American Front (41 page)

Then Captain Franklin said, “No, they don’t have one yet,” and dashed his hopes. But the squadron commander went on, “They are getting close, though, or at least they think they are. And when they do get one, they promise the front-line squadrons will have it first thing.”

“They promise Santa Claus brings you toys, too, and the Easter Bunny hides eggs,” Stanley McClintock said. “They promised we’d be in Toronto before the snow fell, and Winnipeg, and Richmond, and Guaymas—though I don’t know that it ever snows down there. But I believe that kind of story when it comes true, and not a minute before then.”

“If you’re a defeatist,” Franklin said coldly, “you can take off your wings right now. I’ll give you a white feather instead, the way the limey girls do when their boyfriends don’t want to go off and fight.”

McClintock stomped toward the squadron commander, of whom he made close to two. Franklin moved not an inch. It wasn’t his rank armoring him, Jonathan Moss knew, just a stubborn determination not to back down to anybody. McClintock shouted, “God damn it, Captain, you know I’m no coward. But when I switch buses, I want to have a pretty good idea that I’m doing it for a reason, that the new bus”—he jerked a thumb toward a Wilbur—“is likelier to keep me in one piece than the old one was.”

“You’ve flown it,” Franklin said. “We’ve all flown it. It performs a damn sight better than a Curtiss. Is that so, or isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t turn as well,” Moss said.

“That’s true,” Franklin admitted, “but it climbs better and it dives better and it accelerates better. One of the reasons the Super Hudson turned so tight was that it couldn’t go fast enough to take up a lot of space in a turn. Is that so, or isn’t it?”

Moss kept quiet. It was so. You didn’t want the Canadians or British chasing you, because they’d damn well catch you. But he’d got comfortable with his old machine. It was, he supposed, like a marriage: you knew what your partner was going to do. Now he was going to a partner he didn’t know nearly so well.

Franklin said, “Enough of this nonsense. We’ve got them and we’re damn well going to use them till we get something better. They’ve shipped the Super Hudsons off to…Colorado, I think they said, or maybe Utah. Someplace where they can do reconnaissance and not have to go up against anybody’s varsity, anyway. We do. That’s another reason we get the Wilburs—you men can do your job as pilots, and the observers you’ll have with you can observe. Life’s getting too complicated for one man to do both jobs up there at the same time.”

But for a sigh, Moss remained quiet. Again, the squadron commander was probably right. Again, Moss found the truth unpalatable.

Lyman Baum said, “Other thing is, sir, I don’t like trusting my neck to the observer. I’d rather have my own gun now instead of waiting to get one in the great by-and-by. Observers—”

He let that hang there. Most observers who were just observers and not pilot-observers like the members of the squadron were guys who had been through flight school and hadn’t made it as pilots. That made everybody suspect there was something second-rate about them. If you knew darn well you were first-rate and you’d got used to being your own gunner, how were you going to shout “Hurrah!” at the idea of turning over the shooting to somebody you didn’t figure could match you?

As if Baum’s question had been a cue, a truck chugged up to the aerodrome and started disgorging men in khaki with overladen duffel bags and with flight badges that had only one wing, not a pilot’s two. Captain Franklin nodded; he’d expected them. “Gentlemen, your observers,” he said while the newcomers were still getting out. “Does anyone care to express any further ill-founded opinions?…No? Good.”

Moss kicked at the dirt. The captain had a point. You couldn’t condemn out of hand a man you’d never met. But Baum had a point, too. If a fellow was liable to be a lemon, did you really want to meet him?

Whether you did or not, you were going to. From a breast pocket, Franklin pulled out a sheet of stationery folded in quarters. Before he unfolded it, he waved the observers over to him. They came, some with their bags slung over a shoulder, some carrying them in front, some dragging them along the ground. “We have the following pairings,” Franklin announced, unfolding the paper: “Pilot Baum and Observer van Zandt; Pilot Henderson and Observer Mattigan…” On and on he went, till he said, “Pilot Moss and Observer Stone.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Moss burst out amid laughter. “You did that on purpose, Captain, and don’t try to tell me different.”

“Well, that tells me who you are,” the newly teamed observer said, stepping forward. “I’m Percy Stone.” He let his duffel bag fall from his shoulder to the ground and stuck out his right hand.

“Jonathan Moss,” Moss said, shaking it, and studied Captain Franklin’s idea of a joke. Stone was a couple of years younger than he, he guessed, with a long, ruddy face, a brown Kaiser Bill mustache, and a disarming grin underneath it. He didn’t look like a loser or a washout. “What did you do before the war started?” Moss asked him.

“I had a little photography studio in Ohio,” Stone answered. “You?”

“I was studying the law,” Moss said. He waved that aside, as he would have any question both irrelevant and immaterial, and stared at Percy Stone. Maybe Captain Franklin’s idea of a joke had given him something a good deal better than your average One-Wing Wonder. “A photographer, were you? No wonder they turned you into an observer.”

“No wonder at all,” Stone agreed. “I wanted to be a pilot. They told me if I kept squawking about it they’d stick me in the infantry, and I could see how I liked that. You know what, Lieutenant Moss? I believed ’em.”

“Good thing you did,” Moss said. “I don’t have any doubt the powers that be meant every bit of it.” He kicked Stone’s duffel bag, then picked it up himself. “Come on; let’s get you settled in. Tomorrow, if the weather’s decent, we’ll get up there and you can take some pretty pictures of the enemy line. How does that sound?”

“Better than a poke in the eye with a carrot,” Stone said, and both young men grinned. The observer waved toward the tents. “Lead on, Macduff!” It was a misquotation, but Moss wasn’t about to ruffle any feathers by saying so.

As if the arrival of the observers had changed the squadron’s luck, the weather, which had been cold and foggy and drizzly, turned something close to springlike the next morning. Of course, by the calendar spring was only a week and a half away, but, up till now, Ontario had shown no signs of paying attention to the calendar. As far as Moss could see, blizzards were liable to keep coming all the way through July.

The next morning, Percy Stone exclaimed with pleasure when he saw the camera he was to use. “Ah, one of the new models,” he said. “They’re the next thing to foolproof. In fact, they’re the next thing to moronproof.” He exclaimed again when he discovered the Wright in which he was to fly had a conical recess in which the camera would fit built into the fuselage floor in the observer’s cockpit. “Someone was awake during the design work here.”

Moss shrugged as he climbed into the forward cockpit. A groundcrew man spun the prop. The engine started to roar, seemingly right in his lap. He didn’t like that. The slipstream blew the noise to him now, not away from him as it had in a Curtiss pusher. No help for it, though. This was the bus he had, so this was the bus he’d fly.

Fly he did, north and west. Every so often, Percy Stone would shout something at him. He caught perhaps one word in five. One of these days, somebody would have to figure out how to let pilot and observer talk back and forth and understand each other. That could be as important as perfecting the interrupter gear.

Endless hammering had finally let the Americans break out of the Niagara Peninsula. Threatened from west and east at the same time, the foe had evacuated the town of London, which had held so long and cost so many American lives. One fairly short push along the northern shore of Lake Ontario and Toronto would fall. That would bring the war in the north a long step closer to being won.

Under his flying goggles, Moss made a sour face. The limeys and Canucks, damn them, hadn’t been idle while the U.S. soldiers pounded at their front door. They’d built a whole new series of lines behind the ones they’d had to abandon. Smash one and you found the next just as tough.

Moss was supposed to get Percy over the town of Berlin, south and west of Guelph, so the observer could photograph Canadian railheads and other targets for the U.S. artillery. Berlin was the name the town bore on his map, anyhow; the Canadians were calling it Empire these days. The region had been settled by Germans, a lot of whom, after the war broke out, had been resettled to Baffin Island and other such tropic climes lest they prove gladder to see Germany’s American allies than the forces of the British Empire.

Both the USA and Germany had trumpeted the Canadians’ inhumanity to the skies. The Canadians and the British defended themselves on the grounds of the exigencies of war. (Moss suspected the argument sold newspapers down in South America. Past that, he didn’t see much point to it.)

Because the weather was so clear and fine, the Canadian landscape—what had been farming country, now chewed to pieces by the war, torn and gouged and tied down with barbed wire—lay neatly spread out below the Wright 17. And, because it was so clear and fine, the biplane and its flightmates were all too easily visible to the enemy troops down below.

Black puffs of smoke started appearing in the sky, all around Moss and Stone. Moss started stunting the aeroplane, changing course and speed at random intervals to confuse the antiaircraft gunners and throw off their aim. The gunnery—the hate, everybody on the receiving end called it—was more a nuisance than anything else, but you didn’t want to think you’d stay lucky all the time.

A shell burst a scant handful of yards below the Wilbur, which bounced in the air. Percy Stone picked that moment to shout “Now!” over and over till Moss waved to show he understood. For the photographic run, the aeroplane had to fly level and straight.

Back there, the observer would be yanking the loading handle to bring the first photographic plate into position, then pulling a string every few seconds. Every time he did, the camera would expose the plate then behind the lens. Sliding the loading handle forward and back again brought the exposed plate down into an empty changing box below and to the side of the camera body and slid a fresh one into place, ready for the next pull of the string. The camera held eighteen plates altogether.

Stone yelled something else. Moss couldn’t make out the words, but he thought it was about time to go around and return to the aerodrome on a track parallel to the course they’d flown so far. When he did that, the observer stopped screaming, so he supposed he’d been right.

“Done!” Stone shouted at last, and Moss gave the Wright all the juice it had to get out of the antiaircraft fire and head for home.

The aeroplane rolled to a stop on the landing strip. Moss killed the engine. For a moment, silence seemed louder than the roar had. He needed a distinct effort of will not to shout as he said, “That wasn’t so bad.” After a reflective pause, he added, “Any run where they don’t send their aeroplanes up after you is a pretty good one, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Percy Stone said. “I was sort of looking forward to the chance of shooting the tail right off my own bus.” His grin was so disarming, it almost let Moss forget that that was one of the things that could happen when an observer got overeager.

Moss climbed out of the cockpit and jumped down to solid ground. Stone followed more slowly and more carefully; he had to remove the camera and the precious exposed plates from their mounting. Moss liked the precise way he did things. “This may work out pretty well,” he said.

Percy Stone’s grin got wider and more wicked. “Oh, darling,” he breathed, “I didn’t know you cared.” Laughing, the two men headed off toward the photographic laboratory together.

Sylvia Enos stared at the new form the Coal Board clerk handed her. “Fill this out and bring it to Window C, over there, when you’ve finished it,” the clerk droned, almost as mechanically as a gramophone record. Sylvia wondered how many times a day he said the exact same thing.

She wished Brigid Coneval weren’t down with the grippe. But Mrs. Coneval was, which meant Sylvia had had to bring George, Jr., and Mary Jane with her to the Coal Board office of a Saturday afternoon. She was just glad the office stayed open on Saturday afternoons; if it hadn’t, she would have had to try to get time off from work to fill out this new and hideous form.

She sat down in one of the hard chairs that filled the open area in front of the Coal Board office windows. George, Jr., sat down next to her. She plopped Mary Jane into the chair on the other side. “Be good, both of you, while I answer these questions,” she said.

Every time she had to fill anything out, it was a race against the clock. The children
would
get into mischief; it was only a question of when. To delay the inevitable, she gave her son a lollipop and her daughter a bottle, then took out a fountain pen and bent over the sheet full of tiny type to find out what sort of information they wanted from her now.

COAL RATION ALLOTMENT REASSESSMENT EVALUATION SURVEY REPORT
, the form said at the top. Sylvia sighed. It seemed to be a law—or perhaps a Coal Board policy—that every form had to be more complicated than the one it replaced. This one certainly lived up to the requirement.

She had no trouble filling out her own name or the address of the flat in which she and the children lived. Then the form asked for the names of all individuals residing at that address. That was all fine. But next it asked for the present status of each individual, and gave check-off boxes for
MILITARY, CIVILIAN GAINFULLY EMPLOYED, CIVILIAN UNEMPLOYED OTHER THAN STUDENT, STUDENT
, and
CHILD BELOW AGE
12.

None of those boxes fit her husband, and there was no
OTHER
line on which to explain. Painful experience had taught her nothing caused more trouble than filling out a Coal Board form the wrong way. She glanced at her children. They both seemed occupied. “Wait here,” she told them. “I have to go ask that man a question.”