American Front (77 page)

And, thrusting ahead like this, he felt he was doing more to help the American soldiers on the ground push forward against the unceasing and often insanely stubborn opposition of the Canadian and British troops struggling to hold them back.

“More than a year,” he said through the buzz of the engine. “More than a year, and we still aren’t in Toronto.” He shook his goggled head. Back in August 1914, no one would have believed that. The Americans weren’t in Montreal. As long as Canada still hung on to the land between the one big city and the other, she was still a going concern.

Moss knew better than to let such gloomy reflections keep him from doing what he needed to do to stay alive. He kept an eye on his position in the flight of four Martins. Without consciously thinking about it, he checked above, below, and to both sides; his head was never still. He used the rearview mirror the mechanics had installed on his aeroplane, but did not rely on it alone. Every minute or so, he’d half turn and look back over his shoulder.

He hoped that was all wasted precaution, but his hope didn’t keep him from being careful. The Canucks hadn’t been sending many aeroplanes up lately to oppose the U.S. machines, but the British were shipping over more and more aeroplanes and pilots to make up for the shrinking pool of Canadian men and aircraft. He and his comrades had found out about that the hard way.

If the prospect of running into more British airmen bothered Dud Dudley, he didn’t let on. The flight leader waggled his wings to make sure his comrades were paying attention to him, then dove down toward the ground. Moss spotted the target he had in mind: a column of men in butternut—no, he reminded himself, up here they called that color khaki, limey fashion—moving up toward the front.

The first time he’d machine-gunned men on the ground, he’d felt queasy and uncertain about it for days afterwards. He’d heard robbers were the same way: the first job they pulled was often almost impossibly hard. After that, things got easier, till they didn’t really think about what they were doing, except the way any laborer might on the way to work.

He didn’t know about robbers, not for sure. He did know that the only things going through his mind as he swooped on the marching soldiers like a hawk on a chipmunk were considerations of speed and altitude and angle, all the little practical matters that would help him do the foe as much damage as he could.

He swore when the men on the ground spotted him and his flightmates a few seconds faster than he’d hoped they would. The infantrymen began to scatter, and had good cover in which to shelter, for the road along which they were marching ran through what had been a built-up area that American artillery had rather drastically built down.

Little flashes from the ground said the soldiers down there were shooting at him. He didn’t think much of it: after antiaircraft fire from cannon dedicated to the job, what were a few rifle bullets? Then one of them cracked past his head, almost close enough to be the crack of doom.

“Jesus!” he shouted, and stabbed his thumb down on the firing button of his machine gun. Bullets streamed out between the spinning blades of his propeller. He wished Dudley had never told him what happened when an interrupter gear got out of adjustment. If he shot himself down now, flying so low and fast, he’d surely crash. And even if, by some miracle, he did manage to glide to a landing, no insurance salesman would give him a dime’s worth over coverage if he landed anywhere near the men he’d been shooting up. In their shoes, he would have settled his own hash, too.

There was a knot of them, running for the shelter of rubble that might once have been a row of shops. As long as he didn’t shoot himself down, he held the whip hand. He fired another long burst and saw some of the men in khaki fall before he zoomed by.

Those are people
, he thought with a small part of his mind as he gained altitude for another firing run. He had no trouble ignoring that small part. Those fleeing shapes in uniforms of the wrong color? They were just targets. And if they weren’t targets, they were the enemy. He’d just been thinking about what they’d do if they caught him. They hadn’t caught him. He’d caught them instead.

He turned and shot them up again. They put a lot of lead in the air, trying to shoot down his aeroplane and those of his flightmates. After the second pass, Dud Dudley waved for the flight to pull up and head back toward the American lines. Moss had no trouble obeying the flight leader. Neither did Tom Innis. But smoke was pouring out of Luther Carlsen’s engine. The careful pilot hadn’t been careful enough.

After the smoke came fire. It caught on the fabric of the one-decker’s fuselage and licked backwards with hideous speed; the doping that made the fabric resist the wind was highly inflammable, and the slipstream pushed the flames along ahead of it.

Carlsen did everything he could. He beat at the flames with the hand he didn’t keep on the controls. He brought the aeroplane’s nose up into a stall, to reduce the force of the wind. But when he recovered from the stall—and he did that as precisely and capably as he did everything else—the fire engulfed the aeroplane. He crashed into what might once have been a pleasant block of houses in Guelph.

Numbly, Moss, Innis, and Dudley flew back to their aerodrome, which, with the forward movement of the front, had advanced to near the city of Woodstock. Woodstock, before the war, had been famous for its tree-lined avenues. When the front passed through it, the famous trees were reduced to kindling, in which sad state they remained. Woodstock had also been prominent for its munitions plants. Nothing was left of them but enormous craters; the retreating Canadians had exploded them to deny them to the USA.

The three survivors landed without any trouble. Groundcrew men asked what had happened to Carlsen. The pilots explained, in a couple of short sentences. The mechanics didn’t push them. Those things had happened before. They would happen again, all too often.

Captain Shelby Pruitt took their report, “Nothing to be done,” he said when they were through. “Go where there are bullets and they’re liable to hit you.” He shook his head. “It’s too damn bad. He knew what he was doing up there.” Pointing to a big tent not far from the one in which he made his office, he added, “Go on over to the officers’ club. I’m not going to send you up tomorrow.”

That was the polite way of saying,
Go get drunk and then sleep it off
. The pilots gratefully took him up on it. Staring down into a glass of whiskey, Tom Innis said, “I always figured I would be the one to go. Luther did everything right all the time. Now he’s dead. God damn it to hell, anyway.” He knocked back the drink and signaled for another.

“Don’t talk about who’s going to go,” Moss said, earnestly if a little blurrily—the tip of his nose was getting numb, and so was his tongue. “Bad luck.”

“Bad luck,” Innis repeated. He gulped down the new drink, too. “How many pilots who started the war will still be alive at the end of it, do you think?”

Moss didn’t answer that. He didn’t want to think about it, not at all. To keep from thinking about it, he got as drunk as he could as fast as he could. He and Innis and Dud Dudley were all staggering when they made their way back to their tent. By the time they got there, somebody had cleaned out Luther Carlsen’s personal effects, to send back to his next of kin. Seeing the bare, neat, empty cot made Moss shiver. He’d taken over a cot like that. Who, one of these days, would take over the one over which he now sprawled at an angle no sober man would have chosen?

He was lucky. He fell asleep—or passed out—before he could dwell on that one for long. When he woke up the next morning, the whiskey had taken its revenge, and he hurt too bad to dwell on anything.

But that afternoon, after gallons of coffee and the hair of the dog that bit him, he felt almost human, in an elderly, melancholy way. He was writing a letter to a cousin in Cleveland when the tent flap opened. Captain Pruitt led in a gawky young man with a green-gray duffel slung over his shoulder. “Gentlemen,” he said, “this is Zach Whitby. Lieutenant Whitby, we have here Dan Dudley, Tom Innis, and Jonathan Moss.”

Whitby threw the duffel down on the cot that had been Luther Carlsen’s. He stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you all.”

“You all?” Moss ran the words together. “Look out, boys, we’ve got a Reb flying with us.” If you laughed, you didn’t have to think about it…not so much, anyhow.

“Why, Major, why did you pick
my
farm?” Lucien Galtier demanded. As he knew perfectly well what the answer to that question was, he was not so much seeking information as plumbing the depths of Major Jedediah Quigley’s hypocrisy.

“I have several excellent reasons,
Monsieur
Galtier,” Quigley answered. As he spoke, he ticked them off on his fingers, which, with his elegant Parisian accent and his incisive logic, made him seem more a lawyer than a soldier to Galtier: an invidious comparison if ever there was one. “First,
monsieur
, your farm is sufficiently far back from the banks of the St. Lawrence as to be beyond artillery range even from the gunboats that try to harass our operations on the river and our crossings. This is an important matter in the placement of a hospital, as I am sure you must agree.” Without waiting to learn whether Galtier agreed or not, he went on, “Second, the road is already paved to within a couple of miles of your farm. Extending it this much farther is a work of no great trouble.”

“I would not put you to any trouble whatever,” Galtier said, knowing he was fighting a losing battle.

“As I say, it is a small matter,” Quigley replied. “It will even work to your advantage: an all-weather road passing by your farm will enable you to sell your produce ever so much more readily than you do now.”

“I shall have ever so much less produce to sell, however, as you are taking so much of my patrimony for the purpose of building this hospital,” Lucien told him. “And you appear to be taking the best land I have, that given over to wheat.”

“Only the most convenient,” Major Quigley assured him. “And you will be compensated for the use.”

“Compensated as I was for my produce last winter?” Galtier shot back. Quigley shrugged, a fine French gesture to go with his fine French tongue. Yes, his hypocrisy was deep indeed. He never once mentioned Lucien’s refusal to give names to Father Pascal or to collaborate with the Americans in any other way. But the farmer was as sure as he was of his own name that, had be chosen to collaborate, the hospital would have gone up on someone else’s land.

Quigley said, “Do not think of this hospital as a permanent structure,
Monsieur
Galtier. It will serve its purpose for the time being and then pass away and be forgotten. As we establish and enlarge our foothold north of the St. Lawrence, no doubt it will become practical for us to build hospitals in secure areas there.”

“No doubt,” Lucien agreed tonelessly. Thinking he ought to learn all he could about the American incursion on the far side of the river, he asked, “And how is the war faring for you there?”

Major Quigley spread his hands. Though not a real Frenchman, he played the role well enough to take it on the stage. “Not so well as we would like, not so poorly that the enemy will be able to throw us back into the river.”

By
the enemy
, of course, he meant the forces of Galtier’s rightful government and those of Great Britain, which was proving a loyal ally to France. Lucien did not reply. What could he say? He was just an ordinary farmer. He supposed he should have been grateful that the American’s revenge was no worse than this. From what he had heard, people who crossed the U.S. military government sometimes disappeared off the face of the earth. He had a wife and half a dozen children who needed him. He could not afford to let his tongue run as free as he might have liked.

When he didn’t say anything, Jedediah Quigley shrugged again. “There you are,
Monsieur
Galtier. We should start construction in the next few days. If you have any objections to the plan as currently constituted, you can offer them to the occupation authorities in Rivière-du-Loup.”

“Thank you so much, Major Quigley,” Galtier said, so smoothly that the American did not notice he was being sardonic. Oh, yes, you could make a trip up to Rivière-du-Loup for the privilege of complaining to the authorities about what they were doing to you. But, since they’d already decided to do it, how much was that likely to accomplish? The short answer was,
not much
. The longer answer was that it might do harm, because daring to complain would get his name underlined on the list the occupation authorities surely kept of those they did not trust.

“Now that I have given you the news,
Monsieur
, I must return to town,” Quigley said. He climbed onto an utterly prosaic bicycle and pedaled away.

Off to the north, across the river, artillery rumbled. Galtier wondered whether it belonged to the American invaders or to those who tried to defend Quebec against them. The defenders, he hoped. He glanced up to the sky. The weather was still fine and mild. How much longer it would remain fine and mild, with September heading toward October, remained to be seen. Long enough for him to finish getting in the harvest—that long, certainly, if God was merciful even to the least degree. But the day after the harvest was done…

“Let the snow come then,” he said, half prayer, half threat. The Americans would not have an easy time keeping an army on the far side of the wide river supplied if the winter was harsh. The defenders would not have an easy time, either, but they would not be cut off from their heartland as the invaders would. How well did Americans, used to warm weather, deal with weather that was anything but? Before long, the world would find out.

Marie came out of the farmhouse and looked down the road toward Rivière-du-Loup. Major Quigley, a rapidly disappearing speck, was still visible. Lucien wished Quigley would disappear for good. His wife asked, “What did the
Boche américain
want of you?”

“He was generous enough to inform me”—Lucien rolled his eyes—“the Americans are taking some of our land for the purpose of building a hospital on it. It is a safe place to do so, Major Quigley says.”