Breakthroughs (12 page)

Then Canadian antiaircraft guns opened up. Black puffs of smoke appeared in the sky, as if by magic. When one burst a couple of hundred yards below Moss’ fighting scout, the aeroplane bucked like a restive horse. He began changing his speed and course and altitude more or less at random, so the gunners could not calculate just where to place their shells. The sky, thank heaven, was a big, wide place. He respected antiaircraft fire without fearing it.

He led his flight south and east along the line, in the direction of Toronto, daring enemy aeroplanes to come up and fight. Every so often, he would glance at his fuel gauge and his watch. Like most other fighting scouts, the new Wright machines could stay in the air for about an hour and a half. If he and his comrades found no challengers, they would have to go home.

When more antiaircraft shells burst in the sky south of Moss, they drew his eye toward the aeroplane at which they were aimed: one of the Avro two-seat biplanes the Canadians had been using for reconnaissance work since the beginning of the war.

Moss sped toward the Avro, followed close by his flightmates. The Canuck pilot hadn’t changed course despite the Archie bursting around him; he was letting his observer take the photos he needed. Moss knew about that from his work with Stone. Having four U.S. fighting scouts on this tail was a different business for the Avro driver. He corkscrewed away from the Wrights in a spinning dive.

Sometimes speed did matter. Moss and his comrades had better than twenty miles an hour on the Avro. They closed quickly. The observer started shooting at them. They shot back from four directions at once. Four streams of tracers converged on the desperately dodging Avro.

Then it dodged no more, but plunged toward the ground. One of those streams of machine-gun bullets must have found the pilot and left him dead or unconscious. The observer kept firing till the American fighting scouts pulled away from their stricken foe. A moment later, the Avro slammed into the frozen ground and burst into flame.

We only get to claim a quarter of an aeroplane apiece,
Moss thought:
no way to tell whose bullet nailed the Canuck.
He didn’t care. He needed a moment to get his bearings after the dizzying action. When he knew which way was which, he waggled his wings and pointed northwest, back toward the aerodrome. The flight headed for him. Moss looked back at the burning wreck of the Avro.
We’ve earned our pay today,
he thought.

Confederate soldiers tramped glumly south through the mud that clogged the roads of the state of Sequoyah. The Red River, which marked the boundary between the former Indian Territory and Texas, was only a couple of miles away.

Private First Class Reginald Bartlett pointed. “What’s the name of that little town there?” he asked. He was a big, fair fellow with a comic turn of phrase that let him get away with saying outrageous things that would have got other men into trouble or into fights.

“That there’s Ryan,” Sergeant Pete Hairston answered. The veteran’s harsh Georgia drawl was far removed from Bartlett’s soft, almost English Richmond accent.

Reggie grinned. “Well, I want to tell you something, Sarge,” he said, making his voice as deep and authoritative as he could. “We’ve got to hold this town. The whole Confederacy is depending on us to hold this town.”

Hairston let out a strangled snort of laughter. “You go to hell, Bartlett, you goddamn smartmouth son of a bitch.”

“Sarge, why you cussin’ out Reggie?” Private Napoleon Dibble asked. “What did he say that was so bad?”

A moment later, First Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll, the company commander, spoke up in deep, authoritative tones of his own: “I want to tell you something, boys—we’ve got to hold Ryan. The whole Confederacy is depending on us to hold Ryan.”

“You
son
of a bitch,” Hairston said admiringly, and made as if to throw a punch at Bartlett.

“What did he say, Sarge?” Nap Dibble repeated, his eyes wide and puzzled. “He said the same thing the lieutenant said, so why are you getting steamed at him?”

Hairston and Bartlett shared a moment of silent amusement. Dibble was a pretty good fellow, brave and good-natured, but not a fireball when it came to brains. “Don’t worry about it, Nap—everything’s fine,” Bartlett said. He turned back to Hairston. “We’ve got to hang on to any chunk of Sequoyah we can, you know. The Germans still don’t have all of Belgium.”

A moment later, Lieutenant Nicoll delivered the same sentiment in almost identical words. “See?” Dibble exclaimed. “Reggie said just what the lieutenant said, so how come you’re givin’ him a hard time about it?”

“The lieutenant said the same damn thing in front of Duncan, too, an’ we got run out of Duncan,” Hairston said. “He said the same damn thing in front of Waurika, and we got run out of there. Just on account of we got to do somethin’ don’t have to mean we
can
do it.”

As if to underscore that point, a shell screamed down and burst a few hundred yards off to one side of the road. It threw up a fountain of dirt. A few of the Kiowas and Comanches who’d attached themselves to the C.S. army in its grinding retreat through southern Sequoyah jumped and exclaimed. Most of them took no more notice of the explosion than did the white soldiers.

“I hear some of these Indian tribes have their own little armies in the field, fighting alongside ours,” Reggie said.

Pete Hairston nodded. “That’s a fact. But those are the Five Civilized Tribes, and they pretty much run their own affairs any which way. They did, anyhow, till the damnyankees landed on ’em. God knows what’s happening to the poor miserable red-skinned bastards now.”

“These Indians here seem civilized enough,” Bartlett said.

Lieutenant Nicoll overheard that (fortunately, he’d missed Reggie’s impersonation of him). “It’s a matter of law, Bartlett. The Creeks, the Choctaws, the Cherokees, and whatnot have legal control over their own internal affairs. The redskins hereabouts don’t.”

Ryan, when they trudged into it, might have once boasted a thousand people. Then again, it might not have. It certainly didn’t have a thousand civilians in it now: most of them had fled across the Red River into Texas. Ryan lay on the edge of the Red River bottomland, with forests of mesquite and tamaracks and swamps with endless little streams winding through them taking the place of the prairie over which Bartlett had been marching for so long.

At Lieutenant Nicoll’s shouted order, his company joined the rest of the Confederate soldiers retreating from Waurika in entrenching in front of Ryan. Flinging dirt out behind him, Reggie said, “Wasn’t like this on the Roanoke front. There, if you went forward or back a quarter of a mile, that was something to write home about. When we pulled out of Waurika, we had to pull back maybe ten miles.”

“Yeah, well, this here’s the next town south of Waurika, too. Ain’t nothing to speak of between there and here,” Hairston said. “The Yankees run us out of the one place, what the hell’s the point in stoppin’ till you got somewheres else worth holding on to?”

“Mm, maybe you’ve got something there,” Bartlett admitted. “Lot of built-up land in the Roanoke valley, and what isn’t built up is good farm country. Here, there’s a lot of land just lying empty, not doing anything in particular. Seems kind of funny, when you’re used to the way things are on the other side of the Mississippi.”

“Yeah,” Hairston agreed. A couple of three-inch field guns came by, pulled through the mud by laboring horses. “And that’s our artillery. That’s all the artillery we got, for miles and miles. Ain’t like that on the Roanoke front, is it?”

“Lord, no,” Reggie answered. “There, the Yankees and us’d line ’em up hub to hub and whale away at each other till it didn’t seem like there was a live man anywhere the guns could reach.”

He wished there were barbed wire to string in front of the entrenchments he and his comrades were digging. Confederate forces had been able to use some farther north in Sequoyah, but had had to abandon it when the Yankees forced them out of their positions. Nothing new had come up from Texas. From what Reggie’d heard, the defenders of Texas had their problems, too.

He was still digging when the U.S. field guns opened up on his position. He had to throw himself down in the mud a couple of times because of near misses. After each one, he got up, brushed himself off, and went back to work.

Joe Mopope, one of the Kiowas who’d been fighting alongside the Confederates since Waurika, asked, “How can you do that? I can fight with a rifle”—he carried a Tredegar now, not the squirrel gun he’d started with—“but it’s different when the big guns start shooting. They are too far away for me to shoot back at them, so they make me afraid.”

Admitting fear took a kind of nerve of its own. Bartlett studied Mopope’s long, straight-nosed, high-cheekboned face. “All what you’re used to, Joe,” he said at last, more careful of the Indian’s pride than he’d thought he might be. “I’ve been under worse shellfire than this since 1914. I know what it can do and what it can’t. First few times, it damn near scared the piss out of me.”

“Ah.” Mopope was usually a pretty serious fellow. Now he tried out a smile, as if to see whether it would fit his face. “This is good to know. A warrior can learn this kind of fighting, then, the same as any other kind.”

“Yeah,” Reggie said. Joe Mopope’s father might have been a warrior of the traditional Indian sort, sneaking across the U.S. border on raids up into Kansas. That sort of thing had gone on for years after the Second Mexican War, finally petering out not long before the turn of the century.

Bartlett shrugged. He came from a family of warriors, too. Both his grandfathers had served in the War of Secession. His father hadn’t fought in the Second Mexican War, but Uncle Jasper sure as hell had—and wouldn’t shut up about it, either, not to this day.

From in back of the trenches, the Confederates’ field guns opened up. They fired faster than their Yankee counterparts. Joe Mopope’s smile got wider. “Ah, we give it back to them. That is good. Hurting them is better than sitting here and letting them hurt us.”

“Yes, except for one thing.” Reggie set down his entrenching tool and unslung his rifle. “If we’re opening up on the damnyankees, that means they’re close enough for the gunners to spot ’em. And if they’re close enough for the gunners to spot ’em, we’re going to have company before long.”

He looked north. Sure enough, here came the men in green-gray. They advanced much more openly than they would have in the Roanoke valley, where any man outside a trench risked immediate annihilation. That aside, the Yankee commander hereabouts seemed to assess danger by how many men the Confederates in front of him knocked over on the approach. Some generals in butternut were like that, too. Bartlett was glad he didn’t serve under any of them.

Rifle and machine-gun fire forced the Yankees to go to earth. Dirt flew as the U.S. soldiers dug themselves in. Any man who hoped to live through the war was handy with the spade. Stretcher-bearers carried a few wounded Confederates back into Ryan. On the other side of the line, stretcher-bearers in U.S. uniforms were no doubt doing the same thing with injured damnyankees.

“We stopped ’em!” Napoleon Dibble said happily.

Even Joe Mopope rolled his black eyes at that. As gently as he could, Reggie said, “We stopped ’em for now, Nap. We stopped ’em for a while at Duncan, and for a while at Waurika, too. Question is, can we stop ’em when they bring up everything they’ve got?”

“We have to,” Dibble answered. “Lieutenant Nicoll said we have to. If we don’t, the Yankees get Sequoyah, and they’ll fill it up with Germans.” He’d made that mistake before; nobody bothered correcting him about it any more.

Dusk fell. Reggie gnawed stale cornbread and opened a tin of beans and pork. That was enough to quiet the growling in his belly, though it didn’t make much of a meal. Cold drizzle started falling. Rifle fire spattered up and down the lines, muzzle flashes looking like lightning bugs.

When Bartlett wanted somebody to dig a trench forward toward a good post for a picket that he’d spotted, he looked around for Joe Mopope, but didn’t spot him. He wondered where the hell the Indian had got to. The Kiowas and Comanches were good enough in a fight, but they didn’t like the drudgery that went with soldiering for hell.

He set Nap Dibble digging instead. Nap did the job without complaint. He never complained. He probably wasn’t smart enough to complain. Because he didn’t, he got more than his fair share of jobs nobody else wanted.

Sergeant Pete Hairston launched a fearsome barrage of curses. Reggie hurried over to see what was going on. There stood Joe Mopope, knife in one hand, a couple of objects Bartlett couldn’t see well in the other. In tones somewhere between disgust and awe, Hairston said, “This red-skinned son of a bitch just brought us back two Yankee scalps.”

Reggie stared. Then he blurted, “No wonder he wasn’t around when I needed him to dig.”

Very quietly, Joe Mopope laughed.

As she rode the streetcar to her job at a mackerel-canning plant, Sylvia Enos went through the inner pages of the
Boston Globe
with minute care. As far as she was concerned, the paper never talked enough about naval affairs. A battle on land that didn’t move the front a quarter of a mile in one direction or the other got page-one coverage. Sometimes she thought ships got mentioned only when they were torpedoed or blown to bits.

She saw nothing about the USS
Ericsson
. Not seeing anything about the destroyer made her let out a silent sigh of relief. It meant—she devoutly hoped it meant—her husband George was all right.

Most of the people on the trolley were women on the way to work, many of them on the way to jobs men had been doing before the war pulled them into the Army or the Navy. Many of them were scanning the newspaper as attentively as Sylvia was doing. Some of the ones who weren’t wore mourning black. They no longer had any need to fear the worst. They’d already met it.

Sylvia left her copy of the
Globe
on the seat when the trolley came to her stop. She wished George were home. She wished he’d never gone to war. And she hoped the
Ericsson
was far out to sea, nowhere near a port. She loved her husband, and she thought he loved her, but she wasn’t sure, as she had been once, she could trust him out of her sight.