Breakthroughs (37 page)

His first feeling was nothing but surprise. One moment, he’d been sprinting forward, his eyes fixed on the Yankees in their ugly cooking-pot helmets who were shooting at him and his countrymen. The next, he slammed to the ground on his face.

Somebody punched me,
he thought.
Somebody punched me twice. God damn that Joe Mopope anyhow—this is no time for practical jokes.

Then he tried to move. What had been impact turned to pain, stunning pain, in his left shoulder and right leg. Someone very close by was screaming at the top of his lungs. Only when Reggie needed to inhale did he realize those cries belonged to him.

Machine-gun and rifle fire kept right on stitching past him. In what was more a roll and a wriggle than a crawl, he made it into a hole in the torn-up ground, pulled out his wound dressing, and wondered what the hell he should bandage first.

Blood was turning the outside of his right trouser leg blackish red. His left arm didn’t want to do what he told it to do. Awkwardly, one-handedly, he got a sort of a bandage around his thigh and stuffed a pad of gauze into the hole in his shoulder. The world kept going gray as he worked, but he persevered.

“Stretcher-bearer!” he shouted. “Stretcher-bearer!” His voice was hoarse and raw-edged. No one came. The Yanks didn’t usually shoot stretcher-bearers on purpose, any more than the CSA did, but bullets weren’t fussy, either.

Reggie got out his canteen and drank it dry. The day was hot and muggy. Before very long, the anguish of thirst joined the agony from his wounds. The sun beat down on him out of a brassy sky. His bandages went from white to red and soggy.

Every so often, when the pain backed off a little, he wondered how the attack was going. He occasionally saw men in butternut going forward. Nobody flopped down in his shell hole. He didn’t think that was fair.

More screams rose. This time, they didn’t come from Reggie. After a while, those screams stopped. They never started up again. Bartlett got the idea that the fellow who’d been making them wasn’t breathing any more.

Up ahead, the firing hesitated, then broke out anew, louder and fiercer than ever. Shells from the damnyankees’ field artillery whistled overhead. Some, no doubt aimed to impede the Confederates’ advance, dropped down near Reggie. He halfway—more than halfway—hoped one would land square on him. He’d never know what hit him then. He knew exactly what had hit him now. He moaned through dry lips.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the scorching sun slid across the sky. As it sank toward the western horizon, men in butternut started coming back past the shell hole where Reggie Bartlett lay. He called out to them, but his voice was a dry husk of what it had been. No one heard him. No one saw him reach out imploringly with his good hand. His comrades retreated.

In their wake, the soldiers of the U.S. Army advanced. They fired and moved, as their Confederate counterparts had done during the morning. The sun was going more orange than gold when one of them jumped down into Reggie’s hole.

The Yankee had fired twice before he realized the body in there with him was not dead. He had it in his power to change that on the instant. Reggie got a good, long, close look at him: he was in his late twenties or early thirties, dark, in need of a shave, and wearing what the Yanks called a Kaiser Bill mustache. It had a couple of white hairs in it. Reggie thought it looked stupid. Two stripes on the fellow’s sleeve: a corporal.

He said, “I ought to blow your fuckin’ head off, Reb.” Reggie shrugged a one-shouldered shrug. The U.S. corporal suddenly looked thoughtful. “If I bring you in, though,” he went on, thinking out loud, “your pals miss a chance to blow my fuckin’ head off, and that don’t make me even a little bit sorry, I got news for you.”

Reggie forced a word out through parched throat: “Water?”

“Yeah,” the corporal said, and held a canteen to his lips. The water was warm and stale and tasted ambrosial. Then the Yankee heaved him up onto his back with a bull’s strength, ignoring his cries of pain. The U.S. soldier started toward his own line, shouting, “Stretcher-bearers! Got a wounded Reb prisoner here!”

A couple of U.S. soldiers with red crosses on their helmets and on armbands took charge of Bartlett. “How you feelin’, Reb?” one of them asked, not unkindly.

“Shitty,” he answered.

“Stick him, Louie,” the other stretcher-bearer said. “We don’t want him yellin’ at us all the way to the field hospital.”

“Sure as hell don’t,” Louie agreed, and stuck a needle in Reggie’s arm. Reggie sighed as relief washed over him. The pain remained, but now he floated over it instead of being immersed. The relief must have shown on his face, for Louie chuckled. “That morphine’s great stuff, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Reggie breathed.

The stretcher-bearers hauled him through zigzagging communications trenches similar to the ones behind his own front line. Then they put his stretcher in the back of an ambulance. “Daniel brought in this here Reb,” the one who wasn’t Louie told the driver. “Thought he’d be worth patching. Might even be right—he ain’t pegged out on us while we were lugging him back here.”

“Hate to waste the sawbones’ time on a Rebel,” the ambulance driver said, “but what the hell?” The ambulance’s motor was already turning over. He put the machine in gear and headed back toward the field hospital, whose tents were out of range of artillery from the front.

When Bartlett got there, another pair of stretcher-bearers took him out of the ambulance and laid him on the ground outside a green-gray tent with an enormous red cross on it. Most of the men there were U.S. soldiers, but a few others wore butternut. Attendants gave him water and another shot.

Presently, a doctor in a blood-spattered white coat came by and looked him over. “That leg’s not too bad,” he said after cutting away bandages and trouser leg. He examined the shoulder. “We’re going to have to take you into the shop to repair this one, though. What’s your name, Reb?” He poised a pencil over a clipboard.

“Reggie Bartlett. I broke out of one Yankee prisoner-of-war camp. Reckon I can do it again.” With two shots of morphine in him, Reggie didn’t care what he said.

He didn’t impress the Yankee doctor, either. After recording his name, the fellow said, “Son, you’re going to be a good long while healing up. I don’t care whether you escaped before. By the time you think about flying the coop again, this war’ll be over. And we’ll have won it.”

Bartlett laughed in his face—the morphine again.

Captain Jonathan Moss looked down on the tortured Canadian landscape from on high, as if he were a god. He knew better, of course. If one of the shells the Americans aimed at the Canadian and British troops who had blocked their way for so long happened to strike his Wright two-decker, he would crash. The same, assuredly, was true of the shells the enemy hurled back at the U.S. forces, and of the Archie their antiaircraft guns sent up.

Spring was at last in full spate. The land was green, where shellfire hadn’t turned it to mucky brown pulp. All the streams flowed freely; the ice had melted. And the line was beginning to move, too, though it had been frozen longer than any Canadian river.

Below Moss, U.S. troopers advanced behind a large contingent of barrels that battered their way through the defenses the Canucks and limeys had built with such enormous expenditure of labor. The Canadians had barrels, too, though not so many. They dueled with the American machines in a slow, ugly, two-dimensional version of the war Moss and his friends—and his foes as well—fought in the air.

He spied a flight of enemy fighting scouts down near the deck. They were shooting up the advancing Americans, who grew vulnerable when they came up out of their trenches to attack. But the Entente aeroplanes were vulnerable, too. Moss pointed them out to his own flightmates, then took his American copy of a German Albatros into a dive better suited to a stooping falcon. Percy Stone, Hans Oppenheim, and Pete Bradley followed.

Wind screamed in Moss’ face. It tried to tear the goggles off his eyes, and peeled lips back from teeth in an involuntary grin. The grin would have been on his face anyhow, though. His gaze flicked back and forth from the unwinding altimeter to the enemy aeroplanes. The British or Canadian pilots were having such a high old time shooting up American infantry, they made the mistake of not checking the neighborhood often enough. Moss intended to turn it into a fatal mistake if he could.

His thumb came down on the firing button. The twin machine guns roared, spitting bullets between the two wooden blades of the prop. If the interrupter gears didn’t function properly, as, every so often, they didn’t…but contemplating that kind of misfortune gave no better profit than thinking about one’s own path intersecting that of a shell.

Tracers let him direct his fire onto the rearmost enemy fighting scout. He must have hit the pilot, for the Sopwith Pup slammed into the ground an instant later and burst into flame.

“That’ll teach you, you son of a bitch!” he shouted exultantly. Pups had been machines of terror when set against the Martin one-deckers U.S. pilots had been flying for so long.
So long
was right—that was what you said when you went up against a Pup in a one-decker. But the new Wright machines had helped even the odds.

Another Pup started to burn. The pilot turned for home, but never got there. He didn’t have much altitude, and rapidly lost what he had. He tried to land the aeroplane, but rolled into a shell hole and nosed over. Fire raced down the length of the fighting scout. For the pilot’s sake, Moss hoped the crash had killed him.

The other two Sopwith Pups twisted away from Moss’ flight. On the level, they were slightly faster than the not-quite-Albatroses the Americans flew, and succeeded in making good their escape.

Moss led his comrades up out of that part of the sky where a lucky rifle or machine-gun bullet could put paid to a fighting scout. Climbing was slower work than diving had been. Before he got out of range of small-arms fire from the ground, a couple of bullets went through his wings with about the sound a man would have made by poking a stick through a tightly stretched drumhead.

Hans Oppenheim was the pilot pumping his fist up over his head, so Moss assumed he’d brought down that second Pup. Moss couldn’t imagine anything else that would have got the phlegmatic Oppenheim excited enough to show such emotion.

He looked at his watch. They’d been in the air well over an hour. He looked at his fuel gauge. It was getting low. He oriented himself, more from the way the trenches ran than by his unreliable compass, and found northwest. “Time to get back to Arthur,” he said, and let the slipstream blow the words back to his comrades.

They couldn’t hear him, of course. With their engines roaring, they couldn’t hear a damn thing, any more than he could. But they saw his gestures and, in any case, they knew what he was doing and why. They couldn’t have had any more gasoline in their tanks than he did in his.

The aerodrome was surprisingly busy when he and the rest of his flight bumped over the rutted fields. It was the kind of activity he hadn’t seen for a long time. Everybody was tearing things up by the roots and pitching them into trucks and wagons.

“We’re moving up?” Moss asked a groundcrew man after he shut off the Wright’s engine and his words were no longer his private property.

“Hell, yes,” the mechanic answered as Moss descended from the cockpit and, awkward in his thick flying suit, came down to the ground. “Front is moving forward, so we will, too. Don’t want you burning up too much gas getting where you’re going.”

“That sounds plenty good to me,” Moss said.

“Me, too.” The groundcrew man pointed to the bullet holes in the fabric covering the fighting scout’s wings. “Looks like the natives were restless.”

“Ground fire,” Moss replied with a shrug. “But I knocked down a Pup that was strafing our boys, and Hans got another one, and we came back without a scratch.”

“Bully, sir!” the groundcrew man said. “What’s that bring your score to?”

“Six and a quarter,” Moss answered.

“I knew you were an ace,” the fellow said, nodding.

Moss laughed—at himself. “And I’ll tell you something else, too: I was keeping track so well that they were able to give me a surprise party after my fifth victory, because I didn’t remember which one it was. Hans gets everybody drunk tonight, though—this was his first.”

His flightmates were down from their aeroplanes, too. He went over and thwacked Hans Oppenheim on the back. He hit Oppenheim a solid lick, too, but all the leather and wool his fellow flier had on armored him as effectively as anything this side of chainmail.

“Major Cherney will not be unhappy with us today,” Oppenheim said. He had all his self-possession back, and seemed faintly embarrassed to be the object of Moss’ boisterous congratulations.

Percy Stone shook his head. “Cherney won’t even notice we’re here, except that we give him some more things he has to think about. He’s got moving the aerodrome on his mind.”

“He doesn’t have to worry about moving our aeroplanes—we’ll fly ’em,” Pete Bradley said. “I just wonder where the hell we’re supposed to fly ’em to.”

“Don’t let ’em promote you past captain,” Stone advised Jonathan Moss. “Once you get oak leaves on your shoulders, you have to worry about too many other things to do as much flying as you want.”

“That’s so,” Moss said. He started to add that he would be as happy not to have unfriendly strangers shooting at him up in the sky. Before the words came out of his mouth, he realized they weren’t true. He never felt more alive than he did two or three miles above the ground, throwing his aeroplane through turns it wasn’t meant to make so he could get on an enemy’s tail or shake a Canuck off his own. It was pure, it was clean, and it made everything else in the world—fast motorcars, fast women—seem about as exciting as solitaire.

Women…maybe not. After the flight had reported to Major Cherney, the squadron commander said, “Get yourselves packed up, boys. You’re scheduled to move out bright and early tomorrow morning. New aerodrome’s over by Orangeville, twenty miles up the road. We have made some progress. And well done to you all. Hansie, first drink’s on me tonight, for losing your cherry.”

“Thank you, sir,” Oppenheim said. Moss never would have had the nerve to call him
Hansie
, not in a million years.

Back at the tent the flight shared, Moss looked over his meager belongings and said, “I can throw this stuff in a trunk and a duffel bag in half an hour flat. I think I’m going to take a walk before I pack.”

“I know where you’re walking,” Percy Stone said. Amusement glinted in his eyes. “I’ve walked that way a time or three. You’re wasting your time. She still hates Americans.”

“All right, maybe I am wasting my time,” Moss said. “At least I’ll be wasting it in better-looking company than any of you lugs.” He left the tent to the jeers of his flightmates.

When he got to Laura Secord’s farm, she was on her hands and knees in the vegetable garden, weeding. When she saw him, she gave him the same greeting she usually did: “Why don’t you go away, Yank?”

“That’s what I came to tell you,” he answered. “I am going away. The whole base is going away. I came to say I’d miss you.”

She glared at him, which only made him find her more attractive. “Well, I won’t miss you or any other Yank,” she answered, gray-blue eyes flashing. Then she softened a little. “Where is the base going?”

“I won’t tell you,” he answered. “If I did, you’d probably try to imitate your famous ancestor and let the British know where we are. I don’t want to wake up one night with bombs falling all over the place.”

Laura Secord bit her lip. She must have been thinking about doing just what he’d said. Indeed, she admitted it, saying, “You weren’t supposed to see through me. Go on, then. Go wherever you’re going. I only wish you—all you Yanks—were going out of my country and never coming back.”

“That isn’t going to happen,” he said. “In fact, I will tell you we’re going forward, because you could find that out for yourself.”

She looked down at the ground. When she raised her face again, it was wet with tears. “Damn you,” she whispered. “Damn all of you, however too many there are.”

Moss found himself with little to say after that. It was his usual condition in conversations with Laura Secord. But, for once, he did come up with something: “When the war is finally over, I hope your husband comes back here safe.” Most of him even meant it.

“Thank you, Captain Moss,” she said. “You make it hard for me to hate you in particular along with the United States.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he replied with a smile.

“It’s the nicest thing I’m likely to say to you, too,” she told him. “Now go your way, wherever it is that you dare not let me know.” With unmistakable emphasis, she returned to her weeding.

And Jonathan Moss walked back to the aerodrome and landing strips that would soon be abandoned. He’d never seen any of Laura Secord but her face, her hands, and her ankles. He’d never touched her. He’d rarely had anything but insults from her. He was whistling as he walked. He wondered why he felt so good.

The
Dakota
’s seaplane splashed down into the South Atlantic close by the battleship. Sailors on deck, Sam Carsten among them, waved to the pilot. He waved back, delighted as always to come down in one piece.

Carsten turned to Luke Hoskins and said, “I hope to Jesus he’s found something worth our while to fight. Otherwise, we’re going to have to turn around and head back to Chile.”

“Goddamn ocean is a big place,” Hoskins said, “and the limeys’ convoys are hugging the shore now that they know we’re in the neighborhood.”

“We’ve got to hit ’em in Argentine waters, too,” Carsten agreed unhappily. “If we sink half a dozen freighters inside Brazilian territory, it’s even money whether we scare Dom Pedro IV into coming in on our side or make him so mad, he’ll declare for the Entente.”

“I don’t want to get all that close inshore,” Hoskins said. “The limeys have been selling those damn little torpedo boats to Argentina the last twenty years, and everybody and his brother’s been selling ’em to the Empire of Brazil. Run up against one of those babies when you’re looking in the wrong direction and it’s liable to ruin your whole day.”

That was more talk from the shell-heaver than Sam had heard for the past week. “Those torpedo boats are one of the reasons we’ve got the destroyers playing tag with us,” he said.

“Come on, Sam, I know that—I didn’t ride into town on a load of turnips,” Luke Hoskins answered. “Here, let me ask it like this: are you happier knowing your neck is on the line if somebody on one of those goddamn pipsqueak four-stackers didn’t polish his telescope when he should have? Damned if I am, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Well, hell,” Sam said, “when you put it like that, I’m not, either.” He stared over toward the nearest destroyer, as if to make certain nobody on deck was asleep at the switch.

Out swung the crane. It plucked the aeroplane out of the water and hoisted it, pilot and all, onto the deck of the
Dakota
. As usual, Sam tried to get close enough to the machine to hear what the pilot was telling the officers who crowded round him. As usual, he failed.

Frustrated, he turned away—and almost ran into Vic Crosetti. “Stickin’ your nose in where it don’t belong, ain’t you, Sam?” Crosetti said.

“Yeah, same as you are,” Carsten returned.

Crosetti laughed, altogether unembarrassed. “Hey, everybody can tell I got a big nose, right?” He put a hand on the organ in question, which was indeed of formidable proportions. “You know what they say—big in the nose means big somewhere else, too.”