“Leave them,” the young lieutenant said, as if they were unimportant. They were—to him. He went on, “The Yankees will take them as spoils of war, I reckon.” That didn’t seem important to him, either. Off he went, to give the word to the next battery he found.
“Spoils of war?” Featherston muttered. “Hell they will.” He looked at his watch. “We got most of an hour, boys, till the war’s over. Let’s make those shitheels wish it never got started.”
Plainly, his soldiers would just as soon have let the fighting peter out. He didn’t shame them into keeping on—he frightened them into it. That he could still frighten them with everything they’d known crashing into ruin around them said a lot about the sort of man he was.
At five o’clock, he himself pulled the lanyard to his field gun one last time. Then he undid the breech block, carried it over to Hazel Run—a couple of hundred yards—and threw it in the water. He did the same with the breech blocks from all the other guns. “Now the damnyankees are welcome to ’em,” he said. “Fat lot of good they’ll get from ’em, though.”
His words seemed to echo and reecho. As the armistice took hold, silence flowed over the countryside. It seemed unnatural, like machine-gun fire on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of Richmond. When the gun crew talked, they talked too loud. For one thing, they were used to shouting over the roar of the three-inchers. For another, they were all a little deaf. Jake suspected he was more than a little deaf. He’d been at the guns longer than any of his men.
Before the sun set, Major Clarence Potter made his way to the battery. Featherston nodded to him as to an old friend; in the Army, Potter was about as close to an old friend as he had. The intelligence officer looked at the field guns, then at Jake. “You’re not going to let them have anything they can use, eh?” he said.
Jake spent some little while describing in great detail the uses the damnyankees could make of his guns. Major Potter listened, appreciating his imagination. Finally, Featherston said, “Goddammit, sir, sure as hell we’re going to fight those bastards another round one of these days before too long. Why give ’em anything they can take advantage of?”
“Oh, you get no arguments from me, Sergeant,” Potter said. “I wish more men were busy wrecking more weapons we’ll have to turn over to the USA.” He wore a flask on his hip. He took it in hand, yanked the cork, swigged, and passed it to Featherston. “Here’s to the two of us. We were right when the people over us were wrong, and much good it did us.”
The whiskey burned its way down to Jake’s belly. He wanted to gulp the flask dry, but made himself stop after one long pull and hand it back to Major Potter. “Thank you, sir,” he said, for once sincere in showing an officer gratitude. Then he asked the question undoubtedly echoing throughout the beaten Army of Northern Virginia, throughout the beaten Confederate States: “What the devil happens next? We never lost a war before.”
“What happens next is up to the Yankees.” Potter drank again. “Unless I read them wrong—and I don’t think I do—they’ll take us down just as far as they can without provoking us into starting up the war.” He thrust the flask at Featherston once more. “Here. Finish it.”
“Yes, sir.” Jake was glad to obey that order. Once the reinforcements had landed and spread warmth along his legs and up on his cheeks and nose, he found another question, closely related to the first: “What’ll they make us do?”
“I’m not Teddy Roosevelt, thank God, but I can make some guesses,” Potter said. “First one is, the United States are going to keep whatever they’ve grabbed in the war. Kentucky’s gone, Sequoyah’s gone, that chunk of Texas they’re calling Houston is gone, the chunk they bit out of Sonora is gone, too.”
“Yeah.” Jake pointed out north. “Probably hold on to Virginia down to the Rappahannock, too.”
“Probably,” the intelligence officer agreed. “When the next war comes, that will keep us from shelling Washington the way we have the last couple of times—keep us from doing it for a little while, anyhow.”
“The next war,” Jake repeated. He assumed there would be a next one, all right. “How soon do you reckon it’ll come?”
“That depends on a lot of things,” Major Potter answered. “How much the damnyankees make us cut our Army and Navy, for one: how many men and barrels and aeroplanes and submersibles they let us keep.”
“Oh, yeah.” Featherston nodded. “And on how many we’ll have stashed away without them being any the wiser.”
“And on that,” Potter agreed. “The other side of the coin is, how soon do the thieves fall out?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Jake said with a frown.
“Who won the war?” Major Potter asked patiently. “The USA and Germany, that’s who. Oh, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, too, but they hardly count. Roosevelt and the Kaiser are pals now, but how long will that last? When they start squabbling among themselves, that may give us the chance to get some of our own back.”
“Ah.” Featherston thought that over, then raised an admiring eyebrow. “You come up with all kinds of things, don’t you, Major?” That was genuine, ungrudging praise, and drew a smile from Potter. Featherston went on, “I’ll tell you who lost the war for us, though.”
“I’ve heard this song before, Sergeant,” Potter said.
Jake went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “The white-bearded fools in the War Department and the niggers, that’s who. Anybody wants to know, we ought to take ’em all out and shoot ’em. Whole lot of good they did us during the war.”
“Take all who out and shoot them?” Major Potter asked interestedly. “The white-bearded fools in the War Department or the niggers?”
“Hell, yes.” Without his quite noticing it, the whiskey had mounted to Jake’s head. “Country’d be better off without ’em, you mark my words.”
“Duly marked, Sergeant.” But Potter sounded amused, not convinced. “Nice to know someone has all the answers. I’ll tell you one thing: a lot of people in Richmond will be looking for answers, and heads will roll on account of it.”
“Some, maybe.” Savage scorn filled Featherston’s voice. “But not enough. You mark my words on that, too. The high muckymucks’ll find ways to cover for their brothers and cousins and in-laws and pals, and nothing much’ll come out of this. And as for the niggers—hellfire, Major, some of those damn coons’ll be voting now. Voting! After they stabbed us in the back, voting! Can you imagine it?”
“You are an embittered man,” the intelligence officer told Jake. He studied him for a long moment, then slowly shook his head. “If you turned to good use the energy you waste in bitterness, who knows what you might be able to do with it?”
“Waste?” Jake shook his head, too. “I’m not wasting it, Major. I’m going to get even. I’m going to get even with everybody who screwed me and my country.”
“Forgive me, Sergeant, but I’ll believe it when I see it,” Potter said.
“You will,” Jake said. “Damned if I know how, but you will.”
Major Cherney was laying things out for the fliers in his squadron: “All right, boys, this is the last act. The Confederate States are out of the war. It’s us against England and Canada now, and we’re going to lick them. That’s all there is to it. Toronto is going to fall. With the Rebs quitting, we can bring up another million men and another thousand aeroplanes and squash ’em flat.”
Jonathan Moss stuck up his hand. When Cherney pointed to him, he said, “Sir, I don’t know about you, but I want to finish licking the Canucks before all the reinforcements come up from the south. If they do it for us, it’s like saying we couldn’t handle the job ourselves.”
He looked around the tent at the Orangeville aerodrome. Most of the pilots who nodded with him were men who’d been flying against the Canadians and Englishmen for a long time. Percy Stone agreed with him, for instance. Pete Bradley, like a lot of the newer men, didn’t seem to care one way or the other. As long as Canada goes under, his shrug might have said, who
cares how?
But Charley Sprague, among the newest of the new, spoke in support of Moss: “That’s right. They’ll take all the credit, and what will they leave us? Not a confounded thing, that’s what. After the war is over, everybody will try to pretend we didn’t do anything, anything at all. Is that how we want to go down in history?”
“I agree with both of you,” Cherney said. “We’ve been through too much to let those other bastards grab our glory. That means we have to grab it ourselves. Let’s go out and do it.”
After almost three years of war, Moss hadn’t thought a speech could fire him up for combat in the air. But he went out to his Wright two-decker with a grim smile on his face and a spring in his step. He felt ready to whip the whole British Empire singlehanded.
Perhaps seeing that, Percy Stone set a hand on his arm as he was about to climb up into his flying scout. “Steady, there,” he said. “When you try to do more than you really can, that’s when you get into trouble.”
Moss paused with his foot in the mounting stirrup on the side of the fuselage. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll remember. Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” Stone answered. “You brought me home so they could patch me up again. I want you to get home, too.” He paused, then looked west. “Or over toward Arthur, if you’d rather do that when the war is over.”
Ears burning under his flying helmet, Moss scrambled into the cockpit. Percy Stone went over to his own bus and took his place inside. Moss shook his head. His friend knew how sweet he’d got on Laura Secord, and if doing that wasn’t foolish, he didn’t know what was. For one thing, she despised Americans. For another, she had a husband. Except for those minor details, she would have made a perfect match.
But he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He knew he should, but he couldn’t. A groundcrew man spun the fighting scout’s prop. Moss checked his instruments. He had plenty of fuel, plenty of oil, and his oil pressure was good. Flying relieved the symptoms of what ailed him. He didn’t have time—well, he didn’t have much time—to think about it.
He looked to the other pilots. Stone, Bradley, and Sprague waved in turn: they were ready to go. He nodded to the groundcrew man, who pulled the chocks away from his wheels. The two-decker bumped along over the rutted grass of the landing strip till, after one bump, it didn’t come down.
The smoke that marked Toronto’s funeral pyre guided him south and east. His flightmates followed. He kept trying to look every which way at once, and wished for eyes on stalks like a snail’s to make that easier.
For two or three miles inland from the shore of Lake Ontario, the land that made up the city of Toronto rose smoothly from the water. Then it became steeper, even hilly. British and Canadian artillery used the hills to advantage, posting batteries on them and looking down on the flat country through which U.S. forces were slowly and expensively fighting their way.
Antiaircraft guns protected the pieces that were shelling the Americans. Black puffs of smoke burst around Moss’ aeroplane as he dove on an enemy battery. The Wright two-decker bucked in the turbulence from the explosions like a restive horse. A piece of shrapnel tore some fabric from the bus’s right upper wing. Moss knew it could as easily have torn through the engine, or through him.
His thumb found the firing button on top of the stick. Below, the gunners swelled from dots to toys to bare-chested men in khaki trousers. Englishmen or Canadians? He didn’t know. He didn’t see that it made a difference one way or the other. He stabbed at the button with all his strength.
“See how you like that!” he shouted as tracers lanced toward the artillerymen. They scattered. Some of them fell.
Early in the war, when he’d thought the principal function of fliers was observation, he’d felt bad about shooting at the foe. It didn’t bother him any more. It hadn’t bothered him for a long time. The limeys and Canucks weren’t shy about shooting at him. They would have cheered their heads off if he’d crashed in flames. His twin machine guns kept things even.
He zoomed back toward the front at just above treetop height, his flightmates on his tail. Every time he spotted a concentration of men in khaki, he gave them a burst and sent them flying like ninepins. They shot back, too; rifle bullets hissed past him, some uncomfortably close. An infantryman had to be amazingly lucky to shoot down an aeroplane. If enough infantrymen fired enough rounds, though…He’d never liked that thought.
He brought up the Wright’s nose to gain altitude for another swoop on the enemy’s guns. That let him look down on Toronto once more. U.S. forces had crossed the Etobicoke and the Mimico; there was heavy fighting in a park—High Park: he remembered the name from maps he’d studied—just east of the latter stream. Farther east still, what had been the Parliament building in Queen’s Park was now a burnt-out ruin, wrecked by bombs and artillery.
As always, he checked the air around him for enemy machines. Spying none, he began his second dive on the enemy’s guns. Something was different this time. The altimeter wound off a thousand feet before he realized what it was: the antiaircraft guns weren’t firing any more. He wondered if artillery hits had put them out of action. “Hope so,” he said. With luck, the slipstream would blow his words to God’s ear.
Down on the ground, the enemy artillerymen were milling around their guns. His thumb found the firing button again. The men were looking up at him and waving scraps of cloth…scraps of white cloth.
Behind his goggles, his eyes widened. He took his thumb away from the firing button and pulled out of the dive a little higher than he would have if he’d been shooting up the gunners in khaki. Instead of grabbing rifles to take potshots at him, they kept flying those makeshift white flags. Some of them waved their hands, too, as if he were a comrade and not a hated foe. Tears that had nothing to do with the slipstream blurred his vision.
“It’s over,” he said, almost in disbelief. “Can it really be over?”
It could. It was. As Moss once more led his flight back toward the American lines, none of the British and Canadian soldiers on the ground fired at their machines. Like the artillerymen, they waved whatever bits of white cloth they could find. U.S. soldiers in green-gray were beginning to come out of their trenches and approach the enemy line. No one shot at them, either.
Jonathan Moss wished the racket from his aeroplane’s motor didn’t drown out everything else. He would cheerfully have given a month’s pay to hear the silence on the ground where only minutes before rifles and machine guns and exploding shells had created hell on earth.
He wanted to find a landing strip and put down, just to be able to savor that silence. He needed all the discipline in him to fly away from the front where the fighting had finally ceased and back toward the Orangeville aerodrome. If he’d suffered a sudden case of fortuitous engine trouble, he had no doubt Stone’s aeroplane—and Bradley’s and Sprague’s as well—would have come down with similar miseries.
When he finally did land at the aerodrome, the groundcrew men knew far more about what was going on than he did. “Yeah, we got word of the armistice about half an hour after you took off,” a mechanic said. “We could have called you back if you’d had a wireless telegraph in your bus.”
“Canucks kept fighting up till the last minute, then,” Moss said. “They did their best to blow us out of the sky the first time we strafed their artillery.”
Charley Sprague asked, “Has England given up the fight, then?”
The groundcrew man shook his head. “Wish the limeys had, but they haven’t. The armistice is for land forces in Canada. The Royal Navy’s still fighting us and the Germans both.”
“They can’t win that fight—not a prayer,” Sprague said. Had his flightmate not beaten him to it, Moss would have said the same thing.
“Well, you know that, sir, and I know that, but the limeys haven’t figured it out yet,” the mechanic answered. “Been a hell of a long time since they lost a war; I guess they don’t hardly know how to go about it.”
“We’v
e had practice,” Moss said. “How many Remembrance Day parades have you watched?” That was a rhetorical question; everybody in the USA had seen his share and then some. Moss went on, “About time they threw in the sponge. Quebec—the city, I mean—is gone, Winnipeg’s gone, Toronto’s going, Montreal’s blasted to hell, and we’ve finally broken out of that box between the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa and the Ridea where they’d penned us up since the start of the war. Another few months and they wouldn’t have had much left to surrender.”
“Now we’ve conquered them,” Percy Stone said. “What the devil are we supposed to do with them?”
“Sit on ’em,” Pete Bradley said. “If they give us a hard time, we’ll shoot some of ’em. That’ll give the rest the idea.”
“Oderint dum metuant,” Sprague said. Moss, who’d had Latin, nodded. The groundcrew men stared in blank incomprehension. Sprague condescended to translate: “Let them hate, so long as they fear.”
Moss thought of Laura Secord. She hated. He didn’t think anything could make her fear. He wondered whether her husband had come through the war in one piece. If he had, he had; that was all there was to that. If he hadn’t…Moss did intend to make a trip back to Arthur, so he could find out one way or the other. He suddenly smiled. With the fighting done, that trip looked a lot easier to arrange than it had when he took off earlier in the day.
Rosenfeld, Manitoba, blazed with light as the U.S. soldiers occupying the town celebrated their victory over the forces of the British Empire in Canada. Every so often, somebody would fire a Springfield into the air. Every shot set off a fresh round of raucous cheers.
Arthur McGregor crouched behind a bush in the darkness just outside of town. If a patrol caught him here, he was in a lot of trouble. He shook his head. If a patrol caught him here, he was a dead man. He didn’t usually take chances like this. But he wouldn’t get another chance like this, either. If ever he could catch the Yanks with their guard down, now was the time.
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