"Just so," de la Fayette agreed.
But, where he seemed to think the heartfelt curse settled things, Victor was less inclined to give in or give up. "We have as yet no Atlantean navy to speak of-" he began.
"Indeed not, or you would give your own vessels the task of interdicting Croydon," de la Fayette said, and then, "Interdicting? It is the right word, n'est-cepas?"
"Yes, it is, but I hadn't finished yet," Victor said. "We have no navy to speak of, but we have a good many merchantmen and a great plenty of fishing boats. If we send them forth in search of your warships, they should be able to find them before long, and to lead them back here to render our cause such aid as may prove within their power."
The Marquis de la Fayette blinked. "God has blessed you with an adventurous spirit-this is not to be denied. Have you any notion how very wide the ocean is, however?"
"I do, sir," Victor replied. "I have crossed it myself, and my ancestors made their living from it for centuries." He didn't mention that he was no sailor himself. De la Fayette might already know that, but what point to reminding him if he did? Victor went on, "With enough boats searching, the enterprise is bound to succeed in time-and, chances are, in not such a long time, too."
"Well, it could be." De la Fayette didn't seem altogether convinced. Victor wasn't altogether convinced, either, but he was convinced it was worth a try. And the French nobleman seemed to admit that much, for he asked, "And what will our land forces be doing whilst awaiting the navy's arrival-which may not prove altogether timely?"
"I expect we will be doing what we would be doing if there were no such thing as the French navy," Victor replied. "That is to say, we will be doing everything in our power to defeat Cornwallis' army in and around Croydon. Had you anything else in mind for us?"
"By no means, Monsieur le General. I merely wished to make certain you did not intend to rest on our laurels, so to speak. The war still wants aggressive prosecution, and will fail without it."
"D'accord," Victor said. De la Fayette smiled at the very French agreement. Victor continued, "My first target for prosecuting the war would be the English works defending the hamlet of Wilton Wells. If we drive them away from the village, we dent their lines in a way Cornwallis won't care for."
"Splendid!" the marquis said gaily. "Let us proceed, then." Proceed they did. But Cornwallis' fieldworks bristled with cannon. Ditches and abatis kept the Atlanteans from getting close. The forlorn hopes that broke through the interlaced tree trunks and branches proved exactly that. The English guns sprayed them with canister. The men who could staggered back through the gaps they'd made in the abatis. The rest lay where they'd fallen, some writhing and moaning, others ominously still.
Some of the forlorn hopes were French, others Atlantean. Neither commander had any excuse to blame the other's soldiers, for they'd failed together. All de la Fayette said was, "It could be that we will find an easier way toward Croydon than the one that goes through Wilton Wells."
"It could be, yes," Victor said, admiring de la Fayette's sangfroid. "I had not thought this one would prove so well defended."
"Not everything works," de la Fayette said. "One of the tricks of the game is to keep trying even after a failure."
"True enough." Victor had been a good deal older than the Frenchman was now when he'd learned that-which made it no less true.
Chapter 21
The Atlanteans planned to feint at Wilton Wells again and strike a little farther east, just past Garnet Pond. Woods let them closely approach the redcoats' line there, and it didn't seem strongly held. If they could break through, Cornwallis' men would have to fall back toward Croydon in a hurry. Victor and de la Fayette could concentrate their force and attack where they pleased. The redcoats, trying to hold a line well outside of Croydon, had to try to stay reasonably strong all along it. Reasonably strong, with luck, would prove not to be strong enough.
With luck. Victor Radcliff had much too much reason to remember those two little, seemingly innocent, words after the thrust past Garnet Pond came to grief. The worst of it was, he couldn't think of anything he should have done differently.
It was sunny when the attacking column set out for Garnet Pond early in the morning. Sunny-he remembered that very well. Oh, the wind came down from the northwest, but what of it? Summer was over, and chilly winds were nothing out of the ordinary, especially in a northern settiement-a northern state-like Croydon.
De la Fayette seemed as happy with the arrangement as Victor was himself. "This is a well-conceived plan," he declared. Even if he was very young, his praise warmed Victor. "The false attack at the place we struck before will hold the English in place, or even, it could be, draw men from Garnet Pond to the position that seems more threatened."
"I hope so, yes." Victor did his best to keep his smile sheepish and modest rather than, say, full of gloating and anticipation.
"And we have deployed a full complement of sharpshooters and skirmishers to ensure that the true attack is not detected prematurely," de la Fayette went on. "Nom d'un nom, Monsieur le General, I cannot imagine what could possibly go wrong."
Maybe that was what did it. Had Victor been more pious, he might also have been more nearly certain it was. The Frenchman didn't precisely take the Lord's name in vain. He didn't use the Lord's name at all-not directly, anyhow. But wasn't trotting out a euphemism just as bad, really? Assuming the Lord was listening, wouldn't He know what was on your mind, what was in your heart, regardless of whether His name actually passed your lips? Victor wondered about it afterwards. But afterwards was too late, as afterwards commonly is.
"Clouding up," Blaise remarked not ten minutes after the attacking column set out.
"Well, so it is," Victor agreed. "What of it?" He tried to look on the bright side, even if that bright side was rapidly vanishing from the sky. The clouds were thick and roiling and dark. It hadn't been warm before they swept across the sky; it got noticeably colder as soon as they did. The air seemed damper, too, although Victor tried his best to tell himself that was only his imagination.
He might have managed to persuade himself. But Blaise's broad nostrils flared. "Smells like rain," he said.
"I hope not!" Victor exclaimed. But he knew that wet-dust odor as soon as Blaise pointed it out. As a matter of fact, he'd known it before, even if he hadn't wanted to admit it was there.
No matter what he'd managed to talk himself into, he wouldn't have stayed deluded much longer. When rain started coming down, it was impossible to believe the weather remained fine. And this wasn't a light shower of the kind some of the people farther south called liquid sunshine. This was a downpour, a gully washer, a cloudburst… The ground under his feet turned to mud, and then to something a good deal more liquid than the stuff commonly known by that name.
"What does the Bible talk about?" Blaise said-shouted, really, to make himself heard over, or through, that roaring rain. "Forty days and forty nights?"
It hadn't even been raining forty minutes then. All the same, Victor understood why the Negro asked the question. It had gone from cloudburst to deluge. Had Noah's Ark floated by, Victor wouldn't have been amazed (but why didn't the Ark seem to contain any Atlantean productions?).
"Maybe I should recall them," Victor said. The Atlanteans would have a devil of a time shooting once they got past Garnet Pond-wet weather turned flintlocks into nothing more than clumsy spears and clubs.
"Redcoats won't be able to shoot at them, either," Blaise replied, understanding what he was worried about.
"Well, no," Victor said. "But not all our men have bayonets." At the beginning of the war, very few Atlanteans had them, giving the redcoats a great advantage when the fighting came to close quarters. These days, thanks to captured weapons and hard work at smithies all over Atlantis, most greencoats were as well armed as their English counterparts. "Or maybe I worry overmuch."
A few gunshots marked the moment when the feint went in. Victor admired the men on either side who'd managed t
o keep their powder dry. The shots rang out distinctly, even through the rain. But there were only a few. And no one had the slightest hope of reloading. After the scattered opening volley, both Atlanteans and Englishmen might have fallen back through time a thousand years, back to days long before the first clever artificer made a batch of gunpowder without blowing himself up in the doing.
Instead of musketry, a few shouts and screams pierced the curtain of sound the downpour spread over the scene. They were enough to let Victor picture it in his mind. He imagined dripping, muddy men stabbing with bayonets and swinging clubbed muskets as if they were cricket bats. He imagined rain and blood rolling down their faces and rain trying to wash away spreading patches of red on their tunics. And, knowing soldiers as he did, he imagined them all swearing at the weather at least as much as they swore at one another.
Off to the east, the main attacking party should have been able to gauge when to hit the English lines by the noise the men in the feint made. They probably couldn't hear the men in the feint at all, though. The major commanding them had to use his best judgment about when to go on-or whether to go in at all,
Victor Radcliff wouldn't have blamed him for aborting the attack. But he didn't. His men-and the redcoats facing them-also managed to get off a few shots. One cannon boomed. Hearing it go off truly amazed Victor. He had to hope it didn't harm his men too much.
And then he had to wait… and wait… and wait. No messenger came back from the main attack to tell him how it was going. Maybe the officer in charge forgot to send anyone. Maybe the messenger got killed or wounded before he went very far. Or maybe he just sank into the ooze and drowned.
If the attackers weren't going to tell Victor what had happened, he had to find out for himself-if he could. He rode toward the woods through which the Atlanteans should have gone. He rode ever more slowly, too, for the rain rapidly turned the road to a river of mud. The horse looked back at him reproachfully, as if wondering whether it would sink out of sight. Not much farther on, Victor began to wonder the same thing.
Where he had trouble going forward, he soon found out the Atlantean soldiers were managing to go back. "It's no use, General!" one of them bawled through the rain.
"What happened?" Victor asked.
"We damn near drowned, that's what," the soldier answered.
"That cannon ball blew Major Hall's head off," another man added, which went a long way towards explaining why the poor major hadn't sent back any messengers. Losing your head metaphorically could distract you. Losing it literally… got everything over with in a hurry, at any rate. And whoever'd taken over for Hall must not have thought to send word back, either.
"We got in amongst the redcoats," a sergeant said, "but we couldn't get through 'em. Nobody could do anything much, not in this slop." His wave took in rain and mud and bedraggled men.
"Damnation!" Victor Radcliff shook his fist at the black clouds overhead. They took not the slightest notice of him.
The storm lasted almost a week. By the time it finally blew out to sea, half the English earthworks had collapsed. Entrenchments on both sides were more than half full of water. Since the redcoats had so much trouble using their field fortifications, the Atlanteans might have walked into Croydon. They might have, that is, had walking anywhere not involved sinking thigh-deep in clinging muck.
Victor thanked heaven his own quartermasters had managed to keep most of the army's grain dry. That meant the troops could go on eating till the roads dried enough to bring in more wheat and barley and rye. Even oats, Victor thought. No one in these parts would have any trouble finding plenty of water for stewing up oatmeal.
If Cornwallis chose this moment to try to drive the Atlanteans away from Croydon, Victor didn't know how he would be able to hold back the redcoats. But the Englishmen, while working feverishly to repair their lines, didn't try to come out of them. Before long, Victor realized he'd worried over nothing. Had the redcoats attacked, they would have bogged down the same way his own men did.
"Are such storms common in these parts?" de la Fayette inquired, his manner plainly saying Atlantis wasn't worth living in if they were.
But Victor shook his head. "Down in the south, hurricanes are known," he answered. "Rainstorms like this up here…" He shook his head again. "Bad luck-I know not what else to call this one."
"Bad indeed," the French noble said. "And are we to expect blizzards next?"
"God forbid!" Victor exclaimed, knowing too well that God was liable to do no such thing. But then, trying his best to look on the bright side of things, he added, "If we should have a hard freeze, the ground won't try to swallow us up, anyhow."
"Well, no." If that prospect pleased de la Fayette, he hid it very well. "But I find the climate in this country imperfectly equable. The southern regions suffer from excessive heat, while these parts seem to have a superabundance of both rain and snow. A more moderate regimen would be preferable-a regimen more like that of, exempli gratia, la belle France."
His reaching that particular conclusion amused Victor without much surprising him. The Atlantean general spread his hands. "I fear I cannot help it, your Grace. As I said a moment before, the weather is under the good Lord's command, not mine."
De la Fayette crossed himself. "You have reason, certainly. I shall pray that He might extend to your country the blessings He has generously granted mine."
If God hadn't changed Atlantis' climate at least since the days when Edward Radcliffe founded New Hastings-and probably not for centuries before that-he was unlikely to alter it at the marquis' request. De la Fayette had to know that as well as Victor did. All he meant was that he didn't care for the way things were. Victor didn't, either, not the way they were up here. He liked the weather around his farm much better. Which only proved he, like de la Fayette, liked what he was used to and disliked any departure from it. Blaise felt the same way, though his African norm was far different from either white man's.
"Leaving the power of prayer out of the question, we should discuss what we might best attempt now," Victor said.
"So we should." The marquis sighed. "Such a pretty plan we had before. We would assuredly have surprised the redcoats with it." He paused, considering. "I don't suppose we could simply try it again."
That made Victor pause to consider, too. His first response was to call the suggestion ridiculous. The redcoats would be waiting for it. Or would they? The more he thought, the less sure he grew. He started to laugh. "Our stupidity in repeating ourselves would surprise them, at the least."
"Just so. Just so!" De la Fayette seemed to catch fire at the idea. "However insolent they are themselves, they would never believe we have the insolence to make the second stroke the same as the first."
Victor thought out loud: "Perhaps we should make the previous stroke the feint, and the previous feint the stroke."
"No. But no. Certainly not." De la Fayette shook his head so vigorously, he had to grab his tricorn to keep from losing it. "That, they would anticipate. It is precisely the ploy an ordinary man, a man without imagination, might try, thinking himself clever beyond compare."
"I see," Victor muttered, his ears burning. Well, he'd never thought himself anything but an ordinary man. De la Fayette seemed to agree with him.
Unaware that he might have given offense, the Frenchman went on, "If we try something altogether different from our previous ploy, we may find success. If, contrariwise, we surprise them by our stupidity, we may also hope to triumph. The flaw lies in the middle way, as it commonly does."
And so it was decided.
Even after it was decided, Blaise had his doubts about it. "If the redcoats look for this, they will slaughter us."
"That they will," Victor agreed, which made the Negro blink. Victor went on, "But if we essay anything that they anticipate, they are likely to slaughter us."
"Hmm." He'd made Blaise stop and think, anyhow. Then the black man delivered his verdict: "If we are going to do this, we had better do it quic
kly, lest a deserter betray the plan to the English."
That made excellent sense. Victor ordered the feint to go in at dawn the next morning, and the true attack to follow as soon as the redcoats seemed to have taken the bait. He also strengthened the picket line between his army and Cornwallis'. He didn't know whether he could keep deserters from slipping away, but he intended to try.
Both columns formed up in the chilly predawn darkness. Baron von Steuben volunteered to lead the attackers, replacing the late Major Hall. "Any cannon ball that hits this hard head will bounce off," he declared in gutturally accented English.
"Try not to make the experiment," Victor said. The German soldier of fortune nodded. Victor added one more piece of advice: "Strike hard and strike fast."
"I do it. The Soldaten do it also. They fear me more than any piffling redcoats," von Steuben said. Chances were he knew what he was talking about, too. A good drillmaster was supposed to inspire that kind of respectful fear in his men.
To Victor's ears, the feinting and attacking columns both made too much noise as they moved out. But he didn't hear any shouts of alarm from the English lines. Very often, what seemed obvious to a worried man was anything but to the people around him. Even more often, his failure to realize that alerted those other people to the idea that something funny was going on. Don't give the game away ahead of time, Victor told himself.
He waited to hear what would happen next. The feint went in when he expected it to. He'd urged the men to fight especially hard so they'd make the redcoats believe they truly meant to bull their way through. He was sure they understood the reason behind the order. He wasn't sure they would follow it. If anything, he feared them less likely to do so precisely because they understood why he asked it of them. Most of his men were veterans by now. They knew that, the more fiercely and ferociously they attacked earthworks, the better their chances of stepping in front of a cannon ball or a bullet or of meeting one of those fearsome English bayonets.
If they were veterans, wouldn't they take such mischances in stride? Redcoats would have. So would troops from the Continent-Baron von Steuben had taken such soldiering for granted till he got here. The Marquis de la Fayette still did, and got it from his Frenchmen. But Atlanteans were a different breed. They expected-no, they demanded-a solid return on their investment, regardless of whether they risked their time or their money or their lives.
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