The United States of Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  Victor ordered the buglers to wake the army before sunrise, so the men could start marching at first light. By the groans and oaths that greeted the horn calls, the buglers won no friends doing it. In an army that elected most of its officers and underofficers, friendship was important. Victor didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, getting to Weymouth was important. Everything else could wait.

  Militiamen gnawed hard bread and gulped tea or coffee or beer. The army drove some unhappy beeves with it, too. The cooks knocked a few of them over the head, just enough to leave everybody dissatisfied with the portion he got.

  Victor Radcliff was certainly dissatisfied with his portion. “This is some of the most odious beef I ever had the misfortune to eat,” he said.

  “Better than no beef at all,” Blaise said, grease running down his chin. “Better than slave rations, too. And we won’t work as hard when we fight as I did out in the fields. Sergeants don’t have whips, either.”

  “Do you feel the lack?” Victor inquired, not altogether ironically.

  “Only every now and again,” Blaise answered—also not altogether ironically. He took another bite of beef. He had better teeth than Victor did. Dentistry wasn’t quite hell on earth, but it came close. Even after heroic doses of brandy and opium—or of laudanum, which combined the two—losing a tooth hurt like blazes.

  “As long as your men fear you worse than they fear enemy musketry, they’ll hold the line,” Victor said. “That’s what we need.”

  Blaise’s wave took in the Atlantean army’s encampment. “Can we fight the redcoats with troops like this?” he asked. “Seems to me we had better men when we took on the French settlers. And we had England to back us up then, too—we didn’t go against her.”

  “The second is true, of course,” Victor said. “As for the first . . .” He shrugged. “This is a raw force. No one would say any different. But as soon as the men gain some experience—”

  “Their enlistment time runs out, and they go home,” Blaise broke in.

  “That isn’t what I was going to say, dammit!” Victor burst out, which made it no less true. He sighed and took a careful bite of his tough, stringy beef. “Before long, we shall have to improve our system of recruitment. In the meanwhile, what choice have we but to do the best we can with what the Atlantean Assembly, in its infinite wisdom, has seen fit to give us?”

  “If we lose a few times, how well we fought won’t matter.” Yes, Blaise was ruthlessly pragmatic.

  Again, Radcliff thought his comment altogether too likely. Still . . . “The first few times, I would not be completely discontented with any result that demonstrates we can confront English soldiers on terms approximating equality. Our men need to believe that—and so does the enemy.”

  “If it be true,” Blaise said.

  “Yes. If.” Victor Radcliff might not have admitted that even to his wife. As much to raise his own spirits as for any other reason, he went on, “The last time around, you will recall, we fought not only French settlers but also French regulars. We did well enough against ’em, too. I see no reason we can’t do the same against King George’s redcoats. Am I overlooking anything?”

  “Only that, when we fought the French, all these settlements joined together against them,” the Negro said. “How many settlers now aim to fight on King George’s side?”

  Victor grunted uncomfortably. He’d already talked about loyalists. He knew too well that this fight would split families. It had already split some. Custis Cawthorne’s press and his formidable wit were at the Atlantean Assembly’s disposal. Richard Cawthorne, his eldest son, was royal governor of Freetown, south of New Hastings. Richard was not the man his father was. But he was, by all accounts, capable and conscientious: a good enough servant for the king.

  “Not many settlers who aim to fight for King George are in camp with us here,” Victor said, again trying to buck himself up.

  “Nooo,” Blaise said, which sounded like agreement but was anything but. He found another unpleasant question to ask: “But how many of ’em are hotfooting it off to General Howe, to tell him how many men we’ve got and how they’re accoutered? By the time we fight, he’ll know everything about us except the holes in our stockings.”

  “Well, it’s not as if we won’t know as much about his men,” Radcliff replied. Patriots came south with word of Howe’s movements and of his regiments. And more than a few redcoats, having come to Atlantis, wanted nothing more than to strip off their uniforms and either join the Assembly’s army and take aim at their former comrades or to go off into the wilderness where neither side would trouble them again.

  “How soon before we meet him?” Blaise asked.

  “Two or three days,” Victor said. “Three, I hope: that will mean our skirmishers are making his march a misery. It will also mean we’ve passed through Weymouth and saved what’s in the arsenal. We won’t get powder from England any more, either.”

  “Not unless we take it from the redcoats’ baggage train after we beat them.” Blaise understood how war worked, all right.

  “I hope we can do that. I expect we will, some of the time. But we are going to have to make our own, too. If we need to depend on what we can steal, we’re ruined,” Victor said.

  From horseback, he urged his men to hurry north. Every so often, a horseman would come down and tell him where General Howe’s army was—or rather, where it had been when the horseman rode off to report on it. Victor had to calculate how long it had taken each rider to come from one army to the other. That told him about where the redcoats were at any moment, and about how fast they were coming.

  “Whole countryside’s in arms against ’em,” one scout told him. “They’ve got to battle their way past every copse of trees and every stone fence within range of the road to Weymouth.”

  “Good,” Victor said. He scowled at the map he held open between his knees. How much nonsense would his horse put up with before it tried to buck him off onto his head? If he was doing his sums correctly, Howe and the Englishmen ought to be about . . . there. He did some more sums in his head. Then he blinked in sudden glad surprise. “By God! We really may get to Weymouth ahead of them! Who would have believed it?”

  “Way they go stealing anything that ain’t nailed down, no wonder everybody wants to take a shot at ’em,” the Atlantean scout said.

  “Well . . . yes.” Victor Radcliff hid as much of a smile as he could. The redcoats’ thievery was far from unique. The French Atlanteans had robbed just as enthusiastically in the last war. So had the English Atlanteans, come to that. Soldiers in the Atlantean Assembly’s army—his army—were bound to plunder, too. Victor dared hope they would mostly steal from farmers who favored King George. Sometimes, though, it didn’t do to inquire too closely.

  Heavy wagons carried hogsheads of gunpowder out of Weymouth and down toward New Hastings. The Atlantean soldiers moved off the road to let those wagons by, where all the other traffic had had to move aside for the army’s sake. Other wagons brought muskets and lead away from the redcoats. Victor was glad to see them. Even if Weymouth fell, the precious munitions stored there wouldn’t fall into English hands.

  His men burst into cheers when they entered Weymouth. Victor felt like cheering himself—he’d got there ahead of General Howe. He wondered how long it had been since Weymouth heard much in the way of cheering. The town stank of cod. With Hanover to the north and New Hastings to the south, it would never get very big or very prosperous. A lot of the shops hadn’t been painted or spruced up for a long time. Why bother? the shopkeepers seemed to say.

  Some of them came out into the street to clap as the Atlantean army went by. Barmaids handed out mugs of beer and kisses. Church bells clanged. Dogs yapped as if possessed.

  Not all the locals seemed delighted to see the settlers in arms. One weathered fellow, a cigar clamped in his jaws, looked more as if he was counting them than applauding them. Would he slip off and tell General Howe what he knew, as Victor’s scouts had been d
oing for him? The chances seemed good. Both sides in this fight would have plenty of spies.

  With the arsenal evacuated, Victor could have let Howe have Weymouth. Sooner or later, though, the Atlanteans would have to fight. If they let the redcoats march here and there unhindered, they weren’t an army at all—they were only playing at being one. Victor looked for favorable ground on which to make a stand.

  He found what he wanted about five miles north of the town. A stout stone wall led from the road to the beach. A grove of apple trees off to the left covered that flank. All he had to do was barricade the roadway and he would block the redcoats’ path and force them to fight.

  Axes rang out among the apples. Men and oxen dragged fallen trees to block off the space between the grove and the stone wall. Victor set up his fieldpieces where they could rake the oncoming English soldiers. He wished they didn’t burn so much powder at every shot. Yes, he’d got that store out of Weymouth, but even so. . . .

  The sun was setting in the direction of the Green Ridge Mountains when he got the position strong enough to suit him. That was just as well; scouts said Howe’s men were only a few miles away. The Atlanteans ate at their posts. They bragged about what they would do to the enemy come morning. And then, like any innocents, they slept.

  IV

  Drums and fifes woke the Atlantean rebels with the eastern sky going from gray to pink. The men staggered out of tents and uncocooned from tight-wound blankets. They yawned and rubbed their eyes and swore sleepily. It was as if they only half remembered—or didn’t want to remember—what lay ahead.

  The cooks served bread and meat and coffee. The men might have hit their wives if they’d got food like that at home. Here, they ate without complaint. They seemed glad to get any food at all. Gnawing on a chunk of half-raw beef between two slabs of badly risen bread, Victor remembered from the way his belly’d pinched in campaigns gone by that they were right to be glad.

  Up ahead, musketry in the distance said farmers and hunters were still harassing the redcoats. They weren’t even militiamen, and had no connection to the Atlantean Assembly or anyone but their neighbors. If Howe’s men caught them, the usages of war said they could hang them. But cathcing francs-tireurs wasn’t easy. All they had to do was hide their firelocks, and then they were just men ambling down country tracks. Shoot at redcoats? The idea would never once cross their minds!

  Victor stepped out in front of the abatis to survey the ground once more. The English would have to charge uphill to come at his men. That would make things harder for them, too. He nodded to himself. He wanted to make things as hard as he could for the enemy, because he knew the redcoats were better soldiers than his own men were.

  A fieldpiece boomed. Maybe Howe’s troopers had got a good shot at some of their tormentors. Maybe they just wanted to scare them off. Victor thought they had a pretty good chance of doing it, too. Men who’d never had cannon aimed at them found it terrifying. Radcliff had faced field guns before, and he wasn’t enthusiastic about it, either.

  Here came the redcoats. Mounted men rode out ahead of the main column on foot. When the riders spied the obstruction ahead, they wheeled their mounts and galloped back to report the news.

  “Won’t be long now, men!” Victor called to his own army. “Pretty soon, we’ll give the damned English what they deserve!” The Atlanteans raised a cheer. They didn’t know what they were getting into, not yet. Pretty soon, they’d find out. They would never be the same again, neither the ones who died nor the ones who lived.

  Watching the redcoats deploy from column into line, Victor tried to fight down his jealousy. He’d put the Atlanteans through their evolutions in the fields outside New Hastings. He knew how raw they were. Seeing those same evolutions performed by professionals for whom they were second nature rubbed his nose in it.

  Lines perfectly dressed, regimental banners and Union Jacks waving in the breeze off the ocean, the English troops advanced. Victor looked nervously out into the Atlantic. To his vast relief, he saw no warships. Their fire could have enfiladed his line and made him fall back, and he had no answer for them.

  Three hundred years earlier, a fishing boat with a few swivel guns helped in the Battle of the Strand. Blasting Sir Richard Neville off his horse made sure Atlantis would have no native kings. Naval gunnery had come a long way in those three centuries. And now the artillery was on the king’s side.

  “Come back, General!” someone called from behind the abatis. “You don’t want to make yourself a bull’s-eye for them.”

  Victor’s uniform wasn’t so resplendent as all that. He would have felt embarrassed—to say nothing of weighted down—by all the gold braid and medals and buttons English generals wore to declare who they were. But a man standing out in the open in front of his side’s works was bound to be a target. Victor picked his way back through the abatis’ tangled branches. It wasn’t easy; that was why the obstruction was there.

  Thinking of the way the opposing general dressed reminded him of something. “Riflemen—aim at their officers!” he shouted. “The more of them we kill, the better off we are.”

  He didn’t have that many riflemen. Most of the ones he did have came from the backwoods, where every shot had to count. A rifle was accurate at three or four times the range of a smoothbore musket, but was also slower to reload and quicker to foul its barrel.

  An Atlantean field gun roared. Victor watched the ball kick up dirt in front of the English line and bound forward. It bowled over two redcoats like ninepins. Other soldiers smoothly stepped forward to take their places. More Atlantean guns fired. Enemy fieldpieces replied. A rending crash said a ball smashed a gun carriage. That cannon was out of action for the rest of the battle.

  Enemy bugles blared. The soldiers in the first two ranks brought their muskets down to the horizontal. Their bayonets flashed in the sun. Barbarians facing the Roman legions must have known that shock of fear as the legionaries’ spearheads all glittered as one. It had lost none of its intimidation over the centuries between Caesar’s day and Victor Radcliff’s.

  The bugles blared again. Here came the redcoats, at a steady marching pace. The first ranks’ muskets probably weren’t even loaded. General Howe wanted them to win with the bayonet. If they got in among the Atlanteans, chances were they would, too. Only a few of Victor’s men had the sockets and long knives that turned muskets into spears. The rest would have to fight back with clubbed guns or with knives.

  A cannon ball tore through the redcoats’ ranks. Injured men fell or fell out. Others moved up to replace them. The soldiers knew getting killed or maimed was all part of the job. They didn’t get excited about it—unless it happened to them.

  Atlantean riflemen started firing. A captain or major, his epaulets proclaiming his rank, clutched at his shoulder and went down. Another officer fell a moment later, and then another. The ones who remained kept coming. English officers weren’t professionals like the men they led. That didn’t mean they lacked courage, though. On the contrary—a man who showed fear in front of his fellows was hardly a man at all.

  “Wait till you can see what they’ve got on their buttons. Then blow ’em all to hell!” a sergeant shouted to the musketeers he led. Good advice: their guns weren’t accurate much farther out than that.

  “Now!” someone else yelled, and a blast of fire ripped into the English soldiers. Redcoats staggered. Redcoats stumbled. Redcoats screamed. Redcoats fell.

  And the redcoats who didn’t stagger or stumble or scream or fall came on. Another volley tore into them, and another. The third one was noticeably more ragged than the first. By the time it came, the enemy was almost to the wall and the abatis. The blast of lead proved more than even the bravest or most stoic flesh and blood could bear. Sullenly, the redcoats drew back out of range, now and then stopping and stooping to help a fallen comrade.

  Cheers rose from the Atlanteans. “We whipped ’em, by Jesus!” somebody cried, which set off new rejoicing.

  Knowing the
men his army faced, Victor wasn’t so sure. And damned if the redcoats didn’t re-form their lines and make ready to come at the Atlanteans again. Their field guns turned on the abatis across the road. The fallen trees might hinder soldiers, but they didn’t keep out roundshot. A man hit square by a cannon ball turned into something only a butcher would recognize. And a man speared by a branch a cannon ball tore loose was in no enviable situation, either.

  A few Atlanteans couldn’t stand the cannonading and fled. They were raw troops, men who’d never come under fire before. Most of the new men stood it as well as any veterans. Victor was proud of them. He was also astonished, though he never would have told them so.

  On came the Englishmen again. This time, they sent fewer troops against the stone wall and more against the area protected by the abatis. This time, too, they stopped and delivered two volleys of their own before rushing the Atlantean field works.

  Bullets snapped past Victor’s head. A wet thud! said a man next to him was hit. The Atlantean clutched his chest and crumpled to the ground, his musket falling from his hands. Victor snatched up the firelock. He aimed at a redcoat pushing through the abatis—a man from Howe’s forlorn hope. If the gun wasn’t loaded . . . What do I lose? he thought, and pulled the trigger.

  The musket bucked against his shoulder. The redcoat went down, grabbing his leg. Victor had aimed at his chest. With a smoothbore, you were glad for any hit you got. Another man from the forlorn hope fell, half his jaw shot away. But the English soldiers were making paths their friends could follow.

  And follow the redcoats did. Some of them fell. More stepped over corpses and writhing wounded and set about doing what they knew how to do: massacring amateurs who presumed to stand against them. The Atlanteans were brave. In close-quarters fighting like that, it probably did them more harm than good. They rushed forward, clutching any weapons they had—and the redcoats emotionlessly spitted them with their bayonets. The Englishmen had the edge in reach, and they had the edge in training, and they used both without mercy.