One or two scouts pointed southeast, the rest northeast. After some shouting and name-calling, the minority swung to northeast like a compass swinging towards a lodestone.
Victor hoped they swung because they were persuaded and not, like the lodestone, because they had no choice. He turned to one of the young messengers who always rode beside him. “Tell the musicians to play Form line of battle, if you would be so kind,” he said.
“Form line of battle. Yes, General.” Eyes bright with excitement, the messenger set spurs to his horse and galloped away.
Atlantean evolutions were smoother than they had been the summer before. Compared to the redcoats, though, Victor’s men still wasted too much time and motion deploying from column to line. Baron von Steuben’s guttural obscenities helped chivvy them into place. With cavalry out in front and off to either flank, they tramped forward across frozen fields.
Horse pistols and carbines boomed up ahead of Victor. So did a field gun—obviously, one that belonged to the English. Snow and scattered trees kept him from seeing what was going on. When his men didn’t come pelting back with enemy riders in pursuit, he took that for a good sign.
“Forward!” he ordered. “Double-time! We will support the horse with all the force at our disposal.”
Urged on by their musicians, the Atlanteans hurried toward combat. Any sensible man, as a cynic like Custis Cawthorne would have been quick to point out, would have turned around and hustled off in the opposite direction. The most a soldier could hope for was not getting shot. All his other possibilities were much, much worse. When you looked at it like that, war seemed a mighty peculiar way to settle disputes.
And yet the men smiled and joked as they advanced. They’d just overrun three English forts in a row. They thought they could beat redcoats any time, anywhere. The summer’s defeats seemed to lie as far behind them as Crécy and Agincourt. Quite a few of the men who’d lost those battles had gone home since. Maybe enthusiasm could make do for experience.
There stood the English line, drawn up at the top of a small swell of ground. “Well, God be praised,” Victor murmured. Unless the enemy was hiding some huge force beyond the crest, this was only a detachment. And the Atlanteans handily outnumbered it.
The officer commanding the redcoats must have seen the same thing at about the same time. Too late for him—he had little choice now but to accept battle. The Atlanteans had drawn too close to let him pull back. They would have harried him all the way to Weymouth. His chances here might not be good, but they were better than the ones retreat offered.
“We’ll lap round his flanks,” Victor said. “If we can get in behind him, the game is up.”
To keep the English soldiers from meeting that threat, he also threw in a frontal assault. Most of the greencoats who went straight at the enemy had captured bayonets tipping their flintlocks. The redcoats wouldn’t have things all their own way in the hand-to-hand, as they so often did.
They gave the Atlanteans a volley. Victor’s men—the majority still standing, at any rate—returned it. The redcoats reloaded with urgent competence. The Atlanteans closed on them, yelling like fiends. If they could turn it into a mêlée before the Englishmen recharged their muskets . . .
They did, or most of them did. Soldiers swore and screamed and stabbed at one another. The Atlanteans were bigger men than their foes. The English still had more experience and know-how. Had that frontal attack been the only string in Victor’s bow, it would have failed.
But, with his superior numbers, he could outflank the redcoats to left and right. The foe couldn’t stand and fight the Atlanteans directly in front of him, not when men to either side poured enfilading fire into his ranks. If the English held their ground, they might get cut off and surrounded. They wouldn’t last long after that.
Common soldiers saw the danger—or simply panicked, depending on one’s point of view—before their officers did. They started streaming away from their battle line. Some left by squads, in fair order, and kept firing at the Atlanteans who harried them. More simply tried to save their own skins. They went off every man for himself. When greencoats challenged them, they were quick to throw down their muskets—if they’d held on to them—and raise their hands.
About half the English force fell back toward Weymouth in a compact mass. Victor let them go. Wiping them out or forcing their surrender would have been more expensive than it was worth. He had another victory.
Crows and ravens and vultures spiraled down to feast on the bounty laid out for them. Surgeons did what they could for the wounded from both sides. They gave them bullets or leather straps to bite on as they probed for musket balls and sutured bayonet wounds. For amputations, the surgeons had a little opium and a lot of barrel-tree brandy to dull the torment. All that might have slightly softened the shrieks rising to the uncaring sky. It assuredly did no more. It might not even have done so much.
“Do we press on, General?” Habakkuk Biddiscombe asked.
Victor eyed the twisted bodies and the trampled, blood-splashed snow. He listened for a moment to the cries of the wounded. Then he did what he had to do: like Pharaoh, he hardened his heart and made himself nod. “Yes, Captain Biddiscombe. We press on.”
The redcoats in Weymouth were as ready to receive Victor Radcliff’s Atlanteans as they could be, given their usual practices and the weather. Their practices meant they were not in the habit of digging entrenchments under any circumstances. The weather, which froze the ground hard, meant they would have had trouble trying it even had it occurred to them.
He sent a messenger into town, calling on the English commander to surrender. “Tell him I am not sure I can answer for my men’s behavior if they take Weymouth by storm,” he instructed the man. “If he thinks us no better than a pack of bloodthirsty copperskins, it may frighten him into yielding.”
“I get you, General.” The messenger tipped him a wink. “I’ll make us out to be most especially frightful.”
He rode in under flag of truce. When he came back that afternoon, he handed Victor a note from the English commanding officer. I must respectfully decline your offer, the man wrote, and I fear I cannot answer for the conduct of my soldiers once they have a pack of rebels in their sights. I am, sir, your most obedient servant, Major Henry Lavery.
“He won’t quit, General,” the messenger said.
“So I gather,” Victor Radcliff replied. This Major Lavery did not lack for nerve or style. “Well, if they won’t do it of their own accord, we shall have to make them.”
He wondered if he could, and what the butcher’s bill would be. He wondered all the more because a pair of Royal Navy frigates lay just offshore. Bombardment from the sea had hurt him when he held Weymouth. How much more would it hurt him while he was trying to retake the town?
Instead of trying to storm Weymouth, he sent his riflemen forward to take up positions as close to the outskirts as they could. “Whenever you see a redcoat’s head, I want you to put a bullet through it,” he told them. “Don’t let the enemy move in the streets by day.”
The riflemen nodded. But one of them asked, “What if they come out after us? We can shoot straighter than they can, but musketeers put a lot of lead in the air.”
“If they come out, fall back,” Victor answered. “I do not ask you to personate the Spartans at Thermopylae. You are there to make their lives miserable, not to sell your own dear.”
That satisfied the marksman and his comrades. They worked their way forward from tree to fence to woodpile. Before long, the rifles’ sharp, authoritative reports began to ring out, now singly, now two or three at a time. The men would, Victor supposed, shift their positions after every shot or two. He wondered how the redcoats liked them.
He got his answer when a cannon inside Weymouth boomed. The roundshot smashed a pile of wood. But the sniper who’d fired from behind it had moved on ten minutes earlier. Victor was more than pleased to see the English waste such a good shot.
Atlantean rifl
es went on barking as long as the light lasted. They would take until the day before forever to wipe out the enemy garrison. But they made the redcoats shun the streets and slink around like weasels. One of the marksmen came back to Victor at sundown and said, “I shot me a major, or maybe even a colonel.”
“How can you be so sure?” Victor asked.
“Well, General, if he wasn’t a big officer, he must’ve been one of those what-do-you-call-’ems—peacocks—like, on account of he sure did have some fancy feathers,” the Atlantean answered.
“All right. That’s good news. Maybe it will stir the English out of their lair come tomorrow.” Radcliff listened to himself. Once he said that out loud, it struck him as much too likely. And he hadn’t done anything about it. In the fading light, he ordered his musketeers and his fieldpieces forward. If the redcoats did come out, he wanted to be ready to receive them.
They didn’t emerge right away. As soon as the eastern sky paled enough, his riflemen started shooting into Weymouth again. A horsefly couldn’t do a horse much real damage, but could drive it wild anyhow. Victor hoped for the same effect.
And he got it. The redcoats in Weymouth sallied forth just after the church bells in town rang ten. As soon as they left the cover of houses and shops, the marksmen began to fire at their officers. As the sniper had said the evening before, those splendid uniforms made them stand out. They fell one after another, and so did the common soldiers unlucky enough to be stationed near them.
The English troopers advanced anyhow. Victor might have known they would. They barely needed officers to tell them what wanted doing. They went after the riflemen with professional competence and perhaps unprofessional fury.
Victor’s marksmen fired and fell back, fired and fell back. Some of them didn’t fall back fast enough. The ones the redcoats caught had a hard time surrendering.
Then the English force came into range of the Atlantean artillery, which lurked just inside an orchard. Cannon balls tore bloody tracks through the enemy’s ranks. The attackers swung toward the guns. Victor wanted nothing more than for them to charge. Canister and grape would do worse than roundshot ever could.
But, even if many of their officers had fallen, the redcoats knew better than to expose themselves to that kind of murderous fire. They swung away again, and went back to chasing the riflemen.
“Forward!” Victor shouted, and the main body of the Atlantean army moved up to support the marksmen.
They outnumbered the soldiers who’d sallied from Weymouth. Their lines hadn’t been thrown into disarray by a long pursuit. Encouraged by three easy wins and a successful skirmish, they thought they could do anything. That went a long way toward making them right.
The redcoats dressed their ranks faster than Victor would have dreamt possible. They thought they could do anything, too. They’d fought in Europe, in India, in Terranova. Some of them would have fought in Atlantis against the French. They’d also had good luck facing the rebellion from their own kinsmen here. No wonder they thought they could win again.
“Fire!” Victor yelled as the English drew near. Flintlocks clicked. Priming powder around touch-holes hissed. Then the muskets boomed.
Some of the redcoats went down. The rest kept coming. They didn’t fire. If they could stand the gaff, if they could get in among their foes, they thought they could win the battle with the bayonet. They’d seen how much the Atlanteans feared cold steel in earlier fights.
Another volley tore into them. More English soldiers fell. By then, the survivors were very close. They were close enough, in fact, to see that most of the Atlanteans also carried bayoneted muskets, as they had in the skirmish on the hillcrest. All that plunder from the English forts was coming in handy.
True, the greencoats weren’t masters of the bayonet the way the English were. But they were most of them big, strong men. Skill counted. But so did reach and ferocity. And so did numbers, and the Atlanteans had the edge there.
As the two lines met in bloody collision, Victor wondered how much weight each factor carried. Before long, one side or the other would give way. Flesh and blood simply couldn’t stand going toe to toe like this for very long.
Spirit oozed from the redcoats first. Victor sensed it even before they began to fall back. Part of it, he judged, was their surprise and dismay at not sweeping everything before them. They should have known better. They’d beaten the Atlanteans in the summer, yes, but they’d never routed them—and the Atlanteans had just forced many of them back into Weymouth.
Now they were routed themselves. Some fled back across the snow toward the town. Others raised their hands in surrender. And still others, the stubborn few, went on fighting and made Victor’s men pay the price of beating them.
“Give up!” Victor called to the knot of embattled Englishmen. “Some of your friends have got away. What more can you hope to do now?”
They kept fighting. Then the Atlanteans wheeled up a couple of fieldpieces and started firing canister into them. One round from each gun was enough to make the redcoats change their minds. The men still on their feet laid their muskets in the snow and stepped away from them. The ones blown to rags and bloody shreds didn’t need to worry about it any more.
Victor’s men hurried forward to take wallets and muskets, boots and breeches and bayonets. He told off enough greencoats to ensure that the prisoners wouldn’t be able to get away. With the rest of his army, he pressed on toward Weymouth.
Had the remainder of the English garrison wanted to fight it out street by street and house by house, they could have made taking the place devilishly expensive. Victor might have made that kind of fight. It didn’t seem to occur to the redcoats. Perhaps that sniper had killed Major Lavery the day before, and taken the linchpin out of their resistance. Badly beaten in the field, the English survivors must have concluded they couldn’t hope to hold Weymouth.
They chose to save the remains of their army instead. They marched off to the south, toward New Hastings, in good order, flags flying and drums beating. They might have been saying that, if Victor wanted to assault them, they remained ready to give him all he wanted.
Later, he wondered whether he should have swooped down on them. Maybe their demeanor intimidated him. Or maybe he focused so completely on taking Weymouth, he forgot about everything else. Whatever the reason, he let them go and rode into Weymouth at the head of his army.
Some people in the seaside town greeted the greencoats with cheers. Here and there, a young woman—or sometimes one not so young—would run out and kiss a soldier. Victor suspected a baby or two would get started tonight, and not by the mothers’ husbands.
But some houses and shops stayed closed up tight, shuttered against the new conquerors and against the world. Victor knew what that meant. The people in those places would have been too friendly toward the redcoats. Now they feared they would pay for it. And they were likely right, if not at his hands then at those of their fellow townsfolk.
That was a worry for another time. Victor had plenty to worry him now. The Royal Navy frigates naturally realized Weymouth had changed hands. They started bombarding the town. One of their first shots smashed a house belonging to somebody Victor had tagged as a likely partisan of King George’s. The unhappy man, his wife, and two children fled.
“My baby!” the woman screamed. “My baby’s still in there!”
The man wouldn’t let her go back. “Willie’s gone, Joan,” he said. “He’s—gone.” He dissolved in tears. His wife’s shrieks redoubled.
That’s what you get for backing England. Victor almost said it, but checked himself at the last moment. However true it might be, it was cruel. He would only make these people hate him more—he wouldn’t persuade them that they should take up the Atlantean cause. Better silence, then.
He pulled most of his men out of range of the frigates’ guns. But he also fired back at the warships with a couple of six-pounders he ran out onto the strand. He’d made that gesture of defiance before, and fel
t good about doing it again. Weymouth is ours! it said.
This time, though, the frigates were waiting for it. They opened a furious fire on the field guns. One roundshot took off an artilleryman’s head. Another pulped a man standing on the opposite side of the six-pounder. Yet another wrecked the other fieldpiece’s carriage and killed a horse.
Victor got the intact gun out of there right away, and the surviving gunners and horses with it. The other gun lay on the sand till night fell, a monument to the folly of repeating himself.
“We did it! You did it!” Blaise didn’t let a small failure take away from a larger success.
“So we did.” Victor didn’t want all the credit. “Now we have to see if we can hold what we’ve taken.”
They couldn’t. However much Victor Radcliff wanted to believe otherwise, that soon became plain to him. It wasn’t just because the Royal Navy kept sending heavy roundshot crashing into Weymouth. But people friendly to the Atlantean cause sneaked up from New Hastings to warn him that General Howe was getting ready to move against the captured town with most of his army.
Getting a large force ready to march didn’t happen overnight for anyone. And Howe valued thorough preparation over speed. Victor had the time to hold an officers’ council and see what the army’s leaders thought.
To his amazement, some of them wanted to hold their ground and fight the redcoats. “General Howe purposes bringing a force more than twice the size of ours, with abundant stores of all the accouterments of war,” he said. “How do you gentlemen propose to stand against him?”
“We can do it—damned if we can’t,” Habakkuk Biddiscombe said. “If we lead ’em into a trap, like, we can slaughter ’em like so many beeves.”
Victor couldn’t tell him he was out of his mind. The French Atlanteans had done that very thing to General Braddock’s army of redcoats south of Freetown. Victor counted himself lucky to have escaped that scrape with a whole skin. He did say, “Beeves are rather more likely to amble into a trap, and rather less so to shoot back.”
The United States of Atlantis Page 14
