American Front (40 page)

They were enthusiastic about the government in Richmond, not resigned like most people in the Confederacy. They had reason to be, because it kept the state government off their backs. But they expected the national government—which now meant the Army—to come through for them, too, and justify faith by works.

Lincoln said, “If I have to tell Charlie Fixico I’m pulling out of Okmulgee without even trying to defend the town, you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to write his congressman, back in Richmond. And since his congressman just happens to be named Ben Fixico, that makes me toast without any marmalade. But what am I supposed to do?”

He wasn’t really looking for an answer. Captains didn’t get answers from sergeants. Lieutenants frequently did, but not captains. Captains had to come up with their own answers, no matter how unpleasant a prospect that was.

And come up with an answer Lincoln did. He got help from a Yankee field gun, which started landing shells in front of the cavalry company. The fountains of smoke and dirt were several hundred yards short, but the Confederates had no field guns of their own with which to reply. Before long, the U.S. forces would move that gun forward and bring up others alongside it.

“Back to Okmulgee!” Lincoln shouted. At his order, the company bugler sounded the retreat.

With the rest of the company, Ramsay rode southeast toward the capital of the Creek Nation. Okmulgee lay in a low, broad valley, with tree-covered hills on either side. As the Confederates came into the valley, Ramsay saw that the town was seething like an anthill to which somebody had just delivered a good swift kick. A train was pulling out, heading south. It had nothing but freight cars, but Ramsay would have bet those were packed with people; he’d even seen some with signs painted on their sides: 36
MEN OR
8
HORSES
. The road south out of Okmulgee was certainly packed, with people, wagons, buggies, barrows, horses, and other livestock. Captain Lincoln might have intended retreating through Okmulgee rather than into it, but getting out the other side wouldn’t be easy.

The Creek Nation Council House was a two-story brown stone building in the center of town. With the cupola rising above it, it was easily the most impressive structure in Okmulgee, and would have made a good fort till cannon started blowing it to bits. Outside the Council House waited a delegation of red-skinned men in somber black suits. They had gathered together a bunch of younger Indians who wore much more nondescript clothes—except for red bandannas tied to their left sleeves as armbands—and who carried a motley assortment of weapons: shotguns, squirrel guns, and what looked to be a couple of single-shot muzzle-loaders that went all the way back to the days of the War of Secession.

One of the Creek bigshots stepped out into the middle of the road as the cavalry drew near. He held up his right hand. Captain Lincoln had the choice of reining in or pretending he wasn’t there. Swearing under his breath, the captain reined in.

“Save our city!” the Indian cried. “Save our nation! Do not abandon us to the merciless United States, whose soldiers we fought a hundred years ago, long before the South saw it had to escape the brutal oppression that came from Washington. As chief of the nation, I beg you. The delegations from the House of Kings and the House of Warriors beg you as well.”

Charlie Fixico gestured to the Indians in fancy dress. They added their voices to his. It was, when you got down to it, a hell of an impressive performance.

He moved his hand, and the delegation—local senators and congressmen, Ramsay supposed they were—fell silent so he could talk some more. “We do not ask you to perform any duty we would not share,” he said, now pointing to the young Indians with armbands. “We will help you defend our homes and our lands. We will fight whether you stay or go, but we beg you to stand by us now as we stood by you in the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War.”

Captain Lincoln looked mad at first, and then helpless. Stephen Ramsay understood that. It was a hell of a speech. He wondered how many times Charlie Fixico had practiced it in front of a mirror so he could bring it out pat like that. If Captain Lincoln led the cavalry out of Okmulgee now, he’d feel like a skunk for the rest of his days—and a lot of the troopers who heard the speech would think he was a skunk, too.

Ramsay glanced over to the young Creek men. Were they really ready to do or die for the Creek Nation? Even if they were, would it make any difference? You ran amateur soldiers up against veterans, odds were the amateurs would come out looking as if they’d just been through a grinding mill.

He was glad the decision was not his to make. Captain Lincoln looked back toward the northwest, toward the burning oil wells his troopers had had to abandon. There were more oil wells in and around Okmulgee, and still more south of town. If he could save any of them for the Confederacy, that would be worth doing. If, on the other hand, he was just throwing his command away…

Charlie Fixico went down on his knees and held his hands up high in the air. At that, so did the men from the House of Kings and the House of Warriors. Ramsay had never seen anybody just get down and beg like that.

“God damn it,” Captain Lincoln muttered under his breath, with luck not so loud the Creeks could hear it. Then, realizing he had to give an answer, he raised his voice: “All right, Chief, we’ll make a stand in Okmulgee. Let’s get some firing pits dug, and we’ll see what we can do.”

Charlie Fixico scrambled to his feet, spry for a fellow a long way from young. He clutched Lincoln’s hand. “God bless you, Captain. You won’t be sorry for this,” he exclaimed.

By the look in his eye, Captain Lincoln was sorry already. In town here, the company would have to fight as infantry, sending their horses south with the retreating Creeks. Ramsay took charge of the young men—
am I supposed to call ’em braves?
he wondered—with armbands on their sleeves. They were ready as all get-out to shoot at the damnyankees, but when he sent them into a hardware store to commandeer shovels so they could start digging foxholes and trenches, they almost balked.

“Look,” he said, more patiently than he’d expected, “the idea is to kill the other guy, not to get killed yourself. Shells start falling here, bullets start flying around, you’re going to be damn glad to have a hole in the ground to hide in.”

They weren’t soldiers. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t believe him. They didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about. They worked like sulking Negroes till Charlie Fixico yelled something at them in their own language. After that, they sped up—a little.

Captain Lincoln sited one of the company machine guns so it fired up Sixth Street and the other so it fired up Fourth. When the Yankees came into town, those would give them something to think about. “Wait till you have a good target,” Ramsay told the crew at Sixth and Morton, in front of the Creek Council House. “We want to make the bastards pay for everything they get.”

U.S. troops were not long in coming. Field guns started landing three-inch shells on the town. The red-armbanded Creeks dove for the holes they hadn’t wanted to dig. To Ramsay’s amazement, one of them shouted an apology to him.

He waved back. He wondered how much ammunition each Indian had for his gun. With all those different calibers, no hope in hell the cavalry could resupply them when they ran dry. He also wondered what the Yankees would do with any Creeks they captured. Was a red armband uniform enough to let them count as prisoners of war? Or would the Yanks call them
francs-tireurs
and shoot them out of hand, the way the Huns had done in France and were doing in Belgium? For the Creeks’ sake, Ramsay hoped they didn’t find out.

He had his own foxhole nicely dug, sited under a tree that would give him cover if and when he had to pull back, as he probably would sooner or later. He peered north up Fifth Street, looking to see how close the Yanks were.

As he’d expected, here they came, green-gray waves of infantry trudging toward Okmulgee, leaning forward a little under the weight of their packs. “Hold fire till they’re good and close,” Captain Lincoln yelled. “We want the machine guns to be able to chew up a whole bunch of ’em when we open up.”

His own men understood the reasoning behind the order. But the Creeks had never been in combat before. As soon as they saw U.S. soldiers, they started shooting at them. Sure as hell, one of them not far from Ramsay did have a rifle musket from his grandfather’s day. A great cloud of black-powder smoke rose above the kid’s firing pit.

The Yankees went to earth the minute they started taking fire. Ramsay swore under his breath. Now they’d advance in small groups instead of the one great wave the machine guns might have broken.

Well, the game didn’t always go the way you wished it would. “Fire at will,” Captain Lincoln shouted, sounding as disgusted as Ramsay felt. The machine guns started chattering. U.S. soldiers fell. Ramsay found a target and fired. The Yankee he’d aimed at went down.

But more U.S. soldiers kept coming. The Confederates fired steadily, taking a good toll. And the Creeks surprised Ramsay. They stayed in their places and kept shooting. You couldn’t hope for anything more, not from raw troops. They might not have had discipline, but they were brave.

When their entry into Okmulgee stalled, the damnyankees gave the town another, bigger dose of artillery to make the defenders keep their heads down. Under cover of the bombardment, they got men into the northern fringes of the built-up area. The forwardmost Confederate troopers came running back toward the center of town. Ramsay didn’t notice any Creeks coming back. He whistled softly. They
were
brave.

He felt cramped, fighting in amongst buildings rather than out on the plains. Unhorsed, he felt slow, too.
Could
he get away, if trouble got bad? He began to think he’d have to find out the hard way.

Then—and he laughed as the comparison occurred to him—like cavalry riding to the rescue, artillery fire began falling on the advancing Yankees just outside of Okmulgee. If that wasn’t a whole battery of those quick-firing three-inchers, he’d go off and eat worms. Caught out in the open, the U.S. soldiers toppled as if scythed.

Ramsay whooped like an Indian—just like an Indian, because several Creeks not far away were letting out the same kind of happy yells. They probably figured the fight was as good as won. Ramsay wished he could believe the same thing. Unfortunately, he knew better. Whatever else you said about the Yankees, they were stubborn bastards.

Still, if there was artillery in the neighborhood, maybe there was infantry around, too. Put a regiment in here instead of a cavalry company and some ragtag civilians, and Okmulgee would hold against damn near anything the USA could throw at it. He looked back over his shoulder, then started laughing all over again.

“Hell of a war,” he muttered, “when the cavalry’s got to look to the infantry to come to the rescue.”

Jonathan Moss looked with something less than joy untrammeled toward the new aeroplanes the squadron was receiving. The Wright 17s, usually nicknamed Wilburs, were very different machines from the Curtiss Super Hudsons they were replacing. He’d grown used to the Super Hudsons. He knew everything they could do, and he wasn’t so stupid as to try to make them do things they couldn’t. That was how you ended up dead.

Captain Elijah Franklin expounded on the Wilbur’s virtues: “Now we have aeroplanes than can climb and dive with the Avros the damned Canucks and limeys are flying. We won’t have to scurry for home if we get in trouble.”

Moss caught Lyman Baum’s eye. Both men shook their heads, just a little. They hadn’t run for home when they faced Avros—very much the reverse. A Curtiss machine could turn inside the circle of which the British-made aeroplanes were capable, but the Wilbur was a bus as big as a bus itself, and—

“Sir?” Moss stuck up a hand.

“What is it?” Franklin asked, a bit testy at being interrupted before his spiel was done. He had a pinched, narrow face, and looked as if his stomach pained him all the time. It probably did. That didn’t keep him from drinking like a fish when he wasn’t flying.

“Sir, one of the biggest advantages we had in the Curtiss was a forward-facing machine gun,” Moss said. “This is a tractor machine, with the prop in front. Now we’re going to be limited to observer fire, just like the Canucks. If I see a target, I want to be able to aim at it and shoot it straight on, not wiggle around so the observer gets to fire off at an angle.”

Everybody in the squadron spoke up, loudly agreeing with him. Franklin stood quiet, perhaps waiting to see if the hubbub would die away. When it didn’t, he held up a hand. Little by little, he got quiet. Into it, he said, “They’re working on that,” and then clammed up again.

The terse announcement produced more hubbub. Through it, Jonathan Moss called, “You mean somebody has finally made a working interrupter gear, sir?”

If you could synchronize the speed at which your machine gun fired with that at which your prop revolved, you could mount a forward-facing gun on a tractor aeroplane and not shoot yourself down faster than the enemy. Moss had heard of a couple of people who’d shod their wooden propellor blades with steel to deflect ill-timed bullets, but sooner or later a ricochet was going to come straight back at you, so that wasn’t the ideal solution. An interrupter gear, though—