Breakthroughs (25 page)

“Remembrance Day soon,” Captain Jonathan Moss remarked to Lieutenant Percy Stone as the two fliers rode battered bicycles along a dirt road not far from the aerodrome near Arthur, Ontario. Both men wore .45s on their hips; trouble wasn’t likely hereabouts, but it wasn’t impossible, either. Ontario remained resentful about occupation.

“It’ll be a good one,” Stone answered. His breath still steamed when he spoke, though spring, by the calendar, was almost a month old. It didn’t steam too much, though; it wasn’t the great cloud of frost it would have been at the equinox. Here and there, a few green blades of grass were poking up through the mud, though snow might yet put paid to them.

“A good one? It’ll be the best one ever,” Moss said. “Everything we’ve remembered for so long, we’re finally paying back.”

But Stone shook his head. “The best Remembrance Day ever will be the one after the war is over and we’ve whipped the Rebs and the Canucks and the limeys. Everything till then is just a buildup.”

Moss considered, then nodded. “All right, Percy. You’ve got me there.”

Stone looked around. “This road could use some building up. Come to that, this whole countryside could use some building up.”

“Well, you’re right about that, too,” Moss said. “Of course, you could say the same thing about just about any piece of Ontario we’re sitting on. If we haven’t ironed it flat to use it for something in particular, it’s had the living bejesus shot out of it.”

As if to prove his point, he had to swerve sharply to keep from steering his bicycle into a shell hole that scarred the road as smallpox scarred the face. And, as smallpox could scar more than the face, shell holes and bomb craters scarred more than the road; they dotted the whole landscape.

By what had to be a miracle, a twenty-foot stretch of wooden fence still stood next to the road not much farther on. Moss dug his heels into the dirt to stop his bicycle. He studied the fence with astonished fascination. “How many bullet holes do you suppose that timber’s got in it, Percy?” he asked.

“More than I feel like counting, I’ll tell you that,” Stone answered at once. “We should have brought Hans along. He’d count ’em, and tell you how many were our .30 caliber and how many the .303 the limeys and Canucks were shooting back at us.”

“You only think you’re joking,” Moss said. His friend shook his head. He wasn’t joking, and they both knew it. Hans Oppenheim
would
do the counting, and was liable to try to figure out how many men on each side were firing captured weapons, too.

Then Jonathan Moss stopped worrying about bullet holes and, for that matter, about Hans Oppenheim, too. Moving slowly across a battered field by the side of the road was a fair-haired woman of about his own age. She led a couple of scrawny cows toward a little creek that meandered through the field.

Percy Stone was also eyeing the young woman. He and Moss stopped their bicycles at the same time, as if they had turned their aeroplanes together up above the trench line. “You’re a married man,” Moss murmured to Stone.

“I know that,” his flightmate answered. Then he raised his voice: “Miss! Oh, Miss!”

The woman’s head came up, like that of a deer when a hunter steps on a dry twig. She looked back toward the distant farmhouse from which she’d come, then toward the much closer Americans. Plainly, her every urge was to flee, but she didn’t quite dare. “What do you want?” she demanded, her voice, like her face, wild and wary and hunted.

And what will Percy say to that?
Moss wondered.
Something like, Will you take a couple of dollars for a roll in the hay?
Moss didn’t think that approach would work. Moss didn’t think any approach would work, not with a woman who had trouble even holding still in their presence.

Percy Stone didn’t even smile at her. He said, “If you’d be so kind, could we buy some milk from you?”

“You’re a genius,” Moss breathed. Stone did smile then, one of his little, self-deprecating grins.

The young woman stared at the cows as if she’d never seen them before, as if they betrayed her merely by being there. Visibly gathering her courage, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I haven’t anything—not one single thing—that I’d sell to you Yanks.”

Moss and Stone looked at each other. That was the reaction the U.S. occupiers got from almost all the Canucks in Ontario. From everything Moss had heard, it wasn’t like that everywhere in Canada. If it had been, the USA never could have set up the Republic of Quebec farther east.

“We don’t mean you any harm, Miss,” he said, “but my friend is right. Some fresh milk would be good, and we’d gladly pay you for it.”

“If you don’t mean any harm,” the woman said, “why don’t you get out of my country, go back to yours, and leave us alone?” Her head came up in defiance; if she wasn’t going to run away from a couple of Yanks, she’d give them a piece of her mind instead.

“If you want to argue like that, why did England invade my country from Canada during the Second Mexican War?” Moss returned.

“Why did you Yanks try invading us during your Revolution, and again during the War of 1812?” she said. “You can’t blame us for not trusting you. You’ve never given us any reason to trust you, and you’ve given us plenty of reason not to.”

“Did we invade Canada back then?” Moss whispered to Stone.

Stone shrugged. “Don’t know. If we did, we didn’t win, so you can’t expect the history books to say much about it.”

Moss grunted. “In that case, the history books wouldn’t have much to say about anything that’s happened since the War of Secession.” But it wasn’t the same thing, and he knew it. Since the War of Secession, the USA had been put upon. Everybody knew that. If the United States had been trying to do the muscling in the earlier days and had got licked, too, that wasn’t just defeat. It was embarrassment, which was worse.

“You don’t even believe me,” the young woman jeered. “Your schools have filled you so full of lies, you don’t believe the truth when you hear it. If you want to know what I think, that’s pretty sad.”

“What makes you so sure you’re preaching the Gospel?” Moss said, getting angry in turn. “I never once heard of a Canuck who wouldn’t lie.”

He didn’t care about milk any more. He wanted to wound the young woman. To his surprise, she laughed. “How do I know I’m telling the truth? Because my maiden name is Laura Secord, that’s how. I’m named after my four-times-great aunt, who went through twenty miles of woods in the dark to let the British soldiers know you Yanks had invaded. And do you know what else? Laura Secord was born in Massachusetts. Up here, any school child knows about her.”

“Like Paul Revere,” Stone muttered, and Moss ruefully nodded.

“Maybe you won that time,” he said to Laura who had been born Secord, “but we’re here to stay now. You may as well learn to like it.”

“Go on your way, Yank,” she said, tossing her head. “You’ll be older than Methuselah before we learn to like it. And don’t be too sure you’re here to stay, either. We’re still in the fight.” The slight Scots burr that distinguished the Canadian accent from the American made her sound very determined indeed.

“Where is your husband?” Percy Stone demanded, his voice suddenly harsh, too.

“Where? Where do you think? In the Canadian Army, where he belongs,” the young woman answered. “I told you once—now I tell you again, go on your way.” She spoke with an odd authority, as if she owned the land and were entitled to give commands on it.

The breeze picked up her yellow hair, which hung uncurled and unconfined, and threw it out behind her like a flag. Her eyes, granite gray, blazed. If her husband was anywhere near as formidable as she, Moss thought, he’d be one dangerous Canuck with a rifle in his hands. Just for a moment, she put the flier in mind of a Viking, and made him wonder, only a little less than seriously, if she’d charge down on him and Stone.

She did take a step toward the two Americans. It was not a charge, though. Her face crumpled; tears ran down her cheeks. Her voice choked, she said, “Go on. Can you not have at least the simple human decency to let me be? Is that too much to ask?”

Without answering her, without looking at Percy Stone, Moss started riding again. A moment later, the former photographer from Ohio joined him. “Quite a lot of woman there,” Stone remarked after a bit.

Jonathan Moss nodded. “Quite a lot of lady there, too,” he said. “After a while, you forget the difference between the one and the other, till it up and stares you in the face.”

Stone nodded. “A woman like that—” He sighed. “She makes you wish she liked the USA better. If we could win over that kind of people, we’d win the war and the peace both.”

“I wonder what they do in Canada instead of Remembrance Day,” Moss said. “They’ve been on top so long, they don’t know what it’s like to be on the bottom. And”—he tried to forestall his friend—“I don’t give a damn about what the first Laura Secord did a hundred years ago.”

“Why not?” Stone said, not about to be forestalled. “If she hadn’t made it through those woods back then, maybe Canada would have been part of the USA the past hundred years, and we wouldn’t have to worry about beating the Canucks now.”

“If I’m going to play the game of might-have-beens, I’d sooner play it with the War of Secession, thanks. If we’d won that and kept the damn Rebs in the United States with us, maybe—”

“Fat chance,” Percy Stone said. “They had England and France on their side, and Lee and Jackson for generals. Jackson licked us again twenty years later, too. And what did we have? President Abraham Lincoln!” His lip curled contemptuously.

Moss sighed and nodded. Might-have-beens was a stupid game, when you got right down to it. Look back on things, and you couldn’t help but see they’d come out the way they had to come out.

Everything squelched. That was Private First Class Reginald Bartlett’s overwhelming impression of the Red River bottomlands. If you put a foot down on the boggy ground, it squelched. If you dug a spade into it, threw away the dirt, and turned your back for a minute, the hole would be half full of water when you turned around again.

“We have to dig in, men,” First Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll said, over and over, as he was in the habit of saying things over and over. “We have to hold on to whatever corners of Sequoyah we can, same as the British and the Belgians are keeping some of Belgium free from the Hun’s boot. They’re entrenched in the muck of Flanders, same as we are here. We have to hold on.”

“Good thing the British and the Belgians are helpin’ us keep the Huns out of Sequoyah, ain’t it?” Napoleon Dibble said.

“Sure as hell is,” Reggie agreed gravely. “And it’s just as much a fact—God damn me to hell if it’s not—that what we’re doing right here, Nap, is keeping the damnyankees from pouring troops into Belgium.”

“For true?” Nap Dibble’s eyes got big and round. “I didn’t know that.” He started digging like a man with a mission, dirt flying from his entrenching tool as if from a steam shovel. “Then this here’s important business, I reckon.”

Sergeant Pete Hairston coughed a couple of times, then pinned Reggie under his gaze as an entomologist might have pinned a butterfly to his specimen board. “God damn you to hell is right,” the veteran grunted in a low voice, so Bartlett would hear and the still furiously digging Dibble wouldn’t.

“Have a heart, Sarge,” Reggie said, also quietly. “I wasn’t telling him anything that wasn’t so, now was I?”

“Maybe not,” Sergeant Hairston answered. “But you sure as hell weren’t telling him anything he could use, neither.” He slapped at himself and cursed. “I’ll tell you what
I
could use. I could use one of those goddamn flame-throwing gadgets they’re starting to issue, that’s what.”

“You don’t want to just shoot the damnyankees?” Reggie asked. “You want to toast ’em instead?”

“Fuck toasting the damnyankees,” Hairston answered. “You got to be crazy to want to get up close enough to ’em to use one o’ them flamethrowers. Nah, what I want to do is, I want to wave that damn thing around and toast me about a million billion mosquitoes.” He slapped again.

“Ah. Now I get you, Sarge.” Reggie Bartlett was slapping, too, and not having much luck. “And after you toasted that million billion, there’d only be about a jillion million billion of the sons of bitches left, and that doesn’t count the chiggers or the ticks or the leeches.”

“Don’t remind me.” Not only did Hairston slap, he scratched, too. “And fleas and cooties and all the other little bastards.”

“Back in Richmond, I was a druggist’s helper,” Bartlett said wistfully. “Seems like a hundred years ago now. This time of year, we’d sell camphor candles by the dozen, to keep the mosquitoes away, and zinc-oxide ointment, and little bottles of kerosene with perfume in it to kill lice and nits. Some pretty high-class folks would buy that stuff, too.”

“Always knew there was a bunch of lousy bastards runnin’ things in Richmond,” Hairston said. “Just goes and proves things, don’t it?”

Joe Mopope came mooching along. What he was looking to see, Reggie knew, was whether the entrenchments had got big and deep enough for him to scramble down into them without doing any digging of his own. The Kiowa was a hell of a fighting man. He enjoyed fighting. What he didn’t enjoy was the work that went into making sure you stayed alive in between fights.

“Hey, Joe,” Reggie called, “you got any secret Indian tricks for keeping the mosquitoes and things off you?”

“You got to do two things,” the Kiowa answered. His long face was serious to the point of being somber. All the white men in earshot leaned forward to hear his words of wisdom. Seeing that he had everybody’s attention, he gave a dramatic pause as good as anything on a vaudeville stage, then went on, “You got to slap like hell, and you got to scratch like hell.”

“And
you
got to go to hell, Joe,” Sergeant Hairston said, but he was laughing. Joe Mopope never cracked a smile. Hairston added, “You got us good that time, but I’m gonna get you back. I know just how, too: hop down here, whip out a spade, and set yourself to diggin’.”

“Damnyankees wouldn’t treat me this way,” Mopope said. He did start entrenching, although without much enthusiasm. “Maybe I should have stayed in town and let them come along.”

“Oh, yeah.” Hairston’s nod was venomously sarcastic. “That would have been really great, Joe. The CSA’s let you Indians do pretty much like you please up here in Sequoyah. Ain’t been like that in the USA. After we licked ’em in the War of Secession, they took out after the Sioux, and they been takin’ out after their redskins ever since. They purely don’t fancy your kind of people, and I don’t reckon they’d give you a big kiss now.”

Joe Mopope exhaled through his nose: not quite a snort, but close. “Oh, yeah. The president in Richmond treats us halfway decent ’cause he likes us. Come on. It’s ’cause he can use us against the Yankees, and everybody knows it.”

Hairston stared at him. So did Reggie Bartlett. Little by little, the Kiowa was making him realize a red skin didn’t mean the fellow wearing it was stupid. Reggie glanced over at Nap Dibble, who was still working away like a machine. A white skin didn’t turn somebody into a college professor all by itself, either.

Maybe, if he’d had the chance to think about it, he would have wondered what having a black skin meant. He might even have wondered if it meant anything more than a red one or a white one. But, at that moment, rifle fire broke out to the north: U.S. troops, prodding at the Confederate position. He stuck his entrenching tool in his belt, grabbed his Tredegar off his shoulder, and squatted down on the damp ground to see how bad it would get.

The soldiers in green-gray didn’t come swarming and rampaging toward him. Only mosquitoes swarmed hereabouts. Machine guns started hammering. Reggie watched the Yankees who were on their feet go flat, some wounded, some prudent enough to try to make sure they wouldn’t be. He fired a couple of rounds, but had no idea whether he hit anyone.

One of the U.S. field guns opened up. The shells tore up the swampy bottom country, but not so badly as they would have had the ground been harder and drier. And much of their explosive force went down into the muck or straight up, rather than out in all directions.

All the things that made Reggie glad when the U.S. troops were shelling the Confederates made him sorry when his own gunners returned the fire. They didn’t hurt the damnyankees nearly so much as he thought they should.

But the U.S. soldiers did not press the attack. Instead, they began to dig in where they lay. Maybe that was all they’d intended to do: push their own lines a little farther forward with this attack so they could try pushing the Confederates back with the next one or the one after that.

“If they had a lot of artillery, they’d ruin us or drive us down into Texas,” Pete Hairston said gloomily. “They’d shoot up all the river crossings so we couldn’t move supplies into Sequoyah any more, and that’d be that. But they haven’t got much more in the way of supplies than we do, so we’ll hang on a while longer. Damned if I know how to push ’em back, though.”

“Mebbe they’ll all drown in the mud an’ never be seen no more, Sarge,” Nap Dibble suggested.

Had anyone else said it, it would have been a joke, and everyone would have laughed. The trouble was, Nap meant it, and that was painfully plain to his comrades. In a more gentle voice than he would have used to speak to most of his soldiers, Hairston said, “Only trouble with that is, Nap, we’re down here in the mud with ’em, and we’d likely drown first.”

“Oh, that’s right, Sarge.” Dibble nodded brightly. “I wonder how come I didn’t think of that.”

“Funny thing about that, ain’t it?” Hairston said. He wasn’t mocking Dibble, not in the least. He got the most he could from a man who was willing without being very bright. Reggie Bartlett admired the way the sergeant handled Nap. He doubted he would have had the patience to match it.

Lieutenant Nicoll came by, inspecting the part of the line his company was digging. He nodded. “This is how you do it, men. Dig in well and the Yankees can never dislodge you.”

“Dig in well, men,” Reggie echoed after Nicoll had gone on his way. “Dig in well and they can’t drive you out of Waurika. Dig in well and they can’t drive you out of Ryan. Dig in well and you’ll have your own grave all nice and ready for those damnyankee sons of bitches to plant you in it.”

Joe Mopope’s grunt was evidently intended for a laugh. “You face this the way one of my people would,” he said. “What will be, will be. Whatever it is, you move toward it. You cannot help moving toward it. It is there. It waits for you. You cannot escape it.”

“I joined up as soon as the war started,” Bartlett answered. “I’ve spent too damn much time in the trenches since. A lot of time when I wasn’t in the trenches, I was in a damnyankee prison camp because the bastards nabbed me when I was up at the front. I’ve seen enough now that nothing I see from here on out is going to surprise me a whole hell of a lot.”

The other soldiers nodded. They were grimy and unshaven and tired and wet and full of bites. Pete Hairston said, “Whatever happens, I reckon I’m ready for it.” The soldiers nodded again.

Joe Mopope studied them. “You are warriors, all of you,” he said at last. “You are not just soldiers. You are warriors.”

“Whatever the hell we are, it isn’t worth gettin’ into an uproar about it,” Bartlett said. More nods. He fished through his pockets and found a scrap of paper that had stayed dry. More fishing revealed a tobacco pouch, but it was empty. “Anybody have some makings? I’m plumb out.”

“I got some,” Sergeant Hairston said. Reggie held out his hand with the paper in it. Hairston poured tobacco onto the paper. Nodding his thanks, Reggie rolled the cigarette. After a couple of drags, he felt better.

Sergeant Chester Martin envied U.S. Army engineers. They always seemed to know exactly what they were doing. He knew that wasn’t always so, but it was so often enough to leave him impressed. His own part in the war, he strongly felt, he was making up as he went along.

He also envied the engineers because they were cleaner than he was. A lot of them wore boots that almost reached their knees—cavalry boots—which kept their trousers from getting as filthy as his. They worked now with fussy precision, laying out lengths of white tape from one stick to another.

“What’s all this about?” David Hamburger asked. “They laying out the route for the Remembrance Day parade?”

“Couple days too early for May Day,” Martin said with a grin, needling the private with a Socialist congresswoman for a sister. “Besides, if it was for that, the tape’d be red, and then you’d get up and march along it and get yourself shot.”

“Funny, Sarge,” the Hamburger kid said. “Funny like a crutch.” But he was grinning, even laughing a little. He hadn’t seen much action—things had been quiet since Martin crossed the Potomac to join B Company of the 91st—but he fit in as well as if he’d been wearing green-gray since 1914.

Tilden Russell said, “If he was paradin’ for May Day, the Rebs wouldn’t shoot at him, not with all the colored troops they’ve got in their trenches. Those smokes are better true-blue Reds than any Socialist from outta New York City, even if he does have his sister in Congress tellin’ Teddy Roosevelt how to run things.”

“I don’t know why you expect Roosevelt to listen to Flora,” David Hamburger said. “He hasn’t listened to anybody else since he got elected.”

Martin laughed. Corporal Reinholdt, on the other hand, scowled. “Shut up,” he said in a flat, hostile voice. “Nobody’s gonna make fun of the president of the United States while I’m here to kick his ass.”

“Hey, take it easy, Bob,” Martin said. “Nobody’s getting in an uproar about this.”

“Oh, now you’re gonna undercut me, are you, Sarge?” Reinholdt growled. “Must be another goddamn Red yourself.”

Had he left off the adjective and smiled, he might have got by with it. As things were, Martin couldn’t ignore it. He’d been waiting for this moment since he got here. It had held off longer than he’d expected, but it wouldn’t hold off any more. His right hand went into a trouser pocket and came out in a fist. “Get up,” he snapped at Reinholdt, who was hunkered down over a tin coffeepot.

“Yeah?” the corporal said as he got to his feet. He was shorter and stockier than Chester Martin; they probably weighed within five pounds of each other. By the way Reinholdt leaned forward, he knew the time was here, too. He took a step toward Martin. “Come in here and take the slot that shoulda been mine, will you?” A season’s worth of resentment boiled in him. “I ought to—”

“Oh, shove it up your ass, or I’ll—” In the middle of the sentence, without warning, Martin threw a left. Reinholdt ducked with a scornful laugh. Martin laughed, too. He hadn’t expected much from that left. The arm still wasn’t so strong as it should have been, not after the wound he’d taken.

His right, though…The uppercut caught Bob Reinholdt square on the point of the chin. Reinholdt didn’t fall over; he was made of stern stuff. But the punch he had on the way ran out of steam before it got near Martin, and was hardly more than a pat when it connected with his ribs. Reinholdt’s eyes stayed open, but they weren’t seeing much.