Breakthroughs (70 page)

The four guns that remained of his battery of the First Richmond Howitzers desperately needed new barrels. They’d sent too many rounds through these; the rifling grooves were worn away to next to nothing. Featherston knew the guns weren’t going to get what they needed.
Fat cats in Richmond get what they need,
he thought.
All I’m doing is defending my country. Does that count? Not likely. What do fellows like me get? Hind tit, that’s what.

When the guns began to roar, though, he whooped to see the shells falling among the leading damnyankees. He’d spent the whole war doing his best to hurt them. Even if the guns weren’t so accurate as they should have been, he could still do that. He could still enjoy it, too.

An improbably young lieutenant in an improbably clean uniform came up to him and demanded, “Who commands this battery, Sergeant?”

Jake drew himself up with touchy pride, and took pleasure in noting that he was a couple of inches taller than this baby officer. “I do,” he growled, “sir.”

“Oh.” The lieutenant looked as if he were tasting milk that had gone sour. “Very well, Sergeant. I am to inform you that, as of five o’clock
P.M.
, which is to say, about an hour from now, an armistice will go into effect along our entire fighting front with the United States.”

Jake had been braced for the news, or thought he had, for the past couple of weeks. Getting it was like a boot in the belly just the same. “We’ve lost, then,” he said slowly. “We’re giving up.”

“We’re whipped,” the officer said. Featherston looked at the men who served the guns. Perhaps for the first time, he let himself see how worn they were. Their heads bobbed agreement with the shavetail’s words—they
were
whipped. The lieutenant went on, “We’ve done everything we could do. It wasn’t enough.”

“What the hell did
you
do?” Jake asked. The lieutenant stared at him, disbelieving his ears—how could an enlisted man presume to question
him
? Jake shook his own head. Strangling the pipsqueak would be fun, but what was the use? The CSA grew his sort in carload lots. Ask a question with an answer worth knowing, then: “What are we supposed to do with the guns after five o’clock?”

“Leave them,” the young lieutenant said, as if they were unimportant. They were—to him. He went on, “The Yankees will take them as spoils of war, I reckon.” That didn’t seem important to him, either. Off he went, to give the word to the next battery he found.

“Spoils of war?” Featherston muttered. “Hell they will.” He looked at his watch. “We got most of an hour, boys, till the war’s over. Let’s make those shitheels wish it never got started.”

Plainly, his soldiers would just as soon have let the fighting peter out. He didn’t shame them into keeping on—he frightened them into it. That he could still frighten them with everything they’d known crashing into ruin around them said a lot about the sort of man he was.

At five o’clock, he himself pulled the lanyard to his field gun one last time. Then he undid the breech block, carried it over to Hazel Run—a couple of hundred yards—and threw it in the water. He did the same with the breech blocks from all the other guns. “Now the damnyankees are welcome to ’em,” he said. “Fat lot of good they’ll get from ’em, though.”

His words seemed to echo and reecho. As the armistice took hold, silence flowed over the countryside. It seemed unnatural, like machine-gun fire on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of Richmond. When the gun crew talked, they talked too loud. For one thing, they were used to shouting over the roar of the three-inchers. For another, they were all a little deaf. Jake suspected he was more than a little deaf. He’d been at the guns longer than any of his men.

Before the sun set, Major Clarence Potter made his way to the battery. Featherston nodded to him as to an old friend; in the Army, Potter was about as close to an old friend as he had. The intelligence officer looked at the field guns, then at Jake. “You’re not going to let them have anything they can use, eh?” he said.

Jake spent some little while describing in great detail the uses the damnyankees could make of his guns. Major Potter listened, appreciating his imagination. Finally, Featherston said, “Goddammit, sir, sure as hell we’re going to fight those bastards another round one of these days before too long. Why give ’em anything they can take advantage of?”

“Oh, you get no arguments from me, Sergeant,” Potter said. “I wish more men were busy wrecking more weapons we’ll have to turn over to the USA.” He wore a flask on his hip. He took it in hand, yanked the cork, swigged, and passed it to Featherston. “Here’s to the two of us. We were right when the people over us were wrong, and much good it did us.”

The whiskey burned its way down to Jake’s belly. He wanted to gulp the flask dry, but made himself stop after one long pull and hand it back to Major Potter. “Thank you, sir,” he said, for once sincere in showing an officer gratitude. Then he asked the question undoubtedly echoing throughout the beaten Army of Northern Virginia, throughout the beaten Confederate States: “What the devil happens next? We never lost a war before.”

“What happens next is up to the Yankees.” Potter drank again. “Unless I read them wrong—and I don’t think I do—they’ll take us down just as far as they can without provoking us into starting up the war.” He thrust the flask at Featherston once more. “Here. Finish it.”

“Yes,
sir.
” Jake was glad to obey that order. Once the reinforcements had landed and spread warmth along his legs and up on his cheeks and nose, he found another question, closely related to the first: “What’ll they make us do?”

“I’m not Teddy Roosevelt, thank God, but I can make some guesses,” Potter said. “First one is, the United States are going to keep whatever they’ve grabbed in the war. Kentucky’s gone, Sequoyah’s gone, that chunk of Texas they’re calling Houston is gone, the chunk they bit out of Sonora is gone, too.”

“Yeah.” Jake pointed out north. “Probably hold on to Virginia down to the Rappahannock, too.”

“Probably,” the intelligence officer agreed. “When the next war comes, that will keep us from shelling Washington the way we have the last couple of times—keep us from doing it for a little while, anyhow.”

“The next war,” Jake repeated. He assumed there would be a next one, all right. “How soon do you reckon it’ll come?”

“That depends on a lot of things,” Major Potter answered. “How much the damnyankees make us cut our Army and Navy, for one: how many men and barrels and aeroplanes and submersibles they let us keep.”

“Oh, yeah.” Featherston nodded. “And on how many we’ll have stashed away without them being any the wiser.”

“And on that,” Potter agreed. “The other side of the coin is, how soon do the thieves fall out?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Jake said with a frown.

“Who won the war?” Major Potter asked patiently. “The USA and Germany, that’s who. Oh, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, too, but they hardly count. Roosevelt and the Kaiser are pals now, but how long will that last? When they start squabbling among themselves, that may give us the chance to get some of our own back.”

“Ah.” Featherston thought that over, then raised an admiring eyebrow. “You come up with all kinds of things, don’t you, Major?” That was genuine, ungrudging praise, and drew a smile from Potter. Featherston went on, “I’ll tell you who lost the war for us, though.”

“I’ve heard this song before, Sergeant,” Potter said.

Jake went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “The white-bearded fools in the War Department and the niggers, that’s who. Anybody wants to know, we ought to take ’em all out and shoot ’em. Whole lot of good they did us during the war.”

“Take all who out and shoot them?” Major Potter asked interestedly. “The white-bearded fools in the War Department or the niggers?”

“Hell, yes.” Without his quite noticing it, the whiskey had mounted to Jake’s head. “Country’d be better off without ’em, you mark my words.”

“Duly marked, Sergeant.” But Potter sounded amused, not convinced. “Nice to know someone has all the answers. I’ll tell you one thing: a lot of people in Richmond will be looking for answers, and heads will roll on account of it.”

“Some, maybe.” Savage scorn filled Featherston’s voice. “But not enough. You mark my words on that, too. The high muckymucks’ll find ways to cover for their brothers and cousins and in-laws and pals, and nothing much’ll come out of this. And as for the niggers—hellfire, Major, some of those damn coons’ll be voting now. Voting! After they stabbed us in the back, voting! Can you imagine it?”

“You are an embittered man,” the intelligence officer told Jake. He studied him for a long moment, then slowly shook his head. “If you turned to good use the energy you waste in bitterness, who knows what you might be able to do with it?”

“Waste?” Jake shook his head, too. “I’m not wasting it, Major. I’m going to get even. I’m going to get even with everybody who screwed me and my country.”

“Forgive me, Sergeant, but I’ll believe it when I see it,” Potter said.

“You will,” Jake said. “Damned if I know how, but you will.”

Major Cherney was laying things out for the fliers in his squadron: “All right, boys, this is the last act. The Confederate States are out of the war. It’s us against England and Canada now, and we’re going to lick them. That’s all there is to it. Toronto is going to fall. With the Rebs quitting, we can bring up another million men and another thousand aeroplanes and squash ’em flat.”

Jonathan Moss stuck up his hand. When Cherney pointed to him, he said, “Sir, I don’t know about you, but I want to finish licking the Canucks
before
all the reinforcements come up from the south. If they do it for us, it’s like saying we couldn’t handle the job ourselves.”

He looked around the tent at the Orangeville aerodrome. Most of the pilots who nodded with him were men who’d been flying against the Canadians and Englishmen for a long time. Percy Stone agreed with him, for instance. Pete Bradley, like a lot of the newer men, didn’t seem to care one way or the other.
As long as Canada goes under,
his shrug might have said,
who cares how?

But Charley Sprague, among the newest of the new, spoke in support of Moss: “That’s right. They’ll take all the credit, and what will they leave us? Not a confounded thing, that’s what. After the war is over, everybody will try to pretend we didn’t do anything, anything at all. Is that how we want to go down in history?”

“I agree with both of you,” Cherney said. “We’ve been through too much to let those other bastards grab our glory. That means we have to grab it ourselves. Let’s go out and do it.”

After almost three years of war, Moss hadn’t thought a speech could fire him up for combat in the air. But he went out to his Wright two-decker with a grim smile on his face and a spring in his step. He felt ready to whip the whole British Empire singlehanded.

Perhaps seeing that, Percy Stone set a hand on his arm as he was about to climb up into his flying scout. “Steady, there,” he said. “When you try to do more than you really can, that’s when you get into trouble.”

Moss paused with his foot in the mounting stirrup on the side of the fuselage. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll remember. Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” Stone answered. “You brought me home so they could patch me up again. I want you to get home, too.” He paused, then looked west. “Or over toward Arthur, if you’d rather do that when the war is over.”

Ears burning under his flying helmet, Moss scrambled into the cockpit. Percy Stone went over to his own bus and took his place inside. Moss shook his head. His friend knew how sweet he’d got on Laura Secord, and if doing that wasn’t foolish, he didn’t know what was. For one thing, she despised Americans. For another, she had a husband. Except for those minor details, she would have made a perfect match.

But he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He knew he should, but he couldn’t. A groundcrew man spun the fighting scout’s prop. Moss checked his instruments. He had plenty of fuel, plenty of oil, and his oil pressure was good. Flying relieved the symptoms of what ailed him. He didn’t have time—well, he didn’t have much time—to think about it.

He looked to the other pilots. Stone, Bradley, and Sprague waved in turn: they were ready to go. He nodded to the groundcrew man, who pulled the chocks away from his wheels. The two-decker bumped along over the rutted grass of the landing strip till, after one bump, it didn’t come down.

The smoke that marked Toronto’s funeral pyre guided him south and east. His flightmates followed. He kept trying to look every which way at once, and wished for eyes on stalks like a snail’s to make that easier.

For two or three miles inland from the shore of Lake Ontario, the land that made up the city of Toronto rose smoothly from the water. Then it became steeper, even hilly. British and Canadian artillery used the hills to advantage, posting batteries on them and looking down on the flat country through which U.S. forces were slowly and expensively fighting their way.

Antiaircraft guns protected the pieces that were shelling the Americans. Black puffs of smoke burst around Moss’ aeroplane as he dove on an enemy battery. The Wright two-decker bucked in the turbulence from the explosions like a restive horse. A piece of shrapnel tore some fabric from the bus’s right upper wing. Moss knew it could as easily have torn through the engine, or through him.

His thumb found the firing button on top of the stick. Below, the gunners swelled from dots to toys to bare-chested men in khaki trousers. Englishmen or Canadians? He didn’t know. He didn’t see that it made a difference one way or the other. He stabbed at the button with all his strength.

“See how you like that!” he shouted as tracers lanced toward the artillerymen. They scattered. Some of them fell.

Early in the war, when he’d thought the principal function of fliers was observation, he’d felt bad about shooting at the foe. It didn’t bother him any more. It hadn’t bothered him for a long time. The limeys and Canucks weren’t shy about shooting at him. They would have cheered their heads off if he’d crashed in flames. His twin machine guns kept things even.