Breakthroughs (71 page)

He zoomed back toward the front at just above treetop height, his flightmates on his tail. Every time he spotted a concentration of men in khaki, he gave them a burst and sent them flying like ninepins. They shot back, too; rifle bullets hissed past him, some uncomfortably close. An infantryman had to be amazingly lucky to shoot down an aeroplane. If enough infantrymen fired enough rounds, though…He’d never liked that thought.

He brought up the Wright’s nose to gain altitude for another swoop on the enemy’s guns. That let him look down on Toronto once more. U.S. forces had crossed the Etobicoke and the Mimico; there was heavy fighting in a park—High Park: he remembered the name from maps he’d studied—just east of the latter stream. Farther east still, what had been the Parliament building in Queen’s Park was now a burnt-out ruin, wrecked by bombs and artillery.

As always, he checked the air around him for enemy machines. Spying none, he began his second dive on the enemy’s guns. Something was different this time. The altimeter wound off a thousand feet before he realized what it was: the antiaircraft guns weren’t firing any more. He wondered if artillery hits had put them out of action. “Hope so,” he said. With luck, the slipstream would blow his words to God’s ear.

Down on the ground, the enemy artillerymen were milling around their guns. His thumb found the firing button again. The men were looking up at him and waving scraps of cloth…scraps of white cloth.

Behind his goggles, his eyes widened. He took his thumb away from the firing button and pulled out of the dive a little higher than he would have if he’d been shooting up the gunners in khaki. Instead of grabbing rifles to take potshots at him, they kept flying those makeshift white flags. Some of them waved their hands, too, as if he were a comrade and not a hated foe. Tears that had nothing to do with the slipstream blurred his vision.

“It’s over,” he said, almost in disbelief. “Can it really be over?”

It could. It was. As Moss once more led his flight back toward the American lines, none of the British and Canadian soldiers on the ground fired at their machines. Like the artillerymen, they waved whatever bits of white cloth they could find. U.S. soldiers in green-gray were beginning to come out of their trenches and approach the enemy line. No one shot at them, either.

Jonathan Moss wished the racket from his aeroplane’s motor didn’t drown out everything else. He would cheerfully have given a month’s pay to hear the silence on the ground where only minutes before rifles and machine guns and exploding shells had created hell on earth.

He wanted to find a landing strip and put down, just to be able to savor that silence. He needed all the discipline in him to fly away from the front where the fighting had finally ceased and back toward the Orangeville aerodrome. If he’d suffered a sudden case of fortuitous engine trouble, he had no doubt Stone’s aeroplane—and Bradley’s and Sprague’s as well—would have come down with similar miseries.

When he finally did land at the aerodrome, the groundcrew men knew far more about what was going on than he did. “Yeah, we got word of the armistice about half an hour after you took off,” a mechanic said. “We could have called you back if you’d had a wireless telegraph in your bus.”

“Canucks kept fighting up till the last minute, then,” Moss said. “They did their best to blow us out of the sky the first time we strafed their artillery.”

Charley Sprague asked, “Has England given up the fight, then?”

The groundcrew man shook his head. “Wish the limeys had, but they haven’t. The armistice is for land forces in Canada. The Royal Navy’s still fighting us and the Germans both.”

“They can’t win that fight—not a prayer,” Sprague said. Had his flightmate not beaten him to it, Moss would have said the same thing.

“Well, you know that, sir, and I know that, but the limeys haven’t figured it out yet,” the mechanic answered. “Been a hell of a long time since they lost a war; I guess they don’t hardly know how to go about it.”

“We’ve had practice,” Moss said. “How many Remembrance Day parades have you watched?” That was a rhetorical question; everybody in the USA had seen his share and then some. Moss went on, “About time they threw in the sponge. Quebec—the city, I mean—is gone, Winnipeg’s gone, Toronto’s going, Montreal’s blasted to hell, and we’ve finally broken out of that box between the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa and the Ridea where they’d penned us up since the start of the war. Another few months and they wouldn’t have had much left to surrender.”

“Now we’ve conquered them,” Percy Stone said. “What the devil are we supposed to do with them?”

“Sit on ’em,” Pete Bradley said. “If they give us a hard time, we’ll shoot some of ’em. That’ll give the rest the idea.”

“Oderint dum metuant,”
Sprague said. Moss, who’d had Latin, nodded. The groundcrew men stared in blank incomprehension. Sprague condescended to translate: “Let them hate, so long as they fear.”

Moss thought of Laura Secord. She hated. He didn’t think anything could make her fear. He wondered whether her husband had come through the war in one piece. If he had, he had; that was all there was to that. If he hadn’t…Moss did intend to make a trip back to Arthur, so he could find out one way or the other. He suddenly smiled. With the fighting done, that trip looked a lot easier to arrange than it had when he took off earlier in the day.

Rosenfeld, Manitoba, blazed with light as the U.S. soldiers occupying the town celebrated their victory over the forces of the British Empire in Canada. Every so often, somebody would fire a Springfield into the air. Every shot set off a fresh round of raucous cheers.

Arthur McGregor crouched behind a bush in the darkness just outside of town. If a patrol caught him here, he was in a lot of trouble. He shook his head. If a patrol caught him here, he was a dead man. He didn’t usually take chances like this. But he wouldn’t get another chance like this, either. If ever he could catch the Yanks with their guard down, now was the time.

He stiffened. Someone was coming his way along the dirt road that led out from Rosenfeld. A moment later, hearing how erratic the footsteps were, McGregor relaxed. The drunken U.S. soldier, a little gamecock of a man, staggered past him and out into the deeper darkness where night still ruled absolutely.

After ten or fifteen minutes, another couple of soldiers meandered by. McGregor stayed concealed. One of the drunks paused not far away to throw up by the side of the road. Then he stumbled after his friend, who hadn’t stopped.

Fifteen or twenty minutes more passed. Out of Rosenfeld came another soldier looking for fresh air, or perhaps only for a quiet place to heave. He was a big, broad-shouldered fellow for whose lurching strides the roadway did not seem wide enough.

As the U.S. soldier passed the bush, McGregor got to his feet. He carried an axe handle, a good, solid chunk of wood. Since he’d had not a drop to drink, his movements were swift and sure. The soldier, his face a mask of surprise, was just starting to turn when the axe handle slammed into the side of his head. He dropped as if shot—but a shot would have made noise, and McGregor could not chance that.

He dragged the soldier back to his hiding place. Once there, he finished the job of smashing the fellow’s skull: he might have been recognized, after all. Then he stripped the dead man of tunic and trousers, puttees and boots. He took off his own clothes and put on the American’s. They weren’t a perfect fit: the tunic was loose, the trousers and boots tight. But they would do. For what he had in mind, they would do. He opened a wooden box he’d carried from the farm and set the alarm clock inside to ring in two hours’ time. Then, carefully, he replaced the lid and used the axe handle to drive in four brads to keep it closed.

That done, he stepped out into the roadway. The dead soldier’s brimless service cap lay there, knocked off his head when McGregor hit him. The farmer picked it up and put it on. A lot of soldiers in town would probably not be wearing theirs, but he wanted to look as much like one of them as he could.

Into Rosenfeld he went. He didn’t stand out on account of his age: the Yanks had conscripted men who looked older than he did. Plenty of them were carrying this or that. One was giving a piggyback ride to a laughing woman waving a whiskey bottle. McGregor knew Rosenfeld’s two or three whores by sight. She wasn’t any of them; the Americans must have brought her in from some other town.

“Hey, pal, whatcha got in the box there?” a soldier asked.

McGregor had known he might get that question, so he had an answer ready: “Beer for Colonel Alexander.” The colonel named for his son was fictitious, but the soldier wouldn’t know that.

“Reckon he could spare a bottle or two?” the fellow said.

McGregor shook his head. “He’d skin me alive.” The U.S. soldier grimaced, but went off instead of trying any more wheedling. The Americans were more submissive to their officers than McGregor remembered being from his own days in uniform.
Comes of having Germans for teachers,
he thought.

He found a spot opposite the sheriff’s station Major Hannebrink was using as his headquarters. Lights were on inside; the Yanks arrested their own men as well as Canadians, and were probably hauling in lots of them tonight.

That thought had hardly crossed his mind before Hannebrink came out to stand on the porch and look around, hands on hips in indignation at the chaos victory was creating. He saw McGregor, but didn’t recognize him. After a couple of minutes, he shook his head and went back indoors.

“Now,” McGregor muttered to himself. If he couldn’t do it now, he’d never do it. He staggered across the street toward the sheriff’s station, suddenly acting much drunker than he had before. He got down on hands and knees by the wooden steps leading up to the porch where Hannebrink had stood, as if about to lose whatever he had in his stomach. He knew he wasn’t the only man in uniform doing that. When he thought—he hoped—no one was paying him any special notice, he shoved the box under the steps.

He got to his feet. Nobody shouted,
What are you doing?
or,
What’s in that box?
or even,
Wait a second, buddy—you forgot something.
After that, he had no trouble walking as if he were drunk. He was drunk, drunk with relief.

He got out of Rosenfeld and made his way back to the bushes where he’d hidden. Once there, he put the dead American’s clothes back on him—an awkward job—and got into his own shirt and overalls and shoes. He took the man’s billfold and stuck it in his pocket. With luck, the Yanks would think one of their soldiers had robbed and murdered another.

He was tying his shoes when another American wobbled up the road past him. Several of them—he didn’t know how many—were farther from Rosenfeld than he was. If any of them saw him, he might be in trouble. Instead of getting up and starting along the road, he crawled away over grass and dirt, then got to his feet and made his way north and west across a field: whatever he did, he was not going to leave a trail that led straight back toward his farm.

When he came to a little rill, he threw the American’s wallet into it after taking out the banknotes. He stuck those in his pocket and splashed along in the rill for a couple of hundred yards. If they set dogs on his trail, he wouldn’t give the beasts an easy time.

Not long after he came out, he kicked a stone. He lifted it and stuck the dead American’s paper money under it. With luck, the money would never be found. If the empty wallet was, it would make robbery look more likely.

“Thank you, sweet Jesus,” he whispered when he found a road. The wheeling stars gave him the direction he needed to head home. On the hard-packed dirt, he’d make good time. He wouldn’t leave much in the way of tracks, either.

He’d been walking almost an hour and a half when a bang louder than any of the sporadic rifle shots came from the direction of Rosenfeld. He made a fist and thumped it against his thigh. He had no way of knowing whether Major Hannebrink was still at his post when the bomb went off. Sooner or later, he’d find out. Even if the major had gone, he’d still hurt the Americans. He could console himself with that—but he didn’t care about consolation. He wanted vengeance.

Going down back roads and sneaking across the well-traveled highway east of his fields after a line of trucks rattled past, he got back to the farmhouse as twilight was beginning to stain the eastern horizon. He still had a full day’s chores ahead. By the time he finished them, he’d wish he were dead. Right now, he hoped someone else was.

Maude was making coffee in the kitchen when he came inside. “Well?” she asked. It was as close to a direct question about what he did when he went out at night as she’d ever given him.

He came close to giving a direct answer, too: “It worked. I wasn’t there, though, so I don’t know how well.”

“All right.” His wife looked him over. “Go change your clothes and bring the ones you have on downstairs. I’ll wash them. Set your shoes by the stove first.”

He bent down and felt of them. They were still damp. “Good idea,” he said. He sighed as he pulled off the shoes. “Feet are tired.”

“I’ll bet they are,” Maude said. “Go on, now. I’ll have coffee and eggs waiting when you come down again.”

By the time he’d changed and splashed water from the pitcher on the chest of drawers onto his face, Mary and Julia were up, too. Julia sliced bread for him, to go with the fried eggs Maude set out. “You look tired, Pa,” she said, which was not a question at all but at the same time was.

“Everything’s all right,” he replied, an answer that said nothing and at the same time quite a lot.

Mary’s face glowed. “Does that mean you—?” she began, and then abruptly stopped, as if she did not want to hear what it meant. Arthur McGregor only shrugged. With food and coffee in front of him, he didn’t want to think for a while.

He went out to work in the fields. When he looked back toward the farmhouse, he saw the overalls and shirt and socks and drawers he’d worn the night before out flapping on the line. The breeze was strong. They would dry quickly.

In the middle of the afternoon, a green-gray Ford parked between the farmhouse and the barn. McGregor didn’t notice it till the soldiers who got out fired a couple of shots in the air. That brought him in at a shambling trot that told him just how worn he was.