American Front

XIX

A few miles outside of Boston harbor, Patrick O'Donnell stuck his head out of the cabin of the Spray and called to George Enos, "The submersible has cast off the tow and the telephone line. Haul 'em aboard."

"Aye aye, Skipper," Enos answered; the biggest difference between life aboard the Spray and the way things had gone aboard the Ripple was that commands got answered in Navy talk these days.

George wished he had a winch with which to haul in the thick line and the insulated telephone wire wrapped around it. But the Spray had no winches for its own trawls, and one would have looked decidedly out of place at the stern. The steam trawler wanted to look like an ordinary fishing boat, not arousing the suspicions of Entente warships till too late. And so he did the work by hand.

Harvey Kemmel said, "Talk about locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen."

Although he had been in the Navy for years, Kemmel still flavored his speech with Midwestern farm talk George Enos sometimes found incompre hensible and often amusing. Today, though, he could do nothing but nod. "We were a little on the excited side when we sank that Rebel submarine," he admitted. "Beginners' luck, you might say."

"One way to put it," Kemmel said. "Christ, our pictures in the paper and everything. Felt good while it lasted, but we haven't had a sniff from the Rebs or the Canucks since."

A nibble, Enos would have said. However you said it, though, the message was the same. Nobody could prove the enemy was wise to the trick the Spray and other boats like her were trying to play, but neither she nor any of those other boats had lured a cruiser or a submarine to destruction since, either. "Hey, we've got a good load of fish in the hold," George said, pausing for a moment to look back over his shoulder.

Kemmel rolled his eyes. "I don't think I'm ever going to look a fish in the face again, now that I know what a hell of a lot of work it is to try and catch the bastards. I thought I was tired on a destroyer, but I didn't know what tired was. I feel like somebody rode me hard and put me away wet."

That was another comparison Enos never would have come up with on his own; he had trouble remembering the last time he'd ridden a horse. Again, though, he understood what his comrade was driving at. He answered, "The smaller the boat, the more work it takes."

"You did this stuff for years, didn't you?" Kemmel said. "Each cat his own rat, but — " He shook his head in bemusement.

"I'd sooner fish than watch a horse's rear end all day," George answered, dirt farming being the only thing he could think of that might possibly have been harder work than fishing.

"Soon as I got old enough, though, I got off my pa's farm and as far away as I could go," Kemmel shot back. "War hadn't come along, you would have kept on doing this your whole blessed life."

George Enos shut up and went back to pulling in the heavy, wet rope and the telephone line, one tug after another, hand over hand. It was hard work, but easier than bringing in the trawl full of fish. There was, at the moment, nothing at the end of this rope.

He'd just brought in the dripping end and coiled the rope neatly in place when a tug steamed up alongside the Spray and demanded her papers: no ship got into the harbor these days without being stopped and inspected first. Since they were Navy, passing the inspection proved easy enough. A pilot came aboard to guide them through the mine fields protecting Boston from enemy raiders. Every time they came back from a trip out to one fishing bank or another, more mines had been sown. Every once in a while, the mines came loose from their moorings, too. Then, pilot or no pilot, a boat or even a ship was likely to go to the bottom in a hurry.

"Wonder where the submersible's gone," Enos said. As had become its custom, the submersible had remained under the sea after releasing the tow- line. Maybe it went into Boston, sneaking under the mines, or maybe to one of the other ports nearby.

Harvey Kemmel laughed. "I can tell you ain't been in the Navy long — you still ask questions. What they want you to know, they'll tell you. What they don't want you to know ain't your business anyhow." George would have argued with him, but he looked to be right.

The pilot brought them in to T Wharf as if the Spray were an ordinary fishing boat. Patrick O'Donnell disposed of the catch as if she were an ordinary trawler, too. Then the illusion that she was still a part of the civilian world took a beating: an officer with a lieutenant commander's two medium-width stripes surrounding a narrow one strolled up the wharf to the Spray and said, "Men, you'll come with me. We have some matters to discuss." By that, he meant he would tell them what to do and they would do it.

"What's going on, sir?" George asked him. Off to one side, Harvey Kem-mel snickered. Enos' ears got hot. He did still ask questions. The United States were a free country, and most places you could do things like that. But when you were in the Navy, your freedom disappeared.

"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," the lieutenant commander said. The hell of it was, George understood the fellow was doing him a favor.

They all walked down T Wharf after the officer. Real fishermen and other people with business on the wharf gave them curious looks, those who didn't know they were Navy themselves. What the dickens did a spruce lieutenant commander want with a bunch of ragamuffins in dungarees and overalls and slickers and hats that had seen better days?

Most of the couple of blocks just back of T Wharf were full of tackle shops and saloons and boatbuilders' offices and whorehouses: businesses serving the fishing trade and the men who worked it. In one of the whorehouses, a girl stood naked behind a filmy curtain: a living advertisement. A cop across the street looked the other way. Actually, he looked right in at her, but he didn't do anything about her. George looked at her, too. He was happy being married to Sylvia, but he was a long way from blind.

He flicked a glance up toward the lieutenant commander. The man's head never moved. Maybe his eyes slid to the right, but George wouldn't have bet on it. He seemed as straight an arrow as Enos had come across in some time.

He led the crew from the Spray into a Navy recruiting station sandwiched between a saloon and a cheap diner. Charlie White said, " 'Scuse me, sir, but we already joined up." The ex-fishermen all laughed. The sailors who filled out the crew didn't.

A couple of young men sat in there, talking earnestly with a gray-haired petty officer. Enos had a pretty fair idea what they were doing: trying to con vince him they ought to be allowed to put on whites before conscription made them don green-gray. From things he'd read about what life in the trenches was like, and from the black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed day in and day out, he had a hard time blaming them.

The lieutenant commander led the men from the Spray into a back room. "Be seated, men," he said, waving to the chairs around the big wooden table. There were just enough chairs for the ersatz fishermen and, at the head of the table, for the officer. As George Enos sat down, he wondered if that was a co incidence. He had his doubts. The Navy didn't run on coincidences.

He also wondered if Patrick O'Donnell would start asking questions. O'Donnell, after all, had commanded a naval vessel that had helped sink a Confederate submarine, while the lieutenant commander had the look of a man who didn't go to sea much. But the former skipper of the Ripple sat silent. He had too much Navy in his blood to pressure an officer.

The lieutenant commander coughed. Maybe he was having trouble coming to the point. George didn't like that. If somebody didn't want to tell you something, odds were you didn't want to hear it, either. At last, the officer did speak: "Men, we are ending the program in which you have been engaged. Results have not shown themselves to be commensurate to the effort involved."

Kemmel and Schoonhoven and a couple of other regular Navy men aboard the Spray nodded. It didn't matter to them. One job, another job — so what? They were little rivets on a big machine. They'd fit wherever someone put them.

Now Patrick O'Donnell found his voice: "But, sir, we did sink a submarine."

"I know you did," the lieutenant commander said. "Another towing couple sank one off the western coast of the Empire of Mexico, too. Both, though, came in the very earliest days of the program, and both, unfortu nately, received wide publicity. Now our enemies are suspicious of targets that look too tempting to be true, and towed submersibles are operating with a far smaller range than would be the case if they were cruising on their own. And so — " He spread his hands.

"What do we do now, sir, in that case?" O'Donnell asked.

"You'll be reassigned, of course," the lieutenant commander answered crisply. "Orders have already been cut for all of you, and transportation arranged for those being moved out of the area." He pushed back his chair; the legs scraped against the floor. "I have them in my office. I'll distribute them to you. Wait here."

He left the room, returning a moment later with a manila folder from which he drew envelopes with names typed on them. He handed O'Donnell his without hesitation, but had to ask who the other men were.

George Enos' fingers fumbled with the flap of the envelope, as if they didn't want to find out what lay inside. No, not as if: he had no desire whatever to learn that the faceless red-tape twisters in Philadelphia had sent him to New York or San Diego or San Francisco or Want to or not, he pulled out the papers folded into the fat envelope. The name leaped out at him at once: " St. Louis," he said, his voice a raw hiss of pain. Report at once to the river monitor USS Punishment, St. Louis, Missouri. A train ticket fell out of the mass of other papers. He stared at it in horrified dismay. "Sir, this says I'm supposed to leave this afternoon!"

"That's correct," the lieutenant commander agreed. "We expected the Spray in three or four days ago, and made arrangements accordingly. Your family will be notified, I assure you."

Your family will be notified. A bloodless way to say it, a gutless way to do it. Sylvia would be at the canning plant now; he couldn't reach her there. The children were at Mrs. Coneval's, but she had no telephone, any more than his own apartment did. Send a wire? He shook his head. That would make Sylvia think he'd been killed.

Charlie White said, " San Diego," in that same wounded, disbelieving voice. They looked at each other. Despite the difference in the color of their skins, they were, in that moment, very much alike.

Marshlands had two wheelchairs now, the old one for upstairs and a new one with bigger wheels, one also easier to maneuver outside, for downstairs. Anne Colleton had bought the second chair without a murmur after watching Scipio bump her brother down the stairway and escape losing control of the chair only by luck.

Getting Jacob Colleton downstairs without having to bring his chair along certainly made matters easier for Scipio. He wheeled the mistress' brother to the top of the staircase, helped him rise, draped one of Jacob's arms over his own shoulder, let the gassed man hang onto the banister with the other hand, and walked down more or less normally. Then he eased Jacob Colleton down into the other wheelchair. "My gun," Colleton rasped.

"Are you certain that is what you require, sir?" Scipio asked tonelessly. As usual, Jacob reeked of whiskey. He'd also given himself an injection of morphia not long before. The butler did not think well of a drunk, drugged man's prospects for straight shooting.

Jacob Colleton glared at him. His body was wrecked, his eyes red-tracked and blurry, but the hate and rage that poured out from them made Scipio back up half a step in alarm. They weren't aimed at him in particular, but at the world as a whole, the world that had done what it had done to Jacob. That made them more frightening, not less. "Bring me my gun," Colleton hissed. He paused to draw a painful breath, then added, "If you're lucky, I'll give you a running start."

Scipio's laugh was dutiful. He might have found that funnier if he hadn't been sure Miss Anne's brother at least half meant it. "I'll be back directly, sir," he said, and went upstairs again. Hung on brackets above the bed in which he could sleep only propped up by pillows, Jacob Colleton had a Tredegar military rifle. Scipio took it and a couple of ten-round clips of ammunition and carried them down to Colleton. Jacob laid the rifle across the arms of his wheelchair and stuck the ammunition in one of the deep pockets of his robe.

"Push me over by that stand of trees," he told Scipio. "You know, the one by the nigger cottages."

"Yes, sir," Scipio said.

"See what kind of varmints I can get," Colleton went on. What a. 303 caliber bullet meant for knocking over men at five hundred yards did to a squirrel at fifty wasn't pretty, but Jacob Colleton didn't seem to care much about that. He was a good shot — a far better shot than he had been before he went off to war. He looked up at Scipio, those pale eyes blazing. "I keep wish ing it was damnyankees in my sights. Do you have any idea what I'm telling you? No, you wouldn't. How could you?"

But Scipio did. As he opened the front door so he could push Jacob Colleton out of Marshlands, he thought of the Negro revolutionary cell to which he'd so unwillingly become attached, and of their endless, hungry murmurs of Come de revolution. Come the revolution, they'd take aim at Jacob Colleton with exactly the same loving hate he lavished on the men of the USA.

A couple of Negro children broke off their games to stare at Jacob and Scipio as they went by. Colleton made as if to lift his rifle. "You better run fast, you damn little pickaninnies," he croaked. Run the children did, squealing in delicious fear. Colleton laughed his ghastly, shattered laugh. He looked up at Scipio again. "If I don't have any luck in the woods, I'll bag 'em on the way back to Marshlands."

Scipio maintained a prudent silence. Again, he thought Colleton was mak ing a joke. Again, he wasn't sure enough to be comfortable.

Some of the trees by the Negro cabins bore fruit or nuts. The plantation hands shared out what they got from them. Some of the trees and bushes were just there, and had been there since before the War of Secession, maybe before the American Revolution.

Colleton clicked a magazine into the Tredegar and chambered the first round. Scipio stood behind the wheelchair. He had other things he needed to be doing, plenty of them. Unless Miss Anne called him, they wouldn't get done for a while. Jacob wanted to be moved every so often if he didn't shoot anything. If Scipio wasn't there to move him, he really might use the butler for target practice on his reappearance.

A crow flapped by and landed in a pecan tree. Fast as a striking snake, Jacob Colleton slapped the rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. The report, as always, made Scipio jump and his heart start to pound. He wondered what war sounded like. Every time he tried to imagine it, his imagination rebelled.

The crow lost its perch and fell to the ground with a plop. It lay, a black puddle, on the grass and moss and leaves below the tree. With a click, Jacob Colleton worked the bolt and brought a fresh cartridge into the chamber. The brass casing he'd ejected glittered by the wheelchair.

"Good shot, sir," Scipio said. "Shall I recover the bird?"

"Don't bother," Colleton wheezed. "Crow isn't worth eating. No kind of crow is worth eating."

You say that, to a Negro? Scipio wanted to snatch the rifle out of his hand and smash in his skull. When whites came out with witless cracks like that, it did more than Cassius' Red rhetoric to make Scipio think the black revolution was not only needed but might succeed. No matter how sharp Jacob Col- leton's eyes were, he was blind.

Colleton fired again, missed, and swore. His trainwrecked voice made ordinary words sound extraordinarily vile. Killing a foolish possum a few minutes later partially restored his spirits. "You can get that," he told Scipio. "Give it to one of those little niggers for the pot." Every once in a while, he remembered he was still supposed to be a gentleman.

Scipio carried the possum back by the tail. Jacob Colleton had put a bullet half an inch back of one eye. The ugly little beast couldn't have known what hit it. And possum, after some time in the pot or the bake oven, was tasty eat ing indeed. "Very good shooting, sir," Scipio said, laying the little body down beside the wheelchair.

Jacob Colleton started to say something, but coughed instead. He kept coughing, and finally started to turn blue. At last, as Scipio helplessly stood by, he mastered the spasm. "Lord God almighty," he whispered, "feels as if they're taking sandpaper and a blowtorch to my insides." Along with the clips of ammunition, he had a silver flask in one pocket of his robe. He gulped from it, swallowed, and gulped again. His color slowly improved. He looked down at the possum he had killed. "Good shooting, Scipio?" He shook his head. "This is nothing. It's not even proper sport. The possum can't shoot back."

"Sir?" Scipio knew he was supposed to say something in response to that, but for the life of him couldn't figure out what.

Colleton breathed whiskey up into his face. "Don't look at me like that. I wasn't joking, not even slightly. What better game to play, what more exciting game to play, than wagering your life that you're a better shot than the damnyankee on the far side of the barbed wire? But machine guns cheat, artillery cheats, gas cheats worst of all. It doesn't care how good a soldier you are. If you're in the wrong place, it kills you — and there's no sport at all about that."

Again, Scipio kept his mouth shut. A robin flew down toward a treetop. Jacob Colleton fired while it was still on the wing. It seemed to explode in midair. Feathers drifted to the ground. Scipio's eyes got wide. That wasn't just good shooting — it was outstanding shooting. And, since there wasn't much left of the poor songbird, Colleton hadn't done it for any reason but to show off… and maybe to savor the moment of killing something. Scipio shivered.

After he'd killed a squirrel and missed a couple of shots, Jacob said, "Enough of this. Take me back inside."

"Yes, sir," Scipio said, and he did. He helped Miss Anne's brother upstairs and back into the pillow-strewn bed in which he could not lie down. Scipio, whose mind took strange leaps these days, wondered how he did what he did with the women he summoned to his room. The Negro, who was very conventional in those matters, had trouble imagining alternatives.

He escaped from the bedroom with more than a little relief. But, try as he would, he could not escape Jacob Colleton. Down in the kitchen, he ran into Cassius; the hunter was bringing in a turkey he'd killed in the woods beyond the cotton fields. Cassius had been very quiet since his return from what he'd told Anne Colleton was Jubal Marberry's plantation. Now he signaled Scipio with his eyes. The two of them walked outside.

A stove had made the kitchen blazing hot. No stove burned outside, but it was blazing hot there, too, and so muggy Scipio expected rain. He and Cassius strolled along side by side. They made an incongruous pair because of their difference in dress, but nobody paid them any mind. Both the field hands and the white folks were used to seeing them together.

In a low, casual voice, Cassius said, "Kip, you got to keep Marse Jacob 'way from them trees." He pointed to the little wood into which Jacob Colleton had been shooting.

"How kin I do dat?" Scipio demanded. In a flash, he went from Congaree dialect to the English he used around Miss Anne and other whites. " 'I'm sorry, sir, but the huntsman-in-chief requires you to take your sport elsewhere'?" He fell back into dialect: "Ain't gwine happen, Cass."

Cassius guffawed and slapped his thigh. "Do Jesus, that funny." He grew se rious again in a hurry, though. "Don' care how you do it, but you do it, hear?"

Scipio stared at him in something approaching agony. "Ah cain't, Cass. He say go dere, we gots to go dere. I tell he no, I dance me all round why fo' no, he jus' git mo' and mo' 'spicious. You hear what I say?"

"I don't got to hear you, Kip. You got to hear me," Cassius said, not loudly, but not in a way Scipio thought he could ignore, either. "Don' wan' no white folks traipsin' through they woods. Don' wan' no white folks nowheres near they woods, you hear?"

"Better shoot me now," Scipio said. He'd never tried standing up to Cas sius till this moment. He'd never had any chance before; the hunter had effortlessly dominated him. But now he'd asked the impossible. If he was too stupid to recognize that, too bad — too bad for everyone, too bad for everything.

He stared at Scipio now; defiance was the last thing he'd expected. "You got to, Kip," he said at last. "Ain' no two ways 'bout it. You got to." But he wasn't ordering now; he sounded more like a man who was pleading.

"How come I got to?" Scipio demanded.

Cassius didn't want to tell him. He could see that, with no room for doubt. After a long, long pause, the hunter said, "On account of I got a whole raf' o' guns, whole raf o' bullets back in there. White folks finds that, ain't gwine do nothin' but hang all the niggers on this here plantation."

"Reckoned it were sumpin' like dat," Scipio said, nodding; wherever Cas- sius had been when he was away, it wasn't in bed with a nineteen-year-old wench named Drusilla. Where had he got the weapons? How had he got them back here? Scipio didn't know, or want to know. He pointed toward the woods in question. "You worry too much, you know dat? Marse Jacob, he cain't git out o' that chair, not hardly. He shoot hisself a possum, I gits it an' brings it back. He ain't goin' in they woods. An' you wants me to ruin everything on account of you gits de vapors. Do Jesus!" He clapped a hand to his forehead.

Cassius soberly studied him. "All right, Kip, we does it yo' way," he said, and Scipio breathed again. "You better be right. You is wrong, you is dead. You is wrong, we all dead."

He walked off shaking his head, perhaps wondering if he'd done the right thing. Scipio stood where he was till he stopped trembling. He'd got away with it. Not only had he been right, he'd made Cassius recognize that he was right. As triumphs went, it was probably a small thing, but he felt as if he'd just won the War of Secession all by himself.

"Pa," Julia McGregor asked with the intent seriousness of which only eleven-year-old girls seem capable, "are you going to send me back to school when it opens again after harvest time?"

Arthur McGregor looked up from the newspaper he was reading. He rested while he could; harvest would be coming soon. The paper was shipped up from the USA, and full of lies; since the demise of the Rosenfeld Register (which had been only half full of lies), no local paper had been permitted. But even lies could be interesting if they were new lies: why else did people read so many books and magazines?

"I'd thought I would," he answered slowly. "The more you learn, the better off you'll be." He brought that last out like an article of faith, even if he couldn't see how he was all that much better off for his own schooling. He studied his elder daughter. "Why? Don't you want me to?"

"No!" she said, and shook her head so vigorously that auburn curls flipped into her face.

"I don't want to go, either," Mary exclaimed.

"Hush," he told her. "I'm talking to your big sister." Mary did hold her tongue, but looked mutinous. She had an imp in her that wouldn't placidly let her do as she was told. Her backside got warmed more often than Julia's or Alexander's ever had. But the imp also drove her to acts of real, even foolhardy, courage, as when she'd charged at the American officer who'd wanted to take McGregor hostage in Rosenfeld. Her father turned back toward Julia. "You used to like school. Why don't you want to go any more?"

"You remember how I went last spring, when the Yankees let the schools open up again?" Julia asked. Arthur McGregor nodded. His daughter went on, "The books they made the teachers use, they were American books." She couldn't have spoken with greater contempt had she called them Satan's books.

"Numbers are numbers, and you do have to learn to cipher," he said. Reluctantly, Julia nodded back at him. He added, "Words are words, too."

"No, they aren't," his daughter said. "Americans spell funny."

McGregor spelled funny himself. His spelling had probably got funnier in the years since he'd escaped the classroom. Julia, though, had always been clever in school. That must have come from Maude's side of the family; he knew it hadn't come from his. He said, "They don't spell all their words different — not even most." He thought that was true. He hoped it was.

At any rate, Julia didn't argue it. What she did say was, "It's not that stuff so much, Pa. It's the history lessons. I don't ever want to go to another one of those again." She looked and sounded on the edge of tears.

McGregor glanced down at the newspaper, which had come from a little town in the state of Dakota. He remembered what he'd thought about it mo ments before. "They telling you lies in the schoolroom, sweetheart?" he asked.

Julia's nod was as emphatic as her headshake had been. "They sure were, Pa," she answered. "All kinds of lies about how America was right to have the Revolution, and the king of England was a wicked tyrant, and the Loyalists were traitors, and they should have conquered us in 1812, and Canada was worse off for staying with England, and how England and France and the CSA kept stabbing the United States in the back. None of it's true, not even a little bit."

"Not even a little bit," Mary echoed happily.

"Hush," Arthur McGregor told her. He picked his words with care as he spoke to Julia: "It's what they have to teach to keep the schools open at all, same as the Register had to print what the Americans told it to a lot of the time."

"I understand that." Julia's voice was impatient. He'd underestimated her, and disappointed her because of it. She went on, "I know they're teaching us a pack of rubbish. I know what really happened, just like they taught me before when they were telling the truth. That isn't what bothers me, or not so much, anyway. But I don't think I can stand going back to school and listening to the teacher talk about all the lying things the Americans make him say and read ing the books that say the same stupid things and watching the other pupils at the schoolhouse listen to all the same lies and believe them."

"Do they?" McGregor wished he had enough tobacco to let himself light a pipe right now. It would have helped him think. He looked at the Dakota newspaper again. People all over American-occupied Manitoba were getting papers on the same order as this one. He didn't take seriously the propaganda with which it was laced, and had assumed nobody else did, either. But how true was that assumption? All at once, he wondered.

"They really do, Pa," Julia said seriously, making him wonder all the more. "It's like they never paid attention before, so when the teacher tells them American lies and the books say the same thing, they don't know any better. They just give it back like they were so many parrots."

"Awrk!" Mary squawked. "Polly want a cracker?"

"Polly want to go to bed right now?" McGregor asked, and his youngest got very quiet. He sat there thinking, his chin in his hand. He was a hard-nosed, rock-chinned Scotsman; he knew what was so and what wasn't. So did his wife. They'd brought up their children to do the same, and evidently succeeded.

But what about the people who weren't the same and who didn't do the same for their children? He hadn't thought much about them. Now, listening to Julia, he realized that was a mistake. What about the light-minded souls who believed the Germans were about to take Petrograd and Paris and the Americans Richmond and Toronto, for no better reason than that the news papers said as much? What about their children, who believed when they got told the Confederacy had had no right to secede from the United States or that Custer's massacre of General Gordon's brave column had been a heroic victory, not a lucky ambush? What about all the people like that?

McGregor got an answer, far more quickly and with far more confidence in his accuracy than if he'd had to do arithmetic on paper. If you rilled the heads of people like that with nonsense like that, and did it for a few years or maybe for a generation at most, what would you have? You'd have people who weren't empty-headed Canadians any more. You'd have people who were empty-headed Americans instead.

"Maybe we won't send you back to that school after all," he said slowly. Julia beamed at him, looking as much surprised as delighted. And Mary let out such a whoop of delight that her mother came out of the kitchen to see what had happened.

When Arthur McGregor explained what he said and why, Maude nodded. "Yes, I think you're right," she said. "If they're going to try to make us over, we can't very well let them, can we?"

"I aim to do everything I can to stop them, anyhow," he answered. "We have primers of one sort or another here around the house, anyway. You and I can give the girls some lessons, anyhow. That way, when this country is back in Canadian hands the way it's supposed to be, they won't have lost too much time with their schooling."

"Oh, thank you, Papa!" Julia breathed. "Thank you so much."

Mary was looking less pleased with the solution. "You mean we'll have to go to school here}" she said. "That's no good."

"I expect your mother and I can probably do a better job of riding herd on you than any schoolteacher ever born," McGregor said.

By the expression on Mary's face, she expected the same thing, and the expectation filled her with something other than delight. She turned on her big sister. "Now look what you've gone and done," she said shrilly.

"It's not my fault," Julia said. Before Mary could demand whose fault it was if not hers, as Mary was plainly about to do, she answered the not yet spoken question on her own: "It's the Americans' fault." That, for a wonder, satisfied her little sister. Mary believed the Americans capable of any enormity. Arthur McGregor was inclined to agree with her.

Later that night, after the children were asleep and he and Maude lying down in their bed, his wife said to him, "I wouldn't mind so much sending the children to the school, no matter what it taught about history and such, if…" Her voice trailed away.

McGregor understood what she meant. He didn't want to say it, either, but say it he did: "If you thought they'd only have to listen to American lies for another year, or two at the most."

Beside him, Maude nodded. The night was warm, but she shivered. "I'm afraid we're going to lose the war, and I'm afraid we won't have a country we can call our own any more."

I'm afraid we're going to lose the war. Neither of them had come out and said that before now. "I think we'll beat them in the end," McGregor an swered, trying to keep up his spirits as well as hers. "They haven't licked us yet, and the mother country is helping all she can. Everything will turn out right. You wait and see."

"I hope so," she said. But then she sighed and fell asleep. Arthur McGregor hoped so, too, but he'd long since discovered the difference between what he hoped and what came true. Now that Maude had named the fear, he could feel it nibbling at his soul, too. I'm afraid we're going to lose the war. No mat ter how tired he was, sleep took a long time catching up with him.

Sam Carsten peered out of the barracks at Pearl Harbor toward the drydock where the damaged Dakota was being repaired. Other buildings hid the dry-dock from sight, but he knew exactly where it was. He thought he could have been dropped anywhere in or near Honolulu and pointed accurately toward it, just as a compass reliably pointed north. His affinity for the ship was hardly less than the instrument's for the North Magnetic Pole.

Knowing the Dakota was wounded ate at him, so much so that he burst out, "I'm afraid we're going to lose the goddamn war."

Hiram Kidde understood him perfectly. "Fleet's not gonna go to the devil on account of we're one battleship light," the gunner's mate said reassuringly. He got a sly look in his eye. " 'Sides, Sam, I know what's really eating you."

"What's that?" Carsten said.

"Now that we're stuck here on the beach, we have to make like soldiers instead of sailors," Kidde answered.

"That's not all bad." Carsten pointed to the row on row of iron cots. "Nice to be able to get some sack time without Crosetti farting in my face from the top bunk. Chow's better, too, same as it always is when we're in port instead of steaming. But… yeah. I haven't been out of a ship for such a long stretch since I joined up. I don't much like it."

"Me, neither," Kidde said, "on both counts, and I been in the Navy damn near as long as you've been alive. Other thing is, when you're on a ship you aren't just spinning your wheels. You keep things clean, you keep things neat, on account of it makes the ship work better. Doing it on dry land… Why bother?"

"Orders," Carsten said, making it a dirty word. "Somebody says you got to do it, you got to do it, never mind whether it makes sense."

"I'm damn glad you understand how that is, Sam, damn glad," Kidde said in a tone of voice that made Carsten realize he'd been betrayed — worse, that he'd just gone and betrayed himself. Smiling at how nicely the trap had worked, Kidde went on, "Got a lot of walks out there that need policing. Get yourself a broom and get to it."

"Have a heart, 'Cap'n,' " Sam said piteously. "You send me out in the sun for a couple hours here and they can stick an apple in my mouth and serve me up at the officers' mess tonight. I'll be cooked meat." He ran a hand along his arm, showing off his fair, fair skin.

"Grab a broom," Kidde said, all at once sounding much more like a chief petty officer than a buddy.

"I hope you screw Maggie Stevenson," Carsten said, and then, while Kidde was still blinking (any male human being who didn't want to screw Maggie Stevenson had to have a screw loose himself), he added, "Right after the guy with the chancre."

There were people who, when they said things like that, started fights. When Carsten said things like that, he got laughs. "You're a funny guy — funny like a crutch," Kidde said, but, if he was trying not to chuckle, it was a losing effort. "Go on, funny guy, get moving."

Sam smeared his arms and his nose and the back of his neck with zinc ox ide ointment. He was unhappily aware that the stuff didn't do much good, but it was, or at least it might have been, better than nothing. He supposed that made up for the medicinal stink of the goop.

Resigning himself to baking, he went out, broom and dustpan in hand. The dustpan wasn't standard military issue; some ingenious soul had mounted it on the end of a broomstick, too, so Sam didn't have to bend down every time he swept something into it. He approved of that. He approved of any thing that made work easier, especially when it was work he had to do.

The walks were pretty clean. Even ashore, sailors were most of them neat people, carrying over the habits they'd picked up at sea. Whenever he came across a cigar butt or a crumpled-up empty pack of cigarettes or a scrap of pa per, he swept it into the dustpan with a muttered, "God damn the Marines."

He muttered his curses for two reasons. First, he didn't know whether Marines were actually responsible for the trash, though he would have bet on it: they weren't trained to neatness the way ordinary Navy men were. The other reason was that, even if he'd been right, some Marines walking by might have heard him, and they'd have beaten the stuffing out of him just as enthusi astically as if he'd been wrong.

Marines strolled through Pearl Harbor as if they owned the world. Marines acted that way even aboard ship. It drove Navy men crazy — but you had to be worse than crazy to want to mess with one of the hard-faced men in forest green. Even if you were a tough guy and you beat him, all of his buddies would come after you then, and they hung together a lot tighter than sailors did. Marines put Sam in mind of mean hunting dogs. You took them to where the game was, you pointed them at it, and you stood back and let them kill it. If you got in the way, they'd chew you up, too.

And so, when, after an hour or so of Sam's being out in the sun, a Marine walking past turned to his friend and said, "You smell something scorched?" Carsten kept on pushing his broom. Both Marines, themselves bronzed and fit-looking, laughed. He sighed. He couldn't do anything about the kind of skin he had except wish he were back in San Francisco, or maybe up in Seat tle. Seattle was a good town if you were fair. The sun hardly ever came out, and when it did it was a lot paler than the lusty fire in the sky above Pearl Harbor.

Thinking of things in the sky above Pearl Harbor, Sam scanned it for aeroplanes. He didn't see any, either American or belonging to the enemies of the USA. He wished he hadn't seen the last aeroplane, that one from Japan. If it hadn't come buzzing around, the Dakota wouldn't have been in drydock with a large hole blown in her flank.

A couple of Navy men came by. They weren't off the Dakota; Carsten hadn't seen them before. He picked up snatches of their conversation-place names, mostly: "Kodiak… Prince Rupert… Victoria… Seattle."

Since he'd just been thinking wistfully of a cooler clime, he called after them: "What about Seattle?"

The two men stopped. "Nothing good," one of them answered. "The goddamn Japs have reinforced the limey fleet off British Columbia."

"You're right-that isn't good," Sam agreed. The places they'd mentioned made sense to him now. "They sailed up by way of Russian Alaska and then down along the west coast of Canada, did they?"

"That's what they did, all right, the bastards," the other sailor agreed unhappily. "On account of it, the North Pacific Squadron can't hardly stick its nose out of Puget Sound."

"You don't have to tell me about the Japs," Carsten said. "I was on the Dakota after they suckered us out of Pearl." The two strangers nodded sympathetically, for once at a predicament other than his sunburn. He went on, "You ask me, everybody in the whole damn Pacific had better watch out on account of the Japs. They're making like they're buddy-buddy with England, but if the limeys ever turn their backs on 'em, they'll get cornholed faster'n you'd believe. Us, too. I already seen that happen."

"We weren't out here yet when the Japs suckered you guys," one of the strangers said. He stuck out his hand. "Homer Bradley, off the Jarvis." He was sandy-haired but, to Carsten's annoyance, suntanned.

"Dino Dascoli, same ship," his companion added. The Honolulu sun wouldn't faze him; he was as swarthy as Vic Crosetti.

Carsten shook hands with both of them and introduced himself. Then he explained how the Americans' dash after the fleet that had launched the aero plane had gone wrong, finishing, "As soon as we got torpedoed, it was easy to figure out what the hell we hadn't thought about. Next time, I hope we don't stick our dicks in the meat grinder that particular way."

"That's the truth," Bradley agreed. He studied Carsten's uniform. "You talk like a Seaman First, Sam, but you sort of sound like you think like an officer, you know what I mean?"

"Too damn much time on my hands, that's what it is, just like everybody else on the Dakota who isn't fixing her up," Sam said. "Nothin' to do but stuff like this or else sit around and play cards and shoot the breeze and think about things." He grinned. "Catch me at my battle station and I'm as stupid as anybody could want."

His new acquaintances grinned. "You got a good way of lookin' at things, Sam," Dino Dascoli said. He lowered his voice. "And since you got a good way of lookin' at things, maybe you got a good way of lookin' for things, too. A guy wants to have a good time around here, where's the best place at?"

"A good, good time?" Sam asked. Dascoli nodded. "You don't mind spending some money?" Dascoli nodded again. Sam smiled till his sunburned face hurt. "All right. What you do, then, is you hop on the trolley into Honolulu and you get off at the Kapalama stop. There's this gal named Maggie Stevenson…" Dascoli and Bradley leaned closer.

Down below Jonathan Moss, the town of Guelph, Ontario, was dying a slow, horrible death. Incessant artillery fell on the Canadians and Englishmen still holding out in the provincial town built of gray stone. The guns had been hammering at the Church of Our Lady Cathedral for days; the Canucks weren't shy about putting artillery observers up in the spires, and so the spires had to come down. Come down they had. Only smoke rose above the cathedral now. It rose high enough to make Moss cough and choke some thousands of feet above the ruined house of God.

In a way, he wished the order loosing the one-deckers to fly above enemy-held territory had not come. It would have spared him the sight of towns given over to pounding from the big guns. He'd seen plenty of that while pi loting observation aeroplanes, and would not have minded missing it in his flying scout.

In another way, though, it mattered little. Although he might not have seen them as they were being wrecked, he'd flown over plenty of towns after the United States took them away from Canada, and they made a pretty ap palling spectacle then, too.

And, thrusting ahead like this, he felt he was doing more to help the American soldiers on the ground push forward against the unceasing and often insanely stubborn opposition of the Canadian and British troops strug gling to hold them back.

"More than a year," he said through the buzz of the engine. "More than a year, and we still aren't in Toronto." He shook his goggled head. Back in Au gust 1914, no one would have believed that. The Americans weren't in Mon treal. As long as Canada still hung on to the land between the one big city and the other, she was still a going concern.

Moss knew better than to let such gloomy reflections keep him from do ing what he needed to do to stay alive. He kept an eye on his position in the flight of four Martins. Without consciously thinking about it, he checked above, below, and to both sides; his head was never still. He used the rearview mirror the mechanics had installed on his aeroplane, but did not rely on it alone. Every minute or so, he'd half turn and look back over his shoulder.

He hoped that was all wasted precaution, but his hope didn't keep him from being careful. The Canucks hadn't been sending many aeroplanes up lately to oppose the U.S. machines, but the British were shipping over more and more aeroplanes and pilots to make up for the shrinking pool of Canadian men and aircraft. He and his comrades had found out about that the hard way.

If the prospect of running into more British airmen bothered Dud Dudley, he didn't let on. The flight leader waggled his wings to make sure his comrades were paying attention to him, then dove down toward the ground. Moss spot ted the target he had in mind: a column of men in butternut-no, he reminded himself, up here they called that color khaki, limey fashion-moving up toward the front.

The first time he'd machine-gunned men on the ground, he'd felt queasy and uncertain about it for days afterwards. He'd heard robbers were the same way: the first job they pulled was often almost impossibly hard. After that, things got easier, till they didn't really think about what they were doing, except the way any laborer might on the way to work.

He didn't know about robbers, not for sure. He did know that the only things going through his mind as he swooped on the marching soldiers like a hawk on a chipmunk were considerations of speed and altitude and angle, all the little practical matters that would help him do the foe as much damage as he could.

He swore when the men on the ground spotted him and his flightmates a few seconds faster than he'd hoped they would. The infantrymen began to scatter, and had good cover in which to shelter, for the road along which they were marching ran through what had been a built-up area that American artillery had rather drastically built down.

Little flashes from the ground said the soldiers down there were shooting at him. He didn't think much of it: after antiaircraft fire from cannon dedicated to the job, what were a few rifle bullets? Then one of them cracked past his head, almost close enough to be the crack of doom.

"Jesus!" he shouted, and stabbed his thumb down on the firing button of his machine gun. Bullets streamed out between the spinning blades of his pro peller. He wished Dudley had never told him what happened when an interrupter gear got out of adjustment. If he shot himself down now, flying so low and fast, he'd surely crash. And even if, by some miracle, he did manage to glide to a landing, no insurance salesman would give him a dime's worth over coverage if he landed anywhere near the men he'd been shooting up. In their shoes, he would have settled his own hash, too.

There was a knot of them, running for the shelter of rubble that might once have been a row of shops. As long as he didn't shoot himself down, he held the whip hand. He fired another long burst and saw some of the men in khaki fall before he zoomed by.

Those are people, he thought with a small part of his mind as he gained altitude for another firing run. He had no trouble ignoring that small part. Those fleeing shapes in uniforms of the wrong color? They were just targets.

And if they weren't targets, they were the enemy. He'd just been thinking about what they'd do if they caught him. They hadn't caught him. He'd caught them instead.

He turned and shot them up again. They put a lot of lead in the air, trying to shoot down his aeroplane and those of his flightmates. After the second pass, Dud Dudley waved for the flight to pull up and head back toward the American lines. Moss had no trouble obeying the flight leader. Neither did Tom Innis. But smoke was pouring out of Luther Carlsen's engine. The careful pilot hadn't been careful enough.

After the smoke came fire. It caught on the fabric of the one-decker's fuse lage and licked backwards with hideous speed; the doping that made the fabric resist the wind was highly inflammable, and the slipstream pushed the flames along ahead of it.

Carlsen did everything he could. He beat at the flames with the hand he didn't keep on the controls. He brought the aeroplane's nose up into a stall, to reduce the force of the wind. But when he recovered from the stall — and he did that as precisely and capably as he did everything else-the fire engulfed the aeroplane. He crashed into what might once have been a pleasant block of houses in Guelph.

Numbly, Moss, Innis, and Dudley flew back to their aerodrome, which, with the forward movement of the front, had advanced to near the city of Woodstock. Woodstock, before the war, had been famous for its tree-lined avenues. When the front passed through it, the famous trees were reduced to kindling, in which sad state they remained. Woodstock had also been promi nent for its munitions plants. Nothing was left of them but enormous craters: the retreating Canadians had exploded them to deny them to the USA.

The three survivors landed without any trouble. Ground crew men asked what had happened to Carlsen. The pilots explained, in a couple of short sentences. The mechanics didn't push them. Those things had happened before. They would happen again, all too often.

Captain Shelby Pruitt took their report. "Nothing to be done," he said when they were through. "Go where there are bullets and they're liable to hit you." He shook his head. "It's too damn bad. He knew what he was doing up there." Pointing to a big tent not far from the one in which he made his office, he added, "Go on over to the officers' club. I'm not going to send you up tomorrow."

That was the polite way of saying, Go get drunk and then sleep it off. The pilots gratefully took him up on it. Staring down into a glass of whiskey, Tom Innis said, "I always figured I would be the one to go. Luther did everything right all the time. Now he's dead. God damn it to hell, anyway." He knocked back the drink and signaled for another.

"Don't talk about who's going to go," Moss said, earnestly if a little blur- rily-the tip of his nose was getting numb, and so was his tongue. "Bad luck."

"Bad luck," Innis repeated. He gulped down the new drink, too. "How many pilots who started the war will still be alive at the end of it, do you think?"

Moss didn't answer that. He didn't want to think about it, not at all. To keep from thinking about it, he got as drunk as he could as fast as he could. He and Innis and Dud Dudley were all staggering when they made their way back to their tent. By the time they got there, somebody had cleaned out Luther Carlsen's personal effects, to send back to his next of kin. Seeing the bare, neat, empty cot made Moss shiver. He'd taken over a cot like that. Who, one of these days, would take over the one over which he now sprawled at an angle no sober man would have chosen?

He was lucky. He fell asleep-or passed out-before he could dwell on that one for long. When he woke up the next morning, the whiskey had taken its revenge, and he hurt too bad to dwell on anything.

But that afternoon, after gallons of coffee and the hair of the dog that bit him, he felt almost human, in an elderly, melancholy way. He was writing a letter to a cousin in Cleveland when the tent flap opened. Captain Pruitt led in a gawky young man with a green-gray duffel slung over his shoulder. "Gentle men," he said, "this is Zach Whitby. Lieutenant Whitby, we have here Dan Dudley, Tom Innis, and Jonathan Moss."

Whitby threw the duffel down on the cot that had been Luther Carlsen's. He stuck out his hand. "Pleased to meet you all."

"You all?" Moss ran the words together. "Look out, boys, we've got a Reb flying with us." If you laughed, you didn't have to think about it… not so much, anyhow.

"Why, Major, why did you pick my farm?" Lucien Galtier demanded. As he knew perfectly well what the answer to that question was, he was not so much seeking information as plumbing the depths of Major Jedediah Quigley's hypocrisy.

"I have several excellent reasons, Monsieur Galtier," Quigley answered. As he spoke, he ticked them off on his fingers, which, with his elegant Parisian accent and his incisive logic, made him seem more a lawyer than a soldier to Galtier: an invidious comparison if ever there was one. "First, monsieur, your farm is sufficiently far back from the banks of the St. Lawrence as to be be yond artillery range even from the gunboats that try to harass our operations on the river and our crossings. This is an important matter in the placement of a hospital, as I am sure you must agree." Without waiting to learn whether Galtier agreed or not, he went on, "Second, the road is already paved to within a couple of miles of your farm. Extending it this much farther is a work of no great trouble."

"I would not put you to any trouble whatever," Galtier said, knowing he was righting a losing battle.

"As I say, it is a small matter," Quigley replied. "It will even work to your advantage: an all-weather road passing by your farm will enable you to sell your produce ever so much more readily than you do now."

"I shall have ever so much less produce to sell, however, as you are taking so much of my patrimony for the purpose of building this hospital," Lucien told him. "And you appear to be taking the best land I have, that given over to wheat."

"Only the most convenient," Major Quigley assured him. "And you will be compensated for the use."

"Compensated as I was for my produce last winter?" Galtier shot back. Quigley shrugged, a fine French gesture to go with his fine French tongue. Yes, his hypocrisy was deep indeed. He never once mentioned Lucien's refusal to give names to Father Pascal or to collaborate with the Americans in any other way. But the farmer was as sure as he was of his own name that, had he cho sen to collaborate, the hospital would have gone up on someone else's land.

Quigley said, "Do not think of this hospital as a permanent structure, Monsieur Galtier. It will serve its purpose for the time being and then pass away and be forgotten. As we establish and enlarge our foothold north of the St. Lawrence, no doubt it will become practical for us to build hospitals in se cure areas there."

"No doubt," Lucien agreed tonelessly. Thinking he ought to learn all he could about the American incursion on the far side of the river, he asked, "And how is the war faring for you there?"

Major Quigley spread his hands. Though not a real Frenchman, he played the role well enough to take it on the stage. "Not so well as we would like, not so poorly that the enemy will be able to throw us back into the river."

By the enemy, of course, he meant the forces of Galtier's rightful government and those of Great Britain, which was proving a loyal ally to France. Lu cien did not reply. What could he say? He was just an ordinary farmer. He supposed he should have been grateful that the American's revenge was no worse than this. From what he had heard, people who crossed the U.S. mili tary government sometimes disappeared off the face of the earth. He had a wife and half a dozen children who needed him. He could not afford to let his tongue run as free as he might have liked.

When he didn't say anything, Jedediah Quigley shrugged again. "There you are, Monsieur Galtier. We should start construction in the next few days.

If you have any objections to the plan as currently constituted, you can offer them to the occupation authorities in Riviere-du-Loup."

"Thank you so much, Major Quigley," Galtier said, so smoothly that the American did not notice he was being sardonic. Oh, yes, you could make a trip up to Riviere-du-Loup for the privilege of complaining to the authorities about what they were doing to you. But, since they'd already decided to do it, how much was that likely to accomplish? The short answer was, not much. The longer answer was that it might do harm, because daring to complain would get his name underlined on the list the occupation authorities surely kept of those they did not trust.

"Now that I have given you the news, Monsieur, I must return to town," Quigley said. He climbed onto an utterly prosaic bicycle and pedaled away.

Off to the north, across the river, artillery rumbled. Galtier wondered whether it belonged to the American invaders or to those who tried to defend Quebec against them. The defenders, he hoped. He glanced up to the sky. The weather was still fine and mild. How much longer it would remain fine and mild, with September heading toward October, remained to be seen. Long enough for him to finish getting in the harvest — that long, certainly, if God was merciful even to the least degree. But the day after the harvest was done…

"Let the snow come then," he said, half prayer, half threat. The Americans would not have an easy time keeping an army on the far side of the wide river supplied if the winter was harsh. The defenders would not have an easy time, either, but they would not be cut off from their heartland as the invaders would. How well did Americans, used to warm weather, deal with weather that was anything but? Before long, the world would find out.

Marie came out of the farmhouse and looked down the road toward Riviere-du-Loup. Major Quigley, a rapidly disappearing speck, was still visi ble. Lucien wished Quigley would disappear for good. His wife asked, "What did the Boche americain want of you?"

"He was generous enough to inform me"-Lucien rolled his eyes-"the Americans are taking some of our land for the purpose of building a hospital on it. It is a safe place to do so, Major Quigley says."

Marie stamped her foot. "If he wants to build it in a safe place, why does he not put it in Father Pascal's church? No one would bring war to holy ground, is it not so?"

"That is an excellent thought," Galtier said. "Even the pious father could not disagree with it, good and Christian man that he is." He shook his head. The war was making him more cynical than he'd ever dreamt of being before it began.

"But no," Marie went on. "It must be on our good cropland. Well, I have a hope for this hospital of theirs."

"I have the same hope, I think," Lucien said. His wife looked a question his way. "I hope it is very full of Americans," he told her. She nodded, satis fied. They'd been married a long time, and thought a lot alike.

Stephen Ramsay used a makeshift periscope to look up over the parapet at the Yankee lines between Nuyaka and Beggs. If he'd stuck his head up to have a look around, some damnyankee sniper would have blown off the top of it. The Creek regiment in which Ramsay was a captain had pushed U.S. troops a few miles back from Nuyaka, but then the lines had set like concrete.

He turned the periscope this way and that. What he saw remained pretty much the same, regardless of the angle: barbed wire, some shiny and new, some rusting; firing pits for Yankee scouts; and then another trench line just like his.

Lowering the periscope — a couple of little hand mirrors mounted at the proper angles on a board-he turned to Moty Tiger and said, "Far as I can see, those damnyankee sons of bitches are here to stay."

"That's not good, sir," the Creek sergeant answered seriously. "This is our land, Creek land. If we can, we have to throw them off here. You Confeder ates have the right to be here. You are our friends. You are our allies. But we have been enemies of the United States for many generations. The Yankees do not belong here."

"I'm not going to argue with you, Sergeant," Ramsay said. "All I'm going to do is give you this here periscope and let you take a look for yourself. If that looks like a position we can rush, you tell me straight out. Go on — take a look."

Moty Tiger looked. He looked carefully — or as carefully as he could, given the limitations of the instrument. As Ramsay had before him, he lowered it. His coppery face was glum. "Doesn't look easy, Captain," he admitted.

"I didn't think so, either," Ramsay said, with more than a little relief. He'd been afraid Moty Tiger would think like a Creek before he thought like a soldier, and would feel duty-bound to try to recover every scrap of Creek terri tory regardless of the cost. He outranked his sergeant, of course, but Moty Tiger was a Creek and he wasn't. In a contest for the hearts and minds of the soldiers in the Creek Nation Army, that counted more than rank did. For that matter, Moty Tiger didn't just influence the opinions of his fellow Indians: he also reflected those opinions.

There the matter rested till late that afternoon, when Colonel Lincoln came up to the front-line trench. When Ramsay saw the regimental C.O.'s face, his heart sank. Lincoln looked thoroughly grim. He didn't say anything. Ramsay got the idea that wasn't because he didn't know anything — more likely because he knew too much, and didn't like any of it.

When Lincoln stayed quiet for more than five minutes, Ramsay, who favored the direct approach, asked him, "What's gone wrong now, sir?"

Colonel Lincoln gestured for Ramsay to walk with him. Once they got out of earshot of the men, Lincoln said, "I'll tell you what's gone wrong. Charlie Fixico's up and decided he's a goddamn general, that's what."

"LIh-oh," Ramsay said, without any great eloquence but most sincerely. "What sort of stupid, impossible thing does he have in mind for us to do?" He still thought like a sergeant, not an officer: what were generals for but ordering troops to try to do stupid, impossible things?

Lincoln was a longtime officer, but he looked to feel the same way. Point ing northeast, he answered, "He wants us to break through that Yankee line and retake Beggs."

"Jesus," Ramsay said. He'd talked Moty Tiger out of that. Talking the chief of the Creek Nation out of it wasn't going to be easy. "Why does he want to do that? Isn't he grateful we saved Okmulgee for him?"

"Not any more, he's not. That was a while ago, and politicians aren't what you'd call good at remembering," Lincoln answered. "Why? Two reasons, far as I can make out. First one is, he wants to get back the oil fields around Beggs. Second one is, it's Creek territory, it's got damnyankees on it, and he wants 'em gone. That's about what it boils down to."

"Jesus," Ramsay said again. "Doesn't he know that if we try to take those Yankee positions, we're gonna get ourselves slaughtered, nothing else but?"

"If he doesn't, it's not because I didn't tell him till I was blue in the face," Lincoln answered. "He ordered the attack to go in anyhow."

"I hope you got the Confederate corps commander to overrule him, sir," Ramsay said. "It'd be suicide, like I said."

"I went to corps headquarters, yes," Lincoln said. "They told me that if Chief Fixico wants an attack, Chief Fixico gets an attack. Two reasons, again. One is, his own men — us-are in it, so he's not asking the CSA to do all his work for him. Two is, near as I can tell, they don't want to make the Indians angry, so they go along with any requests they get. Bombardment begins tomorrow morning at 0300-supposed to chew up the barbed wire between us and them and make reaching their trenches easier. We go over the top at 0600."

"Yes, sir," Ramsay said. He couldn't think of anything else to say. He knew what was liable to happen shortly after 0600. He wasn't afraid — or not very much afraid, at any rate. What he felt was more like numbness, as if he'd been told out of the blue he'd need a surgical operation.

He went up and down the trench line, letting the men know what they'd be doing at dawn tomorrow. Some of the Creeks, especially the younger ones and the replacements who hadn't seen much action, looked excited. A couple of them let out happy yowls: war cries. Moty Tiger just glanced up at Ramsay and nodded. What was going on behind those black eyes, that impassive face? Ramsay couldn't tell.

He made sure his rifle was clean and that he had plenty of ammunition, then wrapped himself in his blanket and tried to sleep. He didn't think he would, but he did. The beginning of the barrage at 0300 woke him. He got up and made sure the men would be ready to move forward when the shelling stopped. "With luck," he said, "the damnyankees'll be too battered to do any shooting back till we're in amongst 'em. Good luck, boys."

At 0600 on the dot, the bombardment ended. Colonel Lincoln blew a whistle. "Let's go!" he shouted.

Out of the trenches swarmed the Creek Nation Army, along with Confed erate troops proper to either side of them. They went forward as fast as they could, knowing their best hope for safety was getting to the enemy front line before U.S. troopers could recover from the barrage they'd taken and reach the firing steps — and the machine guns they surely had all along the line.

The shelling had knocked aside or wrecked some of the barbed wire, but not all, or even most. First one Creek, then another, then another, got hung up in it. "Don't try and cut 'em loose," Ramsay called. "Keep moving. That's the best thing we can do." It wasn't easy. The stuff grabbed and clung and bit, so you felt as if you were moving underwater with sharks nipping you, or through a nightmare, trying without much luck to run from a monster you dared not turn around and see.

But the monster was in front. Here and there along the Yankee line, muzzle flashes showed men who, despite the artillery barrage, knew they had to kill the attackers now or die themselves in moments. Then a couple of machine guns, one right in front of Ramsay, came to hammering life.

Men of the Creek Nation Army fell before that hateful patter like wheat before a reaper. There went Moty Tiger, clutching at his belly. There went Colonel Lincoln, down with boneless finality.

My regiment now, Ramsay thought. He waved the survivors forward. "Come on!" he shouted. "We can still — "

One moment, he was advancing. The next, without warning, he found himself lying in a shell hole, staring in confusion at dirt and a couple of bits of rusty barbed wire. He had trouble breathing. He couldn't figure out why till he tasted blood in his mouth. How did that happen? he wondered vaguely. He looked up at the sky. It was going black. That's not right, he thought. It's morning, not