Could it? Would it? Maybe it had tried to start in New York City on Remembrance Day, but it had been beaten down then. Would it stay beaten down? Capital and labour hadn't gotten on well in the years before the war. Plenty of strikes had turned bloody. If a wave of them came, all across the country…
After the war, something new would go into the mix, too. A lot of men who'd seen fighting far worse than strikers against goons would be coming back to the factories. If the bosses tried to ignore their demands — what then? The night was fine and mild, but Martin shivered.
Captain Stephen Ramsay remained convinced that his Creek Army rank badges were stupid and, with their gaudiness, were more likely to make him a sniper's target. He also remained convinced that entrenching in — or, more accurately, in front of-a town was a hell of a thing for a cavalryman to be doing.
Not that Nuyaka, Sequoyah, was much of a town-a sleepy hamlet a few miles west of Okmulgee. But, with the damnyankees shifting forces in this direction, it had to be defended to keep them from getting around behind Okmulgee and forcing the Confederates out of the Creek capital.
Where the blacks had run off, everybody had to do nigger work. Ramsay used an entrenching tool just as if he still was the sergeant he'd been not so long before. Alongside him, Moty Tiger also made the dirt fly. Pausing for a moment, the Creek non-com grinned at Ramsay and said, 'Welcome to New York.'
'Huh?' Ramsay answered. He paused, too; he was glad for a blow. The heat and humidity made it feel like Mobile. 'What are you talking about?'
' New York,' Moty Tiger repeated, pronouncing the name with exaggerated care, almost as if he came from the USA. Then he said it again, pronouncing it as a Creek normally would have. Sure as hell, it sounded a lot like Nuyaka.
'This… little town'-Ramsay picked his words with care, not wanting to offend the Creek sergeant-'is named after New York City?' Moty Tiger nodded. Ramsay asked, 'How come?'
'Back in Washington 's time, when the Creeks still lived in Alabama and Georgia, he invited our chiefs to New York to make a treaty with him,' the sergeant told him. 'They were impressed at how big and fine it was, and took the name home with them. We took it here, too, when the government of the USA made us leave our rightful homes and travel the Trail of Tears.' His face clouded. ' Richmond has been honest with us. The USA never was. Being at war with the USA feels right.'
'Sure does,' Ramsay said. But the Creeks had been fighting the USA back when his ancestors were U.S. citizens. That made him feel strange whenever he thought about it. The Confederate States had been part of the United States longer than they'd been free. If they'd lost the War of Secession the damnyankees had forced on them, they'd still be part of the USA. He scowled, thinking, Christ, what an awful idea.
Perhaps luckily, he didn't have time to do much in the way of pondering.
When you were digging like a gopher trying to get underground before a hawk swooped down and carried you away, worries about what might have been didn't clog your mind.
Colonel Lincoln, whose two-jewel insigne was twice as absurd as Ramsay's, came up to look over the progress the Creek regiment had made. He nodded his approval. 'Good job,' he told Ramsay. 'You've got foxholes back toward town dug, so you can fall back if you need to, you've got the machine guns well sited, you've done everything I can think of that you should have.'
'Thank you, sir,' Ramsay said. 'And this isn't any ordinary town, either.' He told Lincoln the story of how Nuyaka had got its name.
'Is that a fact?' Lincoln said.
'Yes, sir,' Moty Tiger answered when Ramsay glanced his way. Colonel Lincoln shook his head in bemusement. Like Ramsay, he was careful to do or say nothing that might offend the Indians he commanded. But Nuyaka, any way you looked at it, was pretty damn funny.
Lincoln peered back toward Okmulgee. Smoke and dust were rising up above the hills rimming the valley in which the town sat. The rumble of artillery carried across the miles. 'They're pounding each other again,' he said.
'Sure sounds that way, sir,' Ramsay agreed. 'I'm glad to be out of there, you want to know the truth. This here'-he waved at the Creeks preparing the position in front of Nuyaka-'it ain't cavalry fighting, but it's better than what it was back there. For now it's better, anyways.'
'For now,' Colonel Lincoln echoed. 'The fight around Okmulgee has got itself all bogged down, the way things are in Kentucky and Virginia and Pennsylvania: a whole lot of men battling it out for a little patch of ground. But Sequoyah's got too much land and not enough men for most of it to be like that. And where men are thinner on the ground, you can get some movement.'
'Not cavalry sweeps,' Ramsay said mournfully. 'Hell of a thing, training for years to be able to fight one kind of way, and then when the war comes, you find you can't do it.'
'Machine guns,' Lincoln said. By the way he said it, he couldn't have come up with a nastier curse if he'd tried for a week. He pointed to the ones the Creeks were setting up. 'They'll mow down the Yankees if they try to come in this direction, but they mow down horses even better than they do men.'
'Yes, sir, that's a fact,' Ramsay said. He thought back to the days when the Confederates had been raiding up into Kansas rather than U.S. troops pressing down into Sequoyah. 'If this war ever really gets moving again, it'll have to be with armored motorcars, not horses.'
'Armored motorcars?' Moty Tiger said. 'I read about those in the newspapers. Bad to run up against, are they?'
'You shoot a horse, it goes down,' Ramsay said dryly. 'You shoot one of those motorcars, the bullets mostly bounce off. It's got machine guns, too, and it keeps right on shooting at you. I'm just glad the damnyankees don't have a whole lot of them.'
'More than we do.' Captain Lincoln sounded grim. 'Back before the war started, they were building a lot more automobiles than we were.'
'They come this way, we'll deal with 'em, sir,' the Creek sergeant said. Ramsay didn't want to discourage pluck like that. The Creeks had turned out to make far better, far steadier soldiers than he'd ever figured they would. One of the reasons was, they thought they could do anything. When you thought like that, you were halfway-maybe more than halfway-to being right.
They got the rest of that day, that night, and the first hour or so of daylight the next morning to dig in before the first U.S. patrols started probing their positions. Pickets in rifle pits well in front of the main Creek position traded gunfire with the Yankees.
Things had changed over the past year. When the war was new, infantry running up against opposition would mass and then hurl itself forward, aiming to overwhelm the foe by sheer weight of numbers. Sometimes they did overwhelm the foe, too, but at a gruesome cost in killed and wounded.
No more. The damnyankees coming down toward Nuyaka from the north must have been veteran troops. When they started taking fire, they went to earth themselves and fired back. Instead of swarming forward, they advanced in rushes, one group dashing up from one piece of cover to another while more soldiers supported them with rifle fire that made the Creeks keep their heads down, then reversing the roles.
In danger of being cut off from their comrades, the pickets retreated to the main line. When the U.S. troops drew a little closer, the machine guns opened up on them, spraying death all along the front. Again, the U.S. soldiers halted their advance where a year before they would have charged. It was as if they were pausing to think things over.
Not far from Ramsay, Moty Tiger peered out over the forward wall of the trench. 'Uh-oh,' he said. 'I don't like it when they stop that way. Next thing that happens is, they start shooting cannon at us.'
'You're learning,' Ramsay told him. He looked back over his own shoulder. The Confederates had promised a battery of three-inch field pieces to help the Creek Nation Army hold Nuyaka. Ramsay hadn't seen any sign of those guns. Getting shelled when you couldn't shell back was one of the joys of the infantryman's life with which he'd become more intimately acquainted than he'd ever wanted.
Instead of rolling out the artillery, though, the damnyankees, as if to give Moty Tiger what he'd said he wanted, rolled out a couple of armored motorcars. The vehicles didn't come right up to the trench line. They cruised back and forth a couple of furlongs away, plastering the Creek position with machine-gun fire.
Ramsay threw himself flat as bullets stitched near. Dirt spattered close by, kicked up by the gunfire. Cautiously, he got to his feet again. 'Shoot out their tires, if you can,' he shouted to the Creek machine-gun crews.
