on his mind. Maude nodded, as if she believed him.
He was working when the sun came up, hammering a fresh board onto the side of the chicken coop. Something moving in the fields caught his eye. It was a man: a soldier, he saw after a moment, heading north without the slightest thought for road or anything else, trampling down the nearly ripe wheat and not caring at all.
McGregor opened his mouth for an angry shout. It died unspoken. That first soldier he'd seen was but one of many. Trotting through the wheat, their bodies hidden, only heads and shoulders showing, they looked like nothing so much as shipwreck survivors bobbing in the sea. Here, though, what might have been wrecked was Canada.
Before long, horsemen joined the retreat. They were in better order than the infantry, stopping every so often to fire shots in the direction of an enemy Arthur McGregor could not yet see. A cavalry officer leading a couple of packhorses and a squad of soldiers who seemed to be under his command rode up to McGregor.
'Lieutenant Lapin!' he said in surprise.
'Oui, monsieur, we meet again,' the French-Canadian officer answered wearily. If he'd slept at all since riding south the previous day, he didn't show it. But he still had fight in him. Pointing to the packhorses, he went on, 'I have here a pair of machine guns, ammunition, and soldiers who know how to use them. I desire to make strongpoints of your house and your barn. We have, as you see, been thrown back. We may yet damage the invader, though.'
'Go ahead,' McGregor said at once. He knew his permission was irrelevant. Lapin had disguised a firm statement of intent with politeness, but the intent remained. The farmer went on, 'Can your men drive the livestock out of the barn first, and give me and mine a chance to get clear of the house?' Strongpoints drew fire; he knew that all too well. I'd better hide the rifle, he thought. Secrecy came easy to him, and fear made it come easier.
'That is but a matter of common decency, though I fear in war decency is anything but common.' Lapin gave the orders. More men, seeing him not in headlong retreat, rallied around him. A firing line stretched across the wheatfield.
McGregor got Maude and Alexander, Julia and Mary, and took them off away from the house. They led the family cows and horses. No time to hitch the horses to the buggy, not now. McGregor didn't know where to go with his family and the animals. Toward the road was the only idea he had: to join the stream of refugees trudging toward Winnipeg.
He was about halfway to the dirt track when Alexander exclaimed, 'Here come the Americans!'
You could tell them from the Canadian defenders by their green-gray uniforms, by the shouts of 'Hurrah!' that burst from their throats every few paces, by the fact that they weren't looking back over their shoulders, and by how many of them there were. They came in a great wave, close together as far as the eye could see. Again McGregor had the horrible mental picture of everybody in the United States grabbing a gun and heading for Winnipeg. Now, though, the soldiers were heading for him.
Then the machine guns began to hammer, back in the buildings the neighbors had helped his father run up. Their hideous racket made his head snap back toward the house and barn. When he looked back in the direction of the American soldiers once more, it was as if his fields had had a thresher go over them: where the soldiers had been wheat, they were mowed into stubble. More of them came forward, and more of them went down as the machine guns spat fire through their ranks. They were too far away for McGregor to see how they died, only that they died. Not all of them died at once, of course; a great chorus of agony rose from the fields, even above the racket of machine guns and rifle.
Julia clamped her hands over her ears. 'Make them stop it, Papa!' she screamed. 'Make them stop!'
McGregor couldn't make them stop. If he could have, he wouldn't. He exulted to see the Americans fall and writhe and die. What business did they have, invading his country? Like their German allies, they seemed to specialize in attacking small, defenseless nations that had done them no harm. One way or another, he vowed to himself, he would make them pay.
They were paying now, but they were also still moving forward. A bullet kicked up dust, not far from McGregor's feet. He heard more bullets smacking into the timbers of the house and the barn, where Pierre Lapin was holed up. The machine guns kept working a fearful slaughter, but the skirmish line Lapin had set up was thin, and did not, could not, hold. To east and west, Yanks in green-gray bypassed the strongpoint, as if it were high ground still above water in the middle of a flood.
That didn't last long. The Americans swung round behind the buildings. Firing around them-firing inside them-grew to a crescendo before abruptly falling silent.
A couple of soldiers came up to the McGregors. They held their rifles at the ready. By the way they panted, by the way their eyes glittered, they would open fire at any excuse or none. Arthur McGregor was careful to keep his hands in plain sight and to make no sudden moves. He was glad he didn't have the rifle on his shoulder, too.
'That there your house?' asked one of the Yanks, a fellow with corporal's stripes on his sleeves. He and his companion smelled the way McGregor did before Maude heated up water for a Saturday night bath, only more so.
'It's mine,' McGregor said shortly.
The American corporal gestured with his rifle. 'Go on back to it. Put your critters in the barn again. We cleaned out your soldiers, and we ain't got nothin' against civilians. Go on back.' He scratched his cheek. Maybe the upswept wings of the Kaiser Bill mustache tickled.
'Ever think maybe civilians have something against you?' Alexander said, his voice hot.
'You got a mouthy kid,' the corporal said to Arthur. 'He gets too mouthy, maybe the house and the barn catch on fire-just by accident, understand?'
'I understand,' McGregor said. He didn't know whether, in the end, Canada could win the war. He did know he and his family had just lost it.
'Dowling!' The general's voice, cracking and full of phlegm, echoed through the St. Louis headquarters of the U.S. First Army. 'God damn it to hell, Dowling, have you gone and died while I wasn't looking? Get yourself in here this instant, or you'll be sorry you were ever born!'
'Yes, sir. Coming, sir.' Major Abner Dowling hastily finished buttoning his fly. At the moment, he was sorry he'd ever been born. Of all the men to whom he could have been adjutant 'Dowling!' Wheezing thunder-the general hadn't heard him. The general was hard of hearing: not surprising, since he was heading toward seventy-five. Even when he did hear, he was confounded hard of listening.
'Here, sir.' Dowling rushed into the office. He wanted to wipe off his face; he was built like a rolltop desk, and moving quickly in hot, muggy weather made sweat pour down his ruddy cheeks. But that would have been a violation of military decorum, and his commander-the First Army's commander-made men pay for such trifling lapses.
'About time, Major,' the general grumbled, but let it go at that. Dowling knew some relief; the old fool was just as likely to have kept riding him all day. 'Get me a cup of coffee, man, and put something in it to open my eyes up. You know what I mean.'
'Yes, sir,' Dowling said. The coffeepot sat on top of an alcohol lamp to keep what was inside hot. More alcohol rested in the sideboard drawer- brandy of a finer grade than the Army used for medicinal purposes. The general liked his medicine, though. His adjutant poured a hefty nip into the coffee cup, then handed it to him.
'Thank you very much.' Now that he'd got exactly what he wanted, the general was gracious. Absurdly, he preened, as well as a fat old man shoe- horned into a uniform three sizes too small could preen. Peroxided locks spilled out from under the hat he wore indoors and out to hide the bald crown of his head. He'd dyed his drooping mustachios, too- the color of piss, Dowling thought uncharitably. When the general sipped the coffee, his rheumy blue eyes did open wider. 'That is the straight goods, Major.'
'Glad you like it, General Custer,' Dowling said. 'With your permission-' He waited for Custer's nod before filling his own cup. Not without regret, he substituted cream and sugar for the commanding general's brandy.
Custer drank his coffee almost as fast as he would have had the cup contained nothing bur firewater. He held it out in an imperious, liver-spotted hand for a refill. Dowling didn't lace it with as much brandy this time: if the commander fell asleep over his maps, the First Army would do even less than it had up till now, and it hadn't done much.
