we can give 'em to beat the damnyankees, and if she could help 'em, she would.'
How were you supposed to argue with that? Jefferson Pinkard turned it over in his mind. Far as he could see, you couldn't argue with it, not very well.
And then, after yet another hesitation, Emily said, 'You know, honey, I wouldn't mind goin' to work there my own self. They got lots of ladies, like I said, so it wouldn't be like I was the only one, and with an extra two dollars a day, we could really set some money aside for when we do have young'uns.' She looked at him sidelong. 'Might be any day. You never can tell.'
Two dollars a day was a little more than half what the ammunition factory paid the men who worked there: better than nigger wages, but not a whole lot. That was probably one reason the bosses were hiring women. But women were dexterous, too; Pinkard wouldn't have argued with that. He'd struggled a couple of times to thread a needle with his clumsy, work-roughened hands. Watching Emily do it easy as pie made him swear off trying to sew for good.
But wages weren't what made him hesitate. 'Any other time, I'd say no straight out,' he said.
'I know you would, honey,' Emily answered. 'But I'd be able to keep things goin' here, too; I know I would. It ain't like I'm thinkin' about it just on account of gettin' out of housework or that I don't love you or that I don't think you're workin' hard enough to make us all the money we need. It's nothin' like that, I swear to God it's not. You know I'm speakin' the truth, now don't you?'
'Yeah, I do,' he admitted. He knew she was wheedling, too, but he didn't know what to do about it. What with the war, all of a sudden nothing was simple.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Emily said, 'If the damnyankees lick us, it don't hardly matter that we stuck by what was right and proper beforehand, now does it?'
He threw his hands in the air in defeat. 'All right, Emily. That's what you want to do, you go do it. Like you say, the war's makin' everything all topsyturvy. We'll put it back to rights oncet we done licked the United States again. Shouldn't take long, I reckon.'
'Thank you, honey!' Emily got up, threw herself down into his lap, and flung her arms around his neck. The dining-room chair creaked; it wasn't used to holding two people's worth of weight. They didn't stay there long, though. Pretty soon, they got up and went into the bedroom.
From a mile in the air, the world looked like a map spread out below you. Not many people had been lucky enough to see the world that way, but Lieutenant Jonathan Moss was one of them.
He had a speck of something on the inside of one lens of his goggles. It wasn't enough to interfere with his vision, but it was annoying. Speck or no speck, though, he knew he could keep a close eye on the U.S. Army troops pushing from New York into Ontario, and on the struggles of the Canadians and British to stop them.
Shells pounded the enemy line south of Hamilton. 'That's the way to go, boys!' Moss shouted, slamming a fist down on his thigh. The U.S. eagle and crossed swords were painted big and bold and bright on the fuselage, wings and tail of his Curtiss Super Hudson pusher biplane. He liked the pusher configuration; it gave him a better view of the ground than he could have got from a tractor machine, and also let him mount a machine gun in front of him to shoot at any aeroplanes that rose up to challenge his aircraft. If you mounted a forward-facing machine gun on a tractor aeroplane, you'd chew your own prop to bits when you opened fire.
Somebody ought to do something about that, Moss thought. The idea vanished from his head a moment later, though, for a Canadian battery started returning fire on the advancing-or rather, the stalled-Americans. Scribbling awkwardly in a notebook he held between his knees, Moss noted the position of the guns. When he landed, he'd pass the sketch on to Artillery. The enemy guns would get a wake-up call in short order.
'They've had too damn many wake-up calls already,' he muttered. The wind in his face blew the words away.
The words were gone, but not the fact. For all the big talk in the United States about mopping the floor with the Dominion of Canada, reality, as reality has a way of doing, was proving harder. The damned Canucks and limeys had spent years fortifying the Niagara Peninsula, the part that ran west from Niagara Falls; every time they were blasted and bayoneted out of one position, they fell back to the next, just as tough as the one before. Forcing the crossing of the Welland Canal alone had put women by the thousands into mourning black.
But the canal had been crossed. Now the Canadians and British were moving back toward their last line, the one that ran from Hamilton on Lake Ontario through Caledonia to Port Dover on Lake Erie. When the United States broke through there, the country would widen out and numbers would count for more than they had yet.
As yet, the breakthrough hadn't happened. And, indeed, though the enemy had been thrown back on Hamilton in the north, they were still holding part of the line of the Grand River south of Caledonia. Farther west, the assault from Michigan hadn't been the walkover everyone-everyone south of the border, anyhow-had figured it would be. The line centered on London, Ontario, hadn't cracked yet, either, and when it would was anybody's guess.
Moss sighed. 'We put too much money into Great Lakes battleships,' he told the unheeding sky. He'd told everybody the same, since the day the war started. A fat lot of good it did, too. Great Lakes battleships weren't really battleships to rank with the great vessels in the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets: they were smaller and slower and didn't mount so many guns. In navies like Holland 's or Sweden 's, they would have been called coast-defense battleships.
What people in the USA had called them was victory. Each Great Lake had its own flotilla of them, and the Canadians didn't-couldn't-build ships to match, in quality or numbers. When war came, they'd bombard enemy towns and positions with a weight of metal you couldn't move by land.
The only problem being, it hadn't worked out that way. The first thing the Canadians had done when war broke out was to sow the Great Lakes with mines as thickly as potato soup was sown with potatoes. The Perry and the Farragut, both steaming full tilt toward Toronto, had blown up and sunk within a couple of hours of each other, as had the John Paul Jones over on Lake Huron. Losing millions of dollars' worth of ships and a couple of thousand trained sailors had made the flotillas less intrepid in a hurry.
As if that weren't bad enough, the Canadians had submersibles, too. Nobody-nobody American, anyhow-knew how many, but they'd picked off a Great Lakes battleship and a couple of light cruisers, too, before scuttling back to their home ports. Put it all together and it meant the Army was advancing through the toughest part of the enemy's defenses without a good bit of the fire support it had expected to have. And so the going was tough.
Jonathan Moss peered down at the Canadian and British guns. From a mile in the air, they looked like tiny lead toys, and the bare-chested men who served them like pink ants. He scribbled some more on the makeshift map. The enemy lines really did look like lines from up here: a zigzagging series of entrenchments that cut across the land. Even the entrenchments that ran back from the front-line positions zigzagged, to make a shell landing in one of them do as little damage as possible.
'Those bastards have been thinking about this for a long time,' Moss said, penciling squiggles over the page to represent the zigzag entrenchments.
The American positions facing the foe were less neat. For one thing, the U.S. forces had to form their lines in territory they'd taken away from the Canadians, and every inch of that territory had been fought over till it was nothing but a crumpled, battered landscape that reminded Moss of nothing so much as telescopic photographs of the craters of the moon. For another, the Americans hadn't planned to conduct such a grinding campaign of attrition, and hadn't yet worked out the doctrine for fighting in those conditions.
Even getting supplies forward to the troops at the sharp end of the wedge was anywhere from hard to impossible. The railroads had been chewed up along with everything else in the territory over which the Americans had advanced. Food and ammunition had to come forward by wagon or else on people's backs.
By contrast, the rail network the defenders used was all but intact: Moss watched several trains chugging along toward the front, each one full of troops or munitions or food and fodder. He made a sour face. You could move more faster by train than with horses or people. That was what the second half of the nineteenth century had been about, if you looked at it the right way. It gave the defenders what struck him as an unfair advantage.
He was so busy noting the arriving trains, he didn't spot the other aero plane till it started shooting at him. The sound of Lewis-gun bullets drumming through the fabric of his wings-and whipcracking past his head-got his attention in a hurry. He was banking to the left before he even looked up.
The Avro 504 ahead of him tried to turn with him, but his aircraft was more agile than the tractor machine. He swung away from the area the observer in the front cockpit could cover with his machine gun. The pilot in the
