we’ll worry about it tomorrow. Meantime, let’s see if we can make the damnyankees sorry they ever made it into our trenches.”
Before long, the U.S. soldiers in the Confederate positions were very unhappy; the battery showered them with both gas and shrapnel. The troops they’d driven back counterattacked aided by reinforcements hurrying across the Monocacy on bridges the Yankees hadn’t been able to knock down.
The U.S. soldiers did hold on to the first couple of lines of trenches, but that wasn’t enough of an advance to make the battery change site. Glum-looking Yankee prisoners filed back toward the Monocacy bridges, their hands high in the air.
Once the fighting had eased, officers came out to examine the burned-out hulks of the barrels. One of them was Major Clarence Potter. On his way back to Army of Northern Virginia headquarters, he stopped for a couple of minutes at Jake Featherston’s battery. “I’m given to understand we have your guns to thank for those two ruined behemoths,” he said.
“Yes, sir, that’s right.” Featherston dropped his voice. “They won’t promote me for it, but I did it.”
“Any way you could have gotten us a barrel in working order, not one that’s been through the fire?” Potter asked. He held up a hand. “That won’t get you promoted, either, Sergeant, but it will help our cause.”
“Sir, if those barrels had kept running, they’d be visiting you about now, not the other way round,” Jake answered. “We got any more men back of the line, sir? One more attack and we can push the Yankees all the way back where they started from.”
But the intelligence officer shook his head. “Lucky we were able to throw in as much as we did.” Now he was the one who spoke quietly: “If we don’t get more men in arms, be they white or black, we’ll be reduced to standing on the defensive all along the line, and that’s no way to win a war.”
“Black soldiers.” Featherston’s lip curled.
“You know they can fight,” Potter said. “You of all people should know that.” He’d heard about the use to which Jake had put Perseus and Nero.
“Yes, sir, I do know that,” Jake said. “But I’ll be damned if I think they ought to get any kind of reward for trying to overthrow the government in the middle of the war. That’s what giving ’em guns and giving ’em the vote would be. They stabbed us in the back. Somebody-anybody-does that to me, I’ll make him pay.” Some of the faces in his mind when he said that were black. Some were white and plump and prosperous, the faces of soldiers and bureaucrats in the War Department in Richmond.
XII
Jonathan Moss peered down at the battlefield in dismay. The advance through Ontario toward Toronto had been slow and brutally expensive, but it had been a continuous advance. One enemy defensive line after another had been stormed and overwhelmed. Now, for the first time, American troops were in headlong, desperate retreat. From the air, they looked like ants fleeing a small boy’s shoe.
That was, in effect, what they were. A handful of bigger shapes moved on the ground, grinding through American barbed wire and into the U.S. trenches. “Son of a bitch,” Moss said, and the wind blew his words away. “The limeys and Canucks have barrels of their own.”
They looked different from American barrels, of which he’d seen one or two. He flew lower for a better look, figuring that the more he could put in his report, the better it would be. That battalions of American infantrymen were getting much more intimately acquainted with the barrels advancing on them than he could in an aeroplane never once crossed his mind.
The lower he flew, the stranger the enemy barrels looked. They were forward-leaning rhomboids, with tracks going all the way around the outside of their hulls. He wondered why the Canucks-or was it the limeys? — had settled on such a stupid design till he saw a barrel climb almost vertically out of a trench into which it had fallen. However odd the setup seemed, it had its merits.
Instead of mounting a cannon in the nose like U.S. barrels, the ones currently pushing back the American infantry carried two, one on each side, mounted in sponsons whose design-if not the actual pieces of forged iron themselves-had been taken from the secondary armament of warships. Some of the barrels mounted machine guns in one or both sponsons instead of cannon.
“I wonder whose are better, theirs or ours,” Moss said. He had no way to tell at the moment. American barrels still being thin on the ground, and used mostly to spearhead long-planned attacks, none was anywhere nearby to challenge the machines the enemy was hurling at the poor bastards down in the trenches.
Moss dove on the barrels, machine gun blazing. He walked his tracers across one, another, a third. As far as he could tell, they did the massive machines no harm. He cursed himself for a fool. American barrels were armored to hold out enemy machine-gun fire. Whatever you could say about the Canadians and the British, they weren’t stupid. They’d do unto the USA as they’d been done by themselves.
He cursed his stupidity for another reason as well. The advancing foe loosed a storm of lead at his Martin one-decker. Ground fire had shot him down once already. Now again he heard the thrumming pop of bullets tearing through canvas.
That
As Moss gained altitude, Tom Innis made his own firing run on the advancing enemy. Perhaps profiting from his flightmate’s experience, he didn’t try to shoot up the barrels. Men were always more vulnerable. Banking toward the American lines-or what had been the American lines before the attack-Moss watched men in khaki dive for cover. He whooped with glee and shook his fist in the slipstream.
But not all the British and Canadians tried to shelter themselves from Innis’ gun. They shot back at him as ferociously as they had at Moss. And a streak of smoke began streaming back from Tom’s engine cowling.
“Get out of there!” Moss shouted-uselessly, of course. “Get out of there while you can!” He looked around for Dud Dudley and Phil Eaker-they’d have to shepherd Innis back toward the aerodrome. He’d be a sitting bird if the Canadians or British pounced on his crippled bus.
He swung the one-decker back toward the west. The smoke wasn’t getting better. It was getting worse. “Climb, damn you!” Moss yelled to him, as if he could hear. The more altitude he gained, the farther he’d be able to glide when his engine quit. Moss knew all about that, the hard way.
Innis had to know it, too. But the Martin didn’t get any higher off the deck. The only reason for that, Moss figured, was that it couldn’t get any higher off the deck. And that meant his flightmate was in trouble.
Moss bared his teeth in an anguished grimace-it wasn’t just smoke streaming back from the engine now, it was flame, too. The slipstream blowing in Moss’ face made it hard for him to close his mouth again. The slipstream also blew the flames back toward Tom Innis.
He beat at them with his fist and arm. They spread faster than he could knock them down. “Land it!” Moss screamed. “Land it, God damn you!” He wasn’t cursing his friend. He was cursing fate, without a doubt the most dreadful fate any airman could face. Better to yank out your pistol and put one through your head than go down in a burning crate, as far as he was concerned.
That was especially true if you were going down in a burning crate from, say, fifteen thousand feet. If you were only a couple of hundred feet off the ground when your aeroplane caught fire, you had a chance to put it down and get the hell out before you roasted, too.
You had a chance…. The trouble was, every yard of territory here abouts was as cratered as the surface of the moon: the USA had had to blast the Canucks off the land before advancing through it, and then, even after having had it taken from them, the Canadians and the limeys had shelled it to a faretheewell to make sure the Americans didn’t enjoy owning it.
With a healthy aeroplane, Tom Innis would have had more choices. Of course, with a healthy aeroplane, he wouldn’t have needed to land in the first place. He did the best he could, steering for a meadow that still had some
