But Charley Sprague, among the newest of the new, spoke in support of Moss: “That’s right. They’ll take all the credit, and what will they leave us? Not a confounded thing, that’s what. After the war is over, everybody will try to pretend we didn’t do anything, anything at all. Is that how we want to go down in history?”
“I agree with both of you,” Cherney said. “We’ve been through too much to let those other bastards grab our glory. That means we have to grab it ourselves. Let’s go out and do it.”
After almost three years of war, Moss hadn’t thought a speech could fire him up for combat in the air. But he went out to his Wright two-decker with a grim smile on his face and a spring in his step. He felt ready to whip the whole British Empire singlehanded.
Perhaps seeing that, Percy Stone set a hand on his arm as he was about to climb up into his flying scout. “Steady, there,” he said. “When you try to do more than you really can, that’s when you get into trouble.”
Moss paused with his foot in the mounting stirrup on the side of the fuselage. “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll remember. Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” Stone answered. “You brought me home so they could patch me up again. I want you to get home, too.” He paused, then looked west. “Or over toward Arthur, if you’d rather do that when the war is over.”
Ears burning under his flying helmet, Moss scrambled into the cockpit. Percy Stone went over to his own bus and took his place inside. Moss shook his head. His friend knew how sweet he’d got on Laura Secord, and if doing that wasn’t foolish, he didn’t know what was. For one thing, she despised Americans. For another, she had a husband. Except for those minor details, she would have made a perfect match.
But he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He knew he should, but he couldn’t. A groundcrew man spun the fighting scout’s prop. Moss checked his instruments. He had plenty of fuel, plenty of oil, and his oil pressure was good. Flying relieved the symptoms of what ailed him. He didn’t have time-well, he didn’t have much time-to think about it.
He looked to the other pilots. Stone, Bradley, and Sprague waved in turn: they were ready to go. He nodded to the groundcrew man, who pulled the chocks away from his wheels. The two-decker bumped along over the rutted grass of the landing strip till, after one bump, it didn’t come down.
The smoke that marked Toronto’s funeral pyre guided him south and east. His flightmates followed. He kept trying to look every which way at once, and wished for eyes on stalks like a snail’s to make that easier.
For two or three miles inland from the shore of Lake Ontario, the land that made up the city of Toronto rose smoothly from the water. Then it became steeper, even hilly. British and Canadian artillery used the hills to advantage, posting batteries on them and looking down on the flat country through which U.S. forces were slowly and expensively fighting their way.
Antiaircraft guns protected the pieces that were shelling the Americans. Black puffs of smoke burst around Moss’ aeroplane as he dove on an enemy battery. The Wright two-decker bucked in the turbulence from the explosions like a restive horse. A piece of shrapnel tore some fabric from the bus’s right upper wing. Moss knew it could as easily have torn through the engine, or through him.
His thumb found the firing button on top of the stick. Below, the gunners swelled from dots to toys to bare- chested men in khaki trousers. Englishmen or Canadians? He didn’t know. He didn’t see that it made a difference one way or the other. He stabbed at the button with all his strength.
“See how you like that!” he shouted as tracers lanced toward the artillerymen. They scattered. Some of them fell.
Early in the war, when he’d thought the principal function of fliers was observation, he’d felt bad about shooting at the foe. It didn’t bother him any more. It hadn’t bothered him for a long time. The limeys and Canucks weren’t shy about shooting at him. They would have cheered their heads off if he’d crashed in flames. His twin machine guns kept things even.
He zoomed back toward the front at just above treetop height, his flightmates on his tail. Every time he spotted a concentration of men in khaki, he gave them a burst and sent them flying like ninepins. They shot back, too; rifle bullets hissed past him, some uncomfortably close. An infantryman had to be amazingly lucky to shoot down an aeroplane. If enough infantrymen fired enough rounds, though…He’d never liked that thought.
He brought up the Wright’s nose to gain altitude for another swoop on the enemy’s guns. That let him look down on Toronto once more. U.S. forces had crossed the Etobicoke and the Mimico; there was heavy fighting in a park-High Park: he remembered the name from maps he’d studied-just east of the latter stream. Farther east still, what had been the Parliament building in Queen’s Park was now a burnt-out ruin, wrecked by bombs and artillery.
As always, he checked the air around him for enemy machines. Spying none, he began his second dive on the enemy’s guns. Something was different this time. The altimeter wound off a thousand feet before he realized what it was: the antiaircraft guns weren’t firing any more. He wondered if artillery hits had put them out of action. “Hope so,” he said. With luck, the slipstream would blow his words to God’s ear.
Down on the ground, the enemy artillerymen were milling around their guns. His thumb found the firing button again. The men were looking up at him and waving scraps of cloth…scraps of white cloth.
Behind his goggles, his eyes widened. He took his thumb away from the firing button and pulled out of the dive a little higher than he would have if he’d been shooting up the gunners in khaki. Instead of grabbing rifles to take potshots at him, they kept flying those makeshift white flags. Some of them waved their hands, too, as if he were a comrade and not a hated foe. Tears that had nothing to do with the slipstream blurred his vision.
“It’s over,” he said, almost in disbelief. “Can it really be over?”
It could. It was. As Moss once more led his flight back toward the American lines, none of the British and Canadian soldiers on the ground fired at their machines. Like the artillerymen, they waved whatever bits of white cloth they could find. U.S. soldiers in green-gray were beginning to come out of their trenches and approach the enemy line. No one shot at them, either.
Jonathan Moss wished the racket from his aeroplane’s motor didn’t drown out everything else. He would cheerfully have given a month’s pay to hear the silence on the ground where only minutes before rifles and machine guns and exploding shells had created hell on earth.
He wanted to find a landing strip and put down, just to be able to savor that silence. He needed all the discipline in him to fly away from the front where the fighting had finally ceased and back toward the Orangeville aerodrome. If he’d suffered a sudden case of fortuitous engine trouble, he had no doubt Stone’s aeroplane-and Bradley’s and Sprague’s as well-would have come down with similar miseries.
When he finally did land at the aerodrome, the groundcrew men knew far more about what was going on than he did. “Yeah, we got word of the armistice about half an hour after you took off,” a mechanic said. “We could have called you back if you’d had a wireless telegraph in your bus.”
“Canucks kept fighting up till the last minute, then,” Moss said. “They did their best to blow us out of the sky the first time we strafed their artillery.”
Charley Sprague asked, “Has England given up the fight, then?”
The groundcrew man shook his head. “Wish the limeys had, but they haven’t. The armistice is for land forces in Canada. The Royal Navy’s still fighting us and the Germans both.”
“They can’t win that fight-not a prayer,” Sprague said. Had his flightmate not beaten him to it, Moss would have said the same thing.
“Well, you know that, sir, and I know that, but the limeys haven’t figured it out yet,” the mechanic answered. “Been a hell of a long time since they lost a war; I guess they don’t hardly know how to go about it.”
“We’ve had practice,” Moss said. “How many Remembrance Day parades have you watched?” That was a rhetorical question; everybody in the USA had seen his share and then some. Moss went on, “About time they threw in the sponge. Quebec-the city, I mean-is gone, Winnipeg’s gone, Toronto’s going, Montreal’s blasted to hell, and we’ve finally broken out of that box between the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa and the Ridea where they’d penned us up since the start of the war. Another few months and they wouldn’t have had much left to surrender.”
“Now we’ve conquered them,” Percy Stone said. “What the devil are we supposed to do with them?”
“Sit on ’em,” Pete Bradley said. “If they give us a hard time, we’ll shoot some of ’em. That’ll give the rest the idea.”
