Breakthroughs

the buzzing crowd. A wide smile spread across his narrow face. He waved the telegram, too. “My friends!” he cried, his voice choked with emotion either genuine or artfully portrayed. “My friends, word has just reached me that the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of the Netherlands have also recognized the Republic of Quebec.”

That made the buzzing even louder, and changed its note. Lucien did not buzz, but he did raise an eyebrow. Italy was a member of the Quadruple Alliance with the USA, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, but a backsliding member: she had been neutral since the war began. And the Netherlands, though bordered on her entire land frontier by Germany and German-occupied Belgium, still carried on what trade with England she could. She was a true neutral, and she had recognized this republic.

“I am greatly honored to congratulate Quebec on achieving her independence, even if it was far too many years delayed by British contempt,” Major Quigley said, “and I am privileged to offer this salute to you, Quebecois free at last: vive la Republique de Quebec!”

“Vive la Republique!” Not everyone in the square shouted it. Not even a majority of the people in the square shouted it. But a surprising number-surprising, at any rate, to Lucien, who kept silent with his family-did shout it. Everyone looked around to see who shouted and who did not. Would feuds start because some had shouted and some had not?

Jedediah Quigley stepped back and Bishop Pascal stepped forward. “Vive la Republique de Quebec!” he echoed, not inviting anyone else to shout the phrase but making clear where he himself stood. “I say to you, it is long past time that we should be free, free from the indignities the British have heaped on us for so long. How many of you men, when you were conscripted into the Army of the Canada that was, and when you tried to speak your beautiful French language, were told by some ugly English sergeant, ‘Talk white!’?”

He dropped into English for those two words, which doubled their effect. Galtier chuckled uncomfortably. He’d heard sergeants say that, plenty of times. He was not the only man chuckling uncomfortably, either-far from it. Bishop Pascal knew how to flick where it was already raw.

He continued, “How many times have we had our sacred faith mocked by the Protestants in Ottawa, men who would not know piety and holiness if they came knocking on their doors? How many times must we be shown we are not and cannot be the equals of the English before we decide we have had a sufficiency? Soon, I pray, the Republic of Quebec will embrace all the Quebecois of la belle province de Quebec. Until that time comes, though, which God hasten, we have begun. Go with God, my friends, and pray with me for the success of la Republique de Quebec. Go in peace,” he finished, as he had finished the Mass not long before.

“What do we do now, Father?” It was Georges who asked the question, his voice and his expression both unwontedly serious.

“I do not know,” Lucien answered, and he could hear that he was far from the only man saying Je ne sais pas in the square at that moment. Slowly, he went on, “It is plain to see that this Republic, so-called, is to be nothing but a creature of the United States. But we were not altogether our own men in Canada, either. So I do not know. We shall have to see what passes.”

“It is too soon to tell what this all means.” Where Lucien had groped for words, Marie spoke with great finality. They both said the same thing, though. In the end, they usually did. Seeing as much, their children for once forbore to argue.

“Remembrance Day soon,” Captain Jonathan Moss remarked to Lieutenant Percy Stone as the two fliers rode battered bicycles along a dirt road not far from the aerodrome near Arthur, Ontario. Both men wore.45s on their hips; trouble wasn’t likely hereabouts, but it wasn’t impossible, either. Ontario remained resentful about occupation.

“It’ll be a good one,” Stone answered. His breath still steamed when he spoke, though spring, by the calendar, was almost a month old. It didn’t steam too much, though; it wasn’t the great cloud of frost it would have been at the equinox. Here and there, a few green blades of grass were poking up through the mud, though snow might yet put paid to them.

“A good one? It’ll be the best one ever,” Moss said. “Everything we’ve remembered for so long, we’re finally paying back.”

But Stone shook his head. “The best Remembrance Day ever will be the one after the war is over and we’ve whipped the Rebs and the Canucks and the limeys. Everything till then is just a buildup.”

Moss considered, then nodded. “All right, Percy. You’ve got me there.”

Stone looked around. “This road could use some building up. Come to that, this whole countryside could use some building up.”

“Well, you’re right about that, too,” Moss said. “Of course, you could say the same thing about just about any piece of Ontario we’re sitting on. If we haven’t ironed it flat to use it for something in particular, it’s had the living bejesus shot out of it.”

As if to prove his point, he had to swerve sharply to keep from steering his bicycle into a shell hole that scarred the road as smallpox scarred the face. And, as smallpox could scar more than the face, shell holes and bomb craters scarred more than the road; they dotted the whole landscape.

By what had to be a miracle, a twenty-foot stretch of wooden fence still stood next to the road not much farther on. Moss dug his heels into the dirt to stop his bicycle. He studied the fence with astonished fascination. “How many bullet holes do you suppose that timber’s got in it, Percy?” he asked.

“More than I feel like counting, I’ll tell you that,” Stone answered at once. “We should have brought Hans along. He’d count ’em, and tell you how many were our.30 caliber and how many the.303 the limeys and Canucks were shooting back at us.”

“You only think you’re joking,” Moss said. His friend shook his head. He wasn’t joking, and they both knew it. Hans Oppenheim would do the counting, and was liable to try to figure out how many men on each side were firing captured weapons, too.

Then Jonathan Moss stopped worrying about bullet holes and, for that matter, about Hans Oppenheim, too. Moving slowly across a battered field by the side of the road was a fair-haired woman of about his own age. She led a couple of scrawny cows toward a little creek that meandered through the field.

Percy Stone was also eyeing the young woman. He and Moss stopped their bicycles at the same time, as if they had turned their aeroplanes together up above the trench line. “You’re a married man,” Moss murmured to Stone.

“I know that,” his flightmate answered. Then he raised his voice: “Miss! Oh, Miss!”

The woman’s head came up, like that of a deer when a hunter steps on a dry twig. She looked back toward the distant farmhouse from which she’d come, then toward the much closer Americans. Plainly, her every urge was to flee, but she didn’t quite dare. “What do you want?” she demanded, her voice, like her face, wild and wary and hunted.

And what will Percy say to that? Moss wondered. Something like, Will you take a couple of dollars for a roll in the hay? Moss didn’t think that approach would work. Moss didn’t think any approach would work, not with a woman who had trouble even holding still in their presence.

Percy Stone didn’t even smile at her. He said, “If you’d be so kind, could we buy some milk from you?”

“You’re a genius,” Moss breathed. Stone did smile then, one of his little, self-deprecating grins.

The young woman stared at the cows as if she’d never seen them before, as if they betrayed her merely by being there. Visibly gathering her courage, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I haven’t anything-not one single thing-that I’d sell to you Yanks.”

Moss and Stone looked at each other. That was the reaction the U.S. occupiers got from almost all the Canucks in Ontario. From everything Moss had heard, it wasn’t like that everywhere in Canada. If it had been, the USA never could have set up the Republic of Quebec farther east.

“We don’t mean you any harm, Miss,” he said, “but my friend is right. Some fresh milk would be good, and we’d gladly pay you for it.”

“If you don’t mean any harm,” the woman said, “why don’t you get out of my country, go back to yours, and leave us alone?” Her head came up in defiance; if she wasn’t going to run away from a couple of Yanks, she’d give them a piece of her mind instead.

“If you want to argue like that, why did England invade my country from Canada during the Second Mexican War?” Moss returned.