“Yeah,” the corporal said, and held a canteen to his lips. The water was warm and stale and tasted ambrosial. Then the Yankee heaved him up onto his back with a bull’s strength, ignoring his cries of pain. The U.S. soldier started toward his own line, shouting, “Stretcher-bearers! Got a wounded Reb prisoner here!”
A couple of U.S. soldiers with red crosses on their helmets and on armbands took charge of Bartlett. “How you feelin’, Reb?” one of them asked, not unkindly.
“Shitty,” he answered.
“Stick him, Louie,” the other stretcher-bearer said. “We don’t want him yellin’ at us all the way to the field hospital.”
“Sure as hell don’t,” Louie agreed, and stuck a needle in Reggie’s arm. Reggie sighed as relief washed over him. The pain remained, but now he floated over it instead of being immersed. The relief must have shown on his face, for Louie chuckled. “That morphine’s great stuff, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Reggie breathed.
The stretcher-bearers hauled him through zigzagging communications trenches similar to the ones behind his own front line. Then they put his stretcher in the back of an ambulance. “Daniel brought in this here Reb,” the one who wasn’t Louie told the driver. “Thought he’d be worth patching. Might even be right-he ain’t pegged out on us while we were lugging him back here.”
“Hate to waste the sawbones’ time on a Rebel,” the ambulance driver said, “but what the hell?” The ambulance’s motor was already turning over. He put the machine in gear and headed back toward the field hospital, whose tents were out of range of artillery from the front.
When Bartlett got there, another pair of stretcher-bearers took him out of the ambulance and laid him on the ground outside a green-gray tent with an enormous red cross on it. Most of the men there were U.S. soldiers, but a few others wore butternut. Attendants gave him water and another shot.
Presently, a doctor in a blood-spattered white coat came by and looked him over. “That leg’s not too bad,” he said after cutting away bandages and trouser leg. He examined the shoulder. “We’re going to have to take you into the shop to repair this one, though. What’s your name, Reb?” He poised a pencil over a clipboard.
“Reggie Bartlett. I broke out of one Yankee prisoner-of-war camp. Reckon I can do it again.” With two shots of morphine in him, Reggie didn’t care what he said.
He didn’t impress the Yankee doctor, either. After recording his name, the fellow said, “Son, you’re going to be a good long while healing up. I don’t care whether you escaped before. By the time you think about flying the coop again, this war’ll be over. And we’ll have won it.”
Bartlett laughed in his face-the morphine again.
X
Captain Jonathan Moss looked down on the tortured Canadian landscape from on high, as if he were a god. He knew better, of course. If one of the shells the Americans aimed at the Canadian and British troops who had blocked their way for so long happened to strike his Wright two-decker, he would crash. The same, assuredly, was true of the shells the enemy hurled back at the U.S. forces, and of the Archie their antiaircraft guns sent up.
Spring was at last in full spate. The land was green, where shellfire hadn’t turned it to mucky brown pulp. All the streams flowed freely; the ice had melted. And the line was beginning to move, too, though it had been frozen longer than any Canadian river.
Below Moss, U.S. troopers advanced behind a large contingent of barrels that battered their way through the defenses the Canucks and limeys had built with such enormous expenditure of labor. The Canadians had barrels, too, though not so many. They dueled with the American machines in a slow, ugly, two-dimensional version of the war Moss and his friends-and his foes as well-fought in the air.
He spied a flight of enemy fighting scouts down near the deck. They were shooting up the advancing Americans, who grew vulnerable when they came up out of their trenches to attack. But the Entente aeroplanes were vulnerable, too. Moss pointed them out to his own flightmates, then took his American copy of a German Albatros into a dive better suited to a stooping falcon. Percy Stone, Hans Oppenheim, and Pete Bradley followed.
Wind screamed in Moss’ face. It tried to tear the goggles off his eyes, and peeled lips back from teeth in an involuntary grin. The grin would have been on his face anyhow, though. His gaze flicked back and forth from the unwinding altimeter to the enemy aeroplanes. The British or Canadian pilots were having such a high old time shooting up American infantry, they made the mistake of not checking the neighborhood often enough. Moss intended to turn it into a fatal mistake if he could.
His thumb came down on the firing button. The twin machine guns roared, spitting bullets between the two wooden blades of the prop. If the interrupter gears didn’t function properly, as, every so often, they didn’t…but contemplating that kind of misfortune gave no better profit than thinking about one’s own path intersecting that of a shell.
Tracers let him direct his fire onto the rearmost enemy fighting scout. He must have hit the pilot, for the Sopwith Pup slammed into the ground an instant later and burst into flame.
“That’ll teach you, you son of a bitch!” he shouted exultantly. Pups had been machines of terror when set against the Martin one-deckers U.S. pilots had been flying for so long.
Another Pup started to burn. The pilot turned for home, but never got there. He didn’t have much altitude, and rapidly lost what he had. He tried to land the aeroplane, but rolled into a shell hole and nosed over. Fire raced down the length of the fighting scout. For the pilot’s sake, Moss hoped the crash had killed him.
The other two Sopwith Pups twisted away from Moss’ flight. On the level, they were slightly faster than the not-quite-Albatroses the Americans flew, and succeeded in making good their escape.
Moss led his comrades up out of that part of the sky where a lucky rifle or machine-gun bullet could put paid to a fighting scout. Climbing was slower work than diving had been. Before he got out of range of small-arms fire from the ground, a couple of bullets went through his wings with about the sound a man would have made by poking a stick through a tightly stretched drumhead.
Hans Oppenheim was the pilot pumping his fist up over his head, so Moss assumed he’d brought down that second Pup. Moss couldn’t imagine anything else that would have got the phlegmatic Oppenheim excited enough to show such emotion.
He looked at his watch. They’d been in the air well over an hour. He looked at his fuel gauge. It was getting low. He oriented himself, more from the way the trenches ran than by his unreliable compass, and found northwest. “Time to get back to Arthur,” he said, and let the slipstream blow the words back to his comrades.
They couldn’t hear him, of course. With their engines roaring, they couldn’t hear a damn thing, any more than he could. But they saw his gestures and, in any case, they knew what he was doing and why. They couldn’t have had any more gasoline in their tanks than he did in his.
The aerodrome was surprisingly busy when he and the rest of his flight bumped over the rutted fields. It was the kind of activity he hadn’t seen for a long time. Everybody was tearing things up by the roots and pitching them into trucks and wagons.
“We’re moving up?” Moss asked a groundcrew man after he shut off the Wright’s engine and his words were no longer his private property.
“Hell, yes,” the mechanic answered as Moss descended from the cockpit and, awkward in his thick flying suit, came down to the ground. “Front is moving forward, so we will, too. Don’t want you burning up too much gas getting where you’re going.”
“That sounds plenty good to me,” Moss said.
“Me, too.” The groundcrew man pointed to the bullet holes in the fabric covering the fighting scout’s wings. “Looks like the natives were restless.”
“Ground fire,” Moss replied with a shrug. “But I knocked down a Pup that was strafing our boys, and Hans got another one, and we came back without a scratch.”
“Bully, sir!” the groundcrew man said. “What’s that bring your score to?”
