American Front (33 page)

“The Little Black Devils,” Alexander breathed. His father nodded, too. The 90th Battalion had always had a good reputation and a fierce name. Alexander went on, “What are you down here for, sir?”

Arthur McGregor knew better than to call a sergeant
sir
, but didn’t correct his son. Malcolm Lockerby grinned a lopsided grin. “For all the mischief I can bring our American cousins,” he answered, shrugging out of his heavy pack and setting it and his rifle on the floor. He said nothing more than that, which made Arthur nod again, this time in somber approval. What you didn’t know, American questioners couldn’t sweat out of you if something went wrong.

“Can I help, sir?” Alexander exclaimed. Sure enough, if he thought he saw a way to give a yank to the Yank eagle’s tail feathers, he’d grab it.

Much to Arthur’s relief, Lockerby shook his head. “This operation was set up with one man in mind, and more would only complicate things,” he said, letting Alexander down easy.

Maude disappeared into the kitchen yet again and came back with a plate of salt pork and bread and butter. She set it on the table, then said, “Eat,” like a field marshal ordering an army corps to go over to the attack.

Lockerby obeyed the command with as much élan as any field marshal could have wanted. McGregor’s wife refilled his teacup, and then filled it again. She brought a second helping of pork and more bread. Only when the sergeant leaned back in his chair with a sigh of contentment did she desist.

“Now I don’t want to leave,” Lockerby remarked, which brought a proud smile to Maude’s face. The soldier went on, “But I have to, I know. Now—am I right in thinking the railroad is east of here?”

“No, it’s to the west,” McGregor said, pointing.

“I’ll be—” Lockerby didn’t say what he’d be, probably in deference to Maude’s presence. He shook his head. “I must have skied right over the tracks without even knowing I’d done it. A lot of snow on the ground right now.”

“So there is,” McGregor agreed. “Tell us the news, or more of it than we get from the lying papers the Americans make people print. Is Winnipeg still holding out?”

“That it is,” Lockerby said, “and likely to keep doing it, too, with the lines we’ve made south of the city. Nobody’s moved much since the snows started, but we’ve done a lot of digging.” His face clouded. “We haven’t the men to dig like that along the whole length of railroad, though. When spring comes, we’re liable to have the country cut in half.”

“Aren’t they building a new line north of the one that runs through Winnipeg?” Alexander asked. “Then we could keep shipping things east and west, even if—” He didn’t go on. When you were still a youth, looking defeat in the face came hard.

“They’re building it,” Lockerby agreed. “They can’t run it too far north, though, because of the lakes, and even if they did, the Americans might keep on pushing. We’ll have to see. Have to see if England can spare us any more troops, too.” He looked bleak and tired and older than his years.

After sitting for a few more minutes, he got up, donned pack and rifle once more, and went outside to put on his skis. As far as McGregor was concerned, they were outlandish contraptions, but when Lockerby went on his way, he glided across the surface of the snow amazingly fast, amazingly smooth. The farmer stared after him till he vanished into the night.

McGregor also watched the endless wind blowing away his trail. He looked north. Already, you could not tell Lockerby had come to the farm. That suited McGregor fine—better than fine. If mischief befell the Americans, he didn’t want it traced back to him unless he’d had a part in it: no, not even then, he decided. Especially not then.

Lockerby’s sudden appearance gave the family something to talk about till they went to bed. When Arthur McGregor got up the next morning, he hurried out to use the outhouse and feed the livestock he had left. The day was bright and clear. He peered west, toward the railroad tracks. He could see a train, and it wasn’t moving. Wagons and men were gathered around it; he could make out no more because of the distance.

Whenever he went out for chores, he looked toward the stalled—sabotaged? bombed?—train. Toward evening, it got moving again. It went up the track for about half a mile. Then, all at once, it stopped. The engine and several of the cars left the tracks, or so McGregor thought, anyhow: with the sun in his face, it was hard to be sure.

Some seconds after he saw the train stop, a harsh, flat
bang!
reached his ears—without a doubt, the sound of an explosive going off. He wondered if another of those had come in the night to stop the train the first time. If one had, he’d slept right through it.

“That Lockerby, he did good work there,” McGregor said to no one in particular, breath puffing out of his mouth in a frosty cloud as he spoke. He wondered how many other explosives the sergeant had planted along the track. The Americans would have to be wondering the same thing. How long would the line be out of service while they checked it? How many of them would get frostbite or pneumonia checking it?

Normally dour, he smiled from ear to ear as he went back inside.

Captain Wilcox stabbed a finger out at Reginald Bartlett. “How’d you like to lay some barbed wire tonight?” he said.

“Sir, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather lay one of those pretty little Red Cross nurses back at the aid station.” Bartlett answered, deadpan.

The Confederate soldiers who heard him laughed and snorted and cheered. One or two of them sent up Rebel yells to show they agreed with the sentiment expressed. Captain Wilcox grinned. By now, he’d got used to the idea that expecting Bartlett to take anything, war included, seriously was asking too much.

“Only trouble is, Reggie, they wouldn’t want to lay you,” he said, “Your uniform is filthy, your face is grubby, you’ve got lice in your hair and nits in every seam of your clothes, and you smell like a polecat would if he didn’t take a bath for about a year. Barbed wire, now, barbed wire doesn’t care about any of that.”

“That’s all true, sir,” Bartlett agreed, “but barbed wire can’t foxtrot, either. Honestly, sir—”

It was a losing fight, and he knew it. It wasn’t really even a fight at all, just a way to grumble about orders that was different from the profane complaints most men gave. When evening came, he
would
crawl out of the trench with a roll of barbed wire on his back, and he knew that, too. So did Captain Wilcox, who waved at him and went along the line to pick some more volunteers.

Down in the trenches, you were fairly safe unless you did something stupid like showing yourself to the damnyankees on the other side of the wire, or unless a shell landed right by you, or unless the U.S. soldiers decided to make another probe toward the Roanoke River and happened to pick your stretch of the line to raid.

Once you came out of the earthworks that protected you, though…once you came out of them, machine guns weren’t nuisances any more. They were menaces only too likely to make your family get a “The government of the Confederate States of America deeply regrets to inform you…” telegram. Rifle bullets ran around loose up there, too.

And you were liable to run into damnyankees out between the lines doing the same sorts of things you were. Sometimes you’d work and they’d work and you’d pretend not to notice one another. And sometimes you’d go after them or they’d go after you with guns and bayonets and the short-handled shovels you used to dig holes in the ground. And then the rifles in both trench lines would open up, and the machine guns would start to hammer, and then oh Lord! how you wished you were back of the lines in bed with a nurse—or even down safe in your trench—instead of where you really were.

Captain Wilcox had called Reggie’s face grubby. Before he climbed up out of the trench, he rubbed mud on himself till he looked like the end man in a minstrel show. The blacker you were, the harder it was for the Yankees to spot you.

“We ought to send niggers up to do this for us,” he said. “They’re already black.”

“I hear tell they’ve tried that in Kentucky,” Captain Wilcox said. “Didn’t work. The Yankees shot at them like they were us, and they didn’t have any guns to shoot back with. The ones who lived, you couldn’t make ’em go up again.”

“Too bad,” Reggie said. “Better them than me. Better them than me for just about any job I don’t want to do, matter of fact.” But when the captain said go, you went. Bartlett nodded to his companions. “Let’s get rolling.”

The other half-dozen men nodded. He’d been fighting along the Roanoke longer than any of them, so they took his words as Gospel, even if he had no more rank than they did. He was that mystical, magical thing, a veteran. A lot of the men who’d come to the fight with him were dead now. That he wasn’t was partly luck and partly being able to remember what he’d learned in his first few fights well enough not to repeat any of the stupid parts.

“Stay low and go slow,” he said now. “The less racket we make spreading the wire, the less chance the damnyankees have of starting to shoot at us.”

Some kind and thoughtful soul had made a stairway out of sandbags to help the heavily burdened wire men get out of the trench. Bartlett was grateful and angry at the same time: if he hadn’t been able to get up onto the battered ground between the lines, he wouldn’t have had to crawl forward toward the wire—and toward the enemy.

It was a dark and cloudy night. For once, Reggie wouldn’t have minded rain or even snow: nothing better to keep the U.S. forces from knowing he and his chums were out there. But if a storm hid in those clouds, it refused to come out.

He set down his hands with great care every time he moved forward. Behind him, somebody let out a soft, disgusted oath, probably because he’d crawled over a soft, disgusting corpse or piece of corpse. The line had swung back and forth several times; a lot of the dead from both sides had gone without proper burial. And even those who had been thrown into hasty graves or holes in the ground might well have been disinterred by the endless, senseless plowing of the artillery. The smell was that of a meat market that had been out of ice for a month in the middle of a hot summer.

Up above his head, something went
fwoomp
! “Freeze!” he hissed frantically as the parachute flare spread harsh white light over the field. If you didn’t move, sometimes they wouldn’t spot you even when you were out there in plain sight. Some of the men in his company spoke of walking right past deer that had bounded away once they’d gone by.

Bartlett was no deer, but he knew he could be in some hunter’s sights right now. His nose itched. His hand itched. His scalp and the hair under his arms always itched. He directed a few unkind thoughts to the cooties he carried around with him. But he didn’t scratch. He didn’t move. He did his best not to blink.

Some Yankee with a rifle started shooting, somewhere too close for comfort. Bartlett froze even colder. But whatever the U.S. soldier thought he saw, it wasn’t the Confederate wiring party. Hissing and sputtering, the parachute flare sank ever so slowly, going from white toward red as it did. At last it died, plunging the debatable ground into darkness once more.

“Come on,” Bartlett whispered. “Come on, but come quiet.”

Like most things, that was easier said than done. When at last they got to the wire barrier they were to strengthen, the men couldn’t just unroll the wire and scoot for home. To make it a proper obstruction, they had to mount it on poles and shove the poles in the ground. In some places, the ground was damp. Things were easy there. In some places, though, the ground was frozen. You had a choice then: either stab the supports into the dirt, knowing they wouldn’t stay well, or hammer at them with a shovel or whatever you had, knowing the noise was liable to draw fire. Bartlett opted for quiet. “Hell,” he muttered to himself, “it ain’t like there’s not enough wire out here already.”

Somebody, though, somebody had to get intrepid.
Tap, tap tap
. In the middle of a quiet night, the noise might as well have been a shell going off. Along with everybody else in the wiring party, Bartlett made frantic shushing noises. The damnyankees would start tapping, too, the two-inch tap an experienced machine gunner used on the barrel of his weapon to traverse it through its deadly arc of fire.

And sure enough, the U.S. soldiers did open up, first rifles, then machine guns. When a bullet clipped the barbed wire, it sparked blue. There were a lot of blue sparks, as if lightning bugs had suddenly come to roost between the lines of the two armies.

“Out of here!” Bartlett said urgently. He’d just about finished unreeling his wire; he unhooked the roll from his back and, suddenly lighter, hurried back toward the Confederate front line. Never had a muddy, stinking hole in the ground seemed so welcome, so wonderful.

Bullets zipping all around him, he dove into a shell hole. There was a puddle at the bottom of it. A horrible stink rose when he roiled the water. Something—or more likely someone—had died in this hole, too long ago.

A series of two-inch taps sent the Yankees’ stream of machine-gun bullets past him. He thought he could make it to the trench before the stream came back. Leaping up out of the shell hole, he ran for all he was worth. Somebody else, panting like a dog, sprinted stride for stride with him.

Slap!
His comrade, whoever he was, went down: even with the machine gun busy elsewhere, plenty of rifle bullets were still in the air. Swearing, Bartlett grabbed the other man, slung him over his back in place of the roll of wire, and stumbled on.

He almost went into the trench headfirst. Soldiers caught him, steadied him. “Who have I got here?” he asked, easing the man on his back to the ground.

Somebody struck a match. “It’s Jordan,” he said, and then, a moment later, quite unnecessarily, “He’s dead.”

“Good job you picked him up even so,” Captain Wilcox said out of the darkness. “You can’t know, not for sure. How did the wiring go?”

Bartlett took a minute or so to stop gasping for breath and to let his heart slow as terror began to recede. “Routine, sir,” he answered then. “Just routine.”