American Front (8 page)

You could tell them from the Canadian defenders by their green-gray uniforms, by the shouts of “Hurrah!” that burst from their throats every few paces, by the fact that they weren’t looking back over their shoulders, and by how many of them there were. They came in a great wave, close together as far as the eye could see. Again McGregor had the horrible mental picture of everybody in the United States grabbing a gun and heading for Winnipeg. Now, though, the soldiers were heading for him.

Then the machine guns began to hammer, back in the buildings the neighbors had helped his father run up. Their hideous racket made his head snap back toward the house and barn. When he looked back in the direction of the American soldiers once more, it was as if his fields had had a thresher go over them: where the soldiers had been wheat, they were mowed into stubble. More of them came forward, and more of them went down as the machine guns spat fire through their ranks. They were too far away for McGregor to see how they died, only that they died. Not all of them died at once, of course; a great chorus of agony rose from the fields, even above the racket of machine guns and rifle.

Julia clamped her hands over her ears. “Make them stop it, Papa!” she screamed. “Make them stop!”

McGregor couldn’t make them stop. If he could have, he wouldn’t. He exulted to see the Americans fall and writhe and die. What business did they have, invading his country? Like their German allies, they seemed to specialize in attacking small, defenseless nations that had done them no harm. One way or another, he vowed to himself, he would make them pay.

They were paying now, but they were also still moving forward. A bullet kicked up dust, not far from McGregor’s feet. He heard more bullets smacking into the timbers of the house and the barn, where Pierre Lapin was holed up. The machine guns kept working a fearful slaughter, but the skirmish line Lapin had set up was thin, and did not, could not, hold. To east and west, Yanks in green-gray bypassed the strongpoint, as if it were high ground still above water in the middle of a flood.

That didn’t last long. The Americans swung round behind the buildings. Firing around them—firing inside them—grew to a crescendo before abruptly falling silent.

A couple of soldiers came up to the McGregors. They held their rifles at the ready. By the way they panted, by the way their eyes glittered, they would open fire at any excuse or none. Arthur McGregor was careful to keep his hands in plain sight and to make no sudden moves. He was glad he didn’t have the rifle on his shoulder, too.

“That there your house?” asked one of the Yanks, a fellow with corporal’s stripes on his sleeves. He and his companion smelled the way McGregor did before Maude heated up water for a Saturday night bath, only more so.

“It’s mine,” McGregor said shortly.

The American corporal gestured with his rifle. “Go on back to it. Put your critters in the barn again. We cleaned out your soldiers, and we ain’t got nothin’ against civilians. Go on back.” He scratched his cheek. Maybe the upswept wings of the Kaiser Bill mustache tickled.

“Ever think maybe civilians have something against you?” Alexander said, his voice hot.

“You got a mouthy kid,” the corporal said to Arthur. “He gets too mouthy, maybe the house and the barn catch on fire—just by accident, understand?”

“I understand,” McGregor said. He didn’t know whether, in the end, Canada could win the war. He did know he and his family had just lost it.

“Dowling!” The general’s voice, cracking and full of phlegm, echoed through the St. Louis headquarters of the U.S. First Army. “God damn it to hell, Dowling, have you gone and died while I wasn’t looking? Get yourself in here this instant, or you’ll be sorry you were ever born!”

“Yes, sir. Coming, sir.” Major Abner Dowling hastily finished buttoning his fly. At the moment, he was sorry he’d ever been born. Of all the men to whom he could have been adjutant—

“Dowling!” Wheezing thunder—the general hadn’t heard him. The general was hard of hearing: not surprising, since he was heading toward seventy-five. Even when he did hear, he was confounded hard of listening.

“Here, sir.” Dowling rushed into the office. He wanted to wipe off his face; he was built like a rolltop desk, and moving quickly in hot, muggy weather made sweat pour down his ruddy cheeks. But that would have been a violation of military decorum, and his commander—the First Army’s commander—made men pay for such trifling lapses.

“About time, Major,” the general grumbled, but let it go at that. Dowling knew some relief; the old fool was just as likely to have kept riding him all day. “Get me a cup of coffee, man, and put something in it to open my eyes up. You know what I mean.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said. The coffeepot sat on top of an alcohol lamp to keep what was inside hot. More alcohol rested in the sideboard drawer—brandy of a finer grade than the Army used for medicinal purposes. The general liked his medicine, though. His adjutant poured a hefty nip into the coffee cup, then handed it to him.

“Thank you very much.” Now that he’d got exactly what he wanted, the general was gracious. Absurdly, he preened, as well as a fat old man shoehorned into a uniform three sizes too small could preen. Peroxided locks spilled out from under the hat he wore indoors and out to hide the bald crown of his head. He’d dyed his drooping mustachios, too—
the color of piss
, Dowling thought uncharitably. When the general sipped the coffee, his rheumy blue eyes did open wider. “That is the straight goods, Major.”

“Glad you like it, General Custer,” Dowling said. “With your permission—” He waited for Custer’s nod before filling his own cup. Not without regret, he substituted cream and sugar for the commanding general’s brandy.

Custer drank his coffee almost as fast as he would have had the cup contained nothing bur firewater. He held it out in an imperious, liver-spotted hand for a refill. Dowling didn’t lace it with as much brandy this time: if the commander fell asleep over his maps, the First Army would do even less than it had up till now, and it hadn’t done much.

“I’m not satisfied with the reports the cavalry is bringing us from western Kentucky,” Custer declared, “not satisfied at all. By God, Major, they call that scouting? They call that gathering intelligence? Why, when I was in a blue uniform instead of this moss-colored monstrosity—”

Dowling inserted a couple of mental earplugs as his commander ranted on. Most of the men who’d fought in the War of Secession were dead, and just about all the ones who weren’t dead had long since been put out to pasture. Custer should have been, as far as Dowling was concerned, but he hadn’t. He’d flourished, albeit more on account of persistence and luck than any military virtue past blind aggressiveness.

He’d been on the plains when the Second Mexican War broke out, and spent that conflict, the graveyard of so many U.S. military reputations, using Gatling guns on the Kiowas and then on a division of Canadians led over the border by a British general even more blindly aggressive than he was. Having made himself a hero in two wars conspicuously lacking such—and having made sure the newspapers let the world know just what a hero he was—he’d assured his rise to lieutenant general’s rank and his tenure in the Army for as long as his bloated body would endure. It hadn’t given out yet.

The real problem was that he’d had only a couple of new thoughts since the 1860s, and none since the 1880s. Gently, Dowling tried to bring him up toward modern times: “Much harder for cavalry to move now, sir, than it used to be. Machine guns have been hard on horses, you know. Our aeroplanes have brought back excellent sketches of Confederate defenses, though, and with them—”

“Machine guns are all very well for mowing down savages, but properly trained and disciplined troops shouldn’t be so leery of them,” Custer said. “Our troops are shying from them like so many virgins at the touch of a man. And as for aeroplanes—” He snapped his fingers. “They’re all very fine for impressing yahoos at county fairs, but you can’t take them seriously as weapons of war. Mark my words, Major: in five years’ time the newfangled contraptions will be as forgotten as Ozymandias.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said, that seeming a safer course than asking who Ozymandias was and having to sit through a lecture that had nothing to do with the war. Still trying valiantly to remind Custer that they had reached the twentieth century, he went on, “The couple of armored automobiles we’ve been able to deploy have also given good service.”

“Newfangled contraptions,” Custer repeated, as if scoring a point. “I know what we need to do, Major. I merely need to ensure the Navy’s cooperation before we undertake it. If we can throw a strong force of infantry into Kentucky, they’ll beat down the Confederates’ defenses there, allowing our cavalry to get into the enemy’s rear and complete his destruction as he flees. If the sailors can hold off the Rebel river monitors—”

“Yes, sir—if,” Dowling said. If, on the other hand, one of those heavily armed, heavily armored craft got loose among the barges and such shipping Americans across the river, the slaughter would be horrendous. And, since the monitors were so heavily armored, holding them away from the landing force would be anything but easy—no wonder the Navy was shillyshallying about that.

“I shall go to the front,” Custer said suddenly, catching Dowling off guard. “Yes, that’s what I’ll do. My presence there will surely inspire the men to give the utmost effort. And,” he added with an angry snort, “I am sick to death of being bombarded with telegrams demanding that I move faster. Roosevelt delights in having the War Department nag me. He has delighted in making my life difficult for more than thirty years.” The general commanding First Army and the president had fought the British together during the Second Mexican War. By all the signs, neither had enjoyed the experience. Custer went on. “We are punching into Canada, I hear—but that is all Roosevelt will let me do: hear about it, I mean.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said in his most placating tones.

That did no good. Custer was off to the races: “Damn it to hell and gone,
I
should be the one punching into Canada. Roosevelt knows what I owe the goddamn Canucks. They murdered my brother—shot him down like a dog in front of my eyes. I
deserve
that command, and the chance to take revenge at last. But do I get it? Have I any chance of getting it? No, by jingo! Roosevelt has had it in for me since 1881, and he will not give it to me—not till my dying day, I wager. The one thing I want more than any other in all the world, and I cannot have it. Do you know—have you got any idea—how maddening that is?”

“I’m sure it must be, sir,” Dowling said with some sympathy—some, but not much, for he’d been listening to Custer on the same subject for longer than he wanted to. Custer would not let it go. He clung like a bulldog, or, considering the bare natural state of his gums, perhaps more like a leech.

He took a couple of deep breaths, then went on, “We are fighting hard all across the plains. We have invaded western Virginia—so why, the brass hats in Philadelphia demand, don’t I move? Idiots! Cretins! Imbeciles! Because Teddy Roosevelt has it in for me, they do, too. To them, Dowling, the Ohio and the Mississippi are little squiggly blue lines on a map, nothing more. I am the one who has to find the way across. Make arrangements at once to transfer headquarters to Vienna, Illinois, as soon as is practicable. Why are you still standing there gaping?”

“I’ll attend to it immediately, sir,” Dowling promised. Custer had a point—throwing an army into Confederate territory wasn’t going to be easy here. But if he thought his presence at the front would help things along, he was probably fooling himself. Whether he understood it or not, war had changed over the past fifty years. Most of the soldiers wouldn’t know he arrived, and most of the ones who did know wouldn’t care.

“And one more thing,” Custer ordered. “Keep it secret. Half these Missourians and more than half the downstate Illinoisans wish they were Rebs. Our scouts may have trouble in Kentucky, but theirs, I have no doubt, enjoy a fine old time here.”

“I’ll take care of that, too, sir,” Dowling said. “If the Germans can keep their plans secret from the damned Frenchmen they rule in Alsace-Lorraine, I expect we can keep the would-be Southerners from getting word of ours.”

“We’d better.” Custer bared his teeth in what was meant for a fearsome grimace. Since those teeth were far too white and even and perfect to have stayed in his own mouth for three-quarters of a century, the effect was more nearly ludicrous than frightening. Dowling quickly turned his back so the commanding general wouldn’t see him giggle, then hurried off to do Custer’s bidding.

Baking in the late summer sun, the plains of Kansas didn’t look much different from the plains of Sequoyah just to the south. “Hellfire,” Corporal Stephen Ramsay said, “once we got past the barbed wire, we ain’t had any trouble a-tall.”

“Good,” Sergeant Bobby Brock answered. “We want to do this quick and get the hell out.” He looked around at the two companies of cavalry. “We ain’t got the men to stand up to any big bunch o’ Yankee soldiers.”

Both men—Ramsay little and lithe, Brock taller, thicker through the shoulders, and slower-moving—rode just behind the standard bearer. The Stars and Bars flapped lazily. Pointing to it, Ramsay said, “Maybe the damnyankees up in Kingman’ll think that’s the United States flag till we’re right up on top of ’em. They look enough alike, now don’t they?”

“Sure enough do,” Brock agreed.

Ramsay liked to talk. “Anything that makes our job easier is all right by me,” he said. “I don’t expect any trouble here. Not even the Yankees got enough men to cover all the barbed wire on all the frontier. Our boys shoot off some cannon a ways east of us, they all go runnin’ over there to find out what we’re doin’, an’ we slip across easy as you please.”

“Yeah.” Brock let his horse, a big sorrel gelding, trot on for another few paces, then went on, “I wonder how many soldiers the Yanks got into our country the same kind o’ way.”

“However many there was, only way they’ll come out is feet first,” Ramsay said confidently. “They’re only Yankees, after all. We licked ’em twice running, an’ we’ll do it again. Hellfire, war’ll be over by winter, on account of they’ll have done given up.”