American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  One good surprise- Alarms began to ring. "Battle stations! Battle stations!" came the cry. "Aeroplane spotted. Not known whether hostile."

  The fleet had launched a pair of aeroplanes a couple of hours before, to scout out what lay ahead. But were these American aeroplanes returning, or British machines doing some scouting of their own? If they were British, the fleet had to knock them out of the sky before they could report back to the Royal Navy and to the land-based guns defending Pearl Harbor.

  Carsten's battle station was at the starboard bow, loading five-inch shells into one of the guns of the Dakota's secondary armament. He threw his cigarette over the side as he ran to the sponson. Bringing it in would have been his own funeral, except that the gunner's mate, a bruiser named Hiram Kidde, would have taken care of that for him.

  Behind him, the hose went back aboard the Vulcan, as if an elephant had owned a retractable trunk. They had enough fuel on board for the attack, and they could worry about everything else later.

  "You ready, Sam?" Kidde asked.

  Carsten would have bet any money you cared to name that the gunner's mate would have beaten him there, no matter where he was on the ship when the call for battle stations rang out. He sometimes thought Kidde could just wish himself to the sponson from anywhere on board.

  "Aye aye, 'Cap'n,' " Carsten answered, with a salute more extravagant than he would have given Dewey. "Cap'n" Kidde chuckled; he'd had the inevitable nickname for as long as he'd been in the Navy.

  The sponson was tiny and cramped, with plenty of sharp metal corners to gouge your legs or your arms if you weren't careful. Bare electric bulbs in wire cages on the ceiling shed a harsh, yellow light. The place stank of paint and brass and nitrocellulose and old sweat, odors no amount of swabbing could ever wash away.

  Kidde patted the breech of the gun- affectionately, as if it were a trollop's backside in some Barbary Coast dive in San Francisco. "Wish we had some high-explosive shells for this baby along with armor piercing. She'd make a hell of an antiaircraft gun, wouldn't she?"

  "Damned if she wouldn't," Carsten said. "Have to fuse 'em just right, to burst around the aeroplane, but damned if she wouldn't. You ought to talk to somebody about that one, Mate, you really should."

  "Ahh, it's just stack gas," Kidde said with a shrug. By then, the other loader and the gun layer were in their places. Luke Hoskins, the number-two shell jerker, was slower than he should have been. Kidde reamed him up one side and down the other with a tongue sharp enough to chip paint.

  "Have a heart, 'Cap'n' Kidde," Hoskins said. "First decent shit I've had in three days, and the goddamn battle stations sounds when I got my pants around my ankles in the aft head."

  "Tough," Kidde said flatly. "Next time, don't waste time wipin' your ass. It won't matter what you smell like-we get into a real scrap and we'll all be shittin' ourselves any which way."

  Carsten laughed till he incautiously jerked around and barked his shin on the edge of an ammunition rack. He swore, but kept on laughing. Part of that was good nature, part of it nerves. He didn't try to figure out which part was which.

  A runner came by with word that the aeroplane spotted had been one of the ones they'd launched. "He's floatin' on the water now an' the New York, it's fishin' him out of the drink with a crane," he reported. "Old Man says to stay at battle stations, though." He hurried away.

  The gun crew looked at one another. If they were staying at battle stations, that meant they'd be heading toward Pearl Harbor for the attack. And, sure enough, the rumble of the big steam engines got louder as they picked up steam. The Vulcan and the rest of the support ships would be dropping behind now-this was a job for the warships and the transports that carried a regiment of Marines and a whole division of Army men toward Oahu.

  Another man stuck his head inside the blazing-hot metal box where Carsten and his comrades waited for orders. Voice cracking with excitement, the sailor said, "Word is, the limeys ain't done much with their fleet, an' a lot of it's still in the harbor. We caught 'em with their pants down."

  "You think it's really true?" Hoskins breathed.

  "Why not?" Sam Carsten said. " Battle stations got you that way, didn't it?" The other seaman glared at him, but he wasn't easy to get angry at.

  "If it's so," Kidde said, "you can serve those Englishmen up with tea and crumpets, because they're dinner. They hit us a low blow back in granddad's day, comin' in on the side of the Rebels. Now we give it back. Sweet suffering Jesus, do we ever! All those ships sittin' inside Pearl Harbor, waiting for us to smash 'em…" His smile was beatific.

  Carsten peered through one of the narrow vision slits the sponson afforded. Torpedo-boat destroyers sprinted ahead of the battleships, their creamy wakes vivid against the deep blue of the tropical Pacific. The Dakota and her fellow capital ships were still picking up speed, too; the steel deck hummed and shuddered against his feet as the engines reached full power. They had to be making better than twenty knots. At that rate, it wouldn't be long until "There it is!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Land on the horizon! We'll give 'em what-for any minute now. Well- Holy Jesus!"

  "What?" The rest of the gun crew, the ones who weren't looking out themselves, all shouted the question together.

  "Harbor defense guns just opened up on us. They may not have known we were here, but they sure as hell do now."

  He didn't see the shell splash into the sea. Almost a minute later, though, the sound of the great cannon reached him: a thunder that cut through not only the roar of the Dakota's engines but also the hardened steel armor of the sponson.

  And then, bare seconds after that, the battleship's main armament cut loose, the two fourteen-inch guns in the forward superfiring turret and then the three from the A turret just below and ahead of it. He'd heard the noise from the distant British cannon; the roar of the guns from his own ship enveloped him, so that he felt it with his whole body more than with his ears. When the guns went off, the Dakota seemed to buck for a moment before resuming its advance.

  Sailors crowded up to see what they could see. The shore and the harbor wouldn't be in range of their secondary armament for some time to come. It was like having a moving picture unreel right before your eyes, Carsten thought, except this had sound-all the sound in the world, not some piano-pounding accompanist-and bright colors.

  More thunderclaps came from the guns of the other battleships in the fleet. The shore defenses sent up answering gouts of smoke and flame. This time, Carsten spied the splashes from a couple of shells. If you took a Ford, loaded it with explosives, and dropped it into the sea from a great height, you'd get a plume of water like that. Some of the splashes were close enough to the destroyers for the upthrown seawater to drench the men aboard.

  "Christ!" Altogether involuntarily, Carsten turned away from his viewing slit. One shell from the salvo hadn't landed by a destroyer, but on it. The ship might suddenly have rammed headlong into a brick wall. In an instant, it went from a yappy little terrier leading the fleet into action to a pile of floating-or rather, rapidly sinking-wreckage.

  "A lot of good men there," Hiram Kidde said, as if carving an epitaph on a headstone. So, in a way, he was.

  The Dakota began to zigzag violently at what seemed like random intervals. Armored against such shells, it could take far more punishment than a thin-skinned destroyer. That didn't mean you wanted to be punished- anything but. "Cap'n" Kidde summed that up in one short phrase: "Hate to be zigging when we should have zagged."

  "Wish you hadn't said that," Hoskins told him. The grin the gunner's mate gave him in return looked like a death's head.

  Sam Carsten made himself look some more. A few men in life jackets bobbed in the water near the stricken destroyer. He hoped they'd get picked up before the sharks found them.

  He raised his gaze to Oahu ahead. Shells slammed down around the forts holding the coast-defense guns. Smoke and dust rose in great clouds. But the guns kept pounding back in answer. And more smoke rose from within the sheltered wat
ers of Pearl Harbor, smoke that did not spring from shells. Carsten said, "I think they're gonna come out and fight."

  "They're in a bad way," Kidde said, relishing the prospect. "They can't just sit there and take it, but if they come out, we're going to cross the T on 'em."

  Sure enough, one of the Dakota's zigs to port became a full turn, so that she presented her whole ten-gun broadside to the emerging British warships, which could reply only with their forward-facing cannon.

  "Hit!" everybody screamed at once as gouts of smoke spurted from a stricken British vessel, and then again, a moment later, "Hit!"

  The ships of the Royal Navy were firing back; across blue water, orange flame and black smoke belched from the muzzles of their guns. And their gunnery was good. With a noise like a freight train roaring past when you were standing much too close to the tracks, a salvo of three shells smashed into the ocean a couple of hundred yards short of the Dakota. The battleship heeled to port as the captain took evasive action.

  "Wish I could see what was happening on the port beam," Carsten said. "Have they bracketed us?"

  "Sam, is that somethin' you really want to know?" Kidde asked him. After a moment, Carsten shook his head. If they put one salvo in front of you and one behind, the next one came down right on top of you.

  "We in range for our piece yet, 'Cap'n'?" Hoskins asked.

  "Not quite, but we're gettin' there," the gunner's mate replied. But then the Dakota turned so the gun didn't bear on the enemy. Carsten pictured the turrets that housed the main armament swinging back into position to carry on the fight. You fought your ship to bring them to bear on the most important targets the enemy had. If a torpedo boat or destroyer made a run at you, the five-inchers like the one Carsten manned were supposed to settle its hash. They were good for giving shore batteries hell, too: batteries that weren't main harbor defenses, anyhow.

  Now, though, all Carsten could do was stare out to sea and wait for his turn. It bothered him less than he'd thought it would. Out there were the transports with the soldiers and Marines. If they all landed safely, the Sandwich Islands would fly the Stars and Stripes. The odds looked good.

  "Hell of a start," he muttered.

  The dandy up from Charleston studied the painting with a curious and critical eye. His pose was so languid and exquisite, Anne Colleton thought, that he should have been wearing knee breeches and frock coat and sneezing after a pinch of snuff, not in a dinner jacket and smoking a fragrant Habana. His Low Country drawl only strengthened the impression of aristocratic effete-ness: "Upon my word, Miss Colleton, we surely have here an extraordinary series of contrasts, do we not?"

  She brushed back a lock of pale gold hair that was tickling her cheek. "I can think of several," she said. Starting with, why are you here at Marshlands while both my brothers have gone to serve their country? But to say that out loud would have been impolite and, however often she flouted the code of a Confederate gentlewoman, she still adhered to some of it. And so, not a hint of worry showed in her voice as she went on, "Which ones cross your mind, Mr. Forbes?"

  Alfred Forbes pointed to the canvas he had been examining. "First and foremost, hanging that sense-stretching cubist portrait and all these other pieces from Picasso and Duchamp and Gauguin and Braque and the other moderns here in this hall strikes me as making contrast enough all by itself." He examined the painting once more, then grinned impishly. "Are you sure it's right side up?"

  "Quite sure," Anne replied, with less frost in her voice than she would have liked. Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase had been upside down for a day before anyone noticed. It hadn't been the fault of her Negro servants, either; a curator who'd accompanied the exhibition from Paris had made the mistake. They couldn't even ship him home in disgrace, not with Yankee and German warships prowling the Atlantic. She went on, "I'll have you know Marshlands was avant-garde in its day, too."

  "No doubt, no doubt," Forbes said. Now his smile was somewhere between speculative and predatory. "But even should I have been so ungallant as to doubt, I could point out that yesterday's avant-garde is tomorrow's-" He checked himself.

  "Yes?" Anne Colleton said sweetly. "You were about to say?"

  "Tomorrow's treasured tradition, I was about to say," he replied. He'd probably been about to say something like tomorrow's crashing bore, but he'd managed to find something better. His blue eyes were so wide and innocent, Anne smiled in spite of herself.

  She said, "Supposing that to be a contrast"-it was one that had amused her ever since she'd arranged to bring the sampler of the best of modern painting from Paris to the Confederacy-"what other odd juxtapositions do you find?"

  "That you chose to hold the show here, among others," Alfred Forbes answered. "Worthy though St. Matthews is, it hardly ranks with Richmond or Charleston or New Orleans or even Columbia"-that, a Low Country man's dig at the decidedly Up Country capital of South Carolina-"as a center of cultural advancement."

  "It does now," Anne said. "These works would never have been seen in the Confederate States if I hadn't made the effort"- and spent the money, she thought, although saying that would have been vulgar-"to bring them here. This is my home, sir. Where would you have me exhibit them? The New York Armory, perhaps?"

  Forbes laughed out loud, showing off even white teeth. "Not likely! The next progressive Yankee I know of will be the first. When the USA ships in art from abroad, it's fat German singers in brass unmentionables bellowing about the Rhine while the orchestra does its level best to drown them out- presumably not in the said river."

  Anne smiled again. "They deserve each other, the Yankees and the Germans." The smile slipped. "But we don't deserve either of them, and we have the Yankees on our border and the Germans helping to harry the coast."

  "Which brings me to yet another contrast," Forbes said: "how long the exhibition was supposed to stay on these shores and how long it may actually be here. Wouldn't want these paintings sunk."

  "No, though a Yankee ship captain would likely boast of having rid the world of them." Anne Colleton dismissed the USA with that sentence and a curl of her lip. But the USA was not so easily dismissed. "A pity the Royal Navy took such a beating in the Sandwich Islands last week."

  "A date which will live in infamy for the British fleet," Forbes agreed sadly.

  The butler approached with a silver tray. He wore white tie but, as if his dark brown skin were not enough to mark his status, his vest had stripes and the buttons on his cutaway were shiny brass, just as they would have been in London. "Something to drink, madam, sir?" he asked, his voice the bass pipe of an organ.

  "Thank you, Scipio," Anne said, and took a crystal champagne flute.

  Forbes took one, too. Scipio headed into the drawing room to serve some of the other art aficionados. "He's well spoken," Forbes remarked. "Can't say that for most of the niggers hereabouts-I can scarcely fathom their jargon."

  "We had him specially trained in elocution," Anne said. "A butler, after all, reflects the standards of the house."

  "Very true." Alfred Forbes raised his glass. "And here's to culture on the Congaree! Let New York keep the rancid Rhine; the wave of the future is here!"

  Anne drank to that, quite happily. Forbes hung around and tried to draw her out, tried to make her interested in his admittedly handsome, well-groomed person. She could all but read his thoughts- a woman who is a patroness of cubist art is surely a woman with other modern ideas, and a woman with modern ideas is surely a loose woman. She pretended not to notice his hints. When he stepped forward to try to set his hand on her arm, she moved to one side: not in any offensive way, for he had not been offensive, but not permitting the contact, either. After a while, he gave up and went off to look at other paintings.

  A couple in their fifties came up to scrutinize the Picasso. "Isn't it exciting?" the woman said. "You can see her back and her, er, bosom both together there. It's a whole new way of looking at the world."

  "Maybe it takes special eyesight," the man replied w
ith a dubious chuckle. The left sleeve of his jacket hung limp. Anne wondered whether he'd lost the arm during the Second Mexican War or, less romantically, in a railroading accident.

  "Oh, Joseph, you are such a philistine," his wife-the wedding band sparkled on her ring finger-said in mock despair. They both laughed, comfortable as old shoes together, and, with a nod to Anne, went on to the next painting.

  The salt of the earth, she thought with mingled admiration and scorn. Joseph and his wife, obviously, would never do anything scandalous, but they'd never do anything interesting, either.

  Life should be interesting, she thought. If it's not, what point to living it? She felt like Eleanor of Aquitaine, free beyond the common limits of the world in which she lived. Royal birth had given Eleanor that freedom. Modern times were simpler: money did the job for Anne Colleton. The useless swamp along the Congaree aside, most of the land between St. Matthews and Columbia was Colleton cotton country.

  She tapped a finger against the gleaming mahogany banister. Brains hadn't hurt Eleanor of Aquitaine, and they didn't hurt her, either. She'd doubled profits from the land in the five years since her father died, and they hadn't been low before. After a couple of protests more for form's sake than because they really wanted the job, her brothers had let her run the plantation as suited her. Why not? She let them have allowance enough to get into all the mischief they liked, and they liked quite a lot.

  She'd grown used to patronizing Tom and Jacob in her mind. What they were getting into these days was worse than mischief. The casualty lists in the newspapers were hideously long, and the battles not going so well as everyone had been sure they would. Too many damnyankees, she thought bitterly.

  And who would remember the Marshlands Exhibition of Modern Art now, except as the show that was going on when war raced around the world? She knew to the penny what the show had cost to set up and publicize. She'd made that back-she couldn't remember the last investment where she'd failed to turn a profit-and the artists had sold a good many works, but much of the fame that should have come to both the Marshlands mansion and to herself was gone forever now, lost in the cannon's roar. One more reason to hate the United States.