American Front gw-1

by Harry Turtledove

  "Ahh-men!" Percy Stone sang out, as if at the end of a hymn. Then, in an entirely different tone of voice, he said, "Jesus!" He amplified that: "Bandit on our tail, and diving on us!"

  Moss swung the Wright's nose up till the aeroplane almost stalled, then rolled hard to the right, trying to slip away from the pursuer he hadn't seen. Fear and excitement ran through his body, a jolt stronger than 151-proof rum. The rum wouldn't kill you, even if, come the next morning, you wished it had. The enemy, though He thanked God for the speaking tube. Without it, Stone would have had the devil's own time warning him they had company in the sky. They weren't supposed to have had company; the enemy's aeroplane force was supposed to have been so beaten down, one-aeroplane missions were allowed again. Like a lot of things that were supposed to have happened, that one hadn't.

  He gave the aeroplane full throttle, swinging through a quick circle in the sky to try and get on the foe's tail instead of the other way round. Acceleration and centrifugal force threw him around in the cockpit.

  Halfway through the turn, he got his first glimpse of the enemy bus: an Avro, an aeroplane whose performance closely matched the Wilbur's. The Canadian pilot-or maybe, for all Moss knew, he was an Englishman-rolled through a manoeuvre like his own, so the two flying machines turned away from each other.

  Behind him, Percy Stone squeezed off a burst with his machine gun. The Avro's observer fired back; Moss saw flame burst from the muzzle of the enemy machine gun. Tracers sparked across the open, empty air.

  Thwump! Thwump! Thwump! Bullets punched through fuselage fabric, sounding like flung stones off a tightly stretched awning. Stone's fire abruptly ceased. "I'm hit!" sounded tinnily in Moss' ear.

  He couldn't answer for a moment; he needed both hands to twist the aeroplane through a roll that had earth and sky twisting dizzily all around him. Where was the Avro? Were more enemy aeroplanes in the sky? With his observer wounded, he couldn't fight back. He wished again for the Super Hudson he wasn't flying any more. Of course, had he been in that bus, the bullets might have gone through him, not Stone.

  His head swivelled wildly as he levelled off and scooted back toward the American lines. His altimeter was still unwinding; it hadn't been able to keep up with his dizzying dive. He didn't need it to tell him he'd shed several thousand feet. His ears ached dully. They'd popped several times in the descent, but, like the altimeter, hadn't caught up with the rest of him.

  He didn't see any Canucks or limeys. Grabbing the speaking tube, he shouted into it: "Percy! You there? How bad are you?"

  "One in the side, one ricocheted off the damn camera and nicked me in the leg," Stone answered. A moment later, another word dragged from him: "Hurts."

  Moss flew straight and level, sacrificing everything for speed, till tracer bullets zipped past the Wright 17. Then he began dodging and swerving again. You couldn't outrun a bullet; your best hope was to evade one. Behind him, the observer's machine gun started chattering. He had no idea how accurately Percy Stone was firing. That he was firing at all seemed a good sign.

  But tracers were coming from more than one direction, which, by un pleasant logic, meant he had more than one aeroplane on his tail. That wasn't a good sign. Anything you did to evade one was liable to bring you right under the gun of another.

  And then, like angels with flaming swords, a flight of American aeroplanes dove on the Canucks or limeys, who went from pursuers to pursued in seconds. "They're breaking away," Stone said. Moss didn't like how quiet and tired he sounded. He should have been screaming for joy, leaning forward to pound his pilot on the back. Straight and level, that was the answer: get Stone to a sawbones on the double.

  Enemy antiaircraft gunners sent up a storm of hate as Moss flew over the front line. He didn't waste time on evasive action, not now. Odds weren't so good as if he'd been dodging all over the landscape, but they were still on his side.

  He got away with it. "Almost home, Percy," he said. Stone didn't answer. Moss looked back over his shoulder. The observer was slumped to one side, his eyes closed. Moss tried to fly even faster, but the Wilbur was already going flat out.

  He landed at as high a speed as he could, using the whole airstrip and taxiing to a stop close to the barracks. He was waving for help before the aeroplane stopped rolling. As soon as it did, he scrambled back into the observer's cockpit.

  Blood was everywhere back there: on the walls, on the seat, on the floor, on the camera-and on Percy Stone's flying togs. Moss yanked back the observer's sleeve and jabbed his finger down on the inside of Stone's wrist. He let out a whoop when he felt a pulse.

  "Hurry up, dammit!" he shouted. "He's hurt bad!"

  By then the ground crew were already at the bus. They had a stretcher with them. Lefty helped Moss unbuckle Stone and get his limp weight out of the cockpit and down to the ground. "Can't let him die," the mechanic said. "I need his money." If he was kidding, he was kidding on the square.

  He and Byron rushed Stone away. Jonathan Moss looked down at him self. His friend's blood was on his flight suit, on his boots, on his hands. Wearily, he trudged in to make his report to Captain Franklin. No pictures to develop, not today; Stone had got hit before he had the chance to take any- and the camera looked to be hors de combat, too.

  Somebody brought him a whiskey. He gulped it down without tasting or feeling it. After what seemed a very long time, the telephone jangled. Lefty got it before Moss could even move from his chair. "Yeah?" the mechanic said, and again: "Yeah? All right. Good. Thanks." He hung up, then turned to Moss. "Collapsed lung and he's lost a lot of blood, but they think he's gonna pull through."

  "Thank God," Moss said, and fell asleep where he sat.

  Stephen Ramsay sipped coffee from a tin cup, then said, "Captain Lincoln, sir, ain't this a hell of a war? I've been a cavalryman a long time. When we got into Okmulgee here, I didn't mind fighting like a dragoon, on account of that's what you got to do when you fight in built-up country. But now they've dragooned us into the infantry- and it's not even the Confederate States infantry. Well, not exactly," he amended.

  "You're the captain now, Ramsay," Lincoln said. "I'll have you remember I'm a colonel these days." His hand went to his collar. He didn't wear the three bars of a Confederate captain any more, or the three stars of a Confederate colonel, either. Instead, he had two red costume-jewellery jewels, the newly devised insigne for a colonel in the equally newly devised Creek Nation Army.

  Ramsay had shed his sergeant's stripes, too. He wore one red costume-jewellery jewel on either side of his collar. Both he and Lincoln also had red armbands on the left sleeves of their tunics. Other than that, they, unlike the soldiers they were now commanding, retained ordinary Confederate uniform.

  "Captain? Me?" Ramsay snorted. "Doesn't seem real." He drank some more coffee. It was hot and strong. Past that, he couldn't think of anything good to say about it. After swallowing, he went on, "Last time I got paid, though, it was a captain's money, so I can't kick about that."

  "Same here-I got a colonel's money," Lincoln said. "And we're earning what they pay us, by God. Do you doubt it?"

  "When you put it that way, no sir." Ramsay laughed a little. "Crazy how things work out, isn't it? We were the first white soldiers in town, we helped the Creeks throw back the damnyankees, so Chief Fixico figures we're the ones to turn his braves into real soldiers." Under his breath, he added, "Stupid damn rank badges, anyone wants to know."

  "I told him the same thing." Lincoln 's chuckle was wry. "They turned out to be his idea, so we're stuck with them as long as we do this job." He shrugged. "I hear tell English officers, when they get hired to bring an Indian maharajah's militia up to snuff-their kind of Indian, I mean, not ours-they have to wear the native-style uniform, too. It could be worse-they could have put us in war paint and feathers."

  "Creeks don't seem to go in for that kind of thing much," Ramsay said. "You look around at this place-the way it was before the fighting started, anyway-and it could be anybody's town. You would
n't know red-uh, Indians-had built it."

  You had to be careful about saying redskins hereabouts. The Indians didn't like it for beans. Ramsay had the idea Negroes didn't like being called niggers, either, but he didn't let that stop him. It was different with the Creeks, though. They weren't just hewers of wood and drawers of water. By law and by treaty, they were every bit as much Confederate citizens as he was. Up till manumission, they'd kept slaves of their own.

  "Captain Ramsay?" That was Moty Tiger, probably-no, certainly-the best sergeant Ramsay had. He was the young fellow who'd apologized to Ramsay when he suddenly got a lesson in what foxholes were worth. Now his broad bronze face was worried.

  When Moty Tiger worried, Ramsay figured he ought to worry, too. "What's up, Moty?" he asked, getting to his feet.

  "I've got a discipline problem, Captain," the Creek sergeant said carefully.

  "Well, let's see what we can do about that," Ramsay said. The Indian with the picturesque name turned and led him down the trench, presumably toward whoever was involved in the discipline problem.

  Ramsay kicked at the muddy dirt as he followed. The Creek Nation Army-both regiments of it-had an inordinate number of discipline problems. Part of that was because the men had been under military discipline for only a few weeks. They chafed under it, like barely broken horses. And part of it was that they were Indians, and maybe less used to taking orders from anybody than a like number of whites would have been.

  They particularly didn't like taking orders from their own people. They accepted it better from their white officers. Ramsay didn't think that was because he was white, as he would have if he were dealing with Negroes. But the Creeks seemed to figure that, as a real live working soldier, he knew what he was doing, whereas to them their non-coms were the same kind of amateurs they were.

  "Ten-shun!" Moty Tiger called as he came up to the knot of Indians gathered around a fire. The Creeks got to their feet, not with the alacrity Confederate regulars would have shown, but fast enough that Ramsay couldn't gig them about it. In lieu of uniforms, which hadn't arrived yet from back East, they wore denim pants, flannel shirts with red armbands like Ramsay's, and a variety of slouch hats.

  "All right, what's going on here?" Ramsay asked with something close to genuine curiosity.

  "He gave me the shit duty again!" one of the Creeks exclaimed.

  "Somebody's got to have it, Perryman," Ramsay said. "We don't take the honey buckets to the pit and cover it up, we'd get even worse stinks than we have already, and we'd start getting sick before long, too. No way to keep clean or anything close to it, but we've got to do what we can."

  "Those damn buckets are disgusting," Perryman said. "Hauling them is nigger work, not soldier work."

  "Mike, we ain't got no niggers here," Moty Tiger said, more patiently than Ramsay would have expected. "All we got is us, and if we don't do it, nobody will. And it's your turn."

  "Is it your turn?" Ramsay asked Mike Perryman; there was always the chance Moty Tiger was picking on his fellow Indian, which would have to be stopped if it was happening. But, reluctantly, Perryman nodded. "Then you've got to do the job," Ramsay told him. "I've done it myself, on manoeuvres and out in the field. Take 'em to the pit, fling 'em in, cover everything up, and then you can pretend it never happened."

  "You really did that?" Perryman asked, his black eyes scanning Ramsay's face, searching for a lie.

  But it was the truth. Ramsay nodded with a clear conscience. "You're a soldier now," he said. "This isn't a lark and it isn't a game. It isn't pretty. It isn't a whole lot of fun. But it's what needs doing. So-are you going to be a soldier, or are you going to be an old soldier, somebody who's always complaining and carrying on when he's got no cause to? You said yourself your sergeant wasn't being unfair. If you don't do the job, somebody else will have to, and that wouldn't be fair to the rest of the men in your squad."

  He waited to see what would happen. He didn't want to have to punish Mike Perryman. He'd already seen that punishment didn't work as well with the Creeks as it did with white soldiers. The Indians only resented you more.

  Perryman muttered something Ramsay only half heard. He didn't think it was in English. That was liable to be just as well. If he didn't understand it, he didn't have to notice it. But then, slowly and with nothing like enthusiasm or even resignation, the Creek got to his feet and headed off to the latrine bay dug out from the main trench. Nobody watched him as he carried the buckets off to the disposal pit. Nobody watched him bring them back, either-more courtesy than white soldiers would have shown one of their comrades in the same fix.

  "Thank you, Captain," Moty Tiger said quietly as the two of them walked back toward where Ramsay had been drinking his coffee.

  "You're welcome," Ramsay answered. "You were right, so I backed you up. Before too long, everybody will have the idea, and you won't need me to back you up."

  "I shouldn't have this time." The Creek sounded angry at himself.

  As an old sergeant himself, Ramsay understood that. But things were different here from the way they were in the Confederate Army or any other long-established force. "Next time, or maybe the time after that, everything will go smooth," Ramsay said. "What you want to do is this-you want to make sure they do what you tell 'em before the damnyankees try another push into Okmulgee. That'll keep a lot more of 'em alive, whether they're smart enough to know it or not. They won't thank you for it, but they'll be here."

  "I understand," the Creek sergeant said. He hesitated, then asked, "If the United States soldiers do attack here, can we hold them back?"

  "We've got the Creek Nation Army, we've got some good Texas infantry, we've got artillery back of town and over in the hills," Ramsay said, and then, because honesty compelled him, "Damned if I know. Depends on how hard the Yankees push things. Attacking costs more than defending, but they've got more men than we do, too."

  Moty Tiger nodded soberly. "This is not war, the way we Creeks talk of war. This is not warrior against warrior. It is a whole nation throwing itself at another nation. It does not bring men glory or fame. It uses them up, and it buries them, and then it reaches out and uses more."

  "You're only wrong about one thing," Ramsay said. The Indian looked a question at him. He explained. "A lot of the time, this here war doesn't bother with buryin' the men it uses up."

  Moty Tiger pondered that. He showed his teeth in a grimace of pain, but didn't argue with Ramsay. Instead, after a grave nod, he turned around and went back down the trench, back toward his squad. They and he-and Ramsay-hadn't been used up… yet.

  The train shuddered to a stop. Paul Mantarakis, conscious that the two dark green stripes on the sleeve of his tunic meant he had more important work to do- and that he had to do it under more important eyes- than before, said, "My squad, get ready to pile on out."

  Soldiers stirred on the floor of the boxcar. Not so long ago, it had been carrying horses. The strong smell lingered. Some of the farm boys found it soothing. As far as Paul was concerned, that was their problem, not his. They grabbed their rifles, made sure they had all their gear, and grunted as they slung their packs onto their backs.

  Not far away, Gordon McSweeney, also sporting corporal's stripes, was telling his squad, "Properly speaking, these Mormons are not even Christians. They will go to hell regardless of whether we shoot them down or they die in bed. Spare not the rod, then, for not only are they heretics, they are rebels in arms against the United States of America."

  Lieutenant Norman Hinshaw was talking to the whole platoon: "We have to root out these bandits and rebels and bring Utah back under the Stars and Stripes. Remember, most of the people we come across will be loyal Americans. Only a handful have sold themselves to the Canucks and the Rebs, and they're the ones causing all the trouble. Once we get rid of them, Utah should be a peaceable state, just like all the others." He paused to let that sink in, then went on, "When they first hatched their plot, these Mormon madmen blew up the railroad line right at the border a
nd seized the weapons in every arsenal in the state. Now we've pushed more than halfway to Salt Lake City. The town ahead of us is called Price. We'll take it, repair the tracks, and move on." He didn't ask for questions. He worked the latch on the boxcar door and slid it open. "Let's go!"

  After so long cooped up on the train, Mantarakis' eyes filled with tears when he stepped out into bright sunshine. The first breath of fresh air told him he wasn't in Kentucky any more, or in Philadelphia, either. It was hot and dry, with an alkaline tang to it. It wasn't summer yet, but it felt that way. Ahead- westward-and to the north, he saw forested mountains in the distance. A nearer line of green marked the Price River. But the land where he was standing had only scattered sagebrush and tumbleweeds and other desert plants on it. All it needed was the bleached skull of an ox to make it the perfect picture of an arid waste.

  "This is the abomination of the desolation, as was spoken of in the Book of Daniel," McSweeney said, and Mantarakis, for once, was not inclined to disagree.

  The boxcar from which they'd emerged was one of dozens, hundreds, carrying the two divisions pulled out of Kentucky to their new theatre of operations. They unloaded men, horses, mules, wagons, trucks, guns-all the tools needed to wage war in the modern age, and to keep on waging it in country like this, where they would be hard pressed to draw supplies from the land.

  Every officer of captain's rank or higher was running around with a list and a pencil, checking things off as fast as he could. In an amazingly short time, what had been two entrained divisions turned into two divisions ready for action. In spite of himself, Paul was impressed. Soldiers spent a lot of time groaning about officers, but every now and then they showed what they were worth.

  Dust puffed up under Mantarakis' boots as he marched along. Dust hovered all around the thousands of marching men. It held a stronger dose of the alkaline tang he'd noticed before. How the devil were you supposed to raise crops on soil like this?