Here today, though, one balloon in particular caught his eye. It had to be floating close to a mile in the air, a thousand feet or so higher than the other gas-filled cylinders from which observers watched U.S. troops movements and called artillery down on the Americans’ heads.
Moss grunted, a sound of discontent he could not hear over the roar of the engine and the shriek of the wind. That balloon was liable to be a trap. The enemy always had plenty of Archie around his sausages. If they’d run up a balloon there just to lure U.S. aeroplanes, they were liable to have more than plenty. But those extra thousand feet would give an observer a long, long look behind the American lines.
If the observation balloon was a trap, it was-that was all there was to it. Trap or not, it needed taking out. Moss nodded to himself as decision firmed. He swung his aeroplane toward the balloon. Percy Stone, Hans Oppenheim, and Pete Bradley followed without hesitation, though they had to know what they were liable to be getting into.
Sure as hell, heavy antiaircraft fire burst around Moss’ two-decker as he approached the balloon. “Told you so,” he said to no one in particular. He did settle one thing to his satisfaction, though: it was an observation balloon, not just a trap. He could see a man moving in the wicker basket beneath the gas bag.
Often, a balloon’s groundcrew would reel it in by its cable when it came under attack. That didn’t happen here. Maybe the observer thought the Archie would drive off the U.S. aeroplanes. Maybe he was a patriot. Maybe he was a damn fool. Moss neither knew nor cared. If the fellow stayed up there so temptingly high, he was going to get himself and his balloon shot to bits.
The twin machine guns mounted about the fighting scout’s engine started chattering. Moss aimed the stream of bullets first at the balloon and then at the smaller, more difficult target the wicker basket made.
To his amazement, the enemy observer started shooting back. He was hideously outgunned, but he’d brought a rifle up there to keep him company, and he was taking aimed potshots at Moss and his flightmates. The son of a bitch was a good shot, too. A bullet cracked past Moss’ head, close enough to scare him out of a year’s growth. He jammed his thumb down on the firing button as hard as he could, trying to blow holes in that crazy Canadian or eccentric Englishman or whatever the hell he was. He’d never live it down if he got shot down by an observer in a balloon basket.
That was a joke, something to laugh at, till Hans Oppenheim’s aeroplane pulled out of its run at the balloon and broke back toward the west, toward the American lines. Either the bus or Oppenheim himself was in trouble; Moss saw to his astonished dismay that his flightmate wasn’t going to make it back to territory the U.S. Army controlled. Down Hans went, not far from an enemy artillery position.
Canucks and limeys came running from every direction toward Oppenheim’s aeroplane. After seeing that, Moss had to look away, because he was around the far side of the balloon, with that infernal observer still blazing away at him and Stone and Bradley. The son of a bitch was a good shot. A bullet thrummed through the tight-stretched fabric of the fuselage, about three feet behind Moss’ seat.
He whipped the Wright two-decker into a tight turn and bored in on the observation balloon, Stone behind him to the right, Bradley to the left. “There!” he shouted in savage exultation, as the hydrogen in the fabric sausage finally caught fire. “That’ll teach you, you bastard.”
Maybe nothing would teach the observer. Even as his crew on the ground at last began hauling down the flaming balloon, he calmly climbed over the edge of the wicker basket from which he’d fought so hard and so well and leaped off into space.
His parachute must have been connected to the basket by a static line, for the big silk canopy opened almost at once. Pilots of fighting scouts were not issued parachutes. Moss didn’t know whether to be jealous or to despise the device as a sissy affectation.
The latter, he decided, and swung the nose of his aeroplane down a little. A burst from his machine gun, and the observer hung limp and unmoving beneath the ’chute. Maybe Moss wouldn’t have done it had the fellow not shot down his friend. But maybe he would have, too; that Canuck or limey or whoever he was had been too damn good to let him live.
Moss swooped down below the thunderous Archie and streaked toward the spot where Hans Oppenheim’s aeroplane went down. His flightmate wasn’t inside the bus any more; dead or alive, the enemy soldiers had taken him away. A crowd of men in khaki were gathered around the Wright. Moss machine-gunned them, and whooped with glee to watch them scatter. Some didn’t scatter-some crumpled and wouldn’t get up again.
Then Moss and Stone and Bradley zoomed past the disabled two-decker and low over the front line. The Canadian and British troops in the trenches gave them a warm sendoff with rifle and machine-gun fire. And then, because they were coming out of the east, half the Americans assumed they had to be hostile and fired at them, too. More bullets pierced Moss’ aeroplane.
“Now wouldn’t that be bully?” he growled. “Hell of a mission to have to try and explain to Major Cherney: a balloon observer shot down one machine from the flight and our own ground fire made another one crash. He’d love that, yes he would. He’d love it a hell of a lot.”
But his two-decker kept flying, and so, he saw to his relief in the rearview mirror, did those of Percy Stone and Pete Bradley. U.S. antiaircraft guns opened up on them, too, but they made it back to the Orangeville aerodrome unscathed.
As Moss had known it would be, “What happened to Lieutenant Oppenheim?” was the first question the groundcrew asked after he shut off the motor and the sounds of the outside world returned to his ears. After he answered, the silence that fell made him wonder if he’d gone deaf.
“You’re joking, ain’t you, sir?” asked a fitter who was walking down the length of the fuselage and examining the bullet holes Moss had picked up. “I mean to say, you guys shoot at the balloons. The guys in the balloons don’t shoot back-that’s Archie’s job.”
“You know that, Herm, and I know that,” Moss said, “but nobody ever told this skunk. One thing, though-he won’t ever do it again.” The groundcrew man nodded at the grim emphasis he gave the words.
As they walked toward Major Cherney’s tent, Stone and Bradley sounded as disbelieving as had Herm. “The nerve of that son of a gun,” Bradley said, over and over. “The nerve!”
“Good thing you got him,” Stone said to Moss. “If somebody didn’t punch his ticket for him, he’d have ended up an ace, and he hasn’t even got a motor in that damn thing.”
When they told Major Cherney what had happened to Hans Oppenheim, the squadron leader looked at them for a long time without saying anything. At last, he did speak: “You really mean it.” Solemnly, Moss, Stone, and Bradley nodded. Cherney shook his head. “You go into a war. You fight it for damn near three years. You think you’ve heard every single thing that could happen. And then…” He shook his head again. “Shot down by an observer in a balloon. I will be goddamned. Maybe it’s just as well for him that he didn’t make it back to our side of the line. Nobody would ever have let him forget it.”
“I only hope he’s alive to try and forget it, sir,” Pete Bradley said. “I couldn’t tell when we flew over his aeroplane.”
“Neither could I,” Moss and Stone said together.
“I will be goddamned,” Major Cherney repeated. He let out a long, slow sigh. “Maybe the Canucks will let us know. They do sometimes when one of our boys gets forced down on their side, same as we do for them.”
Two days later, an enemy aeroplane dropped a note behind the U.S. line in a washed-out jam tin made more noticeable by the small ’chute taken from a parachute flare. It duly made its way back to the Orangeville aerodrome, where Major Cherney called in Moss, Stone, and Bradley. “Hansie died of wounds,” he said heavily. “The Canadians buried him with full military honors, for whatever it’s worth.”
“Thank you, sir,” Jonathan Moss said. With one accord, he and his flightmates headed for the officers’ c
lub after they left the squadron commander’s tent. After they had the first of what would be many drinks in front of them, Moss turned to the men on whom his life depended-and vice versa-and said, “Well, boys, I wonder what sort of bird’ll join our flock next.”
“Won’t be long till we find out,” Bradley said. Soberly-for the time being-Moss nodded.
Time hung heavy in the hospital. Lying there with a rubber drainage tube coming out of the shoulder that still stubbornly refused to heal, Reggie Bartlett had plenty of time to think and very little chance to do anything else.
One of the things he thought about-and disapproved of-was the weather. “You all sure this is really Yankee country?” he asked the wounded U.S. soldiers who filled most of the beds in the big ward. “Richmond doesn’t get any hotter and stickier than this.”
“St. Louis, sure as hell,” Pete reminded him. The one-legged soldier winked. “You ought to feel at home, ain’t that right?”
“Doesn’t mean I liked the weather,” Reggie said. “Anybody who likes summer in the Confederate States is crazy.” He turned to his countryman for support. “Isn’t that right, Rehoboam?”
The Negro was scratching toes on the foot he no longer had, as he often did. He said, “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout what it’s like in Richmond. Out in the fields down around Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where I’s from, it gets powerful hot in the summertime. This ain’t a patch on that, I don’t reckon.”
“From what I’ve heard about Mississippi, I expect hell would look chilly in the summertime next to it,” Reggie said thoughtfully. His shoulder twinged. He grunted and thought some more till the pain faded. Then he added, “Working in the fields down there doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.”
Rehoboam looked at him from across the aisle. “You ain’t the stupidest white man I ever did see.”
Pete whistled. “You gonna let him talk to you like that, Reggie? I thought a smoke who talked to a white man like that down in the CSA could go and write his will-except you wouldn’t let him learn to write and he wouldn’t own enough to bother leaving it to anybody.”
“You’re a natural-born troublemaker,” Reggie told him. “If you still had that other leg, I’d tear it off you and beat Rehoboam to death with it. That’d settle both of you. There. Are you satisfied now?”
“Minute I woke up and found out I was shy a pin, I was satisfied and then some, I’ll tell you that right now,” the amputee answered. “Right then, I knew I’d had all the fighting I was ever going to do.”
Reggie only grunted in reply to that. He still wasn’t satisfied, not in that sense. If he ever got healed up, he’d try to escape again. He’d done it once; he didn’t think doing it again would be so hard. But, while his leg wound bothered him less each day, pus still dripped from that shoulder. It left him sore and weak and feverish. There were lots of things he told himself he should be doing, but he lacked the energy to do any of them. Lying here was what he was up to, and lying here was what he did.
In came the nurse with a tray of suppers. Everyone got an identical slab of chicken breast-or possibly it was baked cardboard-an identical lump of mashed potatoes with gravy that looked and tasted like rust and machine oil, and something that might have been bread pudding or might have been sponge in molasses.
After working his way through the dismal meal, Reggie said, “You Yankees are winning the damn war-or you say you are-and this is what they give you? God have mercy on you if you were losing, that’s all I can tell you.”
“If cooking was something they shot out of the barrel of a gun, we’d be good at it,” Pete said. “Since it ain’t, we haven’t much bothered with it since the end of the Second Mexican War. Had more important things to worry about instead.”
Rehoboam said, “The kind o’ cooking you Yankees do here, y’all ought to shoot it out the barrel of a gun.”
“Amen,” Reggie said. “But if you shot it at our side, you’d just make the boys fight harder, for fear of having to eat like that all the time.”
Pete laughed. So did the rest of the wounded U.S. soldiers. They were no fonder of the grub the military hospital doled out than were their Confederate counterparts. And so did Rehoboam. But his laugh had an edge to it, and his dark face twisted in a way that for once had nothing to do with the pain and phantom itches from his missing foot.
“What’s chewing on you?” Reggie called across the aisle.
“What do you reckon?” Rehoboam returned. “When you was talkin’ ’bout what the boys’d do, you didn’t mean me. I ain’t the boys to you, an’ I ain’t never gwine be the boys, neither. I’s just a nigger, an’ I’d be a nigger without a gun if all the whites in the CSA wasn’t worse afeared o’ the damnyankees kickin’ ’em in the ass than they was of putting a Tredegar in my hands and callin’ me a sojer.”
He hadn’t spoken in a loud voice, but he hadn’t particularly kept it down, either. Everybody in the ward must have heard him. Silence slammed down. Everybody looked toward Reggie Bartlett, to see what he would say.
He hadn’t the faintest idea what the devil to say. He’d seen for himself that Confederate blacks harbored a deep and abiding loathing for the whites who ruled them. Outside of the prisoner-of-war camp in West Virginia, though, none of them had ever come out and said so to his face.
Rehoboam pressed the point, too: “What you think, Reggie? Is that the truth, or ain’t it?”
Bartlett had never had a Negro simply call him by his name before, either. He said, “Yeah, that’s the truth. I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when President Wilson declared war on the USA, and I cheered and threw away my straw boater, same as every other damn fool in the place. If we could have licked these fellows here”-he waved with his good arm at the men in the green-gray hospital gowns-“without giving black men guns, of course we’d’ve done it.”
“Kept things like they always was, you mean,” Rehoboam said.
“Of course,” Reggie repeated. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he realize it wasn’t necessarily of course. White Confederate public opinion was so wedded to the status quo that realizing other choices were possible came hard.
Then Pete stuck his oar in the water, saying, “Blacks got guns of their own any which way.”
“Don’t know much about that, especially not firsthand,” Bartlett said. “I got captured over on the Roanoke front before the risings started, and they’d been put down by the time I got loose.”
“Bunch of Reds.” Pete gleefully stoked the fire.
He got Rehoboam hot, too. “You take a man and you work him like they works niggers in the CSA,” the Negro growled, “and if he don’t turn into no Red, he ain’t much in the way of a man. Wasn’t for the risings, I don’t reckon Congress never would’ve done nothin’ about the Army.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right,” Reggie said. “But they did do something, you know. I was thinking about that a while ago. When you go back to Mississippi, you’ll be a citizen, with all the same rights I’ve got.”
“Mebbe,” Rehoboam said through clenched teeth. “Mebbe not, too.”
“It’s what the law says,” Bartlett pointed out.
“Ain’t got no black police. Ain’t got no black lawyers. Ain’t got no black judges. Ain’t got no black politicians.” Rehoboam rolled his eyes at Reggie’s naivete. “How much good you reckon the law gwine do fo’ the likes o’me?”
To Reggie, a law was a law, to be obeyed automatically for no better reason than that it was there. Seeing another side of things made him feel jittery, as if an earthquake had just shaken his bed. Still, he answered, “If there’s enough of the likes of you, you’ll do all right.”
“You reckon the stork brings the babies, too?” Rehoboam asked acidly. “Or do you figure they finds ’em under the cabbage leaves when they wants ’em?”
The ward erupted in laughter, laughter aimed at Reggie. His ears got hot. “No,” he said with venom of his own. “The Red party chairman or general secr
etary assigns ’em. That’s how it worked in the Socialist Republics, isn’t it?”
“You liable to be too smart for your own good,” Rehoboam said after a pause.
“I doubt it, not if I volunteered for the Army,” Bartlett replied. “And if you didn’t want to be a citizen, and if you didn’t think being a citizen was worth anything, what made you put on butternut?”
That made the Negro pause again. “Mebbe I was hopin’ more’n I was expectin’, you know what I’m sayin’?”
As a white man, as a white man living in a country that had beaten its neighbor two wars in a row, Bartlett had seldom had to worry about hope. His expectations, and those of his white countrymen, were generally fulfilled. He said, “I wonder what the Confederate States will look like after the war’s over.”
“Smaller,” Pete put in.
Both men from the CSA ignored him. Rehoboam said, “We don’t get what’s comin’ to us, we jus’ rise up again.”
“You’ll lose again,” Reggie said. “Aren’t enough of you, and you still won’t have enough guns. And we won’t be fighting the damnyankees any more.”
“Mebbe they give us a hand,” Rehoboam said. “Mebbe they give us guns.”
“Not likely.” Now Reggie’s voice was blunt. “They don’t much fancy black folks themselves, you know. If we deal with you, that’d suit them fine.”
And Rehoboam, who had answered back as boldly as if he were a man who had known himself to be free and equal to all other men since birth, now fell silent. His eyes flicked from one of the wounded U.S. soldiers with whom he shared the ward to the next. Whatever he saw there did not reassure him. He buried his face in his hands.
Pete said, “I guess you told him.”
“I guess I did,” said Reggie, who had not expected the Negro to have so strong a reaction over what was to him simply a fact of nature. He called to Rehoboam, “Come on, stick your chin up. It’s not that bad.”
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