The night was moonless, the stars obscured by high fast-running clouds. Apart from a few campfires, and lanterns in odd windows, the town of Striver was entirely dark. The huge kites I had seen before had been brought up here. They were still furled, but their bridles had been attached to reels of hempen twine which were nailed to wooden bases and equipped with hand cranks. Each kite also had a bucket tied to its bridle with a short string, and as we arrived a man was just finishing the work of pouring a measured amount of sand into each of these buckets.
“What’s that for?” I asked Julian—quietly, since the eerie atmosphere of the rooftop seemed to discourage anything beyond a hushed whisper.
“I’ve calculated how much weight each parafoil can carry,” Julian said. “To night we discover whether my calculations were correct.”
I didn’t ask how one estimated the lifting power of a “parafoil,” or with what kind of arithmetic—no doubt it was something else Julian had learned from one of his antique books. If it depended on the wind, we were in luck; the breeze was brisk; but it was very cold, and I kept my hands in the pockets of my overcoat, and wished I had my old packle hat on top of my head, instead of the thin Army cap I was wearing.
Everything seemed ready for the “test flight,” as Julian called it, except for the darkness. “How can you see whether they fly, when the moon is down and even the Northern Lights aren’t operating?”
Julian didn’t answer, but beckoned to a man nearby. This soldier carried a bin with some liquid in it, and a brush.
The liquid, as it turned out, was a compound of phosphorous which radiated an unearthly green light.* The soldier employed his brush to splash a little of this on each bucket, until they had all been so marked, and glowed like demonic jack-o’-lanterns in the darkness.
“Stringmen prepare!” Julian called out abruptly.
Dozens of men jumped to their stations at the anchored kite-reels.
“Furlers stand ready!”
An equal number of men, positioned downwind along the rim of the roof, grasped the huge furled kites and held them at present-arms, ready to be unrolled so that their wings might catch the wind.
“Launch!” cried Julian.
The reader should understand that a black silk kite taller than a man, lofted into the Stygian darkness of a Labrador night, while the wind comes skirling from the arctic regions like a madman with a knife in his teeth, is not the same beast as a child’s kite bobbing in the sunlight of a summer day. The immense black kites, though not easily visible, made their presence known as soon as the first one caught the icy breeze and opened with a concussive bang as loud as a gunshot.
Each kite, as the wind filled it, made the same deafening report (which reminded me of the popping of sails aboard the Basilisk when that vessel began to trim for heavy weather), until it sounded as if an artillery duel was under way and we were in the middle of it. Then the kites rose to the limit of the strings which bound them to the buckets they were meant to carry, each with its weighed portion of sand and its glowing green insigne.
Evidently Julian’s calculations had been correct. With only a moment’s hesitation, and an encouraging tug from the Stringmen, the buckets soared aloft. Mere words cannot convey how unusual and strange this looked: all that was visible from any distance was the phosphorescent paint that marked each rising container. These unearthly Lights (as they seemed) rose and bobbed and rose again, like angels or demons sailing in close formation. I was suffused with awe, even though I knew the explanation for what I was seeing. An unenlightened observer might easily have been terrified.
“Not every American soldier in town is asleep,” I said. “Might not someone see this, and alert others?”
“I hope so. It will brace up the men, to think that this is a sample of what we’ve been preparing.”
“They’ll take it for supernatural.”
“Let them take it according to their beliefs—it makes no difference.”
“But—as impressive as this is—a kite isn’t a weapon, Julian, even if it flies at night and glitters like an owl’s eye.”
“Sometimes seeming is as good as being.” Julian busied himself with a sort of sextant, performing an act he called “triangulation.” By this time the kites had come to the end of their measured lengths of tether. The tether-lines were taut; in fact the Stringmen had to struggle to keep the reels in place, so powerful was the force generated by the wind upon the parafoils. The hempen lines strained ferociously, and made a singing noise, eerie in the darkness.
Julian spent some time instructing the Stringmen on how to buck and lax their lines so that the kites could be made to drop and rise again. They performed the task crudely, but Julian reckoned that even a little experience was better than none. Then the Stringmen began the slow and laborious task of reeling the kites back from the sky.
An impressive display, but it wasn’t finished—Julian had one more theatrical effect he wished to test.
“Tubemen ready!” he shouted.
Another group of soldiers, who had previously been huddled at the chimney-brace for warmth, suddenly separated and formed into a row. Each of them carried a length of rubber tubing, perhaps originally intended to transport water in some Dutch governor’s mansion. When they had room enough—much to my amazement—they began to whirl the tubes above their heads, the way a cattle-herder might whirl a rope, though less elegantly. The result was that each tube (and they had been cut to various lengths) began to sing, much the way an organ-pipe sings when wind is blasted through it. What the performance yielded in this circumstance was not music, however, but a kind of unearthly, dissonant hooting—the sound a chorus of loons might make, if they were inflated to the size of elephants.
I had to clap my hands over my ears. “Julian, the whole town will be awake—you’ll wake up the Dutch infantry, though their trenches are miles away!”
“Good!” said Julian; or at least that’s what he appeared to say; the keening of the rubber tubes drowned him out somewhat. But he smiled contentedly, and after a time made a hand signal that caused the Tubemen to cease their whirling. By this time the black kites were almost reeled in, and before long the whole production was over.
No more than an hour had passed.
My astonishment was boundless, but I told Julian I still could not see the point of it. The Dutch troops, if we tried this trick on them, would no doubt be impressed—quite possibly frightened—but it didn’t seem to me they would be materially damaged in any way.
“Wait and find out,” said Julian.
The next day, rather than attack the Mitteleuropan forces, we exchanged prisoners with them.
Julian went to the trenches to oversee the exchange, which took place under a flag of truce, and I went with him. The Dutchmen scurried across noman’sland with their white flag fluttering, and an equal number of our men passed them going the other way. There was no ceremony, only a brief cease-fire; and when the business was complete the Dutch snipers resumed their deadly practice and the Dutch artillery geared up for more pointless volleys.
“The prisoners we returned,” I said to Julian, as we stood shivering in a rear trench, “are they aware of last night’s test?”
“I made sure their quarters faced the right direction. They would have had a fine view.”
“And your objective is to add their narrative to the rumors already circulating among the Dutch—including that note you dictated, assuming Private Langers has yielded to temptation?”
“That’s the goal exactly.”
“Well, this is all fine theater, Julian—”
“Psychological warfare.”
“All right, if that’s the name of it. But sooner or later the psychological has to yield to the actual.”
“It will. I’ve given the order to prepare for battle. We sleep in forward positions tonight. The attack will begin before dawn. We have to strike while the Dutch panic is still fresh.”
I grasped the sleeve of Julian’s tattered blu
e and yellow jacket, to make sure I had his full attention. It was cold in that trench, and despite the cutting wind the air stank of blood and human waste, and desolation was all that I could see in every direction. “Tell me the truth—will any of this charade make a difference, or is it only a show to bolster the courage of the men?”
Julian hesitated before he answered.
“Morale is also a weapon,” he said. “And I like to think I’ve increased our arsenal at least in that insubstantial way. We have an advantage we lacked before. Any advantage we can take, we sorely need. Are you thinking of home, Adam?”
“I’m thinking of Calyxa,” I admitted. And the child she was carrying, though I had not mentioned that news to Julian.
“I can’t promise anything, of course.”
“But there’s hope?”
“Certainly there is,” Julian said. “Hope, yes—hope, always—hope, if nothing else.”
I wrote another letter to Calyxa that afternoon, and buttoned it into the pocket of my jacket so that it might be found on my person if I died in battle. Perhaps it would eventually reach her, or perhaps it would be buried along with me, or become the souvenir of some Mitteleuropan infantryman—the calculation wasn’t mine to make.
I thought about praying for success, but I wasn’t sure God could be coaxed to intervene in such a remote and desolate land.* In any case I doubted my prayers would be altogether well-received, given my ambiguous denominational status. I was not in an easy state of mind, and wished I did not have to face death quite so soon.
Because it was almost Thanksgiving Julian ordered extra rations for everyone, including the last of our meat (strips of salt beef, plus whatever we could spare of horse—the mules had already been eaten). It wasn’t a proper Thanksgiving dinner as my mother would have prepared it back in Williams Ford, with a baked goose, perhaps, and cranberries purloined from the Duncan and Crowley kitchen, and raisin pie with stiff cream. But it was more than we had had for many days. The feast depleted our larder: all it left was hardtack, and we would need that for the march if we succeeded in breaking the siege of Striver.
The field hospital was a gloomy place when I visited it that evening. A group of orderlies sang sacred songs, in keeping with the spirit of the season, though somewhat halfheartedly. Many of the wounded men were unable to travel, and Dr. Linch said they might have to be abandoned to the mercies of the Mitteleuropan army. The choice of who would be hauled off and who left behind rested in his hands; and he disliked the obligation, and was in a sour mood about it.
“At least,” Dr. Linch said, “the men are a little warmer tonight—that intolerable cold wind has finally stopped blowing.”
It took a moment for the significance of what he had said to register on my mind. Then I ran outside to see for myself.
Dr. Linch was entirely correct. The wind, which had been keening steadily for almost a month, had suddenly ceased to blow, and the air was as still as ice.
We are becalmed! I wrote in my journal.
No food but trail food, and we must be parsimonious with that. Julian can’t tell the men why the attack has been delayed, without betraying the secret of the Black Kites (which of course cannot fly without wind). The troops are restive, and grumble constantly. Thanksgiving Day, 2174—bitter and disappointing.
Another cold and windless day. Julian frets over the question, and is constantly scanning the horizon for meteorological clues and auguries.
None are perceived, though tonight the Aurora shimmers like a cloth of gold just north of the zenith.
Dutch shelling increases, and we have had to put out a number of fires in the eastern section of town. Fortunately the fires do not spread—no wind.
No wind.
We are in danger of losing any advantage Julian’s plan might have given us. He suspects the Mitteleuropans have already been reinforced. We’re greatly outnumbered, and the “Chinese Weapon” begins to seem like an empty threat, if it was ever anything more.
Nevertheless Julian has dreamed up another addition to the charade: his “male seamstresses” have hastily produced nearly two hundred protective masks for the men at the vanguard of our envisioned advance on the Dutch. These are essentially black silk sacks, with holes cut for the eyes, large enough to drape over a man’s head. The eyeholes are circled in white paint, and they present a fearful appearance from a distance—up close they seem slightly clownish. But a phalanx of armed men in such garb would surely be intimidating to a wary enemy.
Still the wind does not blow.
No wind, but snow. It falls gently, and softens the gaps and angles of this broken town.
A few gusts today, not sufficient for our advance.
Wind!—but the snow obscures all. We cannot march.
Clear skies this morning. Gusts fitful but freshening as the afternoon wears on. Will it last until dawn?
Julian says it will. He says it must. We advance in the morning, he says, wind or no.
* A revival of which had been popular in Manhattan the summer past. I know it only by reputation.
* The Dutch use it for military signaling, but it also serves in theatrical effects.
* If I were Him I might be tempted to suppress My power of omniscience when it came to Labrador, and focus My attention on the world’s warmer and greener places.
6
At last, after a dark midnight, and much surreptitious preparation, I stood with Julian and the rest of the general staff in an earthen breastwork near the front lines. We sat at a crude table where two lamps burned while Julian read a letter from the Dutch commander—received that afternoon—offering terms of surrender, “given your present unsustainable occupation of a town the jurisdiction of which is bound to pass to us sooner or later.” The Mitteleuropan general, whose name was Vierheller,* said that we would all be well-treated, and eventually exchanged back to American territory “at the cessation of hostilities,”† so long as our surrender was not conditional.
“They grew back their spine,” a regimental commander commented.
Julian had been forced to brief his staff on the nature of the “Chinese weapon,” though he kept some details to himself. They understood that it would terrify the Dutch, but that any weakness or confusion it excited would have to be quickly and efficiently exploited. For most of these commanders the attack would be purely conventional, conducted along traditional military lines.
“They still fear us a little, I think,” said Julian. “Perhaps we can remind them why they should.”
Thus there was a small overture to the drama he had planned. An hour after midnight he sent his crew of Tubemen as close to the front as they could safely go. The Dutch army was encamped on the plain beyond the hills where we had built our defenses. We had seen their fires burning like countless stars in the darkness, and heard the sound of their threatening maneuvers. Tonight they slept; but Julian meant to wake them. He ordered the Tubemen to begin their ruckus, orchestrating them as if they were a musical act. The eerie noise did not commence abruptly, but started with a lone man generating a single hollow note, soon joined by others, and others still, and so on, until the whole blended chorus, which suggested the cries of unquiet souls hired out for temporary labor by entrepreneurial demons, was carried to the ears of the enemy infantry, who no doubt stirred from their sleep in profound consternation. All across the lowlands the Dutch soldiers must have startled awake and grasped their rifles and peered anxiously into the wintry darkness, though there was nothing to see but a few chill stars in a moonless sky.
“Let that keep them for a while,” Julian said with some satisfaction, when the noise at last faded.
“What do you suppose they’ll make of it?”
“Something dire. I mean to play on their imaginations. What do you suppose a Dutch infantryman pictures when he contemplates the rumor of a secret Chinese weapon?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.”
“Nor do I; but I expect his imagination will have been shaped by stories
of ancient European wars, which were fought with all sorts of fanciful and terrifying weapons, including aircraft and poison gas. I hope the sound of the Tubemen gives some vague inspiration to these nightmares, and that the Black Kites will confirm them. We’ll know soon enough, in any case.”
I cleaned and oiled my Pittsburgh rifle by lamplight while we waited, and I kept a generous supply of ammunition handy, for even the Major General’s staff would not be exempted from the coming battle—every able-bodied American soldier in the vicinity would be pressed into action before the day was done.
Julian could not give orders from the rear echelons. The kites were to be launched from behind a low rill, set about with earthen lunettes and perilously close to the Dutch lines. The effect would be most useful coming in utter darkness, so we had to launch well before dawn, even before the false glow that precedes the rising sun; and our regiments were prepared to advance at first light. Julian stood in our frozen trench, or paced back and forth in it, consulting his Army watch and an almanac for the precise hour of sunrise. He muttered to himself at length; and with the collar of his coat turned up, and his yellow beard flecked with motes of ice, he looked far older than his years.
His adjutants and sub-commanders waited impatiently for Julian to read the auspices. At last he looked up from his watch and gave a pallid smile. “All right,” he said. “Better too early than too late.”
Julian Comstock Page 39