The Yankees went to earth the minute they started taking fire. Ramsay swore under his breath. Now they'd advance in small groups instead of the one great wave the machine guns might have broken.
Well, the game didn't always go the way you wished it would. "Fire at will," Captain Lincoln shouted, sounding as disgusted as Ramsay felt. The machine guns started chattering. U.S. soldiers fell. Ramsay found a target and fired. The Yankee he'd aimed at went down.
But more U.S. soldiers kept coming. The Confederates fired steadily, taking a good toll. And the Creeks surprised Ramsay. They stayed in their places and kept shooting. You couldn't hope for anything more, not from raw troops. They might not have had discipline, but they were brave.
When their entry into Okmulgee stalled, the damnyankees gave the town another, bigger dose of artillery to make the defenders keep their heads down. Under cover of the bombardment, they got men into the northern fringes of the built-up area. The forward most Confederate troopers came running back toward the center of town. Ramsay didn't notice any Creeks coming back. He whistled softly. They were brave.
He felt cramped, fighting in amongst buildings rather than out on the plains. Unhorsed, he felt slow, too. Could he get away, if trouble got bad? He began to think he'd have to find out the hard way.
Then-and he laughed as the comparison occurred to him-like cavalry riding to the rescue, artillery fire began falling on the advancing Yankees just outside of Okmulgee. If that wasn't a whole battery of those quick-firing three-inchers, he'd go off and eat worms. Caught out in the open, the U.S. soldiers toppled as if scythed.
Ramsay whooped like an Indian-just like an Indian, because several Creeks not far away were letting out the same kind of happy yells. They probably figured the fight was as good as won. Ramsay wished he could believe the same thing. Unfortunately, he knew better. Whatever else you said about the Yankees, they were stubborn bastards.
Still, if there was artillery in the neighbourhood, maybe there was infantry around, too. Put a regiment in here instead of a cavalry company and some ragtag civilians, and Okmulgee would hold against damn near anything the USA could throw at it. He looked back over his shoulder, then started laughing all over again.
"Hell of a war," he muttered, "when the cavalry's got to look to the infantry to come to the rescue."
Jonathan Moss looked with something less than joy untrammelled toward the new aeroplanes the squadron was receiving. The Wright 17s, usually nick-named Wilburs, were very different machines from the Curtiss Super Hudsons they were replacing. He'd grown used to the Super Hudsons. He knew everything they could do, and he wasn't so stupid as to try to make them do things they couldn't. That was how you ended up dead.
Captain Elijah Franklin expounded on the Wilbur's virtues: "Now we have aeroplanes than can climb and dive with the Avros the damned Canucks and limeys are flying. We won't have to scurry for home if we get in trouble."
Moss caught Lyman Baum's eye. Both men shook their heads, just a little. They hadn't run for home when they faced Avros-very much the reverse. A Curtiss machine could turn inside the circle of which the British-made aeroplanes were capable, but the Wilbur was a bus as big as a bus itself, and "Sir?" Moss stuck up a hand.
"What is it?" Franklin asked, a bit testy at being interrupted before his spiel was done. He had a pinched, narrow face, and looked as if his stomach pained him all the time. It probably did. That didn't keep him from drinking like a fish when he wasn't flying.
"Sir, one of the biggest advantages we had in the Curtiss was a forward-facing machine gun," Moss said. "This is a tractor machine, with the prop in front. Now we're going to be limited to observer fire, just like the Canucks. If I see a target, I want to be able to aim at it and shoot it straight on, not wiggle around so the observer gets to fire off at an angle."
Everybody in the squadron spoke up, loudly agreeing with him. Franklin stood quiet, perhaps waiting to see if the hubbub would die away. When it didn't, he held up a hand. Little by little, he got quiet. Into it, he said, "They're working on that," and then clammed up again.
The terse announcement produced more hubbub. Through it, Jonathan Moss called, "You mean somebody has finally made a working interrupter gear, sir?"
If you could synchronize the speed at which your machine gun fired with that at which your prop revolved, you could mount a forward-facing gun on a tractor aeroplane and not shoot yourself down faster than the enemy. Moss had heard of a couple of people who'd shod their wooden propellor blades with steel to deflect ill-timed bullets, but sooner or later a ricochet was going to come straight back at you, so that wasn't the ideal solution. An interrupter gear, though Then Captain Franklin said, "No, they don't have one yet," and dashed his hopes. But the squadron commander went on, "They are getting close, though, or at least they think they are. And when they do get one, they promise the front-line squadrons will have it first thing."
"They promise Santa Claus brings you toys, too, and the Easter Bunny hides eggs," Stanley McClintock said. "They promised we'd be in Toronto before the snow fell, and Winnipeg, and Richmond, and Guaymas-though I don't know that it ever snows down there. But I believe that kind of story when it comes true, and not a minute before then."
"If you're a defeatist," Franklin said coldly, "you can take off your wings right now. I'll give you a white feather instead, the way the limey girls do when their boyfriends don't want to go off and fight."
McClintock stomped toward the squadron commander, of whom he made close to two. Franklin moved not an inch. It wasn't his rank armouring him, Jonathan Moss knew, just a stubborn determination not to back down to anybody. McClintock shouted, "God damn it, Captain, you know I'm no coward. But when I switch buses, I want to have a pretty good idea that I'm doing it for a reason, that the new bus"-he jerked a thumb toward a Wilbur-"is likelier to keep me in one piece than the old one was."
"You've flown it," Franklin said. "We've all flown it. It performs a damn sight better than a Curtiss. Is that so, or isn't it?"
"It doesn't turn as well," Moss said.
"That's true," Franklin admitted, "but it climbs better and it dives better and it accelerates better. One of the reasons the Super Hudson turned so tight was that it couldn't go fast enough to take up a lot of space in a turn. Is that so, or isn't it?"
Moss kept quiet. It was so. You didn't want the Canadians or British chasing you, because they'd damn well catch you. But he'd got comfortable with his old machine. It was, he supposed, like a marriage: you knew what your partner was going to do. Now he was going to a partner he didn't know nearly so well.
Franklin said, "Enough of this nonsense. We've got them and we're damn well going to use them till we get something better. They've shipped the Super Hudsons off to… Colorado, I think they said, or maybe Utah. Someplace where they can do reconnaissance and not have to go up against anybody's varsity, anyway. We do. That's another reason we get the Wilburs-you men can do your job as pilots, and the observers you'll have with you can observe. Life's getting too complicated for one man to do both jobs up there at the same time."
But for a sigh, Moss remained quiet. Again, the squadron commander was probably right. Again, Moss found the truth unpalatable.
Lyman Baum said, "Other thing is, sir, I don't like trusting my neck to the observer. I'd rather have my own gun now instead of waiting to get one in the great by-and-by. Observers-"
He let that hang there. Most observers who were just observers and not pilot-observers like the members of the squadron were guys who had been through flight school and hadn't made it as pilots. That made everybody suspect there was something second-rate about them. If you knew darn well you were first-rate and you'd got used to being your own gunner, how were you going to shout "Hurrah!" at the idea of turning over the shooting to somebody you didn't figure could match you?