Sure as sure, the Canucks and the English soldiers who helped fill their trenches were catching hell. Whenever their long, slow retreat moved them back into another town, they fought harder than ever. Now they were trying to hold on to Acton, a no-account little place a few miles east of Guelph. Acton had been no-account, anyhow. Now its name was going into the history books in letters of blood.
When the artillery let up, Americans swarmed out of their trenches and rushed across fields, some snow-covered, others brown-black with mud, toward the enemy line. Watched from high in the sky, it looked as if God's hand were moving pieces on an enormous board: more like chess than war.
One thing neither God nor gas nor shelling had managed was to sweep all the Canucks and limeys from that board. Machine guns began winking from redoubts of timber and sandbags. Between them came flashes of rifle fire. From his lofty perch, Moss saw the American advance falter.
He also saw Dud Dudley wagging his wings up ahead of him. The flight was supposed to support the infantry attack on Acton. Dudley put the nose of his fighting scout down and dove on the enemy trenches. Tom Innis followed. So did Moss, the wind howling past the wires supporting his wings. So did Phil Eaker, who had replaced Zach Whitby, who had replaced Luther Carlsen, who had probably replaced…
Moss didn't want to think about that, either. He was a replacement here, too, even if he'd been in the war from the beginning. Instead, he thought about the rapidly swelling scene below. Yes, the attack had bogged down, sure as the devil. The artillery hadn't cut enough wire in front of the enemy trenches to give the Americans decent avenues to close with their foes. The United States had come as far as they had in Canada on the strength of overwhelming numbers. If they kept throwing men away at this rate, their numbers wouldn't stay overwhelming forever.
"That's what I'm here for," Moss said. "To get rid of some numbers on the other side."
He squeezed the firing button for his machine gun. Tracers let him guide the stream of bullets down the trench ahead of him as he roared over it at treetop height. The way the khaki-clad soldiers scattered before him made him feel treetop tall himself, as firing at men on the ground always did. He felt like a boy in short pants, amusing himself by stepping on bugs.
If you fooled with the wrong bug, though, you were liable to get stung. And the soldiers in the traverses, which ran perpendicular to his line of fire, blazed away at him instead of scattering. He laughed, as he would have laughed stepping on a bee while wearing shoes. They'd have a hell of a time hurting him: how could they draw a bead on a target streaking past at almost a hundred miles an hour?
Thwump! A bullet passing through canvas made a noise like a drumstick tapping on a rather loose drumhead. A lot of bullets were in the air. Some, dammit, would touch the aeroplane. He'd found that out in scraps with the limeys and Canucks, right at the start of the war. It was unnerving (thwump!), but you could put a lot of holes in an aeroplane's canvas and it would keep on flying. Thwump!
Clang! He swore. That wasn't canvas, that was the engine. His oil pressure began to drop. Maybe, he thought hopefully, the bullet had only damaged the pump mechanism. He had a hand squeeze-bulb to augment that; the pump was often balky. He couldn't shoot and work the squeeze-bulb at the same time. When he stopped shooting to work the bulb, the pressure kept dropping. It wasn't the pump mechanism. A fine mist of oil started coating his goggles. He could leave them on and not see well from oil…or take them off and not see well from the breeze.
Clang! "That's not fair!" he shouted angrily. Fair or not, the damage the second bullet had done was immediately obvious. A plume of hot water from the radiator rained back on him.
He turned back toward the U.S. lines and put the Martin into a steep climb, figuring he'd need all the altitude he could get before-No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than the engine started dying. He throttled back for a moment, to see whether it would run better at low revs.
When it didn't, he gave it all the power it had. "A short life but a merry one," he said, and wondered whether he was talking about the engine or himself. He'd find out, one way or the other.
Abruptly, the engine went from dying to dead. That left him in charge of a nose-heavy glider a couple of hundred feet above no-man's-land. He kept the nose up as best he could. The ground got closer with every beat of his heart.
He was over the American trench line-not very far over it, either. An idiot took a shot at him. Thwump! The bullet drilled through the fuselage, not far behind him. Nice to know our boys on the ground are such good shots, he thought, and then, If I ever find out who that son of a bitch is, I'll kick his teeth in.
Between trenches and shell holes, he couldn't have found a worse landscape in which to try to set down an aeroplane. If he'd had a choice, he wouldn't have tried it. He had no choice. There was a road of sorts, one on which fresh ammunition and supplies came to the front. And there was a little train of wagons on it, bringing forward whatever they were bringing.
Would he-could he-get over them and set the Martin down? "I'll do it or die trying," he said, and giggled. Never had a hackneyed phrase been more literally true.
With his engine fallen silent, he could hear the horses whinny in fright. He could hear their drivers cuss, too. He thought that, if he'd wanted to, he could have reached down and snatched the caps off those drivers' heads. He cleared their wagons that closely.
A moment later, his landing gear thudded down on rutted earth. The ruts, God be praised, ran in the direction he was going. The surface, he thought thankfully, wasn't that much worse than the usual landing strip.
Then one of the wheels went into a hole. His teeth slammed together on his tongue. Blood filled his mouth. The aeroplane tried to stand on its nose. If it had succeeded, it would have shoved the engine and machine gun back into his chest and squashed him into jelly. It didn't have quite enough momentum. The tail slammed back to earth. Moss bit his tongue again.
He unfastened his harness and scrambled out of the Martin. It hadn't caught fire, but that didn't mean it couldn't. He stood there on the muddy, half-frozen ground, looking for any sign of the rest of his flight. He saw no aeroplanes at all.
The driver of the rearmost wagon hopped down and ran toward him. "You all right, buddy?" he asked.
Moss spat a mouthful of red into the muck, but then he nodded. "Think so," he answered. Talking hurt, but other than that and what would probably be bruises where the harness had kept him from going facefirst into the instrument panel, he didn't seem damaged.
"Thought you was going to clip me there," the driver said. "Had time for one Hail Mary"-he crossed himself-"and then you was over me."
"Yeah." Moss' legs suddenly felt as if they were made of some cheap grade of modeling clay, not flesh and bone. Now that he was down, he could realize what a narrow escape he'd had. Before, up in the air, he'd been too busy trying to stretch every last inch from his bus.
Soldiers came out of the trenches to shake his hands and congratulate him on being in one piece. Among them was a captain who asked, "Where's your aerodrome, pal?"
"Back near Cambridge," he answered.
"We'll get you home," the captain told him. "Probably tomorrow, not today. You can enjoy the hospitality of the trenches tonight." He stuck out a hand. "I'm Clyde Landis."
"Jonathan Moss, sir." Just then, the Canucks started lobbing artillery at where they thought his aeroplane had gone down. Diving into the trenches seemed the most hospitable thing in the world.
All the rest of that day, the soldiers made much of him. They gave him cigars and big bowls of horrible slumgullion and enough shots of the rotgut they weren't supposed to have to make his head swim. They all sounded convinced he was a hero, and made him tell story after story of what fighting in the air was like.