At that, Galtier sat up very straight. He made a point of glancing over to his two sons to make sure they did nothing foolish. Georges laughed silently, but not with the good-natured laughter that was his hallmark. Charles was tight-lipped with anger. Neither one, fortunately, seemed ready to raise an outburst. Nor did his wife or Nicole. His three younger daughters, though-He caught their eyes, one by one. His warning might have been silent, but it got through.
Father Pascal continued, "The Protestants, the Presbyterians"-he loaded the names with scorn-"in Ottawa and all through Ontario are surely just as glad to have you, to have us, gone from their midst, gone from their Protestant dominion. Well, God will have an answer for them, too, if not in this world then in the world to come."
Now Lucien was the one who had to struggle to keep silent. It's not like that! was the shout he wanted to raise. Looking around the church, he saw several men of roughly his own age also seeming discontented. They were the ones who had been conscripted into the Canadian Army, served their terms, and who had done so enough years before that they were not recalled to the colors when the war began, not until the Americans had overrun this part of Quebec.
No one who had served in it could doubt the Army ran more nearly according to the wishes of the English than those of the French. That was hard to resent, with more Canadians being of English blood than French. But any man of either stock who buckled down and obeyed his superiors would get on well, and veterans knew that, too, whether Father Pascal did or not.
The priest said, "We have survived more than a century and a half of rule by Protestants who despise and fear us. France has suffered for more than a hundred years under one godless regime after another. Accommodating ourselves to the freedom we shall have in the United States, and to the chastisement of the erring mother country, should not be difficult or unpleasant for us, my children. We shall do well, and France, if God is kind, will return to the ways of truth abandoned so long ago."
"He is a beautiful man," the woman in front of Lucien said to her husband, who nodded again. "He sees the truth and he sets it forth, as if he were writing a book for us to read."
And then, to Galtier's alarm, Marie said, "He is a very persuasive man, is he not?" Lucien had to study her face carefully before noticing one eyebrow a hair's breadth higher than the other. He sighed in relief. For a moment, he'd feared Father Pascal had seduced his wife-no other word seemed to fit.
"Very persuasive, yes," Lucien said. He did his best to sound fulsome, in case that idiot woman or anyone else within earshot proved a spy.
People filed up to receive communion from Father Pascal. As he bent to let the priest place the wafer in his mouth, Lucien had to remind himself that a cleric was not required to be in a state of grace for the sacrament he administered to be efficacious; to believe otherwise was to fall into the Donatist heresy. Galtier could not recall-if he had ever known-who the Donatists were, or where they had lived. Staring at sleek, prosperous Father Pascal, though, he wondered if they hadn't been better theologians than the Church proclaimed them. On his tongue, the Body of Christ tasted like ashes.
When the last communicant had taken part in the miracle, Father Pascal said, "The mass is over. Go in peace." He again abandoned the ritual Latin for French to add, "And pray there may be peace here in our province and all over the world."
As Galtier and his family were leaving, they passed Major Quigley, who stood waiting outside the church. Nodding to Lucien as if to a friend, he walked over to the rectory next door, no doubt to speak with the priest who was doing so much for his cause.
"Some of the Americans," Nicole said hesitantly as the wagon made its slow way back to the farm, "some of the Americans are very nice people."
"This is what you get for working in the hospital," Charles snapped at his sister.
Lucien had had similar fears, but held up a hand. "If we quarrel among ourselves, on whom can we rely?" he asked. Both his daughter and his son looked abashed. I have raised them well, he thought with no small pride. He went on, "I agree-some of the Americans are very nice people. My opinion, however, is that all of them, without exception, would be nicer still were they back in America."
"You have reason, Father," Nicole said. Lucien had to fight to keep from crowing all the way back to the farm.
Still commanding the battery that had been Jeb Stuart III's, still a sergeant, likely to be a sergeant till the day he died, Jake Featherston knew that day was liable to be close at hand. The Army of Northern Virginia maintained its presence on this side of the Monocacy, but that was for the most part because the Yankees had been pushing harder elsewhere in Maryland, not because Confederate defenses were strong here.
And now the United States were pounding in this sector, too. Shells burst all around the battery. A couple of men were down. The worst of it, though, wasn't explosions or flying splinters. The worst of it was that the Yankees were firing a lot of gas shells along with their high explosives.
"Come on!" Jake shouted to the men of his own gun. "Pound those Yankee trenches! They're gonna swarm like bees any minute."
Even when he did shout, his words sounded hollow and muffled. The gas helmets Confederate soldiers were wearing these days did a better job of protecting lungs and especially eyes from poison gas than had the chemical-soaked gauze pads that had been the original line of defense against the new and horrid weapon. But wearing a helmet of rubberized burlap that covered your entire head and neck was a torment in its own right, the more so as days got ever hotter and muggier.
Jake rubbed at the glass portholes of the helmet with a scrap of rag. That didn't help; the round windows weren't so much dirty as they were steamy, and the steam was on the inside of the gas helmet. He could have taken off the helmet. Then the portholes would have been clean. Of course, then he would have been poisoned, but if you were going to worry about every little thing…
The Yankee barrage dropped back into the front-line trenches. "Be ready, y'all!" Featherston shouted. "They're going to be coming out any-"
He didn't even get the chance to finish the sentence. The U.S. soldiers swarmed out of their trenches and rushed toward the Confederate lines. The U.S. bombardment didn't ease off till they were within fifty yards of those lines; Jake gave the enemy reluctant credit for a very sharp piece of work there.
Even before the damnyankees' guns stopped pounding the Confederate trenches, though, men in butternut were pouring machine-gun fire into their foes. The barrage was liable to kill them, but, if they didn't keep the U.S. soldiers out of their trenches, they were surely dead.
The battery poured shrapnel into the Yankees advancing across no-man's-land, shortening the range as the soldiers in green-gray drew closer to the Confederate line. Shell casings lay by the breech of the gun in the same way that watermelon seeds were liable to lie by a Negro sleeping in the sun: signs of what had been consumed.
Dirt fountained up from every explosion. Men fountained up, too, or pieces of men. Others dove for the shelter of shell holes old and new. For a moment, the attack faltered. Jake had watched a lot of attacks, both Yankee and Confederate, falter: generals had a way of asking men to do more than flesh and blood could bear. "Be ready to lengthen range in a hurry," he called to his gun crews. "When they run, we want to hurt 'em as bad as we can so they don't try this shit again in a hurry."
But then a cry of alarm and despair rose, not from the ranks of the Yankees but from the Confederates' trenches. Men started running away from the front, straight toward Jake Featherston's guns.