Breakthroughs (46 page)

But Quigley did not take the comment as he might have. Instead, he nodded soberly, or perhaps not so soberly: as he spoke, he reached for the bottle of brandy again. “Well, once more you have reason,” he said. “When we began the war, we thought it would soon be over. But, as you say, our neighbors were more stubborn than we thought, and also stronger than we thought. The fighting has proved harder than we ever imagined.”

He held out the bottle to Lucien, who let him pour. After three big glasses of brandy, the farmer would be slow-moving and achy in the morning, but the morning was a long way away. “I did not think an American would admit any such thing,” Galtier said.

Quigley tapped his long, thin nose. He had to shift his hand at the last minute to make it connect. “I admit I’ve got this here,” he said, “and the other is every bit as plain. But that doesn’t mean the United States aren’t going to win this war. It just means we’ve had to work much harder than we thought we would. We have done the work, M. Galtier, and we are at last beginning to see the results of it.”

“It could be so,” Lucien said. By everything he could learn, it was so, but he knew that what he could learn was limited. Both the United States and the new Republic of Quebec made sure of that.

“It
is
so.” The brandy was talking through Jedediah Quigley, too. Normally as smooth and polished as a new pair of shoes, he made a fist and thumped it against his thigh to emphasize his words.

He also spoke louder than usual. Marie stuck her head out of the kitchen to make sure no quarrel was brewing. When she’d reassured herself, she disappeared again. Galtier didn’t think Quigley saw her.

The farmer said, “I will be glad when the war is over.” He did not think anyone could disagree with that, or with the way he continued: “Everyone will be glad when the war is over.”

And, sure enough, the American officer nodded vigorously. “The only people who love a war are those who have never fought in one,” he declared, to which Lucien could but incline his head; he had not thought Major Quigley could say anything so wise. And then Quigley spoiled it: “But you, M. Galtier, you will have come out of the war having done pretty well for yourself. Without it, you would not have gained a doctor as a fiancé for your daughter.”

Even without brandy in him, Galtier would not have let that go unchallenged. With brandy in him, he let fly, saying, “Without the war, Major Quigley, I would not have had part of my patrimony…alienated”—even with brandy in him, he had sense enough not to say
stolen
—“from me so that the United States Army could build on it a hospital.”

Major Quigley coughed a couple of times. The brandy had turned him a little ruddy. Now he went red as a brick. “I will speak frankly,” he said. “I already told you that, when the war was new, I did not think you were a man the United States could trust.”

“Yes, you said that,” Galtier agreed.
And you were right to think what you thought.
He had sense enough to keep that to himself, too.

After coughing once more, Quigley said, “I also told you I seem to have been wrong. I do not deny I chose your land on which to build this hospital in part because I did not believe you were reliable.”

“And now you know differently?” Lucien asked. He had to make it a question, not least because he remained unsure of the answer himself.

But Quigley nodded. “Now I know better,” he echoed, and coughed yet again. When he went on, he seemed to be talking as much to himself as to Galtier: “Since I know better, it could be that what I did might not have been the wisest thing to do.”

“Perhaps, then, you should think about how you might make amends.” Galtier stared down at the little bit of brandy left in his glass. Had what he’d drunk really made him bold enough to say that?

Evidently it had. Major Quigley rubbed his nose. He fiddled with a cuff on his green-gray tunic. At last, he said, “Perhaps I should. What would you say a fair rent for the piece of ground on which the hospital was built would be?”

Galtier had all he could do not to ask if he had heard correctly. Quigley still assumed he’d had the right to use the land regardless of whether Lucien approved or not, but an offer to pay back rent was ever so much more than the farmer had expected to hear. He scratched his chin, named the most outrageous amount he could think of—“Fifty dollars a month”—and braced himself for the haggle to come.
If I end up with half that,
he thought,
I shall be well ahead of the game.

But Major Quigley, instead of haggling, simply said, “Very well, M. Galtier, we have a bargain.” He stuck out his hand.

In a daze, Lucien Galtier took it. The daze had nothing to do with the brandy he had drunk. He did not know whether to be delighted Quigley had met his price or disappointed he hadn’t tried to gouge the American officer out of more. In the end, he was delighted and disappointed at the same time.

Quigley said, “Here, I will leave the bottle with you. If I drink any more from it tonight, I shall be unable to drive back to Rivière-du-Loup.”

“Here is an advantage of a wagon or a buggy over a motorcar,” Galtier said. “A horse would be able to get you back to town if only you pointed him in the right direction. A motorcar is not so accommodating.”

“C’est vrai, et quelle dommage,”
the American replied, in tones that made it a truly pitiful pity. He got to his feet and walked—steadily but very slowly—to the doorway.
“Bonsoir, Monsieur Galtier.”

“Bonsoir,”
Lucien said. Major Quigley went outside and cranked his Ford to life. Lucien stood in the doorway and watched him drive—steadily but, again, very slowly—north toward Rivière-du-Loup.

Marie came out of the kitchen. Nicole followed her. Astonished disbelief filled both their faces. Almost whispering, Marie said, “Did my ears tell me the truth? Can it be that the Americans will pay us rent for the land they stole for their hospital?”

“If they pay rent, we can no longer say they stole the land from us,” Galtier replied. “It becomes then a matter of business. And what business!” The full weight of what he’d done began to sink in. “Not only rent, but back rent. Not only back rent, but
fifty dollars a month
.”

“We shall be rich!” Nicole exclaimed.

Her mother shook her head, denying even the possibility of such a thing. “No, we shall not be rich. Rich is not for the likes of us. It could be…it could be that, for a little while, we may have almost enough.” Saying even so much took a distinct effort of will from her.

“That would be fine,” Lucien said. “Even of itself, that would be very fine.” Acid returned to his voice: “It might even let us make up for the robbery the Americans committed against us during the first winter of the war.”

In a worried voice, Marie said, “But taking this money…I pray it shall not be as it was when Judas took his thirty pieces of silver.”

“Nonsense,” Galtier said. “Judas took silver for betraying our Lord. We shall take this money in exchange for what is rightfully ours, in exchange for the Americans’ use of my patrimony.”

“Father is right,” said Nicole, who had her own reasons to want things to go smoothly between her family and the Americans.

“I suppose so.” But Marie still did not sound convinced.

Lucien was not altogether convinced, either, but he had made the offer and Major Quigley accepted it. What could he do now? Like Nicole’s engagement to Dr. O’Doull, the rent tied him ever closer to the United States and the interests of the United States. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. In 1914, he never would have, never could have, imagined any such thing.

Night was slowly lifting over northern Virginia. Sergeant Chester Martin hadn’t got much in the way of sleep even while darkness hung over the land. Ever since midnight, U.S. machine guns had been hammering away at the Confederate line to the east and south, and the guns of the Army of Northern Virginia hadn’t been shy about replying, either. The din had kept most of Martin’s section awake, though Corporal Bob Reinholdt still lay wrapped in his blanket, sleeping the sleep of a man more innocent than he was likely to be.

But the din had also kept the Rebs from noticing the noise of a whole great whacking lot of barrels moving toward the front line—or so the brass hoped. So Chester Martin devoutly hoped, too.

He turned to David Hamburger. “Next time you write to your sister, tell her thanks,” he bawled in the kid’s ear. “Looks likely they’ve got a really big force of barrels here, like they’ve been doing it in Tennessee.”

“I don’t know how much she had to do with any of that,” Hamburger shouted—in effect, whispered—back. “You’ve got to remember, Sarge, she hates the war and anything that has anything to do with it.”

“Hey, she’s not the only one,” Martin said. “You think I like getting shot, you’re crazy. But if we’ve got to have the goddamn thing, we’d better win it. The only thing worse than having a war is losing one. The United States know all about that.”

Before Hamburger could reply, U.S. artillery, which had been pretty quiet, opened up with a thunderous roar. Short and sweet—that was how they did it these days. None of the week-long bombardments that Martin had seen on the Roanoke front, enormous cannonadings that did more to tell the Rebs where the attack was going in than anything else.

Artillery or no artillery, Bob Reinholdt kept right on sleeping. Martin went over and shook him, then had to leap back as Reinholdt lashed out with a trench knife. “Naughty,” Martin said; the corporal always woke up at maximum combat alertness. “Show’s about to start.”

“Yeah?” Reinholdt said. “All right.” He grunted, rolled up his blanket, and got to his feet. He hadn’t given Martin any trouble since absorbing both fist and steel reinforcement with his chin. Maybe he’d learned his lesson. Maybe he was biding his time. Martin still kept an eye on him, in case he was.

Captain Cremony strode along the trench. “All right, boys,” he said. “Now we’re driving nails in their coffin. We’ve cleared ’em out of Washington. We need a buffer, so they can’t shell it whenever they choose. Our granddads fought on this ground. They won some fights in Virginia, too, even if they didn’t win the war. We get to make up for what they couldn’t quite manage.”

“
My
grandfather didn’t fight here,” David Hamburger said after Cremony was out of earshot, which didn’t take long. “He was still on the other side of the Atlantic, wondering if the Czar would put him in the Russian Army for twenty-five or thirty years. When the Czar said
go
, he went—here.”

“Conscription-dodger, eh?” Martin grinned. “Somewhere down at the roots of my family tree is a poacher who got out of England a short hop ahead of the sheriff. That’s what my old man says, anyway. How about you, Bob?”

“Me?” Reinholdt seemed surprised at the question. “I’m a son of a bitch from a long line of sons of bitches. You don’t believe me, ask anybody.”

Martin wouldn’t have argued with him for the world. He didn’t get the chance, anyhow. When the barrels’ engines went from low power to high, not all the machine-gun fire and artillery in the world could have concealed the racket. The traveling fortresses clanked and rumbled toward the Confederate line, their own machine guns blazing away at the enemy positions ahead.

All along the front lines of the U.S. works, officers blew whistles to urge their men over the top. Cremony tweeted away till his face turned red. U.S. soldiers scrambled up ladders and sandbag stairways and followed the barrels toward the Confederate trenches.

“Stay close!” Captain Cremony shouted.

“Stay close!” Martin echoed. “Those big iron critters may be ugly, but they’re our best friends.” Even as he spoke, the barrel behind which he advanced began smashing its way over and through the wire the Rebels had strung to protect their position. Between the last wire belt and their forwardmost trenches, the Confederates’ Negro laborers had dug a great ditch, too wide for the barrels to cross and deep enough to be sure to bog them down.

But U.S. observation aeroplanes or balloonists must have spotted the digging, for some of the barrels bore on their forward decks great bundles of sticks and logs bound with chains and ropes. They dumped them into the ditch, then ground their way across over them.

Captain Cremony, who was fond of Shakespeare, shouted out in high glee: “Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane!”

Martin didn’t know about that. He did know the bundles of wood made it easier for him and his men to cross the ditch, too, though some of them used bites the artillery had taken out of its front and rear walls to scramble down and then up. “Stay close to your barrel!” Martin yelled again. “Stay close!”

The barrels were bludgeoning the Army of Northern Virginia into submission. These were new positions for the Rebs, hastily run up after the retreat from Aldie. They lacked much of the reinforced concrete of lines built more slowly and held longer. Machine-gun nests of sandbags could not stand up to the barrels’ nose cannons. One after another, the barrels cleared them out.

Tilden Russell shouted something into Martin’s ear. Martin had trouble making out what he said amidst the rattle of gunfire, the thunder of artillery, and the dyspeptic roar of the barrels. Obligingly, the private shouted it again: “Breakthrough!” He stuffed a cigar into his mouth, got it going with a bronze-cased flint-and-steel lighter, and puffed out happy clouds of smoke.

Was it a breakthrough? Martin wasn’t sure, not here, not now, though on the Roanoke front he would have been ecstatic at the ground he and his comrades were gaining. A day’s advance here could be measured in miles, not yards. If that wasn’t a breakthrough, what was it?

But, if a breakthrough required the Rebs to throw down their rifles and quit in carload lots, that didn’t happen. Soldiers in butternut, white and colored, kept fighting till the barrels and the U.S. infantry rolled over them. If anything, the colored Confederate soldiers fought harder than they had when the U.S. troops broke out of their bridgeheads south of the Potomac. Maybe that was because the whites had given them dire warnings about what would happen to them if they didn’t fight. Maybe, too, and more likely, the Negro soldiers were steadier now simply because they’d seen some action.