American Front

"You remember how I went last spring, when the Yankees let the schools open up again?" Julia asked. Arthur McGregor nodded. His daughter went on, "The books they made the teachers use, they were American books." She couldn't have spoken with greater contempt had she called them Satan's books.

"Numbers are numbers, and you do have to learn to cipher," he said. Reluctantly, Julia nodded back at him. He added, "Words are words, too."

"No, they aren't," his daughter said. "Americans spell fu

McGregor spelled fu

At any rate, Julia didn't argue it. What she did say was, "It's not that stuff so much, Pa. It's the history lessons. I don't ever want to go to another one of those again." She looked and sounded on the edge of tears.

McGregor glanced down at the newspaper, which had come from a little town in the state of Dakota. He remembered what he'd thought about it mo ments before. "They telling you lies in the schoolroom, sweetheart?" he asked.

Julia's nod was as emphatic as her headshake had been. "They sure were, Pa," she answered. "All kinds of lies about how America was right to have the Revolution, and the king of England was a wicked tyrant, and the Loyalists were traitors, and they should have conquered us in 1812, and Canada was worse off for staying with England, and how England and France and the CSA kept stabbing the United States in the back. None of it's true, not even a little bit."

"Not even a little bit," Mary echoed happily.

"Hush," Arthur McGregor told her. He picked his words with care as he spoke to Julia: "It's what they have to teach to keep the schools open at all, same as the Register had to print what the Americans told it to a lot of the time."

"I understand that." Julia's voice was impatient. He'd underestimated her, and disappointed her because of it. She went on, "I know they're teaching us a pack of rubbish. I know what really happened, just like they taught me before when they were telling the truth. That isn't what bothers me, or not so much, anyway. But I don't think I can stand going back to school and listening to the teacher talk about all the lying things the Americans make him say and read ing the books that say the same stupid things and watching the other pupils at the schoolhouse listen to all the same lies and believe them."

"Do they?" McGregor wished he had enough tobacco to let himself light a pipe right now. It would have helped him think. He looked at the Dakota newspaper again. People all over American-occupied Manitoba were getting papers on the same order as this one. He didn't take seriously the propaganda with which it was laced, and had assumed nobody else did, either. But how true was that assumption? All at once, he wondered.

"They really do, Pa," Julia said seriously, making him wonder all the more. "It's like they never paid attention before, so when the teacher tells them American lies and the books say the same thing, they don't know any better. They just give it back like they were so many parrots."

"Awrk!" Mary squawked. "Polly want a cracker?"

"Polly want to go to bed right now?" McGregor asked, and his youngest got very quiet. He sat there thinking, his chin in his hand. He was a hard-nosed, rock-chi

But what about the people who weren't the same and who didn't do the same for their children? He hadn't thought much about them. Now, listening to Julia, he realized that was a mistake. What about the light-minded souls who believed the Germans were about to take Petrograd and Paris and the Americans Richmond and Toronto, for no better reason than that the news papers said as much? What about their children, who believed when they got told the Confederacy had had no right to secede from the United States or that Custer's massacre of General Gordon's brave column had been a heroic victory, not a lucky ambush? What about all the people like that?

McGregor got an answer, far more quickly and with far more confidence in his accuracy than if he'd had to do arithmetic on paper. If you rilled the heads of people like that with nonsense like that, and did it for a few years or maybe for a generation at most, what would you have? You'd have people who weren't empty-headed Canadians any more. You'd have people who were empty-headed Americans instead.

"Maybe we won't send you back to that school after all," he said slowly. Julia beamed at him, looking as much surprised as delighted. And Mary let out such a whoop of delight that her mother came out of the kitchen to see what had happened.

When Arthur McGregor explained what he said and why, Maude nodded. "Yes, I think you're right," she said. "If they're going to try to make us over, we can't very well let them, can we?"

"I aim to do everything I can to stop them, anyhow," he answered. "We have primers of one sort or another here around the house, anyway. You and I can give the girls some lessons, anyhow. That way, when this country is back in Canadian hands the way it's supposed to be, they won't have lost too much time with their schooling."

"Oh, thank you, Papa!" Julia breathed. "Thank you so much."

Mary was looking less pleased with the solution. "You mean we'll have to go to school here}" she said. "That's no good."

"I expect your mother and I can probably do a better job of riding herd on you than any schoolteacher ever born," McGregor said.

By the expression on Mary's face, she expected the same thing, and the expectation filled her with something other than delight. She turned on her big sister. "Now look what you've gone and done," she said shrilly.

"It's not my fault," Julia said. Before Mary could demand whose fault it was if not hers, as Mary was plainly about to do, she answered the not yet spoken question on her own: "It's the Americans' fault." That, for a wonder, satisfied her little sister. Mary believed the Americans capable of any enormity. Arthur McGregor was inclined to agree with her.

Later that night, after the children were asleep and he and Maude lying down in their bed, his wife said to him, "I wouldn't mind so much sending the children to the school, no matter what it taught about history and such, if…" Her voice trailed away.

McGregor understood what she meant. He didn't want to say it, either, but say it he did: "If you thought they'd only have to listen to American lies for another year, or two at the most."

Beside him, Maude nodded. The night was warm, but she shivered. "I'm afraid we're going to lose the war, and I'm afraid we won't have a country we can call our own any more."

I'm afraid we're going to lose the war. Neither of them had come out and said that before now. "I think we'll beat them in the end," McGregor an swered, trying to keep up his spirits as well as hers. "They haven't licked us yet, and the mother country is helping all she can. Everything will turn out right. You wait and see."

"I hope so," she said. But then she sighed and fell asleep. Arthur McGregor hoped so, too, but he'd long since discovered the difference between what he hoped and what came true. Now that Maude had named the fear, he could feel it nibbling at his soul, too. I'm afraid we're going to lose the war. No mat ter how tired he was, sleep took a long time catching up with him.

Sam Carsten peered out of the barracks at Pearl Harbor toward the drydock where the damaged Dakota was being repaired. Other buildings hid the dry-dock from sight, but he knew exactly where it was. He thought he could have been dropped anywhere in or near Honolulu and pointed accurately toward it, just as a compass reliably pointed north. His affinity for the ship was hardly less than the instrument's for the North Magnetic Pole.