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He found what he wanted about five miles north of the town. A stout stone wall led from the road to the beach. A grove of apple trees off to the left covered that flank. All he had to do was barricade the roadway and he would block the redcoats' path and force them to fight
Axes rang out among the apples. Men and oxen dragged fallen trees to block off the space between the grove and the stone wall. Victor set up his fieldpieces where they could rake the oncoming English soldiers. He wished they didn't burn so much powder at every shot. Yes, he'd got that store out of Weymouth, but even so…
The sun was setting in the direction of the Green Ridge Mountains when he got the position strong enough to suit him. That was just as well; scouts said Howe's men were only a few miles away. The Atlanteans ate at their posts. They bragged about what they would do to the enemy come morning. And then, like any i
Chapter 4
Drums and fifes woke the Atlantean rebels with the eastern sky going from gray to pink. The men staggered out of tents and uncocooned from tight-wound blankets. They yawned and rubbed their eyes and swore sleepily. It was as if they only half remembered-or didn't want to remember-what lay ahead.
The cooks served bread and meat and coffee. The men might have hit their wives if they'd got food like that at home. Here, they ate without complaint. They seemed glad to get any food at all. Gnawing on a chunk of half-raw beef between two slabs of badly risen bread, Victor remembered from the way his belt'd pinched in campaigns gone by that they were right to be glad.
Up ahead, musketry in the distance said farmers and hunters were still harassing the redcoats. They weren't even militiamen, and had no co
Victor stepped out in front of the abatis to survey the ground once more. The English would have to charge uphill to come at his men. That would make things harder for them, too. He nodded to himself. He wanted to make things as hard as he could for the enemy, because he knew the redcoats were better soldiers than his own men were.
A fieldpiece boomed. Maybe Howe's troopers had got a good shot at some of their tormentors. Maybe they just wanted to scare them off. Victor thought they had a pretty good chance of doing it, too. Men who'd never had ca
Here came the redcoats. Mounted men rode out ahead of the main column on foot. When the riders spied the obstruction ahead, they wheeled their mounts and galloped back to report the news.
"Won't be long now, men!" Victor called to his own army. "Pretty soon, we'll give the damned English what they deserve!" The Atlanteans raised a cheer. They didn't know what they were getting into, not yet. Pretty soon, they'd find out. They would never be the same again, neither the ones who died nor the ones who lived.
Watching the redcoats deploy from column into line, Victor tried to fight down his jealousy. He'd put the Atlanteans through their evolutions in the fields outside New Hastings. He knew how raw they were. Seeing those same evolutions performed by professionals for whom they were second nature rubbed his nose in it.
Lines perfectly dressed, regimental ba
Three hundred years earlier, a fishing boat with a few swivel guns helped in the Battle of the Strand. Blasting Sir Richard Neville off his horse made sure Atlantis would have no native kings. Naval gu
"Come back, General!" someone called from behind the abatis. "You don't want to make yourself a bull's-eye for them."
Victor's uniform wasn't so resplendent as all that. He would have felt embarrassed-to say nothing of weighted down-by all the gold braid and medals and buttons English generals wore to declare who they were. But a man standing out in the open in front of his side's works was bound to be a target. Victor picked his way back through the abatis' tangled branches. It wasn't easy; that was why the obstruction was there.
Thinking of the way the opposing general dressed reminded him of something. "Riflemen-aim at their officers!" he shouted. "The more of them we kill, the better off we are."
He didn't have that many riflemen. Most of the ones he did have came from the backwoods, where every shot had to count. A rifle was accurate at three or four times the range of a smoothbore musket, but was also slower to reload and quicker to foul its barrel.
An Atlantean field gun roared. Victor watched the ball kick up din in front of the English line and bound forward. It bowled over two redcoats like ninepins. Other soldiers smoothly stepped forward to take their places. More Atlantean guns fired. Enemy field-pieces replied. A rending crash said a ball smashed a gun carriage. That ca
Enemy bugles blared. The soldiers in the first two ranks brought their muskets down to the horizontal. Their bayonets flashed in the sun. Barbarians facing the Roman legions must have known that shock of fear as the legionaries' spearheads all glittered as one. It had lost none of its intimidation over the centuries between Caesar's day and Victor Radcliff's.
The bugles blared again. Here came the redcoats, at a steady marching pace. The first ranks' muskets probably weren't even loaded. General Howe wanted them to win with the bayonet. If they got in among the Atlanteans, chances were they would, too. Only a few of Victor's men had the sockets and long knives that turned muskets into spears. The rest would have to fight back with clubbed guns or with knives.
A ca
knew getting killed or maimed was all part of the job. They didn't get excited about it-unless it happened to them.
Atlantean riflemen started firing. A captain or major, his epaulets proclaiming his rank, clutched at his shoulder and went down. Another officer fell a moment later, and then another. The ones who remained kept coming. English officers weren't professionals like the men they led. That didn't mean they lacked courage, though. On the contrary-a man who showed fear in front of his fellows was hardly a man at all.
"Wait till you can see what they've got on their buttons. Then blow 'em all to hell!" a sergeant shouted to the musketeers he led. Good advice: their guns weren't accurate much farther out than that
"Now!" someone else yelled, and a blast of fire ripped into the English soldiers. Redcoats staggered. Redcoats stumbled. Redcoats screamed. Redcoats fell.
And the redcoats who didn't stagger or stumble or scream or fall came on. Another volley tore into them, and another. The third one was noticeably more ragged than the first. By the time it came, the enemy was almost to the wall and the abatis. The blast of lead proved more than even the bravest or most stoic flesh and blood could bear. Sullenly, the redcoats drew back out of range, now and then stopping and stooping to help a fallen comrade.