Robert Wilson - Julian Comstock - A Story of 22-nd Century America

All morning the artillery roared relentlessly, theirs and ours.

We were outnumbered; but the Dutch had not positioned themselves to their best advantage. Not knowing which way Julian would attack, they had reinforced their flanks and neglected their middle. Julian abetted their confusion by feinting left and right, but stored up his big guns for a frontal charge. This began about noon, and was bloody. We lost nearly a thousand men in the battle that came to be called Goose Gap, and five hundred more were trucked away in Dominion wagons with missing limbs or other disabling injuries. By nightfall the battlefield resembled the waste-bin of a remedial school for inept butchers. I will not describe the odors that began to arise from it.

The Mitteleuropans fled their positions as soon as we were close enough to bring our Trench Sweepers to bear. We captured dozens of prisoners, and after some “mopping up” of stray pockets of re sis tance the day was ours. We had taken the low ridge that was the gateway to Goose Bay , and we hastily occupied and strengthened the former Dutch defenses there. The Dutch commander arranged under a flag of truce to remove his dead and injured from the battlefield. That was a mournful sight—foreign soldiers stumbling with carts among the corpses, accompanied by the terrible groans of the dying—and no doubt disappointing to Private Langers, who would be denied the luxury of looting the enemy dead.

Julian relocated his headquarters and the Campaign Flag to an elevated position from which we could see the town and the harbor of Goose Bay, as well as the surviving Dutch forces, who were hastily rolling out cutwire and building abatisses in anticipation of a siege. Julian used this perspective to mark his maps, and he was still examining those maps by lamplight as midnight approached. My typewriter had been brought up in a wagon along with other supplies appropriate to a mobile headquarters, and I sat in a corner of the same huge tent recording the events of that notable day. At last fatigue overcame me; but before I departed for my own cot I told Julian we had won a great victory, and that he ought to rest now that it had been achieved.

“I can’t afford to rest,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

He looked gaunt and distracted, and I pitied him. It might seem unjust to feel sympathy for a Major General who had not lifted a rifle, on a day when thousands of men had sacrificed lives and limbs on his behalf. But it seemed to me that Julian had lived the struggle of every soldier under his command, at least in his imagination, and suffered each loss as though the bullets had pierced his own body. He identified closely with his men, and always took pains to see that they were fed and rested, and this had helped to make him popular among them; but he paid for it now, in stress and in grief.

“Of course you can afford to rest,” I said gently. “You’ll be a better officer for it.”

He rose from his camp table, stretching, and together we stepped outside. Away from the portable stove the air was very cold, and the fires of the enemy smoldered like coals in the flatlands ahead of us.

“See all that we’ve won,” I said.

“I’m content with what I see,” said Julian. “Apart from the number of the dead. What worries me is what I don’t see.”

“Well, it’s dark, after all… what don’t you see?”

“The cavalry detachment I sent to tear up tracks behind the enemy’s lines, for one. Not a man of them has reported back. If the rail connection to Goose Bay remains intact, reinforcements will begin to arrive, and keep on arriving.”

“It’s no easy job, bending rails and blowing up bridges. Probably the cavalry was just detained in its work.”

“And the harbor at Goose Bay. What do you make out by this light, Adam?”

“It seems peaceful.” There was a glow in the sky—a dusty patch of the Northern Lights, which waxed and waned—and I saw a few masts and ships at anchor—Dutch commercial shipping, I supposed. “They threw all their gunboats against us at Striver, and lost them.”

“I see the same. What I don’t see is any American ship of war. I had hoped Admiral Fairfield would be shelling Goose Bay by now, or at least positioning his vessels.”

That was true… and the absence seemed ominous, now that he pointed it out to me.

“Perhaps they’ll arrive in the morning,” I said.

“Perhaps,” said Julian wearily.

I have not yet said very much about Sam Godwin and his role in these events.

That’s not because his part was insignificant, but because it was performed in intimate consultation with Julian, and I didn’t participate directly in battle-planning. [I had learned all my strategy and tactics from the war narratives of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, in which every attack is fierce and bold, and nearly fails, but finally succeeds by some combination of luck and American ingenuity. These circumstances are more easily arranged on the printed page than on the field of battle.]

But Sam pored over the maps just as intently as did Julian, and brought his greater experience into play. He did not attempt to take command, but made himself sympathetic to Julian’s suggestions, and seldom contradicted them, but only offered nuance in their refinement. I supposed this was the role he had played with Julian’s father Bryce during the successful Isthmian War, and at times, when the two of them put their heads together, I could imagine that twenty years of history had been rolled back, and that this was the command tent of the Army of the Californias… though Julian’s unusual yellow beard belied the daydream, as did the cold November weather.

Julian, in any case, succeeded in maintaining a fragile optimism about the campaign; while Sam, though he tried not to show it, was obviously less hopeful. Ever since we sailed from Manhattan , all humor had fled from him. He didn’t joke, or laugh at jokes. He scowled, instead… and there was a glitter in his eye that might have been fear, sternly suppressed. I expect Sam had concluded that he might not see New York City , or more importantly Emily Baines Comstock, ever again in this earthly life; and it was my fervent wish that Julian might succeed in proving him wrong. But the events of the next day were not encouraging.

The Dutch counter-attacked at dawn.

Perhaps they had done some scouting of their own, and calculated that our army, while intimidating, was not as large as they feared; or perhaps reinforcements had arrived by rail during the night. Whatever the case, their resolve had grown firm and their courage was not lacking.

Though the defenders of Goose Bay lacked a Chinese Cannon, their field artillery outranged ours by several hundred yards. They had figured that difference finely, and used it to their advantage. Shot and shell pummeled our forward ranks and masked their first advance. Our men soon brought their own weapons to bear, including the formidable Trench Sweeper; but the Dutch had come ahead too quickly for our field-pieces to be of much use against them, and an important hill, along with an entire artillery battery, was captured before Julian or his lieutenants could react.

All that morning I heard the unceasing roar of cannonry and the cries of wounded men as they were carried back from the front. Dutch and American regiments went at one another like clashing sabers, shooting off sparks of blood and mayhem. Messengers arrived and departed with desperation in their eyes, and each one seemed more exhausted than the last. An entire battalion collapsed on our right flank, driven back by cannonade, although reinforcements held the position—barely.

Noon passed, and the smoke of the battle continued to rise like a crow-colored obelisk into the wan and windless sky. “Panic is our greatest enemy now,” Sam said grimly.