Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

Sending the paroled men north solved some of the problem, but only some. The Englishmen who remained under arms still seethed with resentment. As long as they all shared the same risks, no one thought anything of it. When some did while others didn't, the less lucky ones naturally disliked the idea of marching into battle while their friends stayed away.

The mere idea of parole bewildered Blaise. "No one has to feed prisoners this way," Victor explained. "When we capture French soldiers, we'll send them back under parole and put a like number of our men into the army again."

"Why not put them in now?" Blaise asked. "The French, they don't know."

"If they recapture a paroled man who isn't properly exchanged, they can shoot him," Victor replied. "It's a question of honor, too."

"What is honor?" Blaise asked.

Victor thought of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1. What is honor? a word. What is that word, honor? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. It is insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it: honor is a mere scutcheon; and so ends my catechism.

That would be more than Blaise needed to know, and in the wrong spirit, too. Victor tried a different approach: "Honor is keeping promises, even if keeping them isn't to your advantage. If both sides in a fight have honor, they can trust each other to follow the rules of war. It means we treat prisoners and enemy civilians well, knowing the enemy will do the same."

Blaise scratched the tightly curling hair on top of his head. "You and the French do this?" he asked.

"We do," Victor said, not without pride.

"You are both mad, then," Blaise declared.

"It could be that you are right." Radcliff fell into French, in which tongue the Negro was still more fluent. "But if we are both mad the same way, it makes fighting the war easier for the helpless without changing who wins or loses."

"Honh," Blaise said, a sound wordless but eloquent in its skepticism. "Prisoners the French take, prisoners you take, you should sell for slaves."

That shocked Victor. "We don't enslave whites!" he exclaimed.

"I know. You should. Then you would know more about slavery than you do," Blaise replied, still in French. "The man holding the whip, he thinks one thing. The man tasting the whip, he thinks maybe something else."

"You are a free man here," Victor said in English, reminding the Negro he'd come out of French-held territory. If slavery paid more up here in the land of wheat and maize and lumber, it might have caught on better in English Atlantis, too. Radcliff didn't mention that.

"Plenty black men, plenty copper men, not free down south," Blaise replied, also in English. "You say to them, 'Help us and you free,' you get big army fast. French, Spaniards, they much unhappy."

He was probably right. Whether he was or wasn't mattered only so much to Victor Radcliff. The white man touched his left epaulet with his right forefinger. "You see this, Blaise? I am a major of Atlantean volunteers. I do not decide things here."

"C'est dommage," Blaise said, and then the same thing in English: "Pity."

"I suppose so," said Victor, who had never tasted the lash. He wondered whether spreading a promise to free slaves where they were now would be honorable. Reluctantly, he decided it wouldn't. It would involve the French in a guerrilla war against their own servitors, with all the horrors that entailed. War as it was fought these days was a business of army against army, and impinged on civilians as little as possible. A slave uprising couldn't help doing just that.

"You want to win this war, eh?" Blaise said.

"Well, yes. We wouldn't be fighting it if we didn't," Radcliff said.

"Give blacks and copperskins guns. Best way." The Negro seemed ruthlessly matter-of-fact. "Make French sorry at home, they no fight up here no more."

"You may be right," Victor said. That was polite, and committed him to nothing.

To his surprise, Blaise realized as much. "You waste a chance," he said. "You not get many better ones. You have to do all your fighting yourself. War is harder. Maybe you lose. What then?"

Victor hadn't seriously imagined losing. He wondered why not. The French settlers had just devastated some of the best infantry in the world. Why wouldn't they do the same to the redcoats' remnants and to the settlers' odds and sods who were all that was left between them and New Hastings and Hanover?

Maybe they would.

"I think I would pack up and go somewhere else. Avalon, perhaps, or the Terranovan mainland," Victor said. "I'm not too old to make a new start. But we aren't whipped yet, either. Not even close."

"No, eh?" Blaise let the question hang there.

"No, by God," Victor Radcliff insisted. "If Kersauzon had pushed us hard, we might have fallen to pieces. But he didn't, and we won't. We're getting stronger by the day, with more Atlantean recruits coming in."

"Honh," Blaise said again. He didn't believe it. He saw the English soldiers and paroled prisoners quarreling among themselves, and he thought that meant the whole army was weak.

He might have been right, too. Victor didn't want to believe it, which didn't mean it wasn't true. We won't win if we give up, Victor thought. As long as he remembered that…he wasn't giving up. So what? He might lose anyhow.

"F orward!" Roland Kersauzon shouted. He gestured to the buglers and drummers. Their martial music underscored and amplified the order.

Several thousand men moved at his command, as if he were a puppet master manipulating marionettes. And so he was, though he used obedience, not actual strings. Still, it was a heady feeling, like a slug of barrel-tree rum sliding hot down his throat into an empty stomach.

A courier rode up from the south and handed Roland a letter.

Roland examined both the man and the seal with care. He would not have put it past the perfidious English to sneak in a false but French-speaking courier with a forged message to confuse him and his troops. But both the courier and the impression stamped into the wax seemed authentic. Kersauzon broke the seal with a clasp knife, unrolled the letter, and read.

"What does it say, Monsieur?" a lieutenant asked. "Have we been reinforced, the way the English-speaking Atlanteans were?"

"As a matter of fact, we have," Roland said. "If this is true, two thousand of King Louis' men have landed at Cosquer and are on their way north to us." He turned to the courier again. "How far behind you are they, do you think?"

"They're foot soldiers, sir," the fellow replied, with a horseman's natural scorn. "I left them in my dust as soon as I set out."

"Well, yes. Of course," Kersauzon said. "And you were riding relays of horses, so that made you all the faster. We can't expect them for some time, then."

"I would think not, sir," the courier agreed.

"Nom d'un nom," Roland muttered unhappily. "I don't want to wait for them-we've already waited long enough. But I don't want to go into battle without them, either. What to do? What to do?"

"It's your decision, sir," the lieutenant said.

Roland Kersauzon could have done without the reminder. He'd been the soul of decisiveness marching up into English territory. He'd got his backwoodsmen and half-trained militiamen a victory even he thought improbable against Braddock's professionals. Now he wanted to rest on his laurels. He wanted to, yes, but he feared that if he tried he soon would have no laurels to rest on. Maybe he'd even made a mistake pausing after the battle. If he'd pressed on right away…

Well, he hadn't. But he would now. He turned back to the courier. "Go tell the soldiers from the mother country I am advancing," he said. "I look for their support as soon as they are able to give it."