So there was. Redcoats and greencoats robbed disconsolate enemy survivors of anything they happened to carry. Kersauzon's men were in no position to complain. Anyone who presumed to resent the thefts wouldn't live long. Had the French settlers triumphed, they would have done the same to their foes. Everyone on both sides knew as much.
"What are we to do with them?" The English lieutenant-colonel seemed to be talking more to himself than to Victor.
Victor answered anyhow: "The ones who are left, we may as well send home." His wave took in the windrows of corpses-far more French than English, because Kersauzon's men had pushed the attack, and pushed it in large measure out in the open. "Even after they get there, French Atlantis will have a great swarm of widows."
"And a great swarm of English settlers coming south to console them?" The lieutenant-colonel might be stolid and earnest, but he had a certain basic shrewdness.
"I shouldn't wonder," Victor said. "French Atlantis is ours now. There's no army left that can slow us down, much less stop us. Plenty of plantations, plenty of ordinary farms, plenty of shops in the towns that will need men to run them. There won't be enough Frenchmen to do it, not after we've killed off so many of them. And our settlements have always been more populous than theirs. Look at the way we're spilling across the Green Ridge Mountains. They have New Marseille over on the west coast, but that's just another little seacoast town."
Now the Englishman glanced up to make sure Blaise was busy plundering. In a low voice, he said, "How do you suppose your bonny English settlers will like turning into slaveholders?"
Victor Radcliff shrugged. "It's a way of life down here. How else are you going to run a plantation?"
"I don't care for it," the lieutenant-colonel said. "Slavery's against the law in England, you know."
"I don't, either, but it's not here. Not in our Terranovan settlements, either," Victor said. "Where slaves and money go together, who complains about slaves? Does that surprise you, sir?"
"Well, when you put it so, perhaps not," the English officer replied. "I shouldn't care to buy and sell other men myself, though."
"Neither would I…sir," Victor said slowly. "But I wear cotton when I don't wear wool or linen. Much of what I wear is dyed with indigo. I enjoy pipeweed. Sometimes I eat rice when I don't eat maize or wheat. Isn't it the same for you?"
"Yes, of course it is," the lieutenant-colonel said. "But-"
"No, sir. No buts, not in that case," Radcliff broke in. "If you use what slaves make but don't care to own them yourself, aren't you like a man who eats pork but doesn't care to butcher hogs?"
The Englishman opened his mouth, then closed it again. After a moment, he tried again: "You are a bloody difficult man, Major."
"Thanks. I do my best," Victor said, not without pride.
"This may all prove moot, you understand," the Englishman said.
With a sigh not quite of resignation, Victor Radcliff nodded. "I understand much too well. If the gentlemen who all speak French sit down together and decide to hand this country back to the people who just now lost it, nothing we can do to keep it this side of insurrection."
"I should not recommend that, either," the English officer said. "It would be foredoomed to failure."
"You may well be right, sir," Victor said politely, though less than convinced that the officer from across the Atlantic was. "I am operating on the assumption that it will not come to that. I am also operating on the assumption that those diplomatic gentlemen will not be so foolish as to squander what we won at such cost."
"You are likely to be right yourself," the Englishman said. "England had the power to take French Atlantis, and God has also blessed us with the power to prevail elsewhere in the world. We may throw France some small sop when this war is over, to prevent her utter humiliation, but I see no reason to throw her a large one. In my view, French Atlantis is too large and too important to return, it once having fallen into our hands."
"We agree." Victor smiled. "That is not something a settler and a man from the mother country can often say these days."
"We have been tested in adversity, you and I," the other officer replied. "And, unlike the King of Babylon, God did not weigh us in the measure and find us wanting."
"Not yet, anyhow," Victor said, smiling still. "Do you suppose that, with French Atlantis in our pocket, we could sweep down through it and pick up Spanish Atlantis as well? I tell you frankly, sir, the slaves who've risen against their masters would likely give us a harder fight than the Spaniards can put up."
"I doubt that not at all," the Englishman said. "Still and all, though, that's a long march, and one with uncertain supply lines, into a country notoriously unhealthy. I should hesitate to undertake it without orders from London."
"My greencoats did it," Victor said. "We lived off the land, and we had no trouble doing it."
"What is easy for irregulars is often difficult for regulars," the lieutenant-colonel answered. "Irregulars often have a certain amount of trouble remembering that the converse also applies. Or do you think your men could have stopped the flow from the spring here?"
Radcliff knew his men could have done no such thing. Even trying would never have occurred to him. That long underground burrow…He shuddered. No, he wouldn't have wanted to try that. "Your point is well taken, sir," he admitted.
"Generous of you to say so," the Englishman told him. "I also fear I can't promise the timely appearance of the Royal Navy, which you were able to enjoy. You might have known a certain amount of embarrassment had the French and Spanish Atlanteans succeeded in combining against you."
The ships plucked you off the beach in the nick of time. The lieutenant-colonel had a cat's politeness; he wouldn't come right out and say such a thing. But Victor understood what he meant. "You may be right, sir," he answered insincerely. "Still and all, not much danger of a Franco-Spanish combination against us now, is there?" We've whipped the French settlers once and for all was what he meant, and the Englishman couldn't very well mistake him.
To his credit, the redcoat didn't try. "No, not much," he said, "but I still believe we would do better to ensure our conquest of French Atlantis than to go haring off after something grander yet. Do you on this side of the ocean know the proverb about the bird in the hand and those in the bush?"
"I've…heard it," Victor said. The English lieutenant-colonel chuckled at his reluctant-indeed, his reproachful (to say nothing of nearly mutinous)-subordination. After a victory like the one they'd gained here, chuckles came easy. Had Roland Kersauzon's men beaten the redcoats and greencoats and escaped en masse to continue the war, the English officer wouldn't have taken that hesitation so lightly. Victor went on, "A lot of the birds here, though, don't fit in the hand."
Redcoats led glum French settlers into captivity. Some of those settlers were in their stocking feet. If they hadn't been whipped out of their boots, they'd lost them as spoils of war. Pretty soon, the English settlers and regulars would plunder Nouveau Redon, too. Victor would have been surprised if some of the more enterprising fellows weren't already starting.
"French Atlantis will fit quite nicely, I do believe," the redcoat said.
"It is a good handful," Victor allowed. Why argue now? Sure enough, triumph was a great sweetener. He took off his hat and saluted the English officer. "We won it together, Colonel Cornwallis."
Cornwallis returned the salute. "We did indeed, Major Radcliff."