Knowing the men his army faced, Victor wasn't so sure. And damned if the redcoats didn't re-form their lines and make ready to come at the Atlanteans again. Their field guns turned on the abatis across the road. The fallen trees might hinder soldiers, but they didn't keep out roundshot. A man hit square by a cannon ball turned into something only a butcher would recognize. And a man speared by a branch a cannon ball tore loose was in no enviable situation, either.
A few Atlanteans couldn't stand the cannonading and fled. They were raw troops, men who'd never come under fire before Most of the new men stood it as well as any veterans. Victor was proud of them. He was also astonished, though he never would have told them so.
On came the Englishmen again. This time, they sent fewer troops against the stone wall and more against the area protected by the abatis. This time, too, they stopped and delivered two volleys of their own before rushing the Atlantean field works.
Bullets snapped past Victor's head. A wet thud! said a man next to him was hit. The Atlantean clutched his chest and crumpled to the ground, his musket falling from his hands. Victor snatched up the firelock. He aimed at a redcoat pushing through the abatis-a man from Howe's forlorn hope. If the gun wasn't loaded… What do I lose? he thought, and pulled the trigger.
The musket bucked against his shoulder. The redcoat went down, grabbing his leg. Victor had aimed at his chest. With a smoothbore, you were glad for any hit you got. Another man from the forlorn hope fell, half his jaw shot away. But the English soldiers were making paths their friends could follow.
And follow the redcoats did. Some of them fell. More stepped over corpses and writhing wounded and set about doing what they knew how to do: massacring amateurs who presumed to stand against them. The Atlanteans were brave. In close-quarters fighting like that, it probably did them more harm than good. They rushed forward, clutching any weapons they had-and the redcoats emotionlessly spitted them with their bayonets. The Englishmen had the edge in reach, and they had the edge in training, and they used both without mercy.
Victor might have fed his whole force into the fight, as a man fed meat into a sausage grinder. The Atlanteans would be gone… and they would have gone down. He saw as much, a little more slowly than he might have. "Back!" he yelled. "Fall back!"
The Atlanteans obeyed him with more alacrity than they'd ever shown marching north from New Hastings. They'd had enough-they'd had too much-of the horrible redcoats. Watching them break away from the English troops, Victor tasted gall. He wondered if the rebellion would smash to bits at the first test.
"Form ranks!" he shouted, hoping they would. "Give them a volley!" he added, praying they would. "Show them you're not whipped!" he said, fearing they were.
And damned if the Atlanteans didn't obey him again. The ranks weren't neat enough to delight an English drillmaster's heart. The volley was on the ragged side, too. But it was enough to knock the redcoats back on their heels. They'd come after the settlers, aiming to break them all at once-and they'd got a nasty surprise "Withdraw fifty yards and give them another one," Victor commanded. The men he led did as he told them to. This volley was fuller, thicker, than the one before. More English soldiers went down.
Now the redcoats, seeing that they couldn't force a decision with the bayonet alone, began loading their muskets again, too. They rebuilt their own battle line with marvelous haste-and much bad language from their sergeants. And they traded several volleys with the Atlanteans, both sides banging away at each other from less than a hundred yards. That was warfare as it was practiced on the battlefields of Europe: organized mutual slaughter.
More bullets cracked past Victor Radcliff than he could keep track of. None of them bit. He had no idea why not: either God loved him or he was luckier than he deserved. He'd begun to think he was luckier than he deserved in the men he led, too. They stood up under that pounding as well as the redcoats. Oh, a few men slipped off toward the rear, but only a few.
Victor told off several companies of New Hastings troops to serve as his rear guard. No settlement, not even Croydon in the north, despised royal authority more than New Hastings. Having disposed of one would-be king on their own soil, New Hastings men had little use for anyone else who tried to tell them what to do.
They held off the redcoats and let the rest of the army fall back toward Weymouth. Then they too broke free. General Howe showed little appetite for the pursuit: less than Victor would have in his place Maybe that said something about him. Maybe it said something about what the Atlanteans had done to his army, even in defeat.
Victor Radcliff looked around for Blaise. He found the Negro with a bloody rag wrapped around the stump of his left middle finger. "Stupid thing," he said. "Hurts like a mad bastard, too." He looked more angry than stunned, as wounded men sometimes seemed.
"Get some poppy juice from the surgeons," Victor told him.
"It will dull the pain a little, anyhow."
"Plenty need it more than I do," Blaise said.
"Plenty need it less, too. Go on. That's an order," Victor said. What point to being a general if you couldn't tell a sergeant what to do?
Blaise's "Yes, sir" was as mutinous an acceptance as Victor had ever heard. But it was an acceptance. He'd take what he could get. He hadn't beaten the English, but he'd given them a better fight than they must have dreamt of in their wildest nightmares. He'd take what he could get there, too. The retreat went on. He had no choice about taking that.
The Atlanteans fortified Weymouth. If General Howe wanted to break into the seaside town with men shooting at him from behind barricades and out of windows and ducking back around corners, he was welcome to try. So Victor thought, anyhow.
His men also seemed ready for another crack at the English. "Hell, yes! Let 'em come," one of them said. "We'll give 'em a bloody nose and whip 'em back to their mamas."
General Howe, unfortunately, didn't seem inclined to play Victor's game. His warships, perhaps slowed by contrary winds, arrived two days later. They lay offshore and bombarded the town. The Atlanteans' field guns fired back, but that was more to make the men feel better than for any other reason. Three-and six-pounders couldn't reach the men-of-war and might not have been able to pierce their thick oak timbers even if they had.
When a ball from a twenty-four-pounder hit a house or an inn, on the other hand, the building was likely to fall down. And when a ball from a twenty-four-pounder hit a man, or several men… what happened after that wasn't pretty. The gravediggers got more work than the surgeons did.
The ships were still there the next morning. As soon as the sun climbed up out of the Atlantic, they started cannonading Weymouth again. They fired slowly and deliberately, one round-shot every few minutes. Again, the Atlanteans returned fire, but with no great hope of success. They fearfully awaited each incoming cannon ball.
Flash and smoke came first. After them-but well after, proving sound traveled slower than light-came the boom from the gun. Victor had the displeasure of watching each roundshot arc through the summery air toward Weymouth. Then another crash would announce more destruction.
The slow, steady bombardment had a horrid fascination to it. Victor almost forgot to breathe as he waited and tensed himself before each new explosion. He hoped each round would fall harmlessly, yet feared each one would not. Surgeons and dentists worked as fast as they could, to get the agony over with in a hurry. The Royal Navy here operated in just the opposite way. Their officers wanted the Atlanteans to suffer for a long time.
Victor Radcliff figured that out right away. The Royal Navy officers also wanted something else: they wanted to use the deliberate cannonading to blind the Atlantean rebels to everything else that was going on. They got what they wanted, too. Along with everyone else in Weymouth, Victor spent the day staring fearfully out to sea, bracing himself for the next thunder from a gun.