"I will. General," Matthew replied. To Paine, he added, "Rest assured, you also have my thanks and that of the Atlantean Assembly." Victor also didn't marvel at that till after the fact
"Let me lay hold of my chattels, such as they are, and I am your man from that time forward," Paine said. "Using barbarians to lay waste to civilization is to me unconscionable. If the king's ministers and admirals fail to find it so, what are they but mad dogs who deserve no better than to be hunted out of this land?"
Without waiting for an answer, he plunged out into the rain. "Afire-eater," Matthew Radcliffe observed, making ready to follow him.
Victor Radcliff shook his head. "Not quite. He is a fire-kindler. Others will eat the flames he sparks-and may they choke on them."
"Amen." Matthew squelched off into the night after Thomas Paine.
General Howe seemed content to enjoy his control of most of the northeastern coast of Atlantis. In his shoes, Victor might have felt the same way. The redcoats held most of the richest parts of the land, and most of the towns that deserved to be styled cities. From London, that might have seemed almost the same as crushing the Atlantean uprising underfoot.
On bad days, it also seemed almost the same as crushing the uprising to Victor Radcliff. But only on bad days, when he looked at all the things he'd failed to do. Holding Hanover and New Hastings topped the melancholy list. Beating the English in a pitched battle anywhere came next. He'd come close several times-which did him less good than he wished it did.
If he could have given the redcoats a black eye in any of their fights along the Brede, New Hastings would still lie in Atlantean hands. The Assembly would send its decisions and requests to the settlements from the oldest town in Atlantis, not from the grand metropolis of Honker's Mill. An edict coming out of New Hastings seemed much more authoritative than one emanating from a backwoods hamlet with a silly name.
Winter gave Victor the chance to drill his troops. New recruits kept coming in, both from the interior and from the coastal regions where King George nominally reigned supreme. That was encouraging. Less so were the Atlanteans who headed for home when their enlistment terms expired. There were at least as many of them as raw replacements.
Victor sent a letter to the Assembly, urging it to enlist troops for longer terms: for the length of the war, if at all possible. The Assembly forwarded the letter to each settlement's parliament. Maybe those august bodies-the ones not under the English boot, anyhow-would do as he asked. Or maybe they wouldn't. Neither he nor the Atlantean Assembly could compel them.
Sometimes he wondered whether the Atlanteans wanted to rule themselves, or whether they wanted no rulers at all. They didn't give their Assembly much to work with. The English Parliament had the power to tax its own folk. It wanted the power to tax the Atlanteans, too. Victor's people didn't aim to put up with that They didn't aim to put up with taxes from the Atlantean Assembly, either. Anyone who tried to tax Atlanteans did so at his peril.
Victor also wondered how his people expected to pay for the war if they weren't taxed. The Assembly was doing the best it could, issuing paper money it promised to redeem with gold or silver once the war was won. When the uprising began, that paper was almost at par with specie. But it seemed to lose a little value every day.
How long before the Assembly's paper was worthless? Victor feared the time would come sooner than he wished. What would the Assembly do then? He didn't have the slightest idea, and suspected they didn't, either.
In the meantime, the war went on. His drill sergeants did their best to turn the recruits into men who could march and deploy and follow orders without fussing about it too much. Despite his great chest, Tom Knox died of some lung ailment. Victor mourned the English deserter-he might have ended up a major had he lived.
The Atlanteans did get a handful of a new kind of recruits: professional soldiers from Europe who saw a need across the sea and hastened to meet it. Some of them were frankly horrified at what they found.
"A proper soldier," one said in a thick German accent, "you tell him what to do, and by God he does it or he dies trying. You Atlanteans, you always must know why before you do anything. It is of time a waste. It is a-a foolishness!" By the way he said that, he couldn't think of many worse names.
"Well, I'll tell you, Baron von Steuben" Victor said. Steuben was no more a baron than he himself was a king. The German captain also had no right to the aristocratic von. But he was far from the first man to improve his past on coming to Atlantis. And the idea of being drilled by a European nobleman appealed to the Atlantean soldiers. Victor went on, "And what I'll tell you is this: officers can be wrong, too. Knowing why they want you to do something isn't so bad. The men do fight hard. They've stood up to the redcoats plenty of times." They hadn't stood up quite well enough, but he didn't dwell on that.
"English regulars is-are-good troops," Steuben admitted. "But maybe your men win if they move faster, if they don't spend time with questions always. Foolishness!" Yes, that did seem to be the nastiest printable word he used.
"Maybe." Victor didn't think so, but he didn't feel like arguing the point. He did want to make sure the German captain knew what he was up against. "No matter how fine a drillmaster you may be, sir, I don't think you'll cure Atlanteans of needing to know why. That would take an act of God, not an order from a mere man."
"I shall petition the Lord with prayer," Steuben said. "If He loves your cause, He will do what is needful."
"They do say the Lord helps those who help themselves," Victor remarked. "We're trying to do that against the English."
He kept sending out little bands to harry the redcoats. Moving small units and keeping them supplied was easier than moving and subsisting his whole army would have been. He gave men who performed well on the practice field the chance to test what they'd learned against some of the sternest instructors in the world. If his raiders won, they came back proud and delighted. And if they lost-which they did sometimes-they didn't lose enough to endanger his main body or to hurt morale much.
One band of horsemen reached the sea near Weymouth. "It's not redcoats everywhere," Habakkuk Biddiscombe reported to Victor. "They're like any other men. They mostly stay where it's warm and cozy. If we broke in amongst 'em with a big enough force, they wouldn't know what the devil to do."
"It's a thought," Victor said. His own soldiers, as he knew full well, wanted to stay warm and cozy, too-and who could blame them? If they got through the winter and started the second year of the war as a force in being, wasn't that a sizable achievement all by itself? It seemed so to him.
The young captain, a born attacker, had different notions. "If it all goes well, we might threaten Hanover. We might even run them out of it. One of the prisoners we took says they haven't got that many men there. They can't garrison and campaign very well, not at the same time."
"Neither can we," Victor said mournfully. A solid company of Croydon men had just marched off to the north. Their enlistments were up, and they didn't intend to stay around one minute longer than they were obliged to. The English occupied the town that gave their settlement its name? If that bothered them, they hid it very well.
"We ought to try," Biddiscombe persisted. What would happen to a junior officer in a European army who kept on arguing with the general commanding? Victor wondered if he ought to ask "Baron"
"von" Steuben. He enjoyed watching the German gutturally sputter and fume. Victor was sure a persistent captain like this one would be hanging his career out to dry.