"It could be, yes," Victor said, admiring de la Fayette's sangfroid. "I had not thought this one would prove so well defended."
"Not everything works," de la Fayette said. "One of the tricks of the game is to keep trying even after a failure."
"True enough." Victor had been a good deal older than the Frenchman was now when he'd learned that-which made it no less true.
Chapter 21
The Atlanteans planned to feint at Wilton Wells again and strike a little farther east, just past Garnet Pond. Woods let them closely approach the redcoats' line there, and it didn't seem strongly held. If they could break through, Cornwallis' men would have to fall back toward Croydon in a hurry. Victor and de la Fayette could concentrate their force and attack where they pleased. The redcoats, trying to hold a line well outside of Croydon, had to try to stay reasonably strong all along it. Reasonably strong, with luck, would prove not to be strong enough.
With luck. Victor Radcliff had much too much reason to remember those two little, seemingly innocent, words after the thrust past Garnet Pond came to grief. The worst of it was, he couldn't think of anything he should have done differently.
It was sunny when the attacking column set out for Garnet Pond early in the morning. Sunny-he remembered that very well. Oh, the wind came down from the northwest, but what of it? Summer was over, and chilly winds were nothing out of the ordinary, especially in a northern settiement-a northern state-like Croydon.
De la Fayette seemed as happy with the arrangement as Victor was himself. "This is a well-conceived plan," he declared. Even if he was very young, his praise warmed Victor. "The false attack at the place we struck before will hold the English in place, or even, it could be, draw men from Garnet Pond to the position that seems more threatened."
"I hope so, yes." Victor did his best to keep his smile sheepish and modest rather than, say, full of gloating and anticipation.
"And we have deployed a full complement of sharpshooters and skirmishers to ensure that the true attack is not detected prematurely," de la Fayette went on. "Nom d'un nom, Monsieur le General, I cannot imagine what could possibly go wrong."
Maybe that was what did it. Had Victor been more pious, he might also have been more nearly certain it was. The Frenchman didn't precisely take the Lord's name in vain. He didn't use the Lord's name at all-not directly, anyhow. But wasn't trotting out a euphemism just as bad, really? Assuming the Lord was listening, wouldn't He know what was on your mind, what was in your heart, regardless of whether His name actually passed your lips? Victor wondered about it afterwards. But afterwards was too late, as afterwards commonly is.
"Clouding up," Blaise remarked not ten minutes after the attacking column set out.
"Well, so it is," Victor agreed. "What of it?" He tried to look on the bright side, even if that bright side was rapidly vanishing from the sky. The clouds were thick and roiling and dark. It hadn't been warm before they swept across the sky; it got noticeably colder as soon as they did. The air seemed damper, too, although Victor tried his best to tell himself that was only his imagination.
He might have managed to persuade himself. But Blaise's broad nostrils flared. "Smells like rain," he said.
"I hope not!" Victor exclaimed. But he knew that wet-dust odor as soon as Blaise pointed it out. As a matter of fact, he'd known it before, even if he hadn't wanted to admit it was there.
No matter what he'd managed to talk himself into, he wouldn't have stayed deluded much longer. When rain started coming down, it was impossible to believe the weather remained fine. And this wasn't a light shower of the kind some of the people farther south called liquid sunshine. This was a downpour, a gully washer, a cloudburst… The ground under his feet turned to mud, and then to something a good deal more liquid than the stuff commonly known by that name.
"What does the Bible talk about?" Blaise said-shouted, really, to make himself heard over, or through, that roaring rain. "Forty days and forty nights?"
It hadn't even been raining forty minutes then. All the same, Victor understood why the Negro asked the question. It had gone from cloudburst to deluge. Had Noah's Ark floated by, Victor wouldn't have been amazed (but why didn't the Ark seem to contain any Atlantean productions?).
"Maybe I should recall them," Victor said. The Atlanteans would have a devil of a time shooting once they got past Garnet Pond-wet weather turned flintlocks into nothing more than clumsy spears and clubs.
"Redcoats won't be able to shoot at them, either," Blaise replied, understanding what he was worried about.
"Well, no," Victor said. "But not all our men have bayonets." At the beginning of the war, very few Atlanteans had them, giving the redcoats a great advantage when the fighting came to close quarters. These days, thanks to captured weapons and hard work at smithies all over Atlantis, most greencoats were as well armed as their English counterparts. "Or maybe I worry overmuch."
A few gunshots marked the moment when the feint went in. Victor admired the men on either side who'd managed to keep their powder dry. The shots rang out distinctly, even through the rain. But there were only a few. And no one had the slightest hope of reloading. After the scattered opening volley, both Atlanteans and Englishmen might have fallen back through time a thousand years, back to days long before the first clever artificer made a batch of gunpowder without blowing himself up in the doing.
Instead of musketry, a few shouts and screams pierced the curtain of sound the downpour spread over the scene. They were enough to let Victor picture it in his mind. He imagined dripping, muddy men stabbing with bayonets and swinging clubbed muskets as if they were cricket bats. He imagined rain and blood rolling down their faces and rain trying to wash away spreading patches of red on their tunics. And, knowing soldiers as he did, he imagined them all swearing at the weather at least as much as they swore at one another.
Off to the east, the main attacking party should have been able to gauge when to hit the English lines by the noise the men in the feint made. They probably couldn't hear the men in the feint at all, though. The major commanding them had to use his best judgment about when to go on-or whether to go in at all,
Victor Radcliff wouldn't have blamed him for aborting the attack. But he didn't. His men-and the redcoats facing them-also managed to get off a few shots. One cannon boomed. Hearing it go off truly amazed Victor. He had to hope it didn't harm his men too much.
And then he had to wait… and wait… and wait. No messenger came back from the main attack to tell him how it was going. Maybe the officer in charge forgot to send anyone. Maybe the messenger got killed or wounded before he went very far. Or maybe he just sank into the ooze and drowned.
If the attackers weren't going to tell Victor what had happened, he had to find out for himself-if he could. He rode toward the woods through which the Atlanteans should have gone. He rode ever more slowly, too, for the rain rapidly turned the road to a river of mud. The horse looked back at him reproachfully, as if wondering whether it would sink out of sight. Not much farther on, Victor began to wonder the same thing.
Where he had trouble going forward, he soon found out the Atlantean soldiers were managing to go back. "It's no use, General!" one of them bawled through the rain.
"What happened?" Victor asked.
"We damn near drowned, that's what," the soldier answered.
"That cannon ball blew Major Hall's head off," another man added, which went a long way towards explaining why the poor major hadn't sent back any messengers. Losing your head metaphorically could distract you. Losing it literally… got everything over with in a hurry, at any rate. And whoever'd taken over for Hall must not have thought to send word back, either.