Somebody ought to do something about that, Moss thought. The idea vanished from his head a moment later, though, for a Canadian battery started returning fire on the advancing-or rather, the stalled-Americans. Scribbling awkwardly in a notebook he held between his knees, Moss noted the position of the guns. When he landed, he'd pass the sketch on to Artillery. The enemy guns would get a wake-up call in short order.

"They've had too damn many wake-up calls already," he muttered. The wind in his face blew the words away.

The words were gone, but not the fact. For all the big talk in the United States about mopping the floor with the Dominion of Canada, reality, as reality has a way of doing, was proving harder. The damned Canucks and limeys had spent years fortifying the Niagara Peninsula, the part that ran west from Niagara Falls; every time they were blasted and bayoneted out of one position, they fell back to the next, just as tough as the one before. Forcing the crossing of the Welland Canal alone had put women by the thousands into mourning black.

But the canal had been crossed. Now the Canadians and British were moving back toward their last line, the one that ran from Hamilton on Lake Ontario through Caledonia to Port Dover on Lake Erie. When the United States broke through there, the country would widen out and numbers would count for more than they had yet.

As yet, the breakthrough hadn't happened. And, indeed, though the enemy had been thrown back on Hamilton in the north, they were still holding part of the line of the Grand River south of Caledonia. Farther west, the assault from Michigan hadn't been the walkover everyone-everyone south of the border, anyhow-had figured it would be. The line centered on London, Ontario, hadn't cracked yet, either, and when it would was anybody's guess.

Moss sighed. "We put too much money into Great Lakes battleships," he told the unheeding sky. He'd told everybody the same, since the day the war started. A fat lot of good it did, too. Great Lakes battleships weren't really battleships to rank with the great vessels in the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets: they were smaller and slower and didn't mount so many guns. In navies like Holland 's or Sweden 's, they would have been called coast-defense battleships.

What people in the USA had called them was victory. Each Great Lake had its own flotilla of them, and the Canadians didn't-couldn't-build ships to match, in quality or numbers. When war came, they'd bombard enemy towns and positions with a weight of metal you couldn't move by land.

The only problem being, it hadn't worked out that way. The first thing the Canadians had done when war broke out was to sow the Great Lakes with mines as thickly as potato soup was sown with potatoes. The Perry and the Farragut, both steaming full tilt toward Toronto, had blown up and sunk within a couple of hours of each other, as had the John Paul Jones over on Lake Huron. Losing millions of dollars' worth of ships and a couple of thousand trained sailors had made the flotillas less intrepid in a hurry.

As if that weren't bad enough, the Canadians had submersibles, too. Nobody-nobody American, anyhow-knew how many, but they'd picked off a Great Lakes battleship and a couple of light cruisers, too, before scuttling back to their home ports. Put it all together and it meant the Army was advancing through the toughest part of the enemy's defenses without a good bit of the fire support it had expected to have. And so the going was tough.

Jonathan Moss peered down at the Canadian and British guns. From a mile in the air, they looked like tiny lead toys, and the bare-chested men who served them like pink ants. He scribbled some more on the makeshift map. The enemy lines really did look like lines from up here: a zigzagging series of entrenchments that cut across the land. Even the entrenchments that ran back from the front-line positions zigzagged, to make a shell landing in one of them do as little damage as possible.

"Those bastards have been thinking about this for a long time," Moss said, penciling squiggles over the page to represent the zigzag entrenchments.

The American positions facing the foe were less neat. For one thing, the U.S. forces had to form their lines in territory they'd taken away from the Canadians, and every inch of that territory had been fought over till it was nothing but a crumpled, battered landscape that reminded Moss of nothing so much as telescopic photographs of the craters of the moon. For another, the Americans hadn't planned to conduct such a grinding campaign of attrition, and hadn't yet worked out the doctrine for fighting in those conditions.

Even getting supplies forward to the troops at the sharp end of the wedge was anywhere from hard to impossible. The railroads had been chewed up along with everything else in the territory over which the Americans had advanced. Food and ammunition had to come forward by wagon or else on people's backs.

By contrast, the rail network the defenders used was all but intact: Moss watched several trains chugging along toward the front, each one full of troops or munitions or food and fodder. He made a sour face. You could move more faster by train than with horses or people. That was what the second half of the nineteenth century had been about, if you looked at it the right way. It gave the defenders what struck him as an unfair advantage.

He was so busy noting the arriving trains, he didn't spot the other aero plane till it started shooting at him. The sound of Lewis-gun bullets drumming through the fabric of his wings-and whipcracking past his head-got his attention in a hurry. He was banking to the left before he even looked up.

The Avro 504 ahead of him tried to turn with him, but his aircraft was more agile than the tractor machine. He swung away from the area the observer in the front cockpit could cover with his machine gun. The pilot in the rear cockpit blazed away at him with a pistol, but only fool luck would let you hit anything with a pistol when both you and your target were moving crazily and at high speed in different directions.

At high speed- The Avro was faster on the level than his Super Hudson, and could climb faster, too. That would nullify his ability to turn inside it if he didn't do something in a hurry. He lined up the nose of his aircraft on the Canadian biplane's tail and squeezed the triggers of his Maxim gun.

Brass cartridge cases streamed out of the breech, glittering in the sun as they fell away. In the Avro, the pilot threw up his hands and slumped forward against the fairing that helped deflect the slipstream. The Canadian aeroplane's nose went down; it began to dive, and then to spin.

Maybe the observer hadn't properly fastened his safety belt; maybe it gave way under the strain. However that was, the luckless fellow was thrown out of the Avro. As he plunged toward the earth, he looked like a man treading water. But the thin, thin air would not bear his weight. He fell, the fringed end of his red wool muffler flapping above him.

"Jesus!" Jonathan Moss shook like a man with the grippe. He'd never fired the Maxim gun in anger before. He'd never expected to have to fire it, despite reports of other aerial combats. He hadn't even wanted it mounted on his aeroplane. But it had just saved his life.

The Avro 504 smashed into the ground and burst into flame a few hundred yards inside the enemy's lines. Dutifully, Moss noted the position on his sketch map. The observer had undoubtedly smashed into the ground, too, but Moss could not see him.

"Jesus!" he said again, and licked his lips. With the wind blasting in his face, they would have been dry anyhow; some pilots smeared petroleum jelly on them before taking off. Moss' lips were drier now. His stomach turned loops that had nothing to do with the acrobatic abilities of the Super Hudson.