Free American Front by Harry Turtledove Page B

United States harvesting the fruits of longtime enmity, any chance he’d have to bring in his own harvest seemed small and dim.
    Instead of watching the waving wheat, he kept gazing southward, after the cavalrymen. Before long, he saw motion on the road coming up from the south. Without turning his head, he said, “Fetch me the rifle, Alexander.”
    “Yes, Pa,” his son answered. The boy thundered up the stairs two at a time and returned a moment later holding the pump-action Winchester with the careful confidence of someone long used to guns. Arthur McGregor checked to make sure he had a cartridge in the chamber, then stood and waited to see what sort of onslaught was coming.
    Before he could raise the rifle to his shoulder, he realized he wasn’t seeing the imminent arrival of the Americans, only people fleeing from them. Fear had almost made him fire on his own countrymen. Thin across the wheatfields, their shouts reached him, urging him to join them.
    He had a buggy in the barn. If he hitched up the horses to it and loaded Maude and Alexander and his two little daughters into it, he could be on the road to Winnipeg inside an hour, and there the day after tomorrow.
    “Will we go, Pa?” Alexander asked. The sight of other folks fleeing seemed to have given him the idea that war was something more than a game. McGregor thanked God something this side of getting shot at—or maybe this side of getting shot—had done that.
    He shook his head. “No, we won’t go. We’ll stick it out a bit longer, see what happens.” Alexander looked proud.
    More soldiers went down the road, a long column of marching infantry, some Canadian, some British, then trucks painted khaki, then more marching men. A plume of coal smoke rose from the stack of a distant southbound train. McGregor would have bet all the acres he had that every compartment on every car was full to overflowing with men in tunics and puttees. Some of them would be gay, some frightened. That wouldn’t matter, and wouldn’t say anything about what sort of soldiers they’d make once they got to the fighting.
    The rumble of artillery went on and on. He went on, too: on about his chores. When you were forking hay or pulling weeds or shoveling manure, for long stretches of time you could forget about what your ears were telling you. Then, as you paused to wipe your face on your sleeve, you’d notice the noise again: in absurd surprise, almost as if it had snuck up behind you and tapped you on the shoulder to make you jump.
    It was getting louder—and, unquestionably, getting closer.
    He hadn’t wanted to believe that at first. When you noticed the thunder only every so often, you didn’t think to compare it from then till now, or think your hearing was telling you the enemy was drawing nearer, which meant your own men were falling back.
    But that was true. By the time evening came—the sun didn’t set quite so late as it had at the height of summer—there could be no doubt left. The family sat down to chicken stew with dumplings and carrots in a grim mood. No one, not even Julia and Mary, who usually prattled on in spite of
children should be seen but not heard
, said much. The girls helped their mother wash the dishes while Arthur McGregor smoked a pipe. He checked the tin from which he filled it: Virginia tobacco, an import from the Confederate States, not the USA. That made him feel better.
    He woke several times in the night, not something he usually did—if God had invented anything more exhausting than farm labor, McGregor hadn’t heard of it. But when he sat up in the blackness, he heard the crash of guns, not so steady as they had been during the day, but not stopping, either.
    And whenever he sat up, the guns were closer.
    He woke for good in the pale gray of false dawn. One arm flopped across the other side of the bed, which was empty. He sniffed, and smelled tea steeping. Maude was up before him, then.
    He put on his overalls and boots and went