Morale: A Story of the War of 1941-43 Read online

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  +--------------------------------------------------------+|Transcriber's Note: || ||This etext was produced from "Astounding Stories", ||December 1931. Extensive research did not uncover any ||evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was||renewed. |+--------------------------------------------------------+

  Morale

  _A Story of the War of 1941-43_

  By Murray Leinster

 

  PART I

  "... The profound influence of civilian morale upon the course of modern war is nowhere more clearly shown than in the case of that monstrous war-engine popularly known as a 'Wabbly.' It landed in New Jersey Aug. 16, 1942, and threw the whole Eastern Coast into a frenzy. In six hours the population of three States was in a panic. Industry was paralyzed. The military effect was comparable only to a huge modern army landed in our rear...." (_Strategic Lessons of the War of 1941-43._--U. S. War College. Pp. 79-80.)

  Sergeant Walpole made his daily report at 2:15. He used a dinkytelephone that should have been in a museum, and a rural Central put himon the Area Officer's tight beam. The Area Officer listened drearily asthe Sergeant said in a military manner:

  _It spouted a flash of bluish flame._]

  "Sergeant Walpole, sir, Post Fourteen, reports that he has nothing ofimportance to report."

  +--------------------------------------------------+ |The Wabbly, uncombatable engine of war, spreads | |unparalleled death and destruction--until Sergeant| |Walpole "strikes at the morale" of its crew. | +--------------------------------------------------+

  The Area Officer's acknowledgment was curt; embittered. For he was anenergetic young man, and he loathed his job. He wanted to be in thewest, where fighting of a highly unconventional nature was taking placedaily. He did not enjoy this business of watching an unthreatenedcoast-line simply for the maintenance of civilian confidence and morale.He preferred fighting.

  Sergeant Walpole, though, exhaled a lungful of smoke at the telephonetransmitter and waited. Presently the rural Central said:

  "All through?"

  "Sure, sweetie," said Sergeant Walpole. "How about the talkies tonight?"

  That was at 2:20 P. M. There was coy conversation, while the civiliantelephone-service suffered. Then Sergeant Walpole went back to his postof duty with a date for the evening. He never kept that date, as itturned out. The rural Central was dead an hour after the first and onlyWabbly landed, and as everybody knows, that happened at 2:45.

  * * * * *

  But Sergeant Walpole had no premonitions as he went back to his hammockon the porch. This was Post Number Fourteen, Sixth Area, Eastern CoastObservation Force. There was a war on, to be sure. There had been a waron since the fall of 1941, but it was two thousand miles away. Evenlone-wolf bombing planes, flying forty thousand feet up, never came thisfar to drop their eggs upon inviting targets or upon those utterlyblank, innocent-seeming places where munitions of war were nowmanufactured underground.

  Here was peace and quiet and good rations and a paradise forgold-brickers. Here was a summer bungalow taken over for militarypurposes, quartering six men who watched a certain section of coast-linefor a quite impossible enemy. Three miles to the south there was anotherpost. Three miles to the north another one still. They stretched allalong the Atlantic Coast, those observation-posts, and the men in themwatched the sea, languidly observed the television broadcasts, and sleptin the sun. That was all they were supposed to do. In doing it theyhelped to maintain civilian morale. And therefore the Eastern CoastObservation Force was enviously said to be "just attached to the Armyfor rations," by the other services, and its members rated with M. P.'sand other low forms of animal life.

  Sergeant Walpole reclined in his hammock, inhaling comfortably. Theocean glittered blue before him in the sun. There was a plume of smokeout at sea indicating an old-style coal-burner, its hull down below thehorizon. Anything that would float was being used since the war began,though a coal-burning ship was almost a museum piece. A trim Dieseltramp was lazing northward well inshore. A pack of gulls were squabblingnoisily over some unpleasantness floating a hundred yards from thebeach. The Diesel tramp edged closer inshore still. It was all verypeaceful and placid. There are few softer jobs on earth than being amember of a "force in being" for the sake of civilian morale.

  * * * * *

  But at 2:32 P. M. the softness of that job departed, as far as SergeantWalpole was concerned. At that moment he heard a thin wailing sound highaloft. It was well enough known nearer the front, but the Eastern CoastObservation Force had had no need to become unduly familiar with it.With incredible swiftness the wailing rose to the shrillest of shrieks,descending as lightning might be imagined to descend. Then there was ashattering concussion. It was monstrous. It was ear-splitting. Windowscrashed in the cottage and tinkled to the sandy earth outside. There wasa pause of seconds' duration only, during which Sergeant Walpole staredblankly and gasped, "What the hell?" Then there was a second thinwailing which rose to a scream....

  Sergeant Walpole was in motion before the second explosion came. He wasdiving off the veranda of Post Number Fourteen. He saw someone elsecoming through a window. He had a photographic glimpse of one of his menemerging through a doorway. Then he struck earth and began to run. Likeeverybody else in America, he knew what the explosions and thescreamings meant.

  But he had covered no more than fifty yards when the third bomb fellfrom that plane so far aloft that it was not even a mote in the sky. Upthere the sky was not even blue, but a dull leaden gray because of thethinness of the atmosphere yet above it. The men in that high-flightbomber could see the ground only as a mass of vaguely blending colors.They were aiming their bombs by filtered light, through telescopes whichused infra-red rays only, as aerial cameras did back in the 1920's. Andthey were sighting their eggs with beautifully exact knowledge of theirvelocity and height. By the time the bombs had dropped eight miles theywere traveling faster than the sound of their coming. The first two hadwiped out Posts Thirteen and Fifteen. The third made no sound before itlanded, except to an observer at a distance. Sergeant Walpole heardneither the scream of fall nor the sound of its explosion.

  * * * * *

  He was running madly, and suddenly the earth bucked violently beneathhis feet, and he had a momentary sensation of things flying madly byover his head, and then he knew nothing at all for a very long time.Then his head ached horribly and someone was popping at somethingvalorously with a rifle, and he heard the nasty sharp explosions of thehexynitrate bullets which have remodeled older ideas of warfare, andSergeant Walpole was aware of an urgent necessity to do something, buthe could not at all imagine what it was. Then a shell went off, theearth-concussion banged his nose against the sand, and the rifle-firestopped.

  "For Gawd's sake!" said Sergeant Walpole dizzily.

  He staggered to his feet and looked behind him. Where the cottage hadbeen there was a hole. Quite a large hole. It was probably a hundredyards across and all of twenty deep, but sea-water was seeping in tofill it through the sand. Its edge was forty or fifty feet from where hestood. He had been knocked down by the heaving earth, and the sand andmud blown out of the crater had gone clean over him. Twenty feet back,the top part of his body would have been cut neatly off by the blast. Asit was....

  * * * *
*

  He found his nose bleeding and plugged it with his handkerchief. He wasstill rather dazed, and he still had the feeling that there wassomething extremely important that he must do. He stood rocking on hisfeet, trying to clear his head, when two men came along the sand-dunesbehind the beach. One of them carried two automatic rifles. The otherwas trying to bandage a limp and flapping arm as he ran. They saw theSergeant and ran to him.

  "Hell, Sarge, I thought y'were blown to little egg-shells."

  "I ain't," said Sergeant Walpole. He looked again at the hole in theground and swore painedly.

  "Look at that," said the man with the flapping arm. "Hell's goin' to poparound here, Sarge."

  The sergeant swung around. Then his mouth dropped open. Just half a mileaway and hardly more than two hundred yards from the shore-line, theDiesel tramp was ramming the beach. A wake still foamed behind it. Amonstrous bow-wave spread out on either hand, over-topping even thecombers that came rolling in. It was being deliberately run ashore. Itstruck, and its fore-mast crumpled up and fell forward, carrying itsderrick-booms with it. There was the squeal of crumpled metal plates.

  "Flyin' a yeller flag just now," panted one of the two privates. "Westarted poppin' hexynitrate bullets at her an' she flung a shell at us.She's a enemy ship. But what the hell?"

  Smoke spurted up from the beached ship. Her stern broke off and settledin the deeper water out from the shore. More smoke spurted out. Her bowsplit wide. There were the deep rumbles of black-powder explosions.Sergeant Walpole and his two followers stared blankly. More explosions,and the ship was hidden in smoke, and when it blew away her funnel wasdown and half or more of her upper works was sliding into the sea, andshe had listed suddenly.

  * * * * *

  Sergeant Walpole gazed upward. Futilely, of course; there was nothing insight overhead. But these explosions did look like the hexynitrate stuffthey put in small-arm bullets nowadays. A thirty-caliber bullet had theexplosive effect of an old-style six-pound T.N.T. shell. Only,hexynitrate goes off with a crack instead of a boom. It wasn't anAmerican plane opening up with a machine-gun.

  Then the beached ship seemed to blow up. A mass of thick smoke coveredher from stem to stern, and bits of plating flew heavily through theair, and there were a few lurid bursts of flame. Sergeant Walpolesuddenly remembered that there ought to be survivors, only he hadn'tseen anybody diving overboard to try to get ashore. He half-startedforward....

  Then the sea-breeze blew this smoke, too, away from the wreckage. Andthe tramp was gone, but there was something else left in its place--sothat Sergeant Walpole took one look, and swallowed a non-existentsomething that came up instantly into his throat again, and rememberedthe urgent thing he had to do.

  "Pete," he said calmly, "you hunt up the Area Officer an' tell him whatyou seen. Here! I'll give you a report that'll keep 'em from slammin'you in clink for bein' drunk. Grab a monocycle somewheres. It's fasterthan a car, the way you'll be travelin'. First telephone you come tothat's workin', make Central put you in the tight beam to head-quarters.Then go on an' report, y'self. See?"

  Pete started, and automatically fumbled with his limp and useless arm.Then he carefully tucked the unmanageable hand in the pocket of hisuniform blouse.

  "That don't matter now," he said absurdly.

  He was looking at the thing left in place of the tramp, as SergeantWalpole scribbled on one of the regulation report-forms of the EasternCoast Observation Force. And the thing he saw was enough to upsetanybody.

  * * * * *

  Where the tramp had been there was a single bit of bow-plating stickingup out of the surf, and a bunch of miscellaneous floating wreckagedrifting sluggishly toward the beach. And there was a solid, rounded,metallic shape apparently quite as long as the original tramp had been.There was a huge armored tube across its upper part, with vision-slitsin two bulbous sections at its end. There were gun-ports visible hereand there, and already a monstrous protuberance was coming into viewmidway along its back, as if forced into position from within. Where thebow of the tramp had been there were colossal treads now visible. Therewas a sort of conning-tower, armored and grim. There was a ghastlysteel beak. The thing was a war-machine of monstrous size. It emitted asudden roaring sound, as of internal-combustion engines operating atfull power, and lurched heavily. The steel plates of the tramp stillvisible above water, crumpled up like paper and were trodden under. Thething came toward the shore. It slithered through the shallow sea, withwaves breaking against its bulging sides. It came out upon the beach,its wet sides glittering. It was two hundred feet long, and it lookedsomehow like a gigantic centipede.

  It was a tank, of sorts, but like no tank ever seen on earth before. Itwas the great-grandfather of all tanks. It was so monstrous that for itsconveyance a ship's hull and superstructure had been built about it, andits own engines had been the engines of that ship. It was so huge thatit could only be landed by blasting away a beached ship from aboutitself, so it could run under its own power over the fragments to theshore.

  Now it stopped smoothly on the sandy beach, in which its eight-foot-widesteel treads sank almost a yard. Men dropped down from ports in itsswelling sides. They made swift, careful inspections of predeterminedpoints. They darted back up the ladders again. The thing roared oncemore. Then it swung about, headed for the sand-dunes, and with anextraordinary smoothness and celerity disappeared inland.