McDougald winced. “Those damned Mormons let the genie out of the bottle with that one,” he said. “How do you stop somebody who’s already decided to die?” By the evidence available so far, you couldn’t stop somebody like that, not often enough. McDougald added, “They’ll feel it in Vienna and Budapest, too.” Serbs and Romanians and Bosnians and God only knew how many others from the Balkan patchwork quilt of peoples and competing nationalisms bushwhacked the King-Emperor’s soldiers where and as they could. Russia encouraged them and sent them arms and ammunition, the way the British helped the Canucks, and the Confederates armed the Mormons.
Of course, the USA armed Negroes in the CSA. (O’Doull didn’t even think about U.S. support for the Republic of Quebec, which would still have been a Canadian province absent the Great War.) Germany played those games with Finns and Jews and Chechens and Azerbaijanis inside the Tsar’s empire. And both sides helped their own sets of guerrillas inside the Ukraine, which was, in technical terms, a mess.
An orderly trotted up to O’Doull and McDougald. “We’ve got a man with a leg wound in OR Seven,” he said.
“We should do something about that,” McDougald said, and O’Doull nodded. They hurried toward the OR. Working in an actual operating room was an unaccustomed luxury for O’Doull. It beat the hell out of doing his job under canvas. He had a real operating table, surgical lights he could aim wherever he wanted, and all the other amenities he’d almost forgotten in the field.
And he had a nasty case waiting on the table for him. A leg wound hardly did the injury justice. “Get him under fast, Granny,” O’Doull said after one glance at the shattered appendage.
“Right,” McDougald said, and not much else till the soldier was mercifully unconscious. Then he asked, “You’re not going to try and keep that on, are you?”
“Good God, no,” O’Doull answered. “Above the knee, too, poor bastard.” He picked up a bone saw and got to work.
Like most amputations, it was bloody but fast. The wounded soldier was young and strong and healthy. O’Doull thought he would do well-or as well as you could do after you’d been maimed. How many men on both sides of the border were short an arm or a leg? Too many, that was for sure.
As he closed up the stump, O’Doull asked, “Ever see a real basket case, Granny?”
“No arms, no legs?” McDougald asked, and O’Doull nodded. The medic shook his head. “No, not me. You always hear about ’em, but I’ve never seen one. You get wounded like that, most of the time they take your pieces back to Graves Registration, not to an aid station. How about you?”
“The same,” O’Doull answered. “You hear about ’em all the time. Hell, people talk about basket cases when they mean somebody who’s just all messed up. But I’ve never seen the real McCoy, either.”
“I suppose there really are some,” McDougald said. “Would we have the name if we didn’t have the thing?”
“Beats me,” O’Doull said. “We have names for truth and justice and liberty, too. How often do you really see the things those names point at?”
“Touche, Doc.” Granville McDougald gave him another sour laugh. “And then we’ve got ‘Freedom!’ too.” By the way he said the word, he might have been a stalwart in white shirt and butternut trousers getting ready to go out there and break some heads.
“God damn Jake Featherston up one side and down the other,” O’Doull said wearily as he went to the sink and washed the now one-legged soldier’s blood from his hands. How much blood did Featherston have on his hands? But he didn’t care about washing it off. He reveled in it.
McDougald stood beside him and scrubbed down, too. “I’ve been wishing that very same thing,” he said, holding out his arms in front of him with the wrists up so water would flow down from his hands and carry germs away with it. “I’ve been wishing for it since before the war started, matter of fact, and God hasn’t done thing one. Far as I can tell, He’s at a football game-probably standing in line to get Himself a couple of franks and a beer.”
That was blasphemous, which didn’t mean it didn’t hold a lot of truth. “I don’t know how anybody’s going to be able to believe in anything by the time this damn war is done,” O’Doull said.
“I don’t know how anybody believed anything after the last one,” McDougald said. “But you’re right. This one’s worse. The poison gas is more poisonous. We’re better at dropping bombs on the Confederates’ cities, and they’re better at dropping them on ours. ‘O brave new world, that has such people in’t!’ ” He quoted Shakespeare with malice aforethought.
“You forgot one,” O’Doull said. McDougald raised a questioning eyebrow. The doctor explained: “We didn’t slaughter people just because of who they were the last time around.”
“Oh, yeah? Tell it to the Armenians. And the Turks were on our side,” McDougald said. O’Doull winced. He’d forgotten about the Armenian massacres. He was sure most people in the USA had. McDougald went on, “But you’re right-we didn’t, not on this continent. And Jake Featherston probably noticed nothing much ever happened to the Turks, and he must have figured nothing much would happen to him if we went after his spooks. And you know what else? Looks like he’s right.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” O’Doull said unhappily.
“I don’t think a whole lot of people in the USA like smokes a whole hell of a lot,” McDougald said. “I’d be lying if I said I liked ’em a whole hell of a lot myself. Don’t know very many. Don’t know any very well-aren’t that many here to know, and that suits me fine. What I do know… Well, you can keep ’em, far as I’m concerned. But there’s a lot of difference between saying that and wanting to see ’em dead.”
“I’m with you,” O’Doull said. “I don’t think I saw a Negro all the time I was up in Riviere-du-Loup, and I didn’t much miss ’em, either. Lots and lots of ’em in the CSA, so the Confederates can’t pretend they aren’t there, the way we can. But making so they really aren’t there-that’s filthy.”
“Yeah, we’re on the same page again, Doc,” Granville McDougald said. “And you know what else?” O’Doull raised an interrogative eyebrow. The medic went on, “It won’t do those poor sons of bitches one damn bit of good.” Leonard O’Doull sadly nodded, because that was much too likely to be true.
Coming back to the Lower East Side of New York City always felt strange to Flora Blackford. It was only a couple of hours by fast train from Philadelphia, but it was a different world. As she made a campaign visit just before the 1942 Presidential elections, she found it different in some new ways.
Confederate bombers hadn’t hit her hometown nearly so hard as they’d hit Philadelphia. Those extra 90 miles-180 round trip-meant more fuel and fewer bombs aboard. They also meant U.S. fighters had all that extra time to try to shoot the Confederates down. And most of the bombs that had fallen in New York City had fallen on Wall Street and the publishing district, and on and around the factories in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The neighborhood where she’d grown up was-oh, not untouched by war, but not badly damaged, either.
She spoke in a theater where she’d debated her Democratic opponent during the Great War. This time, the Democrats were running a lawyer named Sheldon Vogelman. He stood well to the right of Robert Taft, and only a little to the left of Attila the Hun. He was the sort of man who, if he weren’t Jewish, probably would have been a raving anti-Semite. Instead, he raved about plowing up the Confederates’ cities and sowing them with salt so nothing ever grew there again. He also wanted to plow up anybody in the USA who presumed to disagree with him.
“My opponent,” Flora said, “would ship salt from the Great Salt Flats in Utah especially for the purpose. Digging up the salt and bringing it east for his purposes would create jobs. I’m afraid that’s his entire definition of a full-employment policy.”