This penicillin stuff knocked those down in nothing flat, though. It was better than sulfa for the clap, and ever so much better than the poisons that had been medicine's only weapons against syphilis.
"Move up, Doc!" a noncom shouted at O'Doull one morning. "Front's going forward, and you gotta keep up with it."
"Send me a truck, and I'll do it," the doctor answered. Sergeant Goodson Lord played a racetrack fanfare on his liberated trombone. The soldier who brought the news thumbed his nose at the medic. Grinning, Lord paused and returned the compliment, if that was what it was.
By now, O'Doull had moving down to a science. Packing, knocking down the tent, loading stuff, actually traveling, and setting up again went as smoothly as if he'd been doing them for years-which he had. He was proud of how fast he got the aid station running once the deuce-and-a-half stopped. And every forward move meant another bite taken out of the Confederate States.
He hadn't been set up again for very long before he got a hard look at what those bites meant. "Doc! Hey, Doc!" Eddie the corpsman yelled as he helped carry a litter back to the aid station. "Got a bad one here, Doc!"
O'Doull had already figured that out for himself. Whoever was on the litter was screaming: a high, shrill sound of despair. "Christ!" Sergeant Lord said. "They go and find a wounded woman?"
"Wouldn't be surprised, not by the noise," O'Doull answered. "It's happened before." He remembered an emergency hysterectomy after a luckless woman stopped a shell fragment with her belly. What had happened to her afterwards? He hadn't the faintest idea.
When he first saw the wounded person, he thought it was a woman. The skin was fine and pale and beardless, the cries more contralto than tenor. Then Eddie said, "Look what they're throwing at us these days. Poor kid can't be a day over fourteen."
This time, O'Doull was the one who blurted, "Christ!" That was a boy. He wore dungarees and a plaid shirt. An armband said, NATIONAL ASSAULT FORCE.
"You damnyankees here're gonna shoot me now, ain't you?" the kid asked.
"Nooo," O'Doull said slowly. He'd seen National Assault Force troops before, but they were old geezers, guys with too many miles on them to go into the regular Army. Orders were to treat them as POWs, not francs-tireurs. Now the Confederates were throwing their seed corn into the NAF, too.
"They said you'd kill everybody you got your hands on," the wounded boy said, and then he started shrieking again.
"Well, they're full of shit," O'Doull said roughly. He nodded to the stretcher-bearers. "Get him up on the table. Goodson, put him out."
"Yes, sir," Lord said. When the mask went over the kid's face, the ether made him think he was choking. He tried to yank off the mask. O'Doull had seen that before, plenty of times. Eddie and Goodson Lord grabbed the boy soldier's hands till he went under.
He'd taken a bullet in the belly-no wonder he was howling. O'Doull cut away the bloody shirt and got to work. It could have been worse. It hadn't pierced his liver or spleen or gall bladder. He'd lose his left kidney, but you could get along on one. His guts weren't too torn up. With the new fancy medicines to fight peritonitis, he wasn't doomed the way he would have been a few years earlier.
"I think he may make it." O'Doull sounded surprised, even to himself.
"I bet you're right, sir," Goodson Lord said. "I wouldn't have given a dime for his chances when you got to work on him-I'll tell you that."
"Neither would I," O'Doull admitted as he started closing up. His hands sutured with automatic skill and precision. "If he doesn't come down with a wound infection, though, what's to keep him from getting better?"
"Then we can kill him," Lord said. O'Doull could see only the medic's eyes over his surgical mask, but they looked amused. The kid had been so sure falling into U.S. hands was as bad as letting the demons of hell get hold of him.
"Yeah, well, if we don't kill him now, will we have to do it in twenty years?" O'Doull asked.
"He'll be about old enough to fight then," Sergeant Lord said.
That was one of too many truths spoken in jest. But what would stop another war between the USA and the CSA a generation down the road? After the United States walloped the snot out of the Confederates this time around, would the USA stay determined long enough to make sure the Confederacy didn't rise again? If the country did, wouldn't it be a miracle? And wouldn't the Confederates try to hit back as soon as the USA offered them even the smallest chance?
"Once you get on a treadmill, how do you get off?" O'Doull said.
"What do you mean, sir?" Lord asked.
"How do we keep from fighting a war with these sons of bitches every twenty years?"
"Beats me," the medic said. "If you know, run for President. I guaran-damn-tee you it'd put you one up on all the chuckleheads in politics now. Most of 'em can't count to twenty-one without undoing their fly."
O'Doull snorted. Then, wistfully, he said, "Only trouble is, I don't have any answers. I just have questions. Questions are easy. Answers?" He shook his head. "One reason old Socrates looks so smart is that he tried to get answers from other people. He didn't give many of his own."
"If you say so. He's Greek to me," Goodson Lord replied.
They sent the wounded Confederate kid off to a hospital farther back of the line-all the way back into Georgia, in fact. O'Doull, who had a proper professional pride in his own work, hoped the little bastard would live even if that meant he might pick up a rifle and start shooting at U.S. soldiers again twenty years from now…or, for that matter, twenty minutes after he got out of a POW camp.
The front ground forward. Before long, Birmingham would start catching it from artillery as well as from the bombers that visited it almost every night. O'Doull wondered how much good that would do. The Confederates might be running short of men, but they still had plenty of guns and ammunition. The bombing that was supposed to knock out their factories didn't live up to the fancy promises airmen made for it.
Featherston's followers still had plenty of rockets, too. Stovepipe rockets blew up U.S. barrels. O'Doull hated treating burns; it gave him the shivers. He did it anyway, because he had to. Screaming meemies could turn an acre of ground into a slaughterhouse. And the big long-range rockets threw destruction a couple of hundred miles.
"Hell with Birmingham," Sergeant Lord said, picking screaming-meemie fragments out of the thigh and buttocks of an anesthetized corporal. "We've got to take Huntsville away from those fuckers. That's where this shit is coming from."
"No arguments from me." O'Doull held out a metal basin to the senior medic. Lord dropped another small chunk of twisted, bloody steel or aluminum into it. Clink! The sound of metal striking metal seemed absurdly cheerful.
"Well, if you can see it and I can see it, how come the brass can't?" Lord demanded. He peered at the wounded man's backside, then dug in with the forceps again. Sure as hell, he found another fragment.
"Maybe they will," O'Doull said. "They swung a lot of force south of Atlanta to make the Confederates clear out. Now we're better positioned to go after Birmingham than we are for Huntsville, that's all."
"Maybe." Lord sounded anything but convinced. "Me, I think the brass are a bunch of jerks-that's what the trouble is."
Of course you do-you're a noncom, O'Doull thought. He too was given to heretical thoughts about the competence, if any, of the high command. Yes, he was an officer, but as a doctor he wasn't in the chain of command. He didn't want to be, either. There often seemed to be missing links at the top of the chain.