Artillery wasn't always the infantryman's friend, either. Very often, U.S. and C.S. lines would lie close together. Rounds didn't have to fall short by much to come down on soldiers in green-gray rather than those in butternut. Some of the fault, no doubt, lay in mismanufactured shells and in powder that didn't do everything it was supposed to. And some, just as surely, lay in the calculations artillerymen botched when they were in a hurry-and sometimes when they weren't. All those blunders bloated the butcher's bill.
"One thing," O'Doull said.
"What's that?" Granville McDougald inquired.
"Over on the other side of the line, there are bound to be a couple of Confederate medics bitching about the same thing."
"Oh, yeah." McDougald nodded. "But does that make it better or worse?"
That was another of those… interesting questions. How you answered it depended on how you looked at war. It was better for the USA if the Confederates also killed and maimed their own. It was better for the USA, yes, but much worse for a good-sized group of men who would either die too young or go through life with puckered scars and perhaps without fingers or a foot or their eyesight or testicles.
O'Doull answered with a question of his own: "Are you asking me as an American or as a doctor?"
"That's for you to figure out, wouldn't you say?" McDougald was enormously helpful when dealing with the wounded, much less so when he and O'Doull were making the time pass by.
Another round burst closer than it should have. O'Doull swore in English and in Quebecois French. Somebody on one side of the line or the other didn't know his ass from the end zone. No one set out to shell an aid station, but that was also one of the accidents that happened.
"I think we'd better-" O'Doull began.
Granville McDougald was already doing it. O'Doull followed him out of the tent. Both men jumped into a zigzagging trench not far away. O'Doull was glad they had no wounded lying in the tent right that minute. Getting them out would have been a nightmare. The doctor thought he would sooner have stayed in the tent himself and taken his chances.
"Cigarette?" McDougald held out a pack.
"Thanks." O'Doull took one. They were Niagaras, a U.S. brand, and tasted as if they were made of hay and horseshit. Even bad tobacco, though, was better than no tobacco at all. O'Doull sucked in smoke. "Yeah, thanks, Granny. I needed one there."
Another shell screamed in. A man who listened closely could tell which rounds were long, which short, and which right on the money. O'Doull ducked and threw his hands up over his head. So did McDougald, who'd judged the incoming round the same way he had.
The shell burst between the trench and the aid tent. Shrapnel whined through the air not far enough over their heads; dirt pattered down on them. Some slid down the back of O'Doull's neck. He knew that would drive him crazy later. Nothing he could do about it now.
Cautiously, he stuck his head up above the rim of the trench. The explosion had shredded the green-gray canvas of the aid tent; the Red Cross on the side was ventilated with several rips and tears. And what the fragments would have done to them had they stayed in the tent… "You know something? I'm not what you'd call sorry we vacated the premises."
"Now that you mention it, neither am I." McDougald looked up to survey the damage, too. He whistled mournfully. "No, that wouldn't have been a hell of a lot of fun, would it?"
"No. Looks to me like we could have practiced sewing each other up," O'Doull said.
"Suture self, Doc," McDougald said. O'Doull sent him a reproachful stare. The other man didn't seem to notice he'd been reproached. Anyone who'd say something like that probably wouldn't notice such a thing.
Then O'Doull threw himself flat in the trench again. Two more shells came down, one on the tent, the other close by it. He and McDougald would have been in no position to do any sewing after that. Light a candle for me, Nicole, he thought, and wondered if he'd ever see Riviere-du-Loup again.
Mary Pomeroy hugged her mother. "So good to see you, Ma," she said.
"You, too, dear," Maude McGregor answered. "It was a nice visit, wasn't it?"
"I sure thought so," Mary answered. "Easier to get out of town now that Alec's in kindergarten." She made a sour face. "Even so, I wish I didn't have to send him. The Yanks make teachers fill up the children's heads with the most fantastic lies you ever heard."
"You don't want to get in trouble for leaving him out, though," her mother said. "You don't want to get in trouble at all, especially after all the lies Wilf Rokeby told about you."
"I know, Ma," Mary said, and said no more. She knew Wilf Rokeby hadn't told lies. She knew her mother knew, too. Maude McGregor never would have said so, though, even if you put her on the rack. There were things she carefully didn't see. She hadn't seen them when her husband was alive, and she didn't see them when she looked in her daughter's direction, either.
She'd never asked, for instance, why Mary spent half an hour or an hour or an hour and a half of each recent visit to the farm out in the barn by herself. She never came out to see what her daughter was doing there. She didn't want to know-or rather, to know officially.
All she said now was, "Whatever you're doing, be careful about it."
Gently, Mary answered, "I'm always careful, Ma," and her mother nodded. Mary knew she hadn't been careful enough with Wilf. She'd dodged the immediate danger, but the postmaster had brought her to the occupiers' notice.
The Yanks suspected Pa, but he kept on going, Mary thought fiercely. I can, too. As long as they only suspected, what could they do? They'd never found any evidence against her. They'd never found any evidence against her father, either, till things went wrong when he threw the bomb at General Custer. And if Custer hadn't been more alert than an old man had any business being, Pa might have got away with that, too.
"I'll see you before too long," Mary said. Her mother nodded. The two women embraced. Mary went out to the Oldsmobile. She started the auto and drove away from the farm where she'd grown up.
What went through her mind was, I have to be extra careful now. If the Frenchies caught her with a bomb in the Olds, everything was over. They had no particular reason to search it, but…
Even when she used the bomb, she had to be extra careful. If it went off somewhere too close to Rosenfeld, that would make the occupiers wonder. She muttered to herself as she drove across the vast, wintry Manitoba prairie. The Olds was almost the only motorcar on the road. What she didn't know was how active the overall resistance against the Yanks was. How many things happened that never got into the newspapers or on the wireless? If the Americans were smart-and they were, damn them; they were-they would keep most of those things quiet.
If she wasn't the only one fighting the Yanks in this part of the province, though, then one more bomb wouldn't mean so much. It wouldn't necessarily make the occupiers look toward her. If nobody else was giving them trouble, that was a different story.
She sighed. She hadn't heard anyone else's bombs blow up in Rosenfeld. A lot of the farmers in these parts were Mennonites who went along with the central authority, whatever it happened to be. But there had been that pamphlet, the one she'd turned against Rokeby. Somebody had put it out.
About ten miles west of Rosenfeld lay Coulee, an even smaller town. Like Rosenfeld, Coulee would have had no reason to exist if not for the railroad. It was a place where people loaded grain; Mary had trouble imagining anyone getting off the train in Coulee without the immediate, intense desire to get right back on again. People in Rosenfeld hardly ever thought about Coulee; when they did, it was usually with a condescending smile. Even in Rosenfeld, people needed someone to feel superior to.