"Burns are the worst," O'Doull said to Granville McDougald. "Some of the poor bastards with burns, you just want to cut their throats and do them a favor."
"This tannic acid treatment we're using now helps a lot," the corpsman answered. McDougald was resolutely optimistic.
"We're saving people we wouldn't have in the last war-no doubt of that," O'Doull said. "Some of them, though… Are we doing them any favors when we keep them alive?"
"We've got to do what we can," McDougald said. "Once they get the pain under control, they thank us."
"Yeah. Once," O'Doull said tightly. He was seeing a lot more burn cases this time around than he had in the last war. Men who bailed out of barrels usually had to run a gauntlet of flame to escape. During the Great War, barrels had been latecomers and oddities. They were an ordinary part of the fighting here. With so many more of them in action, so many more horrible things could happen to their crews.
In the last war, O'Doull didn't remember anyone asking to be killed so he could escape his torment. It might well have happened, but he hadn't seen it. He did now. More than once, he'd been tempted to ignore the Hippocratic oath he'd sworn and give the victims what they wanted.
"That's why God made morphine, sir," McDougald said.
"God made morphine-and we make addicts," O'Doull replied.
"If you're in pain, that's the least of your worries," the corpsman said. "All you want to do is stop hurting. You can get over morphine addiction once you're not hurting any more. As long as the burns are giving you hell, you might as well be dead."
O'Doull thought of addiction as a personal failing, even if pain relief caused it. He eyed McDougald thoughtfully. The corpsman had a different slant on things. "You look at it from the patient's point of view, don't you? Not the doctor's, I mean."
"I'm not a doctor," McDougald said, which was formally true. He went on, "And we're here for the patients, aren't we?"
A lot of people at aid stations thought they were there to advance their own careers, or to stay out of the front-line fighting. And there were some men from churches that did not approve of members who carried guns, but that had nothing against helping the wounded. "Everybody ought to think the way you do," O'Doull said. "We'd all be better off."
The corpsman only shrugged. "Maybe yes, maybe no. My guess is, we'd just be screwed up a different way."
"Doc! Hey, Doc!" O'Doull had come to dread that call. It meant another wounded man coming in. Sure enough, the corpsman outside went on, "Got a belly wound for you, Doc!"
"Oh, hell," O'Doull said. Even with sulfa drugs, belly wounds were always bad news. The chance for peritonitis was very high, and a bullet or shell fragment could destroy a lot of organs a person simply couldn't live without. O'Doull raised his voice: "Bring him in."
The corpsmen were already doing it. They lifted their stretcher up onto the makeshift operating table that had been someone's kitchen table till the Medical Corps commandeered it. The soldier on the stretcher wasn't groaning or screaming, as men with belly wounds often did. He'd passed out-a mercy for a man with an injury like that. He was ghost pale, and getting paler as O'Doull eyed him.
"I don't think you'd better wait around real long, Doc," said the corpsman who'd shouted for O'Doull.
"I don't intend to, Eddie," O'Doull answered. He turned to McDougald. "Pass gas for me, Granny?" McDougald wasn't an anesthetist, either, but he'd do a tolerable job.
He nodded now. "I'll take a shot at it." He grabbed the ether cone and put it over the unconscious man's face. "Have to be careful not to give him too much, or he's liable to quit breathing for good."
He was liable to do that anyway. He looked like the devil. But he was still alive, and O'Doull knew he had to give it his best shot. He said, "Eddie, get a plasma line into his arm. We're going to have to stretch his blood as far as it'll go, and then maybe another ten feet after that."
"Right, Doc." Eddie grabbed for a needle. O'Doull hoped it wasn't one he'd just used on some other patient, but he wasn't going to get himself in an uproar about it one way or the other. This wounded man had more important things to worry about. Surviving the next half hour topped the list.
When O'Doull opened him up, he grimaced at the damage. The bullet had gone in one side and out the other, and had tumbled on the way through. There were more bleeders than you could shake a stick at, and they were all leaking like hell.
Granville McDougald said, "You don't want to waste a lot of time, Doc. He's just barely here."
"What's his blood pressure, Eddie?" O'Doull asked. His hands automatically started repairing the worst of the damage.
"Let me get a cuff on him," the corpsman said. "It's… ninety over sixty, sir, and falling. We're losing him. Down to eighty over fifty… Shit! He's got no pulse."
"Not breathing," McDougald said a moment later, and then, "I'm afraid he's gone."
Eddie nodded. "No pulse. No BP. No nothin'." He loosened the cuff and pulled the needle from the plasma line out of the soldier's-the dead soldier's-arm. "Not your fault, Doc. You did what you could. He got hit too bad, that's all. I saw what you were trying to fix up. His guts were all chewed to hell."
"That they were." Leonard O'Doull straightened wearily. "Get his identity disk. Then call the burial detail and Graves Registration. Somebody's going to have to notify his next of kin."
"That's a bastard of a job," McDougald said. "In the last war, no one wanted to see a Western Union messenger coming to the door. Everybody was afraid he had a, 'deeply regret' telegram. It's gonna be the same story this time around, too."
O'Doull hadn't thought spending the last war in a military hospital had shielded him from anything. Now he discovered he was wrong. People in Quebec hadn't had to worry about telegrams with bad news-not in the part of Quebec where he'd been stationed, anyhow. Farther west, Quebec City and Montreal had held out for a long time before falling. Francophones had defended them along with English-speaking Canadians.
Lucien doesn't have to worry about the war. He can get on with his life. That was a relief, anyhow. Quebec's conscription law wasn't universal, and Lucien had never had to be a soldier. And with the Republic formally neutral-even if it did lean toward the USA and help occupy English-speaking Canada-it wasn't likely the younger O'Doull would ever have to aim a rifle in anger.
That bothered the elder O'Doull not at all. He'd seen too much of what rifles aimed in anger could do in the last war. The refresher course he was getting now-including the poor son of a bitch who'd just died on the table-had done nothing to change his opinion.
He discovered he was still holding the scalpel. He chucked it into a wide-mouthed jug of rubbing alcohol. The jug had a big red skull and crossbones on it, plus a warning label in red capital letters: poison! do not drink! He hoped that would keep thirsty soldiers from experimenting. You never could tell. He'd heard that sailors were draining the alcohol fuel from torpedo motors and drinking it. But that really was ethyl alcohol, and wouldn't hurt them unless they were pigs. Rubbing alcohol was a different critter. It was poison even in small doses.
He scrubbed his hands with strong soap. He could get the dead soldier's blood off of them easily enough. Getting it off his mind…? He shook his head. That was another story. If anybody could sympathize with Lady Macbeth, a battlefield surgeon was the one to do it. Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. And Macbeth himself:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,