“That’s me.” Johnny sounded halfway proud of himself. Part of that was the morphine talking. And part of it was knowing he had a hometowner. His wound wasn’t enough to ruin him for life, but it was plenty to keep him away from the front for a while. Chester’s wound in the Great War was one like that. He actually did go back to Toledo for a while to recuperate. Maybe Johnny would get to see his family and friends.
“We’ll haul him out of here.” The corpsman yelled for buddies. They manhandled Johnny onto a stretcher and lugged him back toward the closest aid station. Chester hoped the rockets didn’t knock it flat. They sure did a hell of a job up here.
Even if he got himself a hometowner this time around, they wouldn’t ship him over to Los Angeles. He was as sure of that as he was of his last name. Yes, the CSA’s retreat from northern Ohio meant the United States were no longer cut in half, but it would be quite a while before anything but the most urgent supplies and people crossed the gap. A general with a hometowner might fall into that category. A sergeant damn well didn’t.
A bullet cracking past made him flatten out on the ground like a run-over toad. He didn’t want to get shot again, not even with a hometowner. And life didn’t come with a guarantee. You might not pick up a hometowner. You might turn into Graves Registration’s business, not some corpsman’s. Rita would never forgive him if he got himself killed, not that he’d be able to appreciate her anger.
Half an hour later, a thunderous U.S. artillery barrage came down on the heads of the Confederates withdrawing across the Scioto. Every gun the USA had handy opened up on the men in butternut. Some of them would be screaming for medics, no doubt about it.
But would all those guns match the horror the Confederates inflicted with a couple of salvoes of rockets? Chester Martin wasn’t sure. Maybe the rockets seemed worse because he’d been shelled too many times before. And maybe they seemed worse because they were worse. He feared he would see them again often enough to make up his mind.
In a way, Dr. Leonard O’Doull wasn’t sorry to get back under canvas again. It meant the front was moving forward. He’d spent longer than he wanted to working out of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical center as the battle for the city swayed back and forth. He didn’t want to think about how much work he did there.
Operating in a tent a few hundred yards back of the line also had its drawbacks. What he’d done at the medical center reminded him of that. He’d worked in fully equipped operating rooms, with nurses at his beck and call and with X-ray equipment right down the corridor. He had it easy, in other words.
Now he was on his own again, doing the emergency work that patched people up well enough to get them farther back so other doctors could do a more thorough job if they had to. It was, or could be, satisfying work-he saved a lot of lives, and he knew it. But he also knew he might save more still if he had everything here that he had back at the hospital.
He worked like a man possessed, trying to save a private who’d got caught in the open by one of the Confederates’ newfangled rockets. “Who would have thought we’d see a new kind of wound?” he said, tying off a bleeder and extracting a chunk of casing with a forceps. “Half blast, half shrapnel.”
“Best of both worlds. Happy day,” Granville McDougald said. “Aren’t we clever?”
Because O’Doull had an M.D., he held officer’s rank-they made him a major when they talked him out of the Republic of Quebec and back into U.S. uniform for the first time in a quarter of a century. That didn’t mean he would ever have to command a battalion. A good thing for the battalion, too, he thought. It did let him give orders to the men he worked with.
Granny McDougald was a sergeant. He’d been a medic as long as O’Doull had been a doctor-he didn’t leave the Army after the Great War, the way O’Doull did. His knowledge was much narrower than the physician’s. But, within its limits, it was just as deep. He was all too intimately familiar with the multifarious ways in which human bodies could get mangled.
He knew how to fix them, too. Even without formal training, he made a damn good surgeon. He was a more than capable anesthetist, too. O’Doull knew McDougald could do most of his work if anything happened to him.
The medic said, “I wonder when they’ll figure out how to pack gas into those rockets.” Above his mask, his gray eyes were grim.
“Bite your tongue, Granny!” O’Doull exclaimed. But what a U.S. medic could imagine, so, no doubt, could a C.S. engineer. Morosely, O’Doull said, “Probably just a matter of time.”
“Uh-huh,” McDougald said. “How’s he doing there?”
“I think he’ll make it,” O’Doull answered. “I’ve got most of the wound cleaned up. The blast damage to his lungs, though…Damn rocket might as well have been a bomb.”
“Lucky they didn’t point those things in our direction,” McDougald said. “Doesn’t look like they can aim ’em for hell.”
“Tabernac!” O’Doull muttered. He still swore in Quebecois French every once in a while; it was almost the only language he spoke for half his life. He never gave up reading English, because so much medical literature was written in it. But not much of his birthspeech came out of his mouth while he was living in Riviere-du-Loup. “You get the nicest ideas, Granny.”
“Yeah, well, you go through a couple of wars and you figure anything that can come down can come down on your head.”
O’Doull had his own fair share of the cynicism so many medical men wear. When you spend your days looking at the way the human body can go wrong-or, in war, can be made to go wrong-you are unlikely to believe, as Candide did, that this is the best of all possible worlds. But Granny McDougald had his fair share and what seemed like two or three other people’s besides.
“You know what we really need?” McDougald went on as O’Doull put in suture after suture.
“Tell me. I’m all ears,” O’Doull replied.
“Must make sewing up that poor bastard kind of clumsy, but all right,” the senior medic said. “What we really need is a bomb so big and juicy, they won’t waste it on the battlefield. They’ll drop it on New York City or New Orleans, and boom!-it’ll blow the whole place right off the map like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Calisse!” O’Doull said, and then, “Son of a bitch! Why would you want a bomb like that?”
“Because it’s the only thing I can think of that’s so awful that after you use it a few times and everybody sees how awful it is, it’ll scare the shit out of people and they won’t want to use it any more. If we had bombs like that and the CSA did and England and France and Germany and Austria-Hungary and Russia and the Japs, how the hell could you fight a war?”
“Carefully,” O’Doull answered. He set down his scalpel as Granville McDougald laughed. “I’ve got this guy stabilized, or as stabilized as I can get him. If his lungs aren’t wrecked and if the tissue the blast tore up doesn’t go gangrenous on him, chances are he’ll pull through.”
“Good job, Doc. I wouldn’t have given more than about four bits for his chances when the corpsmen hauled him in,” McDougald said.
A couple of minutes later, at Leonard O’Doull’s direction, the corpsmen sent the wounded man back to a real hospital several miles to the rear. He might finish his recovery there, or he might go farther back still. O’Doull would have bet on the latter-this guy would live, he thought, but wasn’t likely to put on a helmet and pick up a Springfield again any time soon.
O’Doull shed his mask and tossed it in a trash can. He washed the soldier’s blood off his hands and chucked his surgical instruments into a tub of alcohol. If he had time, he’d autoclave them before he used them again. If he didn’t…Well, alcohol made a good disinfectant.
“I’m going outside for a smoke before they bring in the next poor miserable so-and-so,” he said. “Come with me?”