Then the pain reached his brain, and he howled like a wolf and clutched at himself. He knew what had hit him, all right, and wished to God he didn’t. He scrabbled for the pouch that held his wound dressing, the sulfa powder he was supposed to dust on the wound before he used the bandage, and the morphine syrette that might build a wall between him and the fire in his leg.
“Sergeant’s down!” somebody yelled.
“Corpsman!” Two or three soldiers shouted the same thing.
Armstrong detached the bayonet from the muzzle of his Springfield and used it to cut away his trouser leg so he could give himself first aid. He felt sick and woozy. He also bit his lip against the pain. The wound hadn’t hurt for the first few seconds after he got it, but it sure as hell did now.
My old man got hit just about like this, he thought as he sprinkled sulfa powder into the hole in his calf. He’d never had a whole lot in common with his father. This wasn’t the way he wanted to start. Merle Grimes still used a cane to take some of the weight off his bad leg. Armstrong hoped that wouldn’t happen to him.
He slapped on the bandage. Then he yanked the top off the syrette, stuck himself, and pushed down on the plunger. He felt more squeamish about that than he had about the bandage, or even the wound. He was hurting himself on purpose. He knew he would feel better soon, but knowing didn’t make a whole lot of difference.
Once he’d done what he could for himself, he looked around for cover. He didn’t see anything close by. He pulled his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging. It wouldn’t be much of a hole, no doubt, but anything was better than nothing. He piled the dirt from the scrape in front of him. Enough of it might stop a bullet, or at least slow one down.
He’d just got up a halfway decent dirt rampart when medics crouched beside him. “Here you go, Sergeant,” one of them said. “Can you slide onto the stretcher?”
“Sure.” Armstrong was amazed at how chipper he sounded. He didn’t care about anything. The morphine had taken hold while he was digging. He didn’t slide so much as roll onto the stretcher.
Another medic looked at his wound. The man with the Red Cross armbands and smock and helmet markings poked at it, too, which hurt in spite of the shot. “He did a pretty good job patching himself up,” he reported. “I don’t think the bones are broken. Looks like a hometowner to me.” He gave Armstrong an injection, too, before the wounded man could tell him not to bother.
“Where you from, Sergeant?” asked one of the corpsmen at Armstrong’s head.
“Uh, Washington. D.C., I mean,” Armstrong answered vaguely. That second shot was kicking like a mule. He felt as if he were floating away from himself.
The medic didn’t seem to see anything out of the ordinary in the way he talked. The man laughed. “If that’s your home town, you’re safer staying away. Damn Confederates have worked it over pretty good, I hear.”
“Folks are all right, as far as I know,” Armstrong said. Then the corpsmen picked up the stretcher and carried it away. Armstrong had felt as if he were floating before. Now he floated and bounced.
Red Cross flags flying around the aid station and Red Crosses painted on the tents themselves told the Canucks not to shoot this way-or gave them targets, depending. One of the medics let out a yelclass="underline" “Doc! Hey, Doc! We got a casualty!”
That’s what I am, all right. With two shots of morphine in him, the idea didn’t bother Armstrong a bit. “Bring him in!” somebody yelled from the other side of the canvas. In Armstrong went. He smelled ether and other chemicals he couldn’t name-and blood, enough blood for a butcher’s shop. “Where are you hit, soldier?” a bespectacled man asked from behind a surgical mask.
“Leg,” Armstrong answered.
The corpsmen slid him off the stretcher and onto the operating table. The doctor peeled off the bandage he’d put on and studied the wound. “You’re lucky,” he said after perhaps half a minute.
“My ass.” Even doped to the gills, Armstrong knew bullshit when he heard it. “If I was lucky, the fucker would’ve missed me.”
“He’s got you there, Doc,” one of the medics said, laughing.
“Oh, shut up, Rocky,” the surgeon replied without rancor. He turned back to Armstrong. “I’m going to give you a shot of novocaine to numb you up. Then I’ll clean that out. It should heal fine. You may not be as lucky as you like, but you’ll do all right.”
He wasn’t especially gentle, and he didn’t wait for the novocaine to take full effect before he started working with a probe and forceps and a scalpel. Armstrong yipped a couple of times. Then he did more than yip. “Christ on a crutch, Doc, take it easy!” he said.
“Sorry about that.” The surgeon didn’t sound very sorry. He didn’t take it easy, but went on, “No offense, but I want to get you taken care of in a hurry so I can deal with a bad wound if one comes in.”
“Thanks a lot,” Armstrong said. “Easy for you to talk like that-it ain’t your goddamn leg.”
“Well, no,” the medico said. “But it’s not an amputation, either, or a sucking chest, or a belly wound, or a bullet in the head. You’ll be back on duty in six weeks or so. In the meantime, you get to take it easy while you heal. Could be worse.” As he spoke, he did some more snipping. Armstrong yelped again.
After what seemed like forever and was probably about ten minutes, the surgeon gave him a shot. “What’s that?” Armstrong asked suspiciously.
“Tetanus-lockjaw,” the man answered. He eyed Armstrong over his mask. “Locking your jaws might be an improvement, all things considered.”
“Funny, Doc. Har-de-har-har. I’m laughing my ass off, you know what I mean?”
“Get him out of here,” the surgeon told the corpsmen. “Some other poor bastard’ll come along pretty damn quick.”
They carried Armstrong over to a tent next to the aid station and put him on a cot. “Ambulance’ll be along in a while,” one of them said.
“Happy day,” he answered. They were shaking their heads when they left the tent. He couldn’t have cared less.
The tent held a dozen cots. Counting his, five of them were occupied. None of the other wounded men was in any shape to talk. One of them had bloody bandages around his head. One had lost an arm. Two had torso wounds. Three, including the man who’d been shot in the head, were deeply unconscious. The other one moaned from time to time, but didn’t come out with any real words.
Looking at them, listening to them, Armstrong reluctantly decided the smartass surgeon had a point. If he had to get wounded, he could have done a lot worse than catching a hometowner. Despite the morphine and novocaine, his leg barked again. He muttered under his breath. Then he brightened-a little, anyhow. His old man had always thought he wasn’t quite good enough, that he never did enough. If his father tried saying that now, Armstrong promised himself he’d knock his goddamn block off.
Lulu looked into Jake Featherston’s office. “General Forrest is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said.
“Send him in, then,” Jake growled. His secretary nodded and ducked out to bring back the chief of the Confederate General Staff.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked pale and pasty: the look of a man who spent most of his time underground and didn’t see the sun very often. Featherston looked the same way, but he hardly noticed it-he saw himself all the time. Forrest nodded to him. “Mr. President,” he said.
“Hello, General.” Jake leaned forward across the desk. “Are we ready to hit back at those damnyankee sons of bitches?”
“General Patton thinks so, sir, and he’s the man on the spot,” Forrest answered.
“He’s the man on the spot, all right,” Jake Featherston said. His eyes went to the map on the wall of his office. The Confederates had been gathering men and materiel east of the Appalachians for weeks, aiming to strike at the U.S. flank. If everything went the way it was supposed to, they could cut off the Yankees in Tennessee and bundle the ones in Kentucky back to the Ohio. That would put the war on even terms again. But if things didn’t go the way he wanted them to…“We can’t afford to fuck this up.”