Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume XVI

Not exactly his sergeant. In theory, at least, the Medical Corps had a different chain of command. Sergeant Sandler had apparently not studied the theory. "Little Ferdie," since arriving at Luebeck, had been assigned every midnight guard duty and shit detail the sergeant could come up with. And "Little Ferdie" had had the good sense-or lack of guts-to put up with it. He was fully aware that the captain had a similar opinion of the medic's separate chain of command.

Not that that was the primary reason Ferdinand had failed to complain. It was more in the way of an excuse he gave himself, but even he didn't really believe it. Ferdinand simply wasn't a very forceful person. Never had been. He pulled a biter out of his bag and shoved it into the patient's mouth. "Karl, bite down on this and try to hold still. What I'm about to do is probably going to hurt worse than getting shot did, but we can't move you till I stabilize that rib. The musket ball broke your number four left rib in two places. It's a miracle it didn't rip your left lung apart. But if you move too much, the busted pieces of your rib are going to do the job the ball didn't."

As he was talking, Ferdinand was pulling stuff from the medic bag. Including the alcohol. That was where he had drawn the line with Sergeant Sandler, and with Karl and the other troops in the company. They had wanted to drink the stuff. But he had had it drilled into him in medic class that it was a bad idea. Not just because it would be needed for sterilizing wounds like this one. Pure alcohol was bloody dangerous to drink.

The ball had cut a crease in Karl's chest. But to do what he was going to have to do, Ferdinand was going to have to cut some more. First the alcohol, then the scalpel, then the tweezers to grab bone fragments.

Ferdinand didn't hear the shot, but he felt the flinch as one of the men holding Karl in place instinctively tried to duck. "Hold steady, damn it!" Alcohol on his hands again, then reaching into Karl's chest to carefully pull a large chunk of bone away from his lung.

Someone made a retching sound. Ferdinand didn't even look up. "Johan, if you're going to throw up, let somebody else hold his arm and get away from here!" A suture used to tie the fragment of rib in place, then another to repair a nick in the lung that Ferdinand had caused while he was pulling the large fragment of rib, away from the lung. All the time, praying that Karl hadn't lost too much blood. That he wouldn't die of an infection caused by the muddy ground on which he was lying. That Ferdinand had guessed right about what to do. That the pieces of gut he'd used to get Karl's ribs together wouldn't break. Ferdinand applied the sterile bandage and called for a stretcher. Karl had lost consciousness about half way through the procedure. Which went to prove what Ferdinand had already known; that Karl was one tough son of a…

"Gently now! Gently! We can't afford to put stress on the body." As the stretcher bearers were carrying Karl away, Ferdinand looked around for another patient, only to see that the battle was over. He guessed that it hadn't been that much of a battle in the great scheme of things. The Danish forces were back where they belonged. And apparently casualties had been fairly light. There hadn't been any other calls for medics in his area anyway.

Which is what he should have been praying about, he realized. It had taken him… Ferdinand didn't know how long it had taken him. But it was more time than a field medic was supposed to spend on a patient. His job was supposed to be simply to get them stable and transport them back to a real doctor. But Ferdinand knew that if he tried to do it that way, Karl would've been dead before he got back to Luebeck.

The doctor was Jena trained, with six months in the Grantville teaching hospital. He was surprisingly good for a military unit. And he questioned Ferdinand about every step he had taken. The issue was how much damage would have actually been done transferring Karl back to the aid station that had been set up in a converted beer hall in the town. Then, once he was clear on what had happened, the doctor had dumped all over Ferdinand. Not because he disagreed about the effect on Karl, but because performing that kind of treatment in the field meant that Ferdinand wasn't available in case someone else needed him.

They found someone with Karl's blood type to give him a couple of pints. And the doctor went back in and cleaned things up; made sure the rib fragments were in the right place. And that the lung wasn't leaking.

Karl would be returning to light duty in about three weeks. He should be back to full duty, if there were no complications, about nine weeks after that.

Ferdinand drew a deep breath. "Now, back to the company."

Ferdinand was nervous about returning to his company. He was remembering ordering the sergeant and the men of his company about as though he was the captain or something. Especially he remembered telling Johan to get away. Johan wasn't a bad guy, but he was very proud of his courage and didn't take kindly to anyone disparaging it. For the life of him, Ferdinand couldn't remember who he had cussed out for flinching or why they had flinched. But he figured he was in trouble for it, whoever it was.

"How's Karl?" Sergeant Sandler asked.

"Doctor Jensen says that he will be in bed for the next three weeks or so, then light duty. That's assuming no complications, Sergeant."

Sandler nodded and said, "Get cleaned up and get some rest."

Ferdinand looked down at his uniform. It was covered in blood and mud with horse shit on the knees. He wondered, sort of vaguely, why the sergeant wasn't screaming at him about the uniform. Sandler was a stickler for proper military appearance. But, mostly, Ferdinand was too tired to care. He managed to get his uniform off and get some of the blood that had splashed on his face and hands up to his elbows off, then fell into bed.

Sergeant Sandler looked at the little man as he walked away. Covered in blood. Granted, it wasn't his blood, but Sandler realized that if Little Ferdie hadn't been there, the man whose blood it was would be dead. And that man was a friend of his. Sandler was a tough man, a veteran of many battles. He had seen a lot of wounds. Karl's wound was the sort that killed people, killed them in a matter of hours and often in minutes. He, unlike Ferdinand, had not been busy with the battle. He'd been holding Karl's shoulders. He hadn't flinched from the musket ball that had come near, as that was a matter of years of experience. He didn't think Ferdinand had even heard the shot. He was too busy saving the life of a man who had been less than kind to him.

Sometime during the battle, the notion of having a member of the medical corps assigned to his company had gone from being an irritation to a blessing. Hell, Sandler thought, half the doctors he had met couldn't have done what Little Ferdie had done. He didn't know any who could-or would-have done it with musket balls flying.

"Hey, Doc. How's Karl?" Corporal Melman called as Ferdinand entered the mess the next morning. Ferdinand looked around for the doctor, but didn't see him. He hesitated but it was clear that Melman was talking to him.

"He should be fine in about three months," Ferdinand answered. Melman just nodded. He made no threats and didn't do any blustering about how tough he was.

From then on the men of Ferdinand's company called him "Doc." Ferdinand was never sure why. For that matter, neither were the men who had once teased him so unmercifully. They just knew that they needed a name for the man who would hold their lives in his hands should they be wounded in battle. "Medic" wouldn't do. They knew he wasn't a real doctor with a diploma from a university, but he was what they had. What they would have, if they were hit by a musket ball or trampled by a horse.