Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

The white-mustached healer nodded. “I’ve also seen this in motorcar accidents,” he said.

“It’s even more critical with gunshot and shrapnel wounds, because the trauma’s usually worse,” McDougald said. The surgeon nodded again, thoughtfully, and walked down the corridor. McDougald looked over at Leonard O’Doull and grinned. “Look at me, Doc, going on just like I know what I’m talking about.”

“Don’t sandbag, Granny,” O’Doull answered. “When it comes to wounds, who’s seen more than you?”

“Nobody this side of the guy who cuts up steers in a Chicago slaughterhouse,” McDougald said. “But he always sees the same ones. Not like that in our line of work, is it?”

“Always something new,” O’Doull agreed. “People keep coming up with new ways to maim their fellow man. I don’t know why I don’t despair of the human race.”

“Somebody once said people were the missing link between apes and human beings,” McDougald said wistfully. “Damned if he didn’t hit that one on the button.”

“Didn’t he just?” O’Doull listened to the artillery outside. “If the Confederates get over the Allegheny, we’re going to be even busier than we are already.”

“So will they,” McDougald said. “They’ll be busier than a one-armed paper hanger with the hives. They may take this place away from us, but Christ! — they’re paying through the nose.”

Leonard O’Doull nodded. It looked that way to him, too. The dashing C.S. barrels weren’t dashing, not in Pittsburgh. They had to fight their way forward house by house, and a lot of them ended up as burnt-out hulks. Confederate infantry had trouble advancing without the barrels, too. Local U.S. counterattacks meant the hospital held a good many wounded Confederates along with U.S. soldiers. That might have been for the best-the more of their own men in this place, the less inclined the Confederates would be to hit it “by accident.”

“Wouldn’t put it past ’em,” McDougald said when O’Doull remarked on that. “They fought as clean as we did the last time around. Here? Now?” He made a sour face. “I think they cheat when they use the Red Cross, and I think they think we cheat, too. Makes them more likely to hit our aid stations and hospitals and ambulances. Featherston’s fuckers, sure as hell.”

“I hope that isn’t true.” O’Doull let it go there. The bad news seemed more likely to be true with each unfolding day. There were even rumors Featherston himself traveled in an ambulance to keep U.S. fighters from shooting him up.

“Well, Doc, if you want some consolation, the bastards in butternut aren’t as bad as they could be,” Granville McDougald said. “It sounds like the Action Francaise boys really abuse the Red Cross.”

“Yeah. I’ve heard that, too,” O’Doull said. “There’s another war as big as this one going on over there-”

“Bigger,” the medic said.

“Bigger, all right.” O’Doull accepted the correction. “But it’s like noises in another room to us. Oh, we’re working with the German High Seas Fleet where we can, but mostly we’ve got our troubles, and Germany and Austria-Hungary have theirs.”

“Austria-Hungary’s got more troubles than you can shake a stick at,” McDougald observed. “All the uprisings in the Balkans make what’s going on in Utah and Canada look like pretty small potatoes.” He grinned crookedly at O’Doull. “Might as well be Ireland, matter of fact.”

“Heh,” O’Doull said sourly-something that sounded like a laugh but really wasn’t. With U.S. help, Ireland had thrown off the English yoke after the Great War. The first thing Winston Churchill’s government did when the new round of fighting flared was send in barrels and bombers and battleships. The Union Jack flew again in Belfast and Dublin and Cork-and the island heaved with rebellion. “I wonder how long it’ll be before Irish people bombs start going off in London.”

McDougald winced. “Those damned Mormons let the genie out of the bottle with that one,” he said. “How do you stop somebody who’s already decided to die?” By the evidence available so far, you couldn’t stop somebody like that, not often enough. McDougald added, “They’ll feel it in Vienna and Budapest, too.” Serbs and Romanians and Bosnians and God only knew how many others from the Balkan patchwork quilt of peoples and competing nationalisms bushwhacked the King-Emperor’s soldiers where and as they could. Russia encouraged them and sent them arms and ammunition, the way the British helped the Canucks, and the Confederates armed the Mormons.

Of course, the USA armed Negroes in the CSA. (O’Doull didn’t even think about U.S. support for the Republic of Quebec, which would still have been a Canadian province absent the Great War.) Germany played those games with Finns and Jews and Chechens and Azerbaijanis inside the Tsar’s empire. And both sides helped their own sets of guerrillas inside the Ukraine, which was, in technical terms, a mess.

An orderly trotted up to O’Doull and McDougald. “We’ve got a man with a leg wound in OR Seven,” he said.

“We should do something about that,” McDougald said, and O’Doull nodded. They hurried toward the OR. Working in an actual operating room was an unaccustomed luxury for O’Doull. It beat the hell out of doing his job under canvas. He had a real operating table, surgical lights he could aim wherever he wanted, and all the other amenities he’d almost forgotten in the field.

And he had a nasty case waiting on the table for him. A leg wound hardly did the injury justice. “Get him under fast, Granny,” O’Doull said after one glance at the shattered appendage.

“Right,” McDougald said, and not much else till the soldier was mercifully unconscious. Then he asked, “You’re not going to try and keep that on, are you?”

“Good God, no,” O’Doull answered. “Above the knee, too, poor bastard.” He picked up a bone saw and got to work.

Like most amputations, it was bloody but fast. The wounded soldier was young and strong and healthy. O’Doull thought he would do well-or as well as you could do after you’d been maimed. How many men on both sides of the border were short an arm or a leg? Too many, that was for sure.

As he closed up the stump, O’Doull asked, “Ever see a real basket case, Granny?”

“No arms, no legs?” McDougald asked, and O’Doull nodded. The medic shook his head. “No, not me. You always hear about ’em, but I’ve never seen one. You get wounded like that, most of the time they take your pieces back to Graves Registration, not to an aid station. How about you?”

“The same,” O’Doull answered. “You hear about ’em all the time. Hell, people talk about basket cases when they mean somebody who’s just all messed up. But I’ve never seen the real McCoy, either.”

“I suppose there really are some,” McDougald said. “Would we have the name if we didn’t have the thing?”

“Beats me,” O’Doull said. “We have names for truth and justice and liberty, too. How often do you really see the things those names point at?”

“Touche, Doc.” Granville McDougald gave him another sour laugh. “And then we’ve got ‘Freedom!’ too.” By the way he said the word, he might have been a stalwart in white shirt and butternut trousers getting ready to go out there and break some heads.

“God damn Jake Featherston up one side and down the other,” O’Doull said wearily as he went to the sink and washed the now one-legged soldier’s blood from his hands. How much blood did Featherston have on his hands? But he didn’t care about washing it off. He reveled in it.

McDougald stood beside him and scrubbed down, too. “I’ve been wishing that very same thing,” he said, holding out his arms in front of him with the wrists up so water would flow down from his hands and carry germs away with it. “I’ve been wishing for it since before the war started, matter of fact, and God hasn’t done thing one. Far as I can tell, He’s at a football game-probably standing in line to get Himself a couple of franks and a beer.”