Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Dr. Leonard O’Doull was a tall, thin man with a long jaw and a face as Irish as his name. He worked in a U.S. Army aid station a few hundred yards behind the line in Virginia. A few hundred yards, in this case, was enough to put him on the north side of the Rapidan when the front was on the south side, in the almost impenetrable second-growth country called the Wilderness. He didn’t like that. Getting wounded men back over the river meant delay, and delay, sometimes, meant a death that faster treatment could have stopped.

But there was no help for it. The U.S. bridgehead over the Rapidan was small and under constant assault by air, armor, and artillery. The Confederates were no worse about respecting the Red Cross than their counterparts in green-gray, but there was nowhere in the bridgehead itself that an aid station could hope to escape the evil chances of war.

First Sergeant Granville McDougald waxed philosophical when O’Doull complained: “We do what we can do, Doc, not what we want to do.”

“Yeah, Granny, I know.” O’Doull had an M.D. He’d had a civilian practice up in Riviere-du-Loup, in the Republic of Quebec, where he’d settled after a stint as an army surgeon there in the Great War. McDougald had been a medic in the last go-round, and ever since. O’Doull wasn’t at all sure which of them knew more about medicine. He went on, “Just ’cause I know it doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“Well, no,” McDougald allowed. “But there’s not a hell of a lot of point to flabbling about things you can’t help.”

O’Doull grunted. Like any doctor, he was an officer-he had a major’s oak leaves on his shoulder straps. Like any long-service noncom, McDougald had ways of subverting the privileges rank gave to officers. Being right most of the time was not the least of them.

Before O’Doull could do anything more than grunt, a flight of northbound shells roared by overhead. The sound put him in mind of a freight train rumbling down the track. Confederate artillery constantly tried to disrupt U.S. supply lines.

Disrupt supply lines. That was a nice, bloodless phrase. What the Confederates were really trying to do was blow up trucks and motorcars and trains, to turn the vehicles into fireballs and the men inside them into burnt, mangled, screaming lumps of flesh. That was what it boiled down to.

Granville McDougald also listened to the shells flying north. “Didn’t hear any gurgles that time,” he said.

“Happy day,” O’Doull answered. And it was a happy day… of sorts. Rounds filled with poison gas made a distinctive glugging noise on their way through the air. Mustard gas hardly ever killed quickly. But the blisters it raised on the skin could keep a man out of action for weeks. And the blisters it raised on the lungs could keep him an invalid for years, strangling him half an inch at a time and making all his remaining days a hell on earth.

Nerve agents, on the other hand… Get a whiff of those, or get even a little drop on your skin, and the world would go dark because your pupils contracted to tiny dots. Your lungs would lock up, and so would your heart, and so would your other muscles, too-but when your lungs and heart stopped working the rest of your muscles didn’t matter a whole hell of a lot.

Soldiers on both sides carried syringes full of atropine. Anyone who thought he was poisoned with a nerve agent was supposed to stab himself in the thigh and ram the plunger home. If he was right, the atropine would block the effects of the poison gas. If he was wrong, the antidote that would have saved him would poison him instead. That wasn’t usually fatal, they claimed.

All the same, it made for one hell of a war.

“You know,” O’Doull said meditatively, “twenty-five years ago I thought we’d hit bottom. I thought we were doing the worst things to each other that human beings could think of to do.” He laughed-in lieu of sobbing or screaming. “Only goes to show what I know, doesn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t suppose you were the only one with that idea,” McDougald said. “Kind of makes you wonder where we go from here, doesn’t it?”

“Tabernac!” O’Doull said, and Granny McDougald laughed at him. When he didn’t watch himself, he swore in Quebecois French. Why not? He’d spoken it every day for a quarter of a century. English was the rusty language for him. He was surprised it had come back as well as it had. He’d read it all through his time in Riviere-du-Loup, to keep up with medical literature. That had probably helped.

U.S. counterbattery fire answered the C.S. artillery. By the sound of things, the U.S. bombardment had plenty of poison gas in it. Intellectually, O’Doull understood why. The gas would either deny Confederate guns to their gunners or force the men to don masks and heavy, rubberized outfits that covered every inch of them. Those were unpleasant in cool weather. In the summer, there was some question whether gas or protection from it was more lethal.

As far as O’Doull was concerned, though, the intellect had little to do with gas. He loathed it, pure and simple. He’d never known a doctor or a medic who didn’t. How could anyone not loathe stuff made to incapacitate and torment?

People on both sides of the front seemed to have no trouble at all.

Savagely, O’Doull said, “I wish to God they’d test that shit”-he could swear in English, too-“on the people who invent it and the people who improve it and the people who make it. Then they’d be sure they’ve got it just right.”

“Works for me,” McDougald said. “Write up a memo and send it on to the Ordnance Bureau. See what they have to say about it.”

“I’ll be damned if I’m not tempted to,” O’Doull said. “What can they do? Court-martial me and throw me out of the Army? I’d thank ’em and go home, and they’d never see my ass again.”

“Do it,” McDougald urged. “I’ll sign it. They want to bust me down to private, I don’t care. I’d be doing the same thing with a lot of stripes or without any, and I won’t get rich on Army pay no matter what grade I’m in.”

Before O’Doull could say anything to that, a shout from outside the aid station brought him back to the real and immediate world of war: “Doc! Hey, Doc! You there? We got a casualty for you!”

“No, I’m not here, Eddie,” O’Doull yelled back. “I went to Los Angeles for the sun.”

“Funny, Doc. Funny like a crutch.” Eddie and another corpsman, a big, burly, taciturn fellow named Sam, carried a stretcher into the tent. Both medics wore smocks with Red Crosses fore and aft, Red Cross armbands, and Red Crosses painted on the fronts and backs of their helmets. Corpsmen on both sides sometimes got shot anyway.

The corporal on the stretcher wasn’t at death’s door. He was, in fact, swearing a blue streak. He had most of one trouser leg cut away, and a blood-soaked bandage on that thigh. His opinion of the Confederate who’d shot him wasn’t far from Sophocles’ of Oedipus.

“Round tore out a big old chunk of meat,” Eddie said. “Missed the femoral artery, though.”

“I guess it did,” Granville McDougald said. “He’d be holding up a lily if the artery got cut.”

O’Doull nodded. A man could bleed out in a hurry if anything happened to his femoral artery. “Let’s get him on the table,” O’Doull said. “I’ll do what I can to patch him up, but he’s going to be on the shelf for a while.” He spoke to the noncom: “You’ve got yourself a hometowner, buddy.”

“Oh, yeah, just what I fuckin’ need,” the corporal said as Eddie and Sam lifted him off the stretcher and onto the operating table. “Got a letter from my sis last week-my wife’s fuckin’ around with the fuckin’ milkman. I go back to fuckin’ St. Paul, I’ll beat the fuck out of her.”