Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Looked that way to me, too,” O’Doull said. “That medial collateral was nicely done. I don’t think I could have got it together anywhere near as neat as you did.”

“Thanks, Doc.” McDougald’s gauze mask hid most of his smile, but his eyes glowed. “Had to try it. A knee’s not a knee without a working medial collateral. It’s not a repair that would do for a halfback, but for just getting around it ought to be strong enough.”

“They play football in Quebec, too. Well, sort of football: they’ve got twelve men on a side, and the end zones are big as all outdoors. But it’s pretty much the same game. Guys get hurt the same way, that’s for sure,” O’Doull said. “I’ve had to patch up a couple of wrecked knees. I told the men I’d come after ’em with a sledgehammer if I ever caught ’em playing again.”

“Did they listen to you?” McDougald asked, amused interest in his voice.

“Are you serious? Quebecois are the stubbornest people on the face of the earth.” Leonard O’Doull knew he sounded disgusted. “Repairing a knee once isn’t easy. Repairing it twice is damn near impossible.” He flexed his none too impressive biceps. “I’m getting pretty good with a sledgehammer, though.”

“I believe that.” McDougald and Eddie eased the wounded sergeant off the table. He would finish recovering farther back of the line. McDougald caught O’Doull’s eye. “Want to duck out for a butt before the next poor sorry bastard comes in, Doc?”

“I’d love to. Let’s-” But O’Doull stopped in midsentence, because the next poor sorry bastard came in right then.

One look made O’Doull wonder why the hell the corpsmen had bothered hauling him all the way back here. He had a bullet wound-pretty plainly an entry wound-in his forehead, just below the hairline, and what was as obviously an exit wound, horrible with scalp and blood, in back.

Seeing O’Doull’s expression, one of the stretcher-bearers said, “His pulse and breathing are still strong, Doc. Maybe you can do something for him, anyways.”

“Fat chance,” O’Doull muttered. Military hospitals still held men who’d got turned into vegetables by head wounds in the Great War. Some of them had a strong pulse and breathed on their own, too. Some of them would die of old age, but none would ever be a functioning human being again.

Then the wounded man sat up on the stretcher and said, “Have any aspirins, buddy? I’ve got a hell of a headache.”

“Jesus Christ!” Everybody in the aid tent except the fellow with the head wound said the same thing at the same time. One of the bearers and Eddie and O’Doull crossed themselves. O’Doull had seen a lot of things in his time, but never a man with a through-and-through head wound who sat up and made conversation.

Granville McDougald strode forward. He bent low and looked not at the soldier’s injuries but at the scalp between them. Then he shook his head in slow wonder. “I will be damned,” he said. “I’ve heard of wounds like this, but I didn’t think I’d ever run into one myself.”

“What is it, Granny?” O’Doull asked. He wanted to latch on to something, anything, but the idea of a dead man talking.

“Look, Doc. You can see for yourself.” McDougald’s finger traced the injury. “The slug must have gone in, then slid around the top of this guy’s skull under the scalp till it exited back here. It didn’t do a damn thing more. It couldn’t have, or he’d be dead as shoe leather.”

“I’m fine,” the soldier said. “Except for that headache, anyhow. I asked you guys for aspirins once already.”

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” O’Doull said, ignoring him. “You’re right. You’ve got to be right. That is the luckiest thing I have ever seen in my life. I thought he was a ghost for a second, I swear to God I did.” The rational part of his brain started working again. “We’d better send him back for X-rays once we clean him up. He could have a fracture in there-though his head’s so hard, he might not.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” the wounded man demanded.

“If you didn’t have a thick skull, pal, that bullet might’ve gone through instead of around,” O’Doull told him. “Can you get up on the table by yourself? We’re going to want to get some disinfectant on that and stitch you up and bandage you. You’ve got a story you can tell your grandchildren, that’s for sure.”

The soldier walked to the table and sat down. “You ain’t doin’ nothin’ to me till I get my aspirins, you hear?”

“Give him a couple, Eddie,” O’Doull said wearily. “Hell, give him a slug of the medicinal brandy, too. If anybody ever earned it, he did.”

That produced the first thing besides loud indignation he’d got from the wounded man, who exclaimed, “Now you’re talkin’, Doc! Want a smoke? I got these off a dead Confederate-fuck of a lot better’n what we make.”

O’Doull grabbed his hand before he could light a match. “You don’t want to do that in here,” the doctor said in gentle tones that camouflaged the panic inside. “You’re liable to blow us sky high if you do.”

After the little white pills and the knock of honey-colored hooch, the wounded man was willing to sit still while O’Doull patched him up. He grumbled about the way the doctor’s novocaine burned before it numbed. He grumbled that he could feel the needle even after the novocaine started working. Except for complaining about his headache, he didn’t grumble at all about getting shot in the head.

“Don’t get the bandages over my eyes, dammit,” he said. O’Doull had to coax him back into the stretcher so the corpsmen could take him away-he wanted to walk.

Once he was gone, O’Doull let out a long sigh and said, “Now I am going to have that smoke, by God!”

“Me, too,” Granville McDougald said. They both left the tent to light up-and they both smoked Confederate tobacco, too.

O’Doull blew out a long plume of smoke. “Great God in the foothills,” he said. “Now I really have seen everything.”

“Yeah, well, you know what’s gonna happen as well as I do, Doc,” McDougald said. “They’ll patch him up and they’ll send him home till he finishes healing, and he’ll be a nine days’ wonder while he’s there. And then he’ll come back to the front, and he’ll stop a shell burst with his nuts, and he won’t have to worry about telling his grandchildren stories anymore.”

“Christ!” Whatever O’Doull had expected him to say, that wasn’t it. “And I thought this war was making me cynical.”

McDougald shrugged. “You got out after 1917. You found yourself a nice little French gal and you settled down. I’ve worn the uniform all that time. I’ve got a long head start on you. The shit I’ve seen…” He shook his head. But then he shook it again in a different way. “I’d never seen anything like that before, though. Talk about beating the odds! I’d heard of it. I knew it was possible. But I’d never seen it, and I never thought I would.”

“You sure were one up on me,” O’Doull said. “When he rose up on the stretcher there, I figured he was Lazarus.”

“Gave me a turn, too, and I won’t try to tell you any different.” McDougald took a last drag on his cigarette and crushed it out under his boot. “Well, at least we can feel good about things for a while. Lazarus is going to get better. Some of the ones like that help make up for the sorry bastards we lose.”

On the other side of the Rappahannock, Confederate guns started pounding. Asskickers screamed down out of the sky. Bombs burst. O’Doull stamped out his cigarette, too. “They’ll be bringing more back to us before very long,” he predicted. “Either that or they’ll move us forward up into Fredericksburg.”