Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

John Abell drummed his fingers on the side of his thigh-from him, the equivalent of another man’s jumping up and down and waving his arms and yelling his head off. “This would involve cooperation with the Navy,” he said at last. By the way he said it, he might have been talking about eating with his fingers. The Army always had the feeling that the Navy didn’t quite pull its weight. Here, though…

Morrell shrugged. He had that feeling himself. There’d been no great naval coups in this war, nothing like the capture of the Sandwich Islands. Indeed, the Navy seemed to be losing those islands a few at a time. Even so, he said, “This is something they can do,” and hoped he told the truth.

Rather than replying, Abell pulled a notebook from a breast pocket and scribbled in it. “You… may be right,” he said when he put the notebook back. “It’s a, ah, more indirect approach to defending the interior regions than we’d had in mind. What happens if you’re wrong?”

“I’ll probably be too dead to worry about it,” Morrell answered. Abell blinked-no, he didn’t think about things like leading from the front. Morrell went on, “But whoever takes over for me will have a couple of things going for him. Either the Confederates won’t have taken all the lakefront, or they’ll have fought their way through it. If they haven’t, he can hit them in the flank. If they have, with luck they’ll be bled white and they’ll have a tougher time getting to Pittsburgh-if that’s where they’re going.”

“That is the current assessment,” Abell said primly.

Bully. But, again, Morrell swallowed the old-fashioned slang before it came out. He and the desk warriors of Philadelphia might not agree on means, but they did on ends. If he were Jake Featherston and he wanted to try to knock the USA out of the war, he would have gone after Pittsburgh, too. Pontiac was the other possibility. Engine production, though, was more widely dispersed than steel. And without steel, you couldn’t make engines for very long, either.

“We’ll do what we can, Colonel,” he said.

“We have to do more than that, ” John Abell exclaimed.

Morrell started to laugh, then checked himself yet again. Abell hadn’t been joking. Morrell looked at the map again. Abell had no reason to joke, either.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull had thought that pulling out of Fredericksburg would cut U.S. casualties. And so it would, no doubt, in the long run. In the short run… In the short run, the Confederates on the heights gleefully bombarded the withdrawing men in green-gray. They’d knocked out the pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock more than once, knocked them out and then poured shellfire into the men stuck near them waiting to cross.

“I hate artillery,” O’Doull remarked as he worked to repair a mangled leg. He’d thought at first that he would have to take it off. Now he hoped this corporal would be able to keep it, and thought he would, too, if he didn’t get a wound infection that spread to the bone.

Across the table from him, Granville McDougald nodded. “The wounds are a lot nastier than anything a bullet can do, aren’t they?”

“They’re more likely to be, anyhow.” O’Doull had seen horrors from both. A lot of the very worst horrors, he’d never seen at all. They were reserved for front-line soldiers and stretcher bearers and Graves Registration personnel. No one could hope to repair some wounds. God almighty would have had trouble repairing some men hit by artillery fire for the Resurrection.

“Get that bleeder there, Doc,” McDougald said, and O’Doull did. The bald medic went on, “I thought you were crazy when you said you were going to try and patch this leg. I’d’ve just reached for the bone saw myself. But you may get a good result out of it. My hat’s off to you.” He doffed an imaginary chapeau.

“I hope so-and thanks.” O’Doull yawned behind his surgical mask. Granville McDougald chuckled, recognizing the expression. O’Doull added, “Jesus, but I’m tired.”

“I believe it. This just never ends, does it?”

“Doesn’t seem to,” O’Doull said. “Now they’ll probably ship us back to Ohio, eh? That would give us a few days of vacation.”

“Oh, boy,” McDougald said in a hollow voice. “We’re getting plenty of practice going back and forth, anyway.”

They were still joking about it when the corpsman brought in another wounded man. They both fell silent at the same time. All O’Doull said was, “Get him under fast, Granny.” McDougald nodded and put the ether cone over the soldier’s face. Even that wasn’t easy; he’d lost part of his nose. He’d also lost a chunk of his upper jaw and a bigger chunk of his lower jaw. He made horrible gobbling noises nothing like words.

“Can you fix him, Doc?” one of the corpsmen asked. The fellow gulped afterwards, and O’Doull had a devil of a time blaming him. This was another artillery horror, and viler than most.

Before answering, O’Doull told MacDougald, “Get a blood-pressure cuff on him, and watch his airway, too-don’t want him drowning on us.”

“Right.” The medic handled his end of the business with quick but unhurried competence. “BP is 110 over 70,” he reported a few seconds later. “He’s got a strong pulse, the poor bastard.”

“He would,” O’Doull said morosely. He nodded to the stretcher bearer then. “I don’t think he’s going to up and die on us, but I’m not sure we’re doing him any favor keeping him alive.”

“Yeah.” The corpsman looked away. With the best will in the world, with the best plastic surgery in the world-which, odds were, the wounded soldier wouldn’t be lucky enough to get-people would be looking away from the man on the table for the rest of his life. Did he have a girlfriend? A wife? Would he still, once she saw him? Did he have a little boy? What would Junior make of Daddy with half a face?

“Gotta try,” McDougald said, and O’Doull nodded. Some men were tough enough to come through something like this not only sane but triumphant. Some had people around them who loved them no matter what they looked like.

Most, unfortunately, didn’t.

Knowing that made O’Doull more hesitant than he wished he were. He did what he could to clean the wound, trim away smashed tissue and bone, and make repairs where and as he could. Then he shot the man full of morphine and told McDougald, “Put him under as deep as he’ll go, Granny. He won’t want to be awake once he finally is. Let’s put off the evil minute as long as we can.”

“No arguments here. Back at a field hospital, they’ll get him all bandaged up so he won’t have to look at-that-right away. If they know what they’re doing, they’ll break it to him gently.”

“Yeah,” O’Doull said tightly, and let it go at that. Field hospitals were almost as frantic as aid stations. Would the people farther back of the line have the time to think of gently breaking the news of this man’s mutilation? Even if they did think of it, would they have the time to do it? Or would they treat him as one more body that took up a valuable cot till they could send him somewhere else? O’Doull didn’t know, but he knew how he’d bet.

Granville McDougald straightened and stretched. “I’m gonna have me a cigarette,” he announced, and headed out of the tent.

“Sounds good to me.” Leonard O’Doull didn’t want to look at or think about that operating table for a while. The Virginia countryside wasn’t much of an improvement, not battered and bludgeoned by war as it was, but mutilated meadows were easier to bear than mutilated men.

McDougald held out a pack of Confederate cigarettes. O’Doull gladly took one. The veteran noncom gave him a light. He drew in smoke. Here, he almost wished it were the harsh stuff that came from U.S. tobacco. Wanting to choke would have done more to distract him than this rich-tasting smoothness.