Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Off to the south, artillery rumbled. Nothing was coming down close by. He thanked the God he was having ever more trouble believing in. “Bad one,” he said.

“Now that you mention it-yes. Don’t see ones like that ever day, and a good thing, too.” McDougald exhaled a thin gray stream of smoke. “You fixed him up as well as anybody could have, Doc.”

“I know. And he’ll still look like something they wouldn’t put in a horror movie because it would really scare people.” O’Doull took a flask off his belt and swigged from it, then offered it to McDougald. He didn’t usually drink when he might be operating again in another couple of minutes. This time, he made an exception. You didn’t see ones like that every day.

“You can do things now you couldn’t begin to in the last war,” McDougald said after a swig of his own. “Thanks, Doc. That hits the spot. Where was I? Yeah-you really can. Get him to where he looks like-”

“A disaster and not a catastrophe,” O’Doull finished for him. “Come on, Granny. There’s not enough left to fix. I’ve seen a lot of wounds, but that poor fucker made me want to lose my lunch.”

He tried to imagine writing Nicole a letter about what he’d just done. That was cruelly funny. He wouldn’t-couldn’t-have written it even if the censors would have passed it. He always wrote her in French, but they would have found somebody who could read it. But you couldn’t subject anyone you loved to even the shadow of what you went through when you were in combat or where you could see what combat did to men. His letters to his wife and son were bright, cheerful lies. When somebody at the aid station said something funny, he would pass that along, especially if it stayed funny in French. Otherwise, he just said he was well and safe and not working too hard. Lie after lie after lie. He didn’t know anyone who tried to tell the truth, not about this kind of thing.

McDougald ground out the cigarette under his heel and lit another one. “Days like this, I wonder why I stayed in the Army,” he said.

“I wonder why I came back,” O’Doull agreed.

“Oh, no, Doc. Oh, no. You did more for that guy than I ever could have. You’re good. I’m not bad-I know I’m not bad-but you’re good. ”

“Thanks, Granny. I’m not good enough, not for that. Nobody’s good enough for that.” O’Doull muttered something under his breath. Even he wasn’t sure if it was curse or prayer. He went on, “Is there any point to all this?”

“For us? Sure,” Granville McDougald answered. “If not for us, a lot of guys would be a lot worse off than they are. What we do is worth doing. For the whole thing? I’m not the one to ask about that, sir. If you want to cross the lines and talk to Jake Featherston…”

“If I ever ran into Jake Featherston, I’d smash his head in with a rock, and screw the Hippocratic oath,” O’Doull said. McDougald laughed, for all the world as if he’d been kidding. He hadn’t, not even a little bit. In plaintive tones, he added, “Featherston went through the last war, every goddamn bit of it. Wasn’t that enough for him?”

“When you lose, a war is never enough,” McDougald answered. That probably held an unfortunate amount of truth. “You happen to recall what Remembrance Day was like before the Great War?”

O’Doull grunted, because he did. The United States, twice beaten and humiliated by the Confederates and Britain and France, had had a lot to remember. The regimentation, the constant stinting to build up the Army and Navy, the tub-thumping speeches, the parades with the flag flown upside down as a symbol of distress… He sighed. “So we finally won. So what did it get us?” He waved. “This.”

“What would we have got if we lost?” McDougald asked. “Something better? Something worse? Christ, we might have grown our own Featherston.”

“Tabernac!” O’Doull said, startled into the Quebecois French he’d used for so long. “That’s a really scary thought, Granny.”

The medic only shrugged. “When things go good, everybody laughs at people like that and says they belong in the loony bin. But when times get hard, they come out of the woodwork and people start paying attention. You go, ‘Well, how could they make things any worse? Let’s see what they can do.’ ”

“Yeah. And then they go and do it,” O’Doull said. Featherston wasn’t the only one of that breed running around loose these days, either. Action Francaise and King Charles had mobilized France even sooner than the Freedom Party grabbed the reins in the CSA. And in England, Churchill and Mosley were yet another verse of the same sorry song.

“It’s a bastard,” McDougald said. “Except for bashing in Featherston’s brains, to hell with me if I know what to do about it. And it might even be too late for that to do any good. By now, this mess has a life of its own.”

“Some life.” The aid station was close enough to the front to share in the smell of the battlefield. O’Doull knew what death smelled like. He lived with that odor-not always heavy, but always there. When war was alive, that smell always got loose.

“Doc! Hey, Doc!” Stretcher bearers hauled another wounded man toward the tent with the big Red Crosses on the sides. Leonard O’Doull and Granville McDougald looked at each other. Maybe they could save this one. Maybe he wouldn’t be horribly mangled. Maybe… They’d find out in a minute. Shaking their heads, they ducked back into the tent.

Appointments, appointments, appointments. Jake Featherston had started to hate them. They chewed up his time and spat it out. When he was talking with people, he couldn’t do the things that really needed doing. He even resented Ferdinand Koenig, and if Ferd wasn’t a friend he didn’t have any.

Today, a smile lightened the Attorney General’s heavy features. “That Pinkard fellow’s given us a new line on things,” he said. “We may be able to dispose of more niggers faster than we ever dreamed we could.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sure as hell, that piqued Jake’s interest. “Tell me about it.” Koenig did. The more Jake listened, the more intrigued he got. “Will this shit work?” he asked. “Do we make it in bulk now, or would we have to run up a new factory to get as much as we need?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Koenig answered. “They already use the stuff to fumigate houses and such. There’s a company in Little Rock-Cyclone Chemicals, the name of the place is-that makes it by the ton. They aren’t the only one, either. They’re just the biggest.”

“Well, I will be a son of a bitch. Pinkard’s chock full of good ideas, isn’t he?” Jake said. “Promote him a grade and tell him to see what he can do to try this out as fast as he can. We’ve got a big job ahead of us, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“I’ll do it.” The Attorney General wrote in a notebook he pulled from a breast pocket. Half apologetically, he said, “I’ve got so much going on, I lose things if I don’t write ’em down. Forget my own head if it wasn’t nailed on tight.”

Jake laughed. “I know what you mean. Boy, don’t I just? But stay on that one, Ferd. Taking care of the niggers is just as important as licking the Yankees. Anything else I ought to know about?”

“Reports I get from here and there, grumbling about the war is up a little.”

“We’ll deal with it.” Jake muttered to himself. Things were dragging on longer than he’d told the country they would. That made propaganda harder than it should have been. “New offensive’s going well,” he said, looking on the bright side. “I’ll talk with Saul, too, see if we can’t figure out a way to perk up morale. Anything besides that?”