The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Lieutenant Wheat stuck his head up like a groundhog looking around to see if it cast a shadow. Another burst of Confederate fire made him duck in a hurry. He popped up again a couple of minutes later, which was asking to get his head blown off.

  “You want to be careful there, sir,” Martin said. “You show yourself twice running, the bastards in butternut are liable to have time to draw a bead on you.”

  He didn’t want this particular platoon commander to stop a slug with his face. Wheat had a pretty good idea of what he was doing; odds were anyone who replaced him would be worse. Or maybe nobody would replace him for a while. Officers weren’t thick on the ground, and the brass might figure a first sergeant could handle a platoon for a while.

  Martin figured he could, too. He led a company for a while during the Great War, when everybody above him got killed or wounded. They lost officers even faster in that war than they were losing them in this one. But, having proved he could command a company, Martin didn’t want to take over the platoon now. They’d never make him an officer-who ever heard of a fifty-year-old second lieutenant? He had plenty to do the way things were.

  “Thanks for the tip, Sergeant,” Wheat said, as calmly as if Chester advised him to lead the fourth highest from his longest and strongest suit. “I’m trying to see how we can cross the Scioto.”

  “We as in the division or we as in this platoon?” Chester asked, more than a little apprehensively. Before long, U.S. forces were bound to get over the Scioto somewhere. The luckless bastards who crossed the river first would pay the price in blood, though. They always did.

  “This platoon, if we can,” Wheat answered, and damned if he didn’t stand up and look around one more time. “We’re only about a mile from the river, and the Confederates are pulling back across it. They may not even notice we’ve got the bridgehead on the other side till we’re too strong to throw back.”

  What have you been smoking? Martin wanted to yell. The soldiers in butternut were alert. Just because they were the enemy, that didn’t mean they were morons. Most of this war was fought on U.S. soil. That at least argued the dummies were the ones in green-gray.

  Another sputter of bullets made Wheat duck down again before Chester could say anything at all. And then the Confederates threw something new at them. That screaming in the sky wasn’t any ordinary artillery Martin had ever heard. And ordinary rounds didn’t come in trailing tails of fire. You mostly couldn’t see ordinary rounds at all till they burst.

  Rockets, Chester thought. Featherston’s men were firing them at barrels. These were different-much bigger and nastier. They slammed down and went off with roars like the end of the world. He didn’t know how many burst all at once. A dozen? Two dozen? Something like that. However many it was, he felt as if God stamped on the platoon with both feet.

  He wasn’t ashamed to scream. Hell, he was too scared not to. Nobody heard him, not through that roar. Even if somebody did hear him, so what? He wouldn’t be the only man yelling his head off. He was sure of that.

  And he didn’t even get hurt, except for being bruised and battered and half stunned by blast. He was one of the lucky ones. As his stunned ears came back to life, he heard soldiers screaming to the right and left and behind him. He scrambled over to the closest wounded man. Shrapnel had gouged a chunk out of the soldier’s leg. As Chester dusted sulfa powder onto the wound and slapped a dressing over it, the soldier said, “What the fuck was that, Sarge?”

  “Beats me, Johnny,” Martin answered. “I just hope to Christ we never see it again.” He injected the soldier with a morphine syrette, knowing all too well the Confederates would play with their new toy over and over again. Why would they do anything else? Wherever that salvo of rockets came from, it did a better job of plastering a wide area with explosives than any other weapon he’d ever seen.

  “Fuck,” Johnny said again, biting his lip against the pain. “When do we get something like it?”

  That was another good question. “Soon, I hope,” Martin said, which was nothing but the truth. Now that his side knew the other side had something new and nasty, how long would they need to copy it or come up with something on the same order? Months, he thought glumly. Gotta be months. That meant U.S. soldiers would be on the receiving end for months, too, which was anything but a cheery idea.

  Chester yelled for the medics. So did Johnny. They didn’t come right away. He wasn’t surprised. They had to be dealing with a lot of casualties. If another salvo came in…

  And then one did. The incoming rockets’ shrieks put him in mind of damned souls. He did some more shrieking himself when they crashed down. Blast picked him up and smashed him into the dirt. “Oof!” he said, struggling to breathe. He tasted blood in his mouth. If the Confederates threw in a counterattack just then, they could push as far as they wanted. The platoon-hell, probably the whole damn regiment-was in no shape to stop them.

  “Boy,” Johnny said, “it’s a good thing they didn’t have those a little while ago, or they’d still be in Pittsburgh.” He sounded detached, almost indifferent. The morphine was working its magic.

  Chester wished he could be indifferent to the chaos and carnage around him. “You ain’t kidding,” he said. These rockets were very bad news. Somebody over in Richmond was probably kicking somebody else’s ass around the block for not thinking of them sooner or for not getting them into production fast enough.

  Motion behind him made him whirl, ready to plug whoever made it. “Easy, buddy,” the soldier there said. The man wore the same uniform he did. Even that didn’t have to mean anything. The Confederates sometimes put their guys in green-gray to raise hell behind U.S. lines. But this fellow had a Red Cross on his helmet, Red Cross armbands, and a white smock with big Red Crosses front and back. “You got a wounded guy here?”

  “That’s me.” Johnny sounded halfway proud of himself. Part of that was the morphine talking. And part of it was knowing he had a hometowner. His wound wasn’t enough to ruin him for life, but it was plenty to keep him away from the front for a while. Chester’s wound in the Great War was one like that. He actually did go back to Toledo for a while to recuperate. Maybe Johnny would get to see his family and friends.

  “We’ll haul him out of here.” The corpsman yelled for buddies. They manhandled Johnny onto a stretcher and lugged him back toward the closest aid station. Chester hoped the rockets didn’t knock it flat. They sure did a hell of a job up here.

  Even if he got himself a hometowner this time around, they wouldn’t ship him over to Los Angeles. He was as sure of that as he was of his last name. Yes, the CSA’s retreat from northern Ohio meant the United States were no longer cut in half, but it would be quite a while before anything but the most urgent supplies and people crossed the gap. A general with a hometowner might fall into that category. A sergeant damn well didn’t.

  A bullet cracking past made him flatten out on the ground like a run-over toad. He didn’t want to get shot again, not even with a hometowner. And life didn’t come with a guarantee. You might not pick up a hometowner. You might turn into Graves Registration’s business, not some corpsman’s. Rita would never forgive him if he got himself killed, not that he’d be able to appreciate her anger.

  Half an hour later, a thunderous U.S. artillery barrage came down on the heads of the Confederates withdrawing across the Scioto. Every gun the USA had handy opened up on the men in butternut. Some of them would be screaming for medics, no doubt about it.

  But would all those guns match the horror the Confederates inflicted with a couple of salvoes of rockets? Chester Martin wasn’t sure. Maybe the rockets seemed worse because he’d been shelled too many times before. And maybe they seemed worse because they were worse. He feared he would see them again often enough to make up his mind.

  In a way, Dr. Leonard O’Doull wasn’t sorry to get back under canvas again. It meant the front was moving forward. He’d spent longer than he wanted to working out of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical center as t
he battle for the city swayed back and forth. He didn’t want to think about how much work he did there.

  Operating in a tent a few hundred yards back of the line also had its drawbacks. What he’d done at the medical center reminded him of that. He’d worked in fully equipped operating rooms, with nurses at his beck and call and with X-ray equipment right down the corridor. He had it easy, in other words.

  Now he was on his own again, doing the emergency work that patched people up well enough to get them farther back so other doctors could do a more thorough job if they had to. It was, or could be, satisfying work-he saved a lot of lives, and he knew it. But he also knew he might save more still if he had everything here that he had back at the hospital.

  He worked like a man possessed, trying to save a private who’d got caught in the open by one of the Confederates’ newfangled rockets. “Who would have thought we’d see a new kind of wound?” he said, tying off a bleeder and extracting a chunk of casing with a forceps. “Half blast, half shrapnel.”

  “Best of both worlds. Happy day,” Granville McDougald said. “Aren’t we clever?”

  Because O’Doull had an M.D., he held officer’s rank-they made him a major when they talked him out of the Republic of Quebec and back into U.S. uniform for the first time in a quarter of a century. That didn’t mean he would ever have to command a battalion. A good thing for the battalion, too, he thought. It did let him give orders to the men he worked with.

  Granny McDougald was a sergeant. He’d been a medic as long as O’Doull had been a doctor-he didn’t leave the Army after the Great War, the way O’Doull did. His knowledge was much narrower than the physician’s. But, within its limits, it was just as deep. He was all too intimately familiar with the multifarious ways in which human bodies could get mangled.

  He knew how to fix them, too. Even without formal training, he made a damn good surgeon. He was a more than capable anesthetist, too. O’Doull knew McDougald could do most of his work if anything happened to him.

  The medic said, “I wonder when they’ll figure out how to pack gas into those rockets.” Above his mask, his gray eyes were grim.

  “Bite your tongue, Granny!” O’Doull exclaimed. But what a U.S. medic could imagine, so, no doubt, could a C.S. engineer. Morosely, O’Doull said, “Probably just a matter of time.”

  “Uh-huh,” McDougald said. “How’s he doing there?”

  “I think he’ll make it,” O’Doull answered. “I’ve got most of the wound cleaned up. The blast damage to his lungs, though…Damn rocket might as well have been a bomb.”

  “Lucky they didn’t point those things in our direction,” McDougald said. “Doesn’t look like they can aim ’em for hell.”

  “Tabernac!” O’Doull muttered. He still swore in Quebecois French every once in a while; it was almost the only language he spoke for half his life. He never gave up reading English, because so much medical literature was written in it. But not much of his birthspeech came out of his mouth while he was living in Riviere-du-Loup. “You get the nicest ideas, Granny.”

  “Yeah, well, you go through a couple of wars and you figure anything that can come down can come down on your head.”

  O’Doull had his own fair share of the cynicism so many medical men wear. When you spend your days looking at the way the human body can go wrong-or, in war, can be made to go wrong-you are unlikely to believe, as Candide did, that this is the best of all possible worlds. But Granny McDougald had his fair share and what seemed like two or three other people’s besides.

  “You know what we really need?” McDougald went on as O’Doull put in suture after suture.

  “Tell me. I’m all ears,” O’Doull replied.

  “Must make sewing up that poor bastard kind of clumsy, but all right,” the senior medic said. “What we really need is a bomb so big and juicy, they won’t waste it on the battlefield. They’ll drop it on New York City or New Orleans, and boom!-it’ll blow the whole place right off the map like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Calisse!” O’Doull said, and then, “Son of a bitch! Why would you want a bomb like that?”

  “Because it’s the only thing I can think of that’s so awful that after you use it a few times and everybody sees how awful it is, it’ll scare the shit out of people and they won’t want to use it any more. If we had bombs like that and the CSA did and England and France and Germany and Austria-Hungary and Russia and the Japs, how the hell could you fight a war?”

  “Carefully,” O’Doull answered. He set down his scalpel as Granville McDougald laughed. “I’ve got this guy stabilized, or as stabilized as I can get him. If his lungs aren’t wrecked and if the tissue the blast tore up doesn’t go gangrenous on him, chances are he’ll pull through.”

  “Good job, Doc. I wouldn’t have given more than about four bits for his chances when the corpsmen hauled him in,” McDougald said.

  A couple of minutes later, at Leonard O’Doull’s direction, the corpsmen sent the wounded man back to a real hospital several miles to the rear. He might finish his recovery there, or he might go farther back still. O’Doull would have bet on the latter-this guy would live, he thought, but wasn’t likely to put on a helmet and pick up a Springfield again any time soon.

  O’Doull shed his mask and tossed it in a trash can. He washed the soldier’s blood off his hands and chucked his surgical instruments into a tub of alcohol. If he had time, he’d autoclave them before he used them again. If he didn’t…Well, alcohol made a good disinfectant.

  “I’m going outside for a smoke before they bring in the next poor miserable so-and-so,” he said. “Come with me?”

  “You bet,” McDougald said. “Grab all the chances to loaf you can-they may not come your way again.”

  With ether and alcohol and other inflammables inside the aid station, lighting up in there was severely discouraged-with a blunt instrument, if necessary. Once O’Doull had stepped away from the green-gray tent, he took out a pack of Niagara Falls.

  “Oh, come on, Doc.” McDougald pulled a horrible face. “Haven’t you got anything better than those barge scrapings?”

  “’Fraid not,” O’Doull admitted. “Smoked my last Confederate cigarette a couple of hours ago. U.S. tobacco won’t kill me, and it’s like coffee-bad is better than none at all.”

  “Like booze, too,” the medic said, and the doctor didn’t deny it. McDougald reached into his pocket and extracted a pack of Dukes. “Here. Bad is better than none, but good is better than bad.”

  “Thanks, Granny. I owe you,” O’Doull said. The noncom was a better scrounger than he was. Some headline that made. O’Doull took a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. McDougald gave him a light. He inhaled, then smiled. “My hat’s off to the Dukes.”

  “I ought to make you put up your dukes for one that bad.” Granville McDougald paused. “Except mine was even worse, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure wasn’t any better,” O’Doull allowed. “But this tobacco is, and I thank you for it.”

  “Any time,” McDougald said. “Not like I haven’t mooched butts from you a time or three.”

  The roar of artillery from behind them drowned his last couple of words. The fire from the big and medium guns went on and on and on. Some of the shells flying west gurgled as they spun through the air. Leonard O’Doull winced at that sound: gas rounds. He tried to look on the bright side of things: “Sounds like we’re finally going over the river.”

  “And through the woods, yeah, but where’s Grandmother’s house?” McDougald said. While O’Doull was still digesting that, the medic went on, “About time we got across the damn Scioto, don’t you think? Hanging on to Chillicothe like they have, the Confederates must have pulled God only knows how many men and how much materiel out of northern Ohio.”

  “You sure you don’t belong back at corps HQ or something?” O’Doull said. McDougald laughed at him.

  They had time to finish their cigarettes, and that was about it. Then the familiar and hated shout of, “Do
c! Hey, Doc!” rang out again.

  “I’m here!” O’Doull yelled. More quietly, he added, “Well, let’s see what we’ve got this time.”

  They had a corporal with a bullet through his calf. He was cussing a blue streak. “Hey, keep your shirt on, pal,” Granville McDougald said. “If that’s not a hometowner, there’s no such animal.”

  “Fuck hometowners,” the corporal snarled. “And fuck you, too, Jack. For one thing, it hurts like shit. And besides, I don’t want any goddamn hometowners. I want to blow the balls off some more of Featherston’s fuckers.”

  A man of strong opinions, O’Doull thought. His voice dry, he said, “It’s not usually smart to swear at the guy who’s going to help fix you up. You might find out it hurts even more than you expected. And before you tell me where to head in, you need to know I’m a major.” Cussing out an officer was a good way for an enlisted man to run into more trouble than he ever wanted to find.

  The noncom opened his mouth to draw in a breath. About then, though, the novocaine O’Doull injected by the wound took effect. What came out was, “Oh, yeah. That’s not so fucking bad now. You can go ahead and sew me up.” He caught himself. “You can go ahead and sew me up, sir.”

  O’Doull decided he’d been given the glove. By Granny McDougald’s barely smothered snort, he thought the same thing. But the corporal scrupulously stayed within regulations. O’Doull cleaned out the wound and sewed it up. “Like it or not, pal, you’ve got a hometowner,” he said. “I know you’d be happier if you didn’t get shot, but you could have stopped it with your face or your chest, too.”

  “Oh, yeah. I know. I’ve seen-” He broke off, then shook his head. “I started to say, I’ve seen as much of that shit as you have, but I probably haven’t.”