After the .50-caliber rounds stopped going off, Dowling cautiously got to his feet. So did the driver. Dowling looked across the road. Major Toricelli emerged from a ditch there. He wasn’t just muddy—he was dripping. His grin looked distinctly forced. “Some fun, huh, sir?”
“Now that you mention it,” Dowling said, “no.”
“We’d better flag down another auto, or a truck, or whatever we can find,” Toricelli said. “We need to be in place.”
He was young and serious, even earnest. Dowling had been through much more. With a crooked grin, he replied, “You’re right, of course. The whole war will grind to a halt if I’m not there to give orders at just the right instant.”
Who was the Russian novelist who’d tried to show that generals and what they said and did was utterly irrelevant to the way battles turned out? Dowling couldn’t remember his name; he cared for Russian novels no more than he cared for Brussels sprouts. With the bias that sprang from his professional rank, he thought the Russian’s conclusions absurd. He remembered the claim, though, and enjoyed hauling it out to bedevil his adjutant.
“They do need you, sir,” Major Toricelli said. “If they didn’t, they would have left you in Texas.”
“And if that’s not a fate worse, or at least more boring, than death, I don’t know what would be,” Dowling said.
While he and Toricelli sparred, the driver, a practical man, looked down the road in the direction from which they’d come. “Here’s a truck,” he said, and waved for it to stop.
Maybe he was persuasive. Maybe the burning command car was. Either way, the deuce-and-a-half shuddered to a halt, brakes squealing. Over the rumble of the engine, the driver said, “You guys look like you could use a lift.”
“You mean you’re not selling sandwiches?” Dowling said. “Damn!”
The driver eyed his rotund form. “You look like you’ve had plenty already…” As his eyes found the stars on Dowling’s shoulder straps, his voice trailed off. Too late, of course, and the glum look on his face said he knew it. “Uh, sir,” he added with the air of a man certain it wouldn’t help.
“Just get me to Army HQ in a hurry, and I won’t ask who the hell you are,” Dowling said.
“Pile in. You got yourself a deal.” Now the driver sounded like somebody’d who’d just won a reprieve from the governor.
Before long, Dowling repented of the bargain. The trucker drove as if he smelled victory at the Omaha 400. He took corners on two wheels and speedshifted so that Dowling marveled when his transmission didn’t start spitting teeth from the gears. Other traffic on the road seemed nothing but obstructions to be dodged.
“What are you carrying?” the general shouted. The engine wasn’t rumbling any more—it was roaring.
“Shells—105s, mostly,” the driver yelled back, leaning into another maniacal turn. “How come?”
Major Toricelli crossed himself. Dowling wondered who was more dangerous, the Confederate fighter-bomber pilot or this nut. Well, if the shells went off, it would all be over in a hurry. Then, brakes screeching now, the driver almost put him through the windshield.
“We’re here,” the man announced.
“Oh, joy,” Dowling said, and got out of the truck as fast as he could. Toricelli and the soldier who’d driven the command car also escaped with alacrity. The truck drove off at a reasonably sedate clip. The madman behind the wheel probably felt he’d done his duty.
A sentry with a captured C.S. submachine gun came up. “I know you, sir,” he said to Dowling. “Do you vouch for these two?” The muzzle swung toward Toricelli and the driver.
Never saw ’em before. The words passed through Dowling’s mind, but didn’t pass his lips. The sentry was too grim, too serious, to let him get away with them, and too likely to open fire before asking questions. “Yes,” was all Dowling said.
“All right. Come ahead, then.” The sentry gestured with his weapon, a little more invitingly than he had before.
Familiar chaos enveloped Dowling as he stepped into the big tent. The air was gray with tobacco smoke and blue with curses. People in uniform shouted into telephone handsets and wireless sets’ mikes. But they just sounded annoyed or angry, the way they were supposed to sound when things were going well.
He remembered headquarters in Columbus, back in the first summer of the war. He remembered the panic in officers’ voices then, no matter how they tried to hold it at bay. They couldn’t believe what the Confederates were doing to them. They couldn’t believe anyone could slice through an army like a housewife slicing cheddar. They didn’t know how to do it themselves, and so they’d figured nobody else knew, either.
They almost lost the war before they realized how wrong they were.
Now they knew what was what. Now they had the barrels and the bombs and the artillery and the men to turn knowledge into action. Better still, they had the doctrine to turn knowledge into effective action. Yes, they’d learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn’t matter. That you learned them did.
One of the men at a field telephone lifted his head and looked around. When he spotted Dowling, he called, “Message for you from General MacArthur, sir.”
“Yes?” Dowling tried not to show how his stomach tightened at that handful of words. Daniel MacArthur often seemed incapable of learning anything, and the lessons he drew from what happened to him verged on the bizarre. His scheme to land men at the mouth of the James and march northwest up the river to Richmond…
I managed to scotch that one, anyhow, Dowling thought. I earned my pay the day I did it, too.
“Well done for your progress, and keep it up,” the man reported. “And the general says he’s over the Rapidan River east of Fredericksburg and rapidly pushing south. ‘Rapidly’ is his word, sir.”
“Is it?” Dowling said. “Good for him!” The Confederates had given MacArthur a bloody nose at Fredericksburg in 1942. There wasn’t much room to slide troops east of the town. Abner Dowling wouldn’t have cared to try it himself. But if MacArthur had got away with it, and if he was driving rapidly from the Rapidan and punning as he went…“Sounds like Featherston’s boys really are starting to go to pieces.”
“Here’s hoping!” three men in Army HQ said in one chorus, while another two or three added, “It’s about time!” in another.
Dowling liked prizefights. People said of some boxers that they had a puncher’s chance in the ring. If they hit somebody squarely, he’d fall over, no matter how big and tough he was. That was the kind of chance the CSA had against the USA. But when the United States didn’t—quite—fall over, the Confederate States had to fight a more ordinary war, and they weren’t so well equipped for that.
Did Featherston have one more punch left? Dowling didn’t see how he could, but Dowling hadn’t seen all kinds of things before June 22, 1941. He shrugged. If the United States seized Richmond and cut the Confederacy in half farther south, what could Featherston punch with?
“Tell General MacArthur I thank him very much, and I look forward to meeting him in front of the Gray House,” Dowling said. Forward to Richmond! Things really were going that way.
As far as Dr. Leonard O’Doull was concerned, eastern Alabama seemed about the same as western Georgia. The hilly terrain hadn’t changed when he crossed the state line. Neither had the accents the local civilians used. Shamefaced U.S. soldiers caught social diseases from some of the local women, too.
This penicillin stuff knocked those down in nothing flat, though. It was better than sulfa for the clap, and ever so much better than the poisons that had been medicine’s only weapons against syphilis.
“Move up, Doc!” a noncom shouted at O’Doull one morning. “Front’s going forward, and you gotta keep up with it.”
“Send me a truck, and I’ll do it,” the doctor answered. Sergeant Goodson Lord played a racetrack fanfare on his liberated trombone. The soldier who brought the news thumbed his nose at the medic. Grinning, Lord paused and returned th
e compliment, if that was what it was.
By now, O’Doull had moving down to a science. Packing, knocking down the tent, loading stuff, actually traveling, and setting up again went as smoothly as if he’d been doing them for years—which he had. He was proud of how fast he got the aid station running once the deuce-and-a-half stopped. And every forward move meant another bite taken out of the Confederate States.
He hadn’t been set up again for very long before he got a hard look at what those bites meant. “Doc! Hey, Doc!” Eddie the corpsman yelled as he helped carry a litter back to the aid station. “Got a bad one here, Doc!”
O’Doull had already figured that out for himself. Whoever was on the litter was screaming: a high, shrill sound of despair. “Christ!” Sergeant Lord said. “They go and find a wounded woman?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised, not by the noise,” O’Doull answered. “It’s happened before.” He remembered an emergency hysterectomy after a luckless woman stopped a shell fragment with her belly. What had happened to her afterwards? He hadn’t the faintest idea.
When he first saw the wounded person, he thought it was a woman. The skin was fine and pale and beardless, the cries more contralto than tenor. Then Eddie said, “Look what they’re throwing at us these days. Poor kid can’t be a day over fourteen.”
This time, O’Doull was the one who blurted, “Christ!” That was a boy. He wore dungarees and a plaid shirt. An armband said, NATIONAL ASSAULT FORCE.
“You damnyankees here’re gonna shoot me now, ain’t you?” the kid asked.
“Nooo,” O’Doull said slowly. He’d seen National Assault Force troops before, but they were old geezers, guys with too many miles on them to go into the regular Army. Orders were to treat them as POWs, not francs-tireurs. Now the Confederates were throwing their seed corn into the NAF, too.
“They said you’d kill everybody you got your hands on,” the wounded boy said, and then he started shrieking again.
“Well, they’re full of shit,” O’Doull said roughly. He nodded to the stretcher-bearers. “Get him up on the table. Goodson, put him out.”
“Yes, sir,” Lord said. When the mask went over the kid’s face, the ether made him think he was choking. He tried to yank off the mask. O’Doull had seen that before, plenty of times. Eddie and Goodson Lord grabbed the boy soldier’s hands till he went under.
He’d taken a bullet in the belly—no wonder he was howling. O’Doull cut away the bloody shirt and got to work. It could have been worse. It hadn’t pierced his liver or spleen or gall bladder. He’d lose his left kidney, but you could get along on one. His guts weren’t too torn up. With the new fancy medicines to fight peritonitis, he wasn’t doomed the way he would have been a few years earlier.
“I think he may make it.” O’Doull sounded surprised, even to himself.
“I bet you’re right, sir,” Goodson Lord said. “I wouldn’t have given a dime for his chances when you got to work on him—I’ll tell you that.”
“Neither would I,” O’Doull admitted as he started closing up. His hands sutured with automatic skill and precision. “If he doesn’t come down with a wound infection, though, what’s to keep him from getting better?”
“Then we can kill him,” Lord said. O’Doull could see only the medic’s eyes over his surgical mask, but they looked amused. The kid had been so sure falling into U.S. hands was as bad as letting the demons of hell get hold of him.
“Yeah, well, if we don’t kill him now, will we have to do it in twenty years?” O’Doull asked.
“He’ll be about old enough to fight then,” Sergeant Lord said.
That was one of too many truths spoken in jest. But what would stop another war between the USA and the CSA a generation down the road? After the United States walloped the snot out of the Confederates this time around, would the USA stay determined long enough to make sure the Confederacy didn’t rise again? If the country did, wouldn’t it be a miracle? And wouldn’t the Confederates try to hit back as soon as the USA offered them even the smallest chance?
“Once you get on a treadmill, how do you get off?” O’Doull said.
“What do you mean, sir?” Lord asked.
“How do we keep from fighting a war with these sons of bitches every twenty years?”
“Beats me,” the medic said. “If you know, run for President. I guaran-damn-tee you it’d put you one up on all the chuckleheads in politics now. Most of ’em can’t count to twenty-one without undoing their fly.”
O’Doull snorted. Then, wistfully, he said, “Only trouble is, I don’t have any answers. I just have questions. Questions are easy. Answers?” He shook his head. “One reason old Socrates looks so smart is that he tried to get answers from other people. He didn’t give many of his own.”
“If you say so. He’s Greek to me,” Goodson Lord replied.
They sent the wounded Confederate kid off to a hospital farther back of the line—all the way back into Georgia, in fact. O’Doull, who had a proper professional pride in his own work, hoped the little bastard would live even if that meant he might pick up a rifle and start shooting at U.S. soldiers again twenty years from now…or, for that matter, twenty minutes after he got out of a POW camp.
The front ground forward. Before long, Birmingham would start catching it from artillery as well as from the bombers that visited it almost every night. O’Doull wondered how much good that would do. The Confederates might be running short of men, but they still had plenty of guns and ammunition. The bombing that was supposed to knock out their factories didn’t live up to the fancy promises airmen made for it.
Featherston’s followers still had plenty of rockets, too. Stovepipe rockets blew up U.S. barrels. O’Doull hated treating burns; it gave him the shivers. He did it anyway, because he had to. Screaming meemies could turn an acre of ground into a slaughterhouse. And the big long-range rockets threw destruction a couple of hundred miles.
“Hell with Birmingham,” Sergeant Lord said, picking screaming-meemie fragments out of the thigh and buttocks of an anesthetized corporal. “We’ve got to take Huntsville away from those fuckers. That’s where this shit is coming from.”
“No arguments from me.” O’Doull held out a metal basin to the senior medic. Lord dropped another small chunk of twisted, bloody steel or aluminum into it. Clink! The sound of metal striking metal seemed absurdly cheerful.
“Well, if you can see it and I can see it, how come the brass can’t?” Lord demanded. He peered at the wounded man’s backside, then dug in with the forceps again. Sure as hell, he found another fragment.
“Maybe they will,” O’Doull said. “They swung a lot of force south of Atlanta to make the Confederates clear out. Now we’re better positioned to go after Birmingham than we are for Huntsville, that’s all.”
“Maybe.” Lord sounded anything but convinced. “Me, I think the brass are a bunch of jerks—that’s what the trouble is.”
Of course you do—you’re a noncom, O’Doull thought. He too was given to heretical thoughts about the competence, if any, of the high command. Yes, he was an officer, but as a doctor he wasn’t in the chain of command. He didn’t want to be, either. There often seemed to be missing links at the top of the chain.
Missing links…His memory went back to biology classes in college, in the dead, distant days before the Great War. He remembered pictures of low-browed, chinless, hairy brutes: Neanderthal Man and Java Man and a couple of others thought to lie halfway between apes and Homo laughably called sapiens. He imagined ape-men in green-gray uniforms with stars on their shoulder straps and black-and-gold General Staff arm-of-service colors.
The picture formed with frightening ease. “Ook!” he muttered. Sergeant Lord sent him a curious look. O’Doull’s cheeks heated.
He also imagined hulking subhumans in butternut, with wreathed stars on their collars. Confederate Neanderthals also proved easy to conjure up. A good thing, too, O’Doull thought. We’d lose if they weren’t as dumb as we are.
And wasn’t Jake Featherston the top Pithecanthropus of them all? “Ook,” Leonard O’Doull said again, louder this time. Then he shook his head, angry at himself for swallowing his own side’s propaganda. Sure, Featherston had made his share of mistakes, but who in this war hadn’t? The President of the CSA had come much too close to leading his side to victory over a much bigger, much richer foe. If that didn’t argue for a certain basic competence, what would?
“You all right, sir?” Goodson Lord asked, real concern in his voice.
“As well as I can be, anyhow,” O’Doull answered. What worried him was that Jake Featherston could still win. The Confederates had come up with more new and nasty weapons this time around than his own side had. The fragments Lord was cleaning up—another one clanked into the bowl—showed that. If the enemy pulled something else out of his hat, something big…
“Hey, Doc!” That insistent shout from outside drove such thoughts from his mind. No matter what the Confederates who weren’t Neanderthals came up with, all he could do was try to patch up the men they hurt.
“You all right by yourself?” he asked Lord.
“I’ll cope,” the senior medic said, which was the right answer.
The new wounded man had had a shell fragment slice the right side of his chest open. The corpsmen who brought him in were irate. “It was a short round, Doc,” Eddie said. O’Doull could all but see the steam coming out of his ears. “One of ours. It killed another guy—they’ll have to scrape him up before they can bury him.”
“That kind of shit happens all the time,” another stretcher-bearer said.
“Happens too goddamn often.” Yeah, Eddie was hot, all right.
“I think so, too.” O’Doull had also seen too many wounds on U.S. soldiers inflicted by other U.S. soldiers. He hated them at least as much as Eddie did. All the same…“Let’s get to work on him. The less time we waste, the better.”
Collapsed lung, lots of bleeders to tie off, broken ribs. O’Doull knew what to expect, and he got it. The wound was serious, but straightforward and clean. O’Doull knew he had a good chance of saving the soldier. By the time he finished, he was pretty sure he had. If the war lasted long enough, the man might return to duty.
In at the Death Page 23
