In at the Death

by Harry Turtledove

  “Hope the Confederates listen up,” Goodson Lord said. “They’d better.” He might be a queer, but if he was, he was a patriotic queer. Long as he doesn’t grab my ass, I can live with that, O’Doull thought, and felt proud of his own tolerance.

  “Today, President La Follette again called for the surrender of the Confederate States,” Sevareid said on the wireless. “In his words, ‘Only by quitting the war now can the CSA hope to escape destruction of a sort the world has never seen before. Newport News and Charleston are just the beginning. We will put an end to this evil regime one way or another. Which way that will be is the only thing left for existing Confederate officials to decide.’”

  “That’s telling ’em!” Eddie said. He was as mild and inoffensive a little guy as ever came down the pike, but he hated the CSA. He wouldn’t have had to see so much misery if not for Jake Featherston.

  “Featherston’s reply was, ‘We aren’t going to lay down for the United States, and they can’t make us do it,’” Sevareid continued. “He is believed to have broadcast that reply from somewhere in North Carolina. Richmond, of course, is in U.S. hands. Featherston narrowly escaped the Newport News bomb, and U.S. forces are now pushing toward Hampton Roads. Before long, he will be a president without a country.” The broadcaster’s voice showed unmistakable satisfaction.

  “In the European half of the war, German drives against Russia continue,” Sevareid said. “The Tsar’s army shows signs of disintegration, but Petrograd Wireless—now broadcasting from Moscow after the destruction of Petrograd—denies reports that the Tsar is seeking an armistice from Germany.”

  “If Russia bails out, England and France are done,” Lord opined.

  “France is about done anyway,” Eddie said. “Bye-bye, gay Paree.” He waved.

  Half a lifetime spent in the Republic of Quebec speaking French almost all the time made O’Doull look at France differently from most Americans. It was the sun around which Quebec revolved whether they were on the same side or not. And when the heart of the sun was torn out…

  “Despite the loss of Paris, France also denies any plan to leave the conflict,” Eric Sevareid said. “The new King of France, Louis XIX, vows revenge against Germany. And Winston Churchill was quoted by the BBC as saying, ‘We can match the Hun bomb for bomb. Let him do his worst, and we shall do our best. With God’s help, it will be good enough.’”

  “With him and Featherston, the bad guys have all the good talkers,” Sergeant Lord said. “Doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Churchill’s a better speaker than Featherston any day,” O’Doull said. “He’s not such a bastard, either.”

  “That’s what you say, Doc,” Eddie put in. “Ask the Kaiser, and I bet he’d tell you different.”

  Since he was bound to be right—what did the Kaiser care about the CSA?—O’Doull didn’t argue with him. He gave his attention to the wireless: “Japan has sent Russia an ultimatum over several Siberian provinces. If the Tsar’s forces do not evacuate them, the Japanese threaten to take them by force.”

  “Wait a minute!” Lord said. “The Japs and the Russians are on the same side.”

  “They’re on the same side against us,” Leonard O’Doull said. “Otherwise? Forget it. The Japs already screwed England in Malaya. They’ve got Australia sweating bullets. They’re the ones who’ve done the best for themselves in this war. If they’d driven us out of the Sandwich Islands, nobody could ever touch ’em.”

  “Won’t be easy, even the way things are,” Eddie said.

  “They haven’t used any of these new superbombs yet,” O’Doull said. “I wonder how close they are to building one.”

  “Well, if they weren’t working on ’em before, they sure as hell are now,” Goodson Lord said. That was another obvious truth.

  Back before the Pacific War, people in the USA would have wondered whether the Japanese were smart enough to do something like that. Not any more. The Pacific War was a push, or as close as made no difference, but Japan bombed Los Angeles while the United States never laid a glove on the home islands. This time around, the United States hadn’t tried breaking through the Japs’ island barricade, either. All the fighting had been on U.S. soil and in U.S. waters. The United States was too busy fighting for their life against the Confederacy to give Japan more than a fraction of their attention.

  It had been quiet up at the front. Suddenly, it wasn’t any more. Machine guns and automatic weapons started banging away. “It’s getting dark outside!” Lord exclaimed. “What the hell do they think they’re shooting at?”

  “They don’t care,” O’Doull answered. “Somebody imagined he saw something, and as soon as one guy starts shooting they all open up.”

  “We better get up there,” Eddie told his fellow corpsmen. They scurried out of the aid station. Before long, they’d likely be back with wounded men.

  Eric Sevareid went on talking about the world and the USA. He had a good wireless voice, a voice that made you think he was your friend even though you’d never met him and never would. You wanted to believe what he said. You wanted to believe what Jake Featherston said, too, even after you knew what a liar he was. If he didn’t believe it himself, he put on one hell of an act.

  “Will the corpsmen be able to find us in the dark?” Goodson Lord asked.

  “Don’t know,” O’Doull answered. “But I’ll tell you something—I’m not gonna put on a light. If our own side doesn’t shoot us because of it, the enemy would.”

  Not even fifteen minutes later, he heard the too-familiar shout of “Doc! Hey, Doc!” from somewhere off to the left.

  “Hey, Eddie!” he yelled back. A battery of 105s was thundering behind the U.S. lines. Pretty soon, C.S. artillery would open up, too, or they’d start shooting off screaming meemies, and then hell really would be out to lunch.

  In the meantime…“We got a sucking chest, Doc!” Eddie said.

  O’Doull swore. That was a bad wound, one that would kill the soldier who had it unless everything went right—and might kill him anyway. “How are we fixed for plasma?” he asked Sergeant Lord.

  “We’ve got enough,” Lord answered.

  “Good,” O’Doull said. “Grab a big needle—chances are we’ll want to pour it in as fast as we can.”

  Sweat made the corpsmen’s faces shine when they brought in the wounded soldier. Heat and humidity were starting to build toward summer. O’Doull noticed only out of the corner of his eye; most of his attention focused on the corporal on the stretcher. The man had bloody foam on his lips and nostrils. Sure as hell, he’d taken one through the lung.

  “Get him up on the table,” O’Doull told the corpsmen. To Goodson Lord, he said, “Get him under.”

  “Right,” Lord said. He jammed the ether cone down on the noncom’s face as soon as the corpsmen put him in position. The plasma line went in next. The corporal already seemed unconscious, so O’Doull started cutting even before the anesthetic would have fully taken hold. Seconds counted here.

  When he opened the guy up, he found the chest cavity full of blood. He hadn’t expected anything different. He had a fat rubber tube ready to go to siphon it out of there. How bad was the wound? Did he have time to tie off the major bleeders in the lung, or would he have to do something more drastic?

  He needed only a moment to decide he couldn’t do anything that took a long time. His vorpal scalpel went snicker-snack and took out the bottom two lobes of the right lung. That left him with just a few vessels to tie off, and he knew where they were—he didn’t have to go looking for them. You could live with a lung and a third. You could live with one lung if you had to, though you wouldn’t have an easy time if you did anything strenuous for a living.

  With the worst of it done, he repaired the wound in the corporal’s back. “What’s his BP?” he asked as he worked.

  “It’s 95 over 68,” Goodson Lord answered, checking the cuff. “Not real great, but it’s pretty steady, anyway.”

  “All right.” O’Doull duste
d the inside of the chest cavity with sulfa powder, then started closing up. He’d read in a journal that the powder probably helped less than people said it did. He used it anyhow. Why not? It wouldn’t hurt.

  “What do you think?” Sergeant Lord asked while he finished. He left a honking big drain in the incision. That could come out later.

  “If shock doesn’t get him, if he doesn’t hemorrhage…” O’Doull shrugged, wishing for a cigarette. “I’ve done what I can. Maybe he’ll make it. I can hope so, anyway.” The corporal would be dead for sure if he hadn’t got here. If he lived—If he lives, score one for me, O’Doull thought. That wasn’t a bad feeling to have, not even a little bit.

  Lieutenant Michael Pound had fought through the Battle of Pittsburgh. He’d seen what a city looked like after two armies jumped on it with both feet. Now, on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, he was seeing it again.

  Confederate General Patton was holed up inside Birmingham, and he wasn’t coming out. The USA had forced him out of Atlanta, but he refused to pull what was left of his army out of the Alabama factory town. He refused to surrender, too. “If you want me, come and take me,” he told the U.S. officers who went in to parley with him.

  “I don’t want to dig the son of a bitch out a block at a time,” Sergeant Mel Scullard grumbled. “Expensive goddamn real estate, y’know?”

  “Yeah.” Pound nodded. “Maybe we won’t have to.”

  “How come, sir?” the gunner asked. “Can’t just leave him there.”

  “No, but if we gave one to Newport News and we gave one to Charleston, how long will it be before we give one to Birmingham, too?” Pound said.

  Scullard laughed a particularly nasty laugh. “’Bye, George!” he said, waving. “See you in hell, like you deserve!”

  “That’d be pretty good, all right,” Joe Mouradian agreed. “But what if they blow us up, too? We ain’t that far outside of town ourselves.”

  “Urk.” Pound hadn’t thought of that. The more he did, the more it worried him. The brass would be eager to get rid of Patton. After Jake Featherston and maybe Ferdinand Koenig, he was the most dangerous character the Confederacy had. If one of those superbombs took him out but hurt or maybe killed some of their own guys, how much would the fellows back in Philadelphia care? Not a whole hell of a lot, not unless a dedicated cynic like Michael Pound missed his guess.

  He stuck his head out of the cupola for a quick looksee. He wasn’t sure what a superbomb could do to Birmingham that lots and lots of ordinary bombs and artillery shells hadn’t already done. The place had been torn up and burned more times than anybody could count. Everything that wasn’t green was gray or black, and just about all the walls he could see either listed or had chunks bitten out of them or both.

  But the remnants of Patton’s Army of Kentucky still lurked in the ruins. They were stubborn men with automatic weapons and stovepipe rockets. They wouldn’t be winkled out easily or cheaply. Maybe a superbomb could get rid of them the way DDT got lice out of clothes.

  As if to prove the Confederate States were still in business, somebody squeezed off a burst from one of their carnivorous machine guns. Pound ducked down into the barrel. He didn’t want to win a Purple Heart, not this late in the game. He didn’t want to buy a plot, either.

  “Anything worth going after, sir?” Scullard asked.

  “Not…right this minute,” Pound answered. He prided himself on being an aggressive soldier. And he was still ready to go forward whenever anybody told him to. Without anything obviously urgent ahead, though, he was just as well pleased to sit tight.

  This must be what the end of the war feels like, he thought. Yeah, you were still willing. But how eager were you when pushing too hard might get you killed just when things wound down?

  Sitting tight didn’t mean sticking his head in the sand like an ostrich. Standing up in the open cupola wasn’t smart right now. All right—next best thing, then. That was looking out through the periscopes built into the cupola. He couldn’t see as much with them as he could head and shoulders above there, but…

  “Powaski!” he shouted to the bow gunner and wireless man. “Ten o’clock! Somebody sneaking up on us, maybe 150 yards!”

  “I’m on it,” Powaski answered over the intercom. The bow gun wasn’t useful very often. Pound had heard talk that the next generation of barrels would dispense with it and go with a four-man crew instead of five. This once, though, it was liable to be a lifesaver.

  It started to chatter now. Pound watched tracers spang off brickwork and fly every which way. The turret hummed as Scullard traversed it so he could bring the coaxial machine gun—and maybe the cannon, too—to bear.

  Like any well-trained gunner, Powaski squeezed off short bursts. You didn’t want to burn out your machine-gun barrel and have to change the son of a bitch. But the butternut bastard behind the bricks got the bow gunner’s rhythm quicker than he had any business doing. As soon as Powaski eased off the trigger after a burst, he popped up and let fly with a stovepipe rocket.

  “Aw, shit!” Pound said. It was a long shot for one of those babies. Maybe this one would fall short or fly wide left or right like a bad field goal…

  Maybe it would, but it didn’t. It caught the barrel right in the glacis plate. The thick armor there nearly kept the hollow-charge warhead from penetrating. Nearly mattered with everything but horseshoes and hand grenades—and, it turned out, hollow-charge warheads, too.

  Powaski and Neyer both screamed. Pound didn’t think either of them had a prayer of getting out. And inside a barrel, nine million different things could catch fire, especially when a white-hot gout of flame played across them.

  Pound screamed himself: “Out!” Some of the things that could catch fire were his boots and his coveralls. They could, and they did. He screamed again, without words this time. Then he shot out through the cupola. He never remembered opening it, but he must have.

  Next thing he knew, he was on the ground beside the burning barrel, on the ground and rolling away. Mel Scullard had got out, too. More of his clothes than of Pound’s were burning.

  Drop and roll and beat out the fire. That was what they taught you. Doing it while you were actually burning…Well, if you could do that, you were disciplined indeed. Michael Pound surprised himself—he was. He got some more burns on his hands putting out his boots and the legs to his coveralls, but he did it.

  Easy, when it’s either that or make an ash of yourself, he thought, and started to laugh. Then he realized it wasn’t just his clothes—he’d been on fire, too. He howled like a wolf instead.

  A foot soldier in green-gray ran up to Mel Scullard with a bucket of water and put him out. Scullard was already shrieking—yes, he’d got it worse than Pound. “Corpsman!” the soldier yelled, and then, “Hold on for a second, buddy, and I’ll give you a shot.”

  What about me? Pound wondered. He fumbled for the wound kit on his belt. That was a brand new hell—an inferno, in fact—because his hands were burned. He managed to get out the syringe and stick himself. He wanted instant relief. Hell, he wanted a whole new carcass. Every second he had to wait seemed an eternity. Maybe this is what Einstein means about relativity.

  Inside the burning barrel, ammunition started cooking off. He hoped it wouldn’t keep medics back. The first team that got there carried Sergeant Scullard away. “We’ll be right back for you, pal,” a little bespectacled guy called to Pound. He didn’t wait for an answer.

  Right back turned out to be something more like fifteen minutes. By then, the morphine syrette had kicked in. It didn’t make the pain disappear, but did shove it into a dark closet so Pound didn’t have to give all of his attention to it. Anything was better than nothing.

  Here came that same stretcher team. “Ease onto the litter, there,” the little guy said—he seemed to be in charge. He looked at Pound’s legs with experienced eyes. “Not too bad.”

  “It’s never too bad when it happens to somebody else,” Pound snarled, in no mood for s
ympathy.

  The little guy blinked, then nodded. “Well, I’m not gonna tell you you’re wrong.” He turned to the other bearers. “On three…One…Two…Three!” Up went the stretcher.

  “How come we get the heavy guy after the light one, Eddie?” a bearer grumbled.

  “’Cause we’re lucky, that’s why,” said the guy with the glasses. “Come on. Let’s move.”

  They took Pound back to an aid station a few hundred yards behind the line. Morphine or no morphine, he yelled and swore whenever a stretcher-bearer missed a step. He felt ashamed at being such a slave to pain, which didn’t mean he could do anything about it.

  Red crosses flew everywhere on and around the aid-station tent, which didn’t keep bullet holes from pockmarking the canvas. “Doc’s still busy with your buddy,” Eddie said. “Want another shot?”

  “Yes, please!” Pound said, in lieu of grabbing him by the shirtfront and making him use the syrette. He hardly noticed the bite of the needle. The second shot really did send the pain off into some distant province.

  He thought so, anyway, till they picked him up again and lugged him inside. That hurt in spite of all the morphine. “How’s Mel?” he asked the doctor, who was scrubbing his hands in an enameled metal basin.

  “He’s the other burned man?” The doctor had a funny accent, half New England, half almost French-sounding. He waited for Pound to nod, then said, “I think he’ll make it. He won’t be happy for a while, though.” He turned to Eddie. “Get this one up on the table, and we’ll see how happy he’ll be.”

  “Right, Doc,” Eddie said.

  Somebody—a medic, Pound supposed—stuck an ether cone over his face. The gas didn’t just smell bad; it smelled poisonous. Even as consciousness faded, he tried to tear off the cone. They wouldn’t let him.