“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 the 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.”