Drive to the East (34 page)

The General Staff officer got redder.
Amazingly lifelike,
Morrell thought. “Production of an improved model is expected to begin within the next few weeks,” Abell said stiffly.

That was better than Morrell expected. He’d feared the USA would have to design anything new from scratch. Even so, he asked, “How late will the improved model be if the Confederates take Pittsburgh away from us? How much of our steel production would that cost?”

“We are hoping . . . sir . . . that that will not happen,” Abell answered. “We are hoping you will help keep that from happening. That’s why we’re sending you to Ohio.”

“Why you’re sending me
back
to Ohio,” Morrell corrected, and had the somber satisfaction of seeing John Abell flinch. To rub it in, he murmured, “Youngstown. Akron. Cleveland.”

“They haven’t taken Cleveland this past year!” Now Abell sounded truly furious. “What makes you think they can take it now?”

“They weren’t trying before,” Morrell said. “They wanted to split us, and they did. Now they want to cripple us.”

“If you’re telling me this is hopeless, General, someone else will be appointed. Your resignation will be accepted. You will be permitted to return home to your wife and daughter. Not just permitted—encouraged.”

Will be appointed. Will be accepted. Will be permitted.
Abell didn’t say who would do any of those things. He probably didn’t even think about it. In his world, things just happened, without any particular agency. That made him a good bureaucrat. Whether it made him a good soldier was a different question.

Morrell wanted to go home to Agnes and Mildred—but not that way. “Sorry, no. If you want to get rid of me, you’ll have to throw me out. I’m telling you it would have been a lot easier if we’d started getting ready when the Confederates did.”

“Hindsight . . .” But Abell’s voice lacked conviction. Morrell had been saying the same thing when it was foresight. Abell gathered himself. “We’re almost to the map room. You’ll see what we’re up against there.”

Except for lacking windows, the map room could have been three stories above ground instead of two stories below it. A haze of tobacco smoke hung in the air. It also smelled of coffee that had been perking for too long and bodies that had gone unwashed for too long. That last odor pervaded the front, too, so Morrell nodded, as at an old friend, when he recognized it here. The stench of death, at least, was mercifully absent.

Officers were poring over large-scale maps of Virginia and Ohio. John Abell led Morrell to one that covered the eastern part of the latter state. Morrell let out a tuneless note of dismay when he saw where the pins with the red heads were. “They’ve come that far this fast?”

“I’m afraid it looks that way,” John Abell answered.

“Jesus,” Morrell said. “They’re
already
inside Cleveland. I thought you told me they couldn’t take it.”

“They must have revised this since I went to meet you at the station,” Abell said unhappily.

“Are the Confederates moving
that
fast?” Morrell asked.

“They can’t be.” Abell spoke with less conviction than he might have liked. “It’s just signal lag, I’m sure.”

“It had better be,” Morrell said. “Well, what do you expect me to do about it? Have we got armor here?” He pointed. “If we do, we can thrust toward the lake and try to cut through their advancing column—do to their supply lines what they’ve done to us.”

“I don’t believe we have enough equipment in place there to give us much hope of success,” Abell replied.

“Why am I not surprised?” Morrell didn’t bother to keep his voice down. Several officers studying other maps looked up at him. He scowled back at them, too furious to care. They looked away. Fury wasn’t an emotion they were used to seeing here.
Too bad,
Morrell thought savagely. He turned back to John Abell. “Well, if we can’t do that, our next best move is pretty obvious.”

“Is it?” The General Staff officer raised an almost colorless eyebrow. “It hasn’t seemed that way here.”

Morrell almost asked why he wasn’t surprised again. Then, remembering the old saw about flies and honey and vinegar, he didn’t. He pointed again instead, this time along the lakeshore, from Cleveland over to Erie, Pennsylvania. “We’ll have to fight like hell here. We’ll have to fight like hell in all the built-up places—barrels aren’t really made for street fighting in the middle of towns.”

“They can do it,” Abell said.

“Sure they can,” Morrell agreed. “Dogs can walk on their hind legs, too, but it’s not what they’re
for,
if you know what I mean. Send barrels through a few good-sized towns and you won’t see very many come out the other end.”

“Suppose they bypass them.” Abell might have been back at West Point, trying to solve a tactical problem. “That’s what they did last year. They didn’t go into Columbus with armor. They got it in a pocket and attacked with infantry and artillery.”

“That’s why we defend the towns along the lake like mad bastards,” Morrell said. “They can’t surround them the way they surrounded Columbus. They have to take them instead, and that’s more expensive. If they don’t, we can resupply and reinforce by water, maybe break out and get into their rear. They’ll know that—they can read maps.”
Unlike some people I could name.

John Abell drummed his fingers on the side of his thigh—from him, the equivalent of another man’s jumping up and down and waving his arms and yelling his head off. “This would involve cooperation with the Navy,” he said at last. By the way he said it, he might have been talking about eating with his fingers. The Army always had the feeling that the Navy didn’t quite pull its weight. Here, though . . .

Morrell shrugged. He had that feeling himself. There’d been no great naval coups in this war, nothing like the capture of the Sandwich Islands. Indeed, the Navy seemed to be losing those islands a few at a time. Even so, he said, “This is something they can do,” and hoped he told the truth.

Rather than replying, Abell pulled a notebook from a breast pocket and scribbled in it. “You . . . may be right,” he said when he put the notebook back. “It’s a, ah, more indirect approach to defending the interior regions than we’d had in mind. What happens if you’re wrong?”

“I’ll probably be too dead to worry about it,” Morrell answered. Abell blinked—no, he didn’t think about things like leading from the front. Morrell went on, “But whoever takes over for me will have a couple of things going for him. Either the Confederates won’t have taken all the lakefront, or they’ll have fought their way through it. If they haven’t, he can hit them in the flank. If they have, with luck they’ll be bled white and they’ll have a tougher time getting to Pittsburgh—if that’s where they’re going.”

“That is the current assessment,” Abell said primly.

Bully.
But, again, Morrell swallowed the old-fashioned slang before it came out. He and the desk warriors of Philadelphia might not agree on means, but they did on ends. If he were Jake Featherston and he wanted to try to knock the USA out of the war, he would have gone after Pittsburgh, too. Pontiac was the other possibility. Engine production, though, was more widely dispersed than steel. And without steel, you couldn’t make engines for very long, either.

“We’ll do what we can, Colonel,” he said.

“We have to do more than
that,
” John Abell exclaimed.

Morrell started to laugh, then checked himself yet again. Abell hadn’t been joking. Morrell looked at the map again. Abell had no reason to joke, either.

D
r. Leonard O’Doull had thought that pulling out of Fredericksburg would cut U.S. casualties. And so it would, no doubt, in the long run. In the short run . . . In the short run, the Confederates on the heights gleefully bombarded the withdrawing men in green-gray. They’d knocked out the pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock more than once, knocked them out and then poured shellfire into the men stuck near them waiting to cross.

“I hate artillery,” O’Doull remarked as he worked to repair a mangled leg. He’d thought at first that he would have to take it off. Now he hoped this corporal would be able to keep it, and thought he would, too, if he didn’t get a wound infection that spread to the bone.

Across the table from him, Granville McDougald nodded. “The wounds are a lot nastier than anything a bullet can do, aren’t they?”

“They’re more likely to be, anyhow.” O’Doull had seen horrors from both. A lot of the very worst horrors, he’d never seen at all. They were reserved for front-line soldiers and stretcher bearers and Graves Registration personnel. No one could hope to repair some wounds. God almighty would have had trouble repairing some men hit by artillery fire for the Resurrection.

“Get that bleeder there, Doc,” McDougald said, and O’Doull did. The bald medic went on, “I thought you were crazy when you said you were going to try and patch this leg. I’d’ve just reached for the bone saw myself. But you may get a good result out of it. My hat’s off to you.” He doffed an imaginary chapeau.

“I hope so—and thanks.” O’Doull yawned behind his surgical mask. Granville McDougald chuckled, recognizing the expression. O’Doull added, “Jesus, but I’m tired.”

“I believe it. This just never ends, does it?”

“Doesn’t seem to,” O’Doull said. “Now they’ll probably ship us back to Ohio, eh? That would give us a few days of vacation.”

“Oh, boy,” McDougald said in a hollow voice. “We’re getting plenty of practice going back and forth, anyway.”

They were still joking about it when the corpsman brought in another wounded man. They both fell silent at the same time. All O’Doull said was, “Get him under fast, Granny.” McDougald nodded and put the ether cone over the soldier’s face. Even that wasn’t easy; he’d lost part of his nose. He’d also lost a chunk of his upper jaw and a bigger chunk of his lower jaw. He made horrible gobbling noises nothing like words.

“Can you fix him, Doc?” one of the corpsmen asked. The fellow gulped afterwards, and O’Doull had a devil of a time blaming him. This was another artillery horror, and viler than most.

Before answering, O’Doull told MacDougald, “Get a blood-pressure cuff on him, and watch his airway, too—don’t want him drowning on us.”

“Right.” The medic handled his end of the business with quick but unhurried competence. “BP is 110 over 70,” he reported a few seconds later. “He’s got a strong pulse, the poor bastard.”

“He would,” O’Doull said morosely. He nodded to the stretcher bearer then. “I don’t think he’s going to up and die on us, but I’m not sure we’re doing him any favor keeping him alive.”

“Yeah.” The corpsman looked away. With the best will in the world, with the best plastic surgery in the world—which, odds were, the wounded soldier wouldn’t be lucky enough to get—people would be looking away from the man on the table for the rest of his life. Did he have a girlfriend? A wife? Would he still, once she saw him? Did he have a little boy? What would Junior make of Daddy with half a face?

“Gotta try,” McDougald said, and O’Doull nodded. Some men were tough enough to come through something like this not only sane but triumphant. Some had people around them who loved them no matter what they looked like.

Most, unfortunately, didn’t.

Knowing that made O’Doull more hesitant than he wished he were. He did what he could to clean the wound, trim away smashed tissue and bone, and make repairs where and as he could. Then he shot the man full of morphine and told McDougald, “Put him under as deep as he’ll go, Granny. He won’t want to be awake once he finally is. Let’s put off the evil minute as long as we can.”

“No arguments here. Back at a field hospital, they’ll get him all bandaged up so he won’t have to look at—that—right away. If they know what they’re doing, they’ll break it to him gently.”

“Yeah,” O’Doull said tightly, and let it go at that. Field hospitals were almost as frantic as aid stations. Would the people farther back of the line have the time to think of gently breaking the news of this man’s mutilation? Even if they did think of it, would they have the time to do it? Or would they treat him as one more body that took up a valuable cot till they could send him somewhere else? O’Doull didn’t know, but he knew how he’d bet.

Granville McDougald straightened and stretched. “I’m gonna have me a cigarette,” he announced, and headed out of the tent.

“Sounds good to me.” Leonard O’Doull didn’t want to look at or think about that operating table for a while. The Virginia countryside wasn’t much of an improvement, not battered and bludgeoned by war as it was, but mutilated meadows were easier to bear than mutilated men.

McDougald held out a pack of Confederate cigarettes. O’Doull gladly took one. The veteran noncom gave him a light. He drew in smoke. Here, he almost wished it were the harsh stuff that came from U.S. tobacco. Wanting to choke would have done more to distract him than this rich-tasting smoothness.

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.