Return Engagement (57 page)

T
he fighting off to the west, in the direction of Sandusky, had picked up again. If the racket of the small-arms and artillery fire hadn’t told Dr. Leonard O’Doull as much, the casualties coming into the aid station near Elyria, Ohio, would have. There seemed to be no easy times, just hard ones and harder.

O’Doull stepped out of the tent for a cigarette. He made sure everyone did that, and set his own example. Smoking around ether wasn’t the smartest thing you could do. All he’d had before was green-gray canvas with a big Red Cross on it between him and the noise of battle. Somehow, things sounded much louder out here. Back in the tent, of course, he’d been concentrating on his job. That helped make the world go away. A cigarette couldn’t equal it.

He smoked anyway, enjoying the ten-minute respite he’d given himself. His boots squelched in mud as he walked about. It wasn’t raining now, but it had been, and the gray clouds rolling in off the lake said it would again before too long. He would have thought both sides would have to slow down in the rain. Things had worked like that in the Great War, anyhow. Here, they didn’t seem to.

And then the shout of, “Hey, Doc! Doc!” made him stamp out the cigarette and mutter a curse under his breath. So much for the respite. War didn’t know the meaning of the word.

“I’m here,” he yelled, and ducked back into the tent.

Stretcher-bearers brought in the casualty half a minute later. At first, O’Doull just saw another wounded man. Then he noticed the fellow wore butternut, not green-gray. He made a small, surprised noise. Eddie—one of the corpsmen—said, “We found him, so we brought him in. Their guys do the same for our wounded. Sometimes we bump into each other when we’re making pickups—swap ration cans for good tobacco, shit like that.”

Such things were against regulations. They happened all the time anyhow. O’Doull wasn’t about to get up on his high horse about them. They wouldn’t change who won and who lost, not even a little bit. And he had the wounded Confederate here. “What’s going on with him?” he asked.

What was going on was pretty obvious: a shredded, bloodied trouser leg with a tourniquet on it. “Shell blew up too damn close,” Eddie answered. “You think you can save the leg?”

“Don’t know yet,” O’Doull said. “Let’s get his pants off him and have a look.” As the corpsman started cutting away the cloth, O’Doull added, “You gave him morphine, right? That’s why he’s not talking and yelling and raising a fuss? He’s not shocky? He doesn’t look it.”

Eddie nodded. “Right the first time, Doc. Gave him a big old dose. He was screamin’ his head off when we found him, but the dope’s taken hold pretty good.”

The wounded Confederate opened his eyes. They were startlingly blue. O’Doull wasn’t sure the man was seeing him or anything else this side of God. In a faraway voice, the soldier said, “Don’t hardly hurt at all no more.”

“Good. That’s good, son.” O’Doull tried to sound as reassuring as he could. One look told him that leg was going to have to come off. It was a miracle the Confederate hadn’t bled out before Eddie got to him. Or maybe not a miracle—his hands were all bloody. Maybe he’d held on literally for dear life and slowed things down enough to give himself a chance to survive. O’Doull turned to Granville McDougald. “As soon as he’s on the table, get him under. We’ve got work to do.” With the soldier conscious, he didn’t want to say any more than that.

McDougald nodded. “Right, Doc.” He didn’t say anything else, either. But he could see what was what at least as well as O’Doull could.

Grunting, Eddie and the other corpsman got the Confederate off the stretcher and onto the operating table. Granville McDougald stuck an ether cone over the soldier’s nose. The fellow feebly tried to fight; ether was nasty stuff. Then he went limp. Eddie said, “You are gonna have to amputate, aren’t you?” He could see what was what, too.

“You bet,” O’Doull answered. “Got to be above the knee, too. That makes learning to walk with an artificial leg harder, but look at his thigh. I’ll be damned if I see how the burst missed cutting the femoral artery. That would’ve been curtains right there. But it sure as hell tore everything else to cat’s meat.”

“If it’s above the knee anyhow, do it pretty high,” McDougald advised. “You can pack more tissue below the end of the bone for a good stump.”

“Right,” O’Doull said. “You want to do it yourself, Granny? He’d have just as good a result with you cutting as he would with me.” He meant it; the other man was a thoroughly competent medical jack of all trades.

But McDougald shook his head. “Nah. You go ahead. You got me up here passing gas. I’ll go on with that.” He didn’t say he made a better anesthetist than O’Doull would. Whether he said it or not, they both knew it was true.

“All right, then.” The more O’Doull considered the wound, the less happy he got. “It will have to be high. Some of this flesh is just too damn tattered to save.
Tabernac!
” Every once in a while, he still swore in Quebecois French. Constant use had brought his English out of dormancy in a hurry, though.

He got to work, repairing what he could, removing what he had to, picking out shell fragments and bits of cloth driven into the Confederate’s wounds, and dusting sulfa powder over them. That could have gone on a lot longer than it did, but he didn’t need to worry about the damage below mid-thigh.

“Give me the bone saw, Eddie,” he said when he was ready for it. The corpsman handed it to him. He used it. Cutting through even the longest, strongest bone in the body didn’t take long. The leg fell away from its former owner.

“Very neat, Doc,” McDougald said. He’d watched the whole procedure with his usual intelligent interest. “You fixed that up better than I thought you could.”

It wasn’t over yet. O’Doull still had to make the fleshy pad below the femur and suture the flaps of skin he’d left attached for that purpose. But McDougald was right: that was just follow-up. He’d finished the challenging part.

“How’s he look?” he asked.

“He’s pretty pink. Pulse is strong. These young ones are tough. He’s got a decent chance of coming through,” McDougald answered.

“Keep him doped up,” O’Doull said. “I don’t want him feeling all of this till it’s had the chance to settle down a little bit. Be a shame to lose him to shock when we’ve got what looks like such a good result.”

“Too bad he’s not one of ours,” Eddie said, though he’d brought in the Confederate.

“Nothing we can do about that,” O’Doull said. “Geneva Convention says we take care of wounded from both sides the same way. Only common sense that we do, too. If we don’t, the Confederates won’t for our guys.”

“I suppose.” But Eddie still didn’t sound happy about it.

“We can question him while he’s all doped up,” Granville McDougald said. “If he knows anything, he’ll spill his guts.”

That bent the rules if it didn’t actually break them. O’Doull thought about saying so. Then he looked at the Confederate soldier’s tunic: two stripes on his sleeve. The man was only a corporal. Whatever he knew, it wouldn’t matter much. Besides, O’Doull had no doubt the Confederates did the same thing. Who wouldn’t? He kept his mouth shut.

Eddie took the canteen off his belt and sloshed it suggestively. “Want to celebrate pulling him through?”

Where had he come up with booze? O’Doull laughed at himself for even wondering. It wasn’t hard. The corpsman would just claim it was medicinal if anyone came down on him for it. He didn’t let whatever he scrounged interfere with the job he did. As far as O’Doull was concerned, nothing else mattered.

As for the offer . . . The doctor shook his head. “Ask me when I’m not on duty and I’ll say yes. Till then, I’ll pass. I don’t want to do anything that might make me screw up a case. That wouldn’t be fair to the poor sorry bastards who depend on me to patch ’em up the best way I know how.”

“I know plenty of docs who’d say yes so fast, it’d make your head swim,” Eddie said.

O’Doull only shrugged. “That’s their business. I’ve got to mind mine.”

“All right. All right.” By his shrug, Eddie thought O’Doull was nuts, but most likely in a harmless way. The corpsman went on, “I’m going to clean up and go see who else got lucky out there.” He spoke with a casual lack of concern that sounded more cold-blooded than it was. When he went out there, he could “get lucky” as easily as anyone else—more easily than most, for he exposed himself to more fire than any normal soldier in his right mind would have. Yes, he wore Red Cross armbands and smock and had Red Crosses on the front and back of his helmet, but not everybody paid attention to that kind of thing. And machine-gun bullets and shell fragments flew more or less at random. What did they care about the Red Cross? Not a thing, not a single thing.

After Eddie headed off toward the front, McDougald said, “You’ve got pretty good sense, Doc.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why did I put the uniform back on? What the hell am I doing here?” O’Doull said. “It isn’t for the pay and it isn’t for the scenery, that’s for goddamn sure.”

The other man chuckled. “Why? On account of you’re good at what you do, that’s why. Sometimes, if you’re good at what you do, you’ve got to go do it where it’s hardest or where you can do the most good with it. That’s how it looks to me, anyway. But what the deuce do I know? If I had any brains, I’d be out in California laying on the beach and soaking up something with a lot of rum in it.”

O’Doull scrubbed at his hands with water and disinfectant. He used soap and a toothpick to get blood out from under his nails. He always kept them trimmed short, which helped, but not enough. Lying on a beach soaking up something with a lot of rum in it sounded pretty good to him, too. But he knew what sounded better: “I wish I were home.”

“Yeah, there is that, too.” McDougald nodded. “For you there is, anyway. Me, I’m a lifer at this—and if that doesn’t prove I haven’t got any brains, screw me if I know what would.”

“You said it yourself, Granny,” O’Doull answered. “You’re good at what you do, and you’re doing it where it counts most. Next question?”

He got another small laugh from McDougald. “Well, maybe I have picked up a trick or two over the years. I’d better. I’ve been at this game long enough, you know.” He wasn’t one to parade his knowledge, which was at least as extensive as O’Doull’s even if less formally gained. He wasn’t one to make a big fuss about anything—something a lot of men who’d spent a lot of time in the Army had in common.

“I’m glad to have you here, I’ll tell you that,” O’Doull said, “especially when the chips are down.”

“Well, thanks very much. I expect you’re making more out of it than there is to make, but thanks all the same,” McDougald said. “I’m just a gas-passer who can do a little sewing and cutting when I have to, that’s all.”

“Bullshit.” O’Doull didn’t always cuss in French. Sometimes only English had the word he needed. “Maybe you couldn’t teach this stuff at a medical school, but you can sure as hell do it better than most of the docs who do teach it. When the war’s done, you ought to go back to school and pick up your M.D.”

Granville McDougald shrugged. “Have to pick up a bachelor’s first. Hell, I’m lucky I got out of high school.”

Before O’Doull could answer, a salvo of Confederate shells roared by overhead. Somebody’d be sorry when they came down. “You call this luck?” O’Doull asked. McDougald only shrugged.

XV

F
rom Los Angeles, the war back East seemed a quarrel in another room. Chester Martin followed it as closely as anyone, but that wasn’t so closely as he would have liked. The wireless and the newspapers gave him the broad outlines of the stories, but only the broad outlines. He always wanted to learn more. Not being able to ate at him.

Even the Mormon uprising in Utah was hundreds of miles away. Martin kept trying to figure out how many U.S. divisions it was tying down. Try as he would, he couldn’t. The papers and the wireless were coy as could be about stuff like that. He muttered and fumed. Those were divisions that should have been in action against the CSA. They should have, but they weren’t.

When he muttered and fumed once too often in front of Rita, she said, “Why don’t you stop flabbling about it? They aren’t going to come out and tell you. If you can’t figure it out from what you hear and what you read, maybe the Confederates won’t be able to, either.”

“Oh.” Chester felt foolish. He wanted to say several things. They were things he wasn’t supposed to say in front of his wife, so he didn’t. What he did say was, “Well, sweetheart, when you’re right, you’re right.” Anyone who’d been married for a while learned to use that phrase pretty often.

Rita just nodded, as if she knew she’d got her due. “The only way they’d pay as much attention to the war as you want would be if it came here.”

Chester snorted. “Fat chance.”

“You’re right. Fat chance,” Rita agreed. “And you know what else? I’m not sorry, not even a little bit. We’ve paid everything we owe anybody.” She’d lost her first husband in the Great War. Chester had scars on his arm that would never go away and a Purple Heart stashed in a nightstand drawer. Rita repeated,
“Everything.”
She knew he still thought about putting on the uniform again. She did everything she could to keep him from going out and signing up.

Four days later, on a cool, gray morning as close to autumnal as L.A. got (not very close, not as far as Chester was concerned, not when the leaves were mostly still on the trees and mostly still green), the
Times
and the wireless went nuts. A submersible—Confederate? Mexican? Japanese? nobody knew for sure—had surfaced off the coast near Santa Barbara, northwest of Los Angeles. Its deck gun fired maybe a dozen rounds at a seaside oil field. Then it slipped below the surface and disappeared. It was long gone before flying boats and destroyers got to the neighborhood.

At a construction site on the west side of town, Chester observed the hysteria with more than a little amusement. “You’ve almost got to hand it to the Confederates or whoever the hell it was,” he said. “Sneaking up the coast took balls.”

“We got ours draped over a doorknob, that’s for damn sure,” another builder said.

“You wait. You watch. Now we’re going to have air-raid alerts and blackouts and all the other crap we’ve done without since just after the war started,” Chester predicted. “Talk about a pain in the ass . . .”

But the other man said, “Maybe we need ’em. If the Confederates put bombers in Sonora, they could get here. Look at a map if you don’t believe me.”

Martin thought about it. Slowly, he nodded. “Maybe you’re right, Frank. I guess they could. Whether it’d be worth their while is a different story, but they
could.
”

Perhaps the powers that be were looking at the same map. By that afternoon, fighters started buzzing above Los Angeles, something else that hadn’t happened since the war was new. They would dash across the sky like bad-tempered little dogs looking for rats to tear to pieces. No rats seemed to be in evidence. That relieved Chester, but only so much. Bombers on both sides that came overhead in daylight got shot down in large numbers. Night was the time when they could fly in something resembling safety.

He rode the trolley home with more than a little apprehension. What would the night be like? When he got off in Boyle Heights, newsboys on all the corners were still shouting about the submarine and what it had done. As a matter of fact, it hadn’t done much. What it had done wouldn’t change the way the war turned out by even the thickness of a hair.

But Rita greeted Chester at the door with, “Wasn’t that horrible? Right off our coast, bold as brass! What’s the world coming to?”

“I don’t know, babe,” he answered. “Somebody was asleep at the switch, is what it looks like to me.”

That sort of thing was not what the authorities wanted people to be thinking. The wireless crackled with bulletins and commands all through the evening. Coast-watching battalions would be set up all the way from the border with Baja California to San Francisco. Airship patrols would be doubled and redoubled. And, as Chester had gloomily foretold, the blackout returned.

“We want to make sure the cunning enemy has no opportunity to strike us unawares,” brayed the man who made that announcement.

Chester laughed out loud. “What do they think just happened?” he asked.

“Oh, hush,” Rita said. “This is important.”

“Yeah, it is,” he agreed. “It’s so important, they want us to forget they just got caught with their pants down. But they darn well did.”

“We’ll manage,” Rita said. “I never threw out the blackout curtains I made. I’ll put ’em up again tomorrow. It won’t be so bad in the fall and winter. They made the place beastly hot in the summertime. You couldn’t open a window and get a breath of fresh air unless you turned out all the lights. . . .”

She didn’t want to think about what had gone wrong. She just wanted to go on from day to day. And if she thought that way, how many hundreds of thousands of others in Los Angeles did, too? Magnified, that attitude probably showed how people back East on both sides of the border got on with their lives even though bombers appeared overhead almost every night.

Another announcer said, “Mayor Poulsen and Brigadier General van der Grift, commandant of the Southern California Military District, have jointly declared that the area is in no danger and there is no cause for alarm. Steps are being taken to ensure that what Mayor Poulsen termed, ‘the recent unfortunate incident’ cannot possibly recur. General van der Grift was quoted as saying,, ‘Our state of readiness is high. Anyone who troubles us is asking for a bloody nose, and we will give him one.” “

“Where were they before this sub started shooting at us?” Chester asked. But Rita hushed him again.

She was already busy putting up the blackout curtains when he left for work the next morning. He didn’t say anything. It needed doing. And she seemed convinced it would go some little way toward winning the war. Maybe she was even right.
But if she is, God help us all,
Chester thought. That was one more thing he didn’t say.

He bought a
Times
on the way to the trolley stop. The front page showed a shell hole in the oil field, as if no one had ever seen such a thing before. That made Martin want to laugh out loud. He’d seen shell holes so close together, you couldn’t tell where one stopped and the next one started. Seen them? He’d huddled in them, hoping the next shell wouldn’t come down on top of him. How many men his age hadn’t?

But a lot of people these days were younger than he was. And women hadn’t had to go to war. Talk at the trolley stop was about nothing but the shelling. Having the trolley pull up was something of a relief, but not for long. As soon as everybody got settled, the talk started up again. And the people already aboard the car must have been talking about the shelling, too, for they chimed right in.

Chester tried to concentrate on the newspaper, but had little luck. Across the aisle from him, another man who was starting to go gray also kept out of the conversation. They caught each other’s eyes. The fellow across the aisle tapped his chest with a forefinger and said, “Kentucky and Tennessee. How about you?”

“Roanoke front and then northern Virginia,” Chester answered. “I thought you had the look.”

“I thought the same thing about you,” the other middle-aged man said.

“Yeah, well . . .” Martin shrugged. “Everybody’s running around like a chicken after the hatchet comes down. We’ve seen the real thing, for Christ’s sake. Next to that, this isn’t so much of a much.”

“Yup.” The other man nodded. “Try and tell anybody, though. Whoever did it stuck a pin in us so we’d jump up and down and yell,, ‘Ouch!’ Sure got what they wanted, too, didn’t they?”

“You’d better believe it,” Chester said.

Hardly anything is more pleasant than talking about why other people are a pack of damn fools. Chester and the veteran across from him enjoyed themselves till the other man climbed to his feet and said, “I get off here. Take care of yourself, Roanoke.”

“You, too, Kentucky,” Martin said. They nodded to each other.

A lot of the builders at the construction site were veterans, too—more than would have been true before the war started. Some of the younger men had gone into the Army or the Navy. Others were working in armament factories, hoping that would keep the government from conscripting them. Chester suspected that was a forlorn hope, but it wasn’t his worry.

Most of the men who’d seen the elephant reacted the same way as Chester and the vet on the trolley had: they couldn’t believe everyone else was making such a fuss over a nuisance raid. “It’s here, that’s why,” somebody said. “The
Times
just had to send photographers up the coast a little ways and they got the pictures they needed for the goddamn front page. Hell, I could piss in one of those lousy little holes and fill it up.”

That got a laugh. “You’d need three or four beers first, Hank,” somebody else said, and got a bigger one.

Another builder spat a couple of nails into the palm of his hand. He said, “And the mayor’s against people shooting at us. He’s got a lot of guts to take a stand like that, doesn’t he?”

“He’s like the rest,” another man said. “If it’s got a vote in it, he’s all for it. Otherwise, he thinks it’s a crappy idea.”

“Not a hell of a lot of votes in getting shelled,” Chester observed. “And did you notice the general came out and said we’ll clean their clocks the next time they try something like this? He didn’t say a word about how come the sub got away
this
time.”

“Oh, hell, no,” Hank said. “That’d show everybody what an egg-sucking dog he really is.”

“I think trying to cover it up is worse,” Chester said. “How dumb does he think we are, anyway? We’re not going to notice nobody sank the damn thing? Come on!”

“Tell you what I wish,” another man said. “I wish Teddy Roosevelt was President. He’d give that Featherston bastard what-for. Smith tries hard, and I think he means well, but Jesus! The way Featherston picked his pocket last year, they ought to throw him in jail. I voted for Smith, on account of we didn’t have to fight right then, but it looks like I got my pocket picked, too.”

Several men nodded at that. Chester said, “I voted for Taft because I was afraid Featherston would cheat. I wish I was wrong. I’ve voted Socialist almost every time since the Great War. I don’t like it when I don’t think I can. Hell, I wish we had TR back again, too.”

Were Roosevelt alive, he would have been in his eighties.
So what?
Chester thought. George Custer had been a hero one last time at that age. Would TR have let the general with whom his name was always linked upstage him? Martin shook his head. Not a chance. Not a chance in church.

W
hen the door to Brigadier General Abner Dowling’s office opened, he swung his swivel chair around in surprise. Not many people came to see him, and he didn’t have a hell of a lot to do. He’d been staring out at the rain splashing off his window. There’d been a lot of rain lately. Watching it helped pass the time. His visitor could have caught him playing solitaire. That would have been more embarrassing.

“Hello, sir.” Colonel John Abell gave him a crisp salute and a smile that, like most of the General Staff officer’s, looked pasted on. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything important.”

Dowling snorted. They both knew better. “Oh, yes, Colonel. I was just finishing up my latest assignment from the President—the plan that will win the war in the next three days. Remember, you heard it here first.” Dowling hardly cared what he said any more. How could he get an assignment worse than this one?

Abell smiled again. This time, he actually bared his teeth. That was as much reaction as Dowling had ever got from him. He said, “Are you prepared to take command of General MacArthur’s First Corps in Virginia?”

Dowling’s jaw dropped. His teeth clicked together when he closed it. “If this is a joke, Colonel, it’s in poor taste.”
Kicking a man when he’s down,
was what went through his head. Did Abell think he was too far down to take revenge? If Abell did . . . he was probably right, dammit.

But the slim, pale officer shook his head and raised his right hand as if taking an oath. “No joke, sir. General Stanbery’s command car had the misfortune to drive over a mine. They think he’ll live, but he’ll be out of action for months. That leaves an open slot, and your name was proposed for it.”

“My God. I’m sorry to hear about Sandy Stanbery’s bad luck. He’s a fine soldier.” Dowling paused, then decided to go on: “I think I’d better ask—
who
proposed me? As much as I’d like to get back into action, I don’t want to go down there and find out that General MacArthur wishes somebody else were in that position.”

“Your sentiments do you credit,” Abell said. “You don’t need to worry about that, though. MacArthur asked for you by name. He said you were very helpful in his recent meeting with you, and he said bringing you in would cause fewer jealousies than promoting one of General Stanbery’s subordinates to take his place.”

That made some sense, anyhow. Dowling didn’t know that he’d been so helpful to MacArthur, but he wasn’t about to argue. He did ask, “How will this sit with the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War?”

“Well, sir, I would say that’s largely up to you.” Abell’s pale eyes—Dowling never could decide if they were gray or light, light blue—measured him. “If the attack succeeds, how can the Joint Committee complain? If it fails, on the other hand . . .” He let that hang in the air.