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.
'Won't he be proud of his Purple Heart?' Eddie was a little rabbity guy. Somehow, that only made his sarcasm more devastating.
'He's here to get one, anyway,' O'Doull said. 'You told me he had a buddy who bought the whole plot,
