In at the Death Read online

  “Me, too,” Rhodes said. “We’ve got used to dishing it out. That’s a lot more fun than taking it.”

  “Bet your ass—uh, sir.” Chester needed three tries before he could strike a match; his hands were shaking. Then he held out the pack to Rhodes. The company commander didn’t waste time trying to light one on his own. He just leaned close to Chester and started his the easy way.

  Lieutenant Lavochkin came up. “We ought to push on, sir,” he said. “We can do a lot more damage before nightfall.”

  He didn’t care about the air attack. All he wanted to do was keep hitting the Confederates. That was either admirable or slightly insane, depending. Captain Rhodes sighed and blew out a ragged plume of smoke. “We’ll see to the dead and wounded, and then we’ll go on,” he said.

  Some of the dead didn’t leave enough remains to bury. Maybe the Confederates would tear up the graves the men in green-gray quickly dug, but Chester could hope they wouldn’t. Plenty of C.S. soldiers lay in U.S. soil, for the most part quietly.

  When the war was over, they would probably sort all of that out. They’d done the same thing after the Great War. By all the signs, this war was bigger and nastier than the one that had lasted from 1914 to 1917. What would they call it when it was done? The Greater War? The Worse War? Right now, it was just the War, commonly with an obscene adjective stuck on in front.

  They did roll on after an hour or so, and took a would-be Confederate ambush from behind. The enemy soldiers seemed highly offended at that—those who lived through the encounter, anyhow. U.S. soldiers took prisoners, as much to keep their intelligence officers happy as because they really wanted to. One of the men in butternut complained, “Y’all weren’t suppose to come where you did.”

  “That’s what she said,” Chester answered, which left his buddies laughing and the POW shaking his head.

  Home guards and Mexicans tried to make a fight in Stephens and Hutchings, two little towns in front of Lexington. They got blasted out of the way in short order in both places. They were brave, but bravery and small arms and a few mines didn’t go very far against halftracks and barrels. The two villages went up in flames.

  Lexington was a tougher nut to crack. The defenders had a couple of quick-firing three-inch guns, leftovers from a generation earlier. For all Chester knew, they’d been sitting on the courthouse lawn ever since. If they had, somebody’d kept them well greased. And some old-timer—probably a guy a lot like me, Chester thought—knew what to do with them. Shells rained down on the advancing U.S. soldiers.

  But the Confederates didn’t seem to have any armor-piercing ammunition. Those three-inchers weren’t made for barrel busting, anyway. They did hurt some men on foot and in soft-skinned vehicles, but that was enough to make the soldiers in green-gray angry without being enough to stop them. As the December sun went down, Lexington got the same treatment as the two smaller towns in front of it.

  The U.S. soldiers camped in the ruins. “See?” Lieutenant Lavochkin said. “Piece of cake.”

  “Expensive piece of cake…sir,” Chester said woodenly.

  Lavochkin shrugged. “They paid more than we did. And we can afford it better than they can.”

  Both those things were probably true. In the cold calculus of war, they were also probably the only things that mattered. A guy who’d just stopped shrapnel with his belly cared about none of that. Chester lit a Raleigh and thanked God he hadn’t.

  One of the first things Dr. Leonard O’Doull found out about Sergeant Goodson Lord was that he hated his name. “My mother’s maiden name, and I’ve got it for my first one,” the new medic said. “If I had a dime for every time I got called Good Lord, I’d be a goddamn millionaire.”

  “I believe it,” O’Doull said. “Didn’t your folks realize what they were doing?”

  “I doubt it,” Lord replied. “Neither one of ’em’s got much of a sense of humor, I’m afraid.”

  “How about you?” O’Doull asked.

  “Me, sir?” Sergeant Lord gave him a wry grin. “I earned mine the hard way. It was either laugh or murder some yokking asshole before I was twelve years old.”

  “Well, I spent a couple of years working with a guy who answered to Granny,” O’Doull said. “If I say Good Lord every once in a while, I may not be talking to you.”

  “Can’t ask for more,” Lord said.

  “And I’ll tell you one more time—careful about the women around here.”

  “Hey, I like screwing—who doesn’t?” the noncom said. “I hope I’m not too dumb about going after it.”

  He didn’t seem to swish now, even if O’Doull had wondered before. He was on the young side of thirty. Most guys his age would have said the same thing—unless they came out and admitted that they thought with their dick. “Try not to get murdered,” O’Doull said earnestly. “I hate breaking in a new guy every couple of months, you know what I mean?”

  “Sir, I will do my best,” Sergeant Lord said.

  He did his best with the wounded, too. He was at least as good as Vince Donofrio had been, and he was plainly a better anesthetist. O’Doull still missed Granville McDougald, but Lord would definitely do.

  And the wounded kept coming in as U.S. forces cut off one road into and out of Atlanta after another. O’Doull worked like a maniac to keep the hurt men from dying or getting worse right away, then sent them off to field hospitals farther back of the line.

  He spent quite a bit of time patching up a sergeant’s left hand, which had taken a bullet through the palm. “I think he’ll have pretty good function there,” he said when the surgery was done. “Hope so, anyway.”

  “I bet he will, Doc,” Goodson Lord said. “You really do pay attention to the little stuff, and it matters. I’ve seen some guys just stitch up a wound like that and let it go. They figure the doctor in the rear’ll take care of it, and sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong. Myself, I always thought it was a lazy, shitty thing to do.”

  “I’m with you. The more you do right the first time, as soon as you can, the less you have to be sorry for later,” O’Doull said.

  Sometimes you couldn’t do much. The corpsmen brought in a soldier in the mottled camouflage uniform of a Freedom Party Guard; he’d been shot through the head. “Why did you bother?” Lord said after one look at the wound.

  “Well, you never can tell,” Eddie answered.

  That was true. Every once in a while, O’Doull got a surprise. But he didn’t think he would this time. The wounded man was barely breathing. His pupils were of different sizes and unresponsive to light, his pulse reedy and fading. Brains and blood and bits of bone dribbled out of a hole the size of O’Doull’s fist.

  “I can clean things up a little, but that’s it,” O’Doull said. “He’s in God’s hands, not mine.” He didn’t think God would hang on tight, either.

  The Confederate died halfway through the cleanup. He gave a couple of hitching last breaths and then just—stopped. “That’s a mercy,” Sergeant Lord said. “Other mercy is, he never knew what hit him. How many bad burns have you seen, Doc?”

  “One is a million too many,” O’Doull answered, and the senior medic nodded. When O’Doull thought of those, he didn’t think of seeing them, though. The smell, like pork left too long in the oven, rose up in his mind as vividly as if a burned barrelman lay on the table in front of him.

  And they got themselves a different kind of casualty, one brought in not by the medics but by an irate platoon commander. “Sir, this sorry son of a bitch has the clap,” the lieutenant said in a voice that seemed barely done changing. “Isn’t that right, Donnelly?”

  “’Fraid so,” Donnelly said. “Hurts like hell when I piss.”

  “Well, we can do something about that,” O’Doull said; guys with VD were just as much out of the fight as if Jake Featherston’s men had plugged them. “Drop your pants, Donnelly, and turn the other cheek.”

  “You gonna give me a shot?” the soldier asked apprehensively.
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br />   “Yup.” O’Doull readied the needle—a big one.

  “I thought you got pills for the clap.” Donnelly might well be fearless in the field, but he sure wasn’t here.

  “You used to. This penicillin clears it up faster and better, though,” O’Doull said. “Now bend over.”

  “You fuck around, Donnelly, I’ll have you bend over and I’ll kick your sorry ass—I won’t stick it,” the kid lieutenant said.

  By the expression on Donnelly’s face, he would rather have got a kicking than a shot. But he saw he had no choice. He yelped when the needle went home. O’Doull pushed in the plunger with a certain malicious glee. “For Chrissake, wear a rubber next time,” he said.

  “It’s like screwing in socks,” Donnelly whined.

  “Well, your sweetheart sure gave you something to remember her by,” O’Doull said. “What did you give her?”

  “Four cans of deviled ham. She was skinny as all get-out. How was I supposed to know she’d give me a drippy faucet?”

  “You’re supposed to think about shit like that,” his platoon commander snapped before O’Doull could say anything. “How many times did you hear about it in basic?”

  “Yes, sir,” Donnelly said. O’Doull had a good notion of what he wasn’t saying: that the only thing he’d cared about was getting his jollies.

  That was natural enough. Of course, so was running away if somebody started shooting at you. Soldiers could learn not to. They could also learn not to screw without being careful. They could, but this one hadn’t.

  “Clap isn’t the only thing to worry about down here,” O’Doull said. “Medic who worked with me got murdered for laying a Confederate woman.”

  “I wasn’t worried about that, sir. I wasn’t worried about anything,” Donnelly said.

  He wouldn’t listen. O’Doull could see that. “Well, pull your pants up and get the hell out of here,” he said. “If you come down with another dose, so help me God I’ll find a bigger needle.” The threat might work if anything did.

  It made Donnelly look worried as he covered himself again, anyhow. The lieutenant kept barking at him as he led him away from the aid station. “How often does that happen?” Lord asked.

  “Every now and again,” O’Doull answered. “At least this guy didn’t have a chancre.”

  “Penicillin’ll do for syphilis, too,” Sergeant Lord said.

  “Sure a lot better than the chemicals full of arsenic we used before,” O’Doull agreed. “And before that it was mercury and all kinds of other poison.”

  The senior medic made a face. “I think I’d rather have the pox. A lot of the time, something else would kill you before it got bad.”

  “Maybe,” O’Doull said. “But maybe not, too. A lot of the time, you’d get sick over and over, one thing after another. They’d all be different. They’d all look different, anyhow. But they’d all have syphilis at the bottom. Damn thing’s the great pretender.”

  “You know more about it than I do, sir,” Sergeant Lord said. “I played the trombone before I got conscripted. I knew some guys who had it, and it didn’t seem to bother them all that much.”

  “Seem to is right,” O’Doull said, and then, “The trombone, eh? Have one with you?”

  “Afraid not, sir. It’s not like a flute or even the trumpet—not so easy to carry around.”

  “Too bad. Well, maybe you can liberate one.”

  “Maybe.” Goodson Lord looked dubious. “I’ve seen fiddles and pianos and guitars in these pissant Confederate towns, but that’s about it.”

  “Well, let the corpsmen know. Let the guys in front of us know,” O’Doull said. “You’d be amazed at what they can come up with—besides the clap, I mean.”

  “If I want that, I’ll get it myself,” Lord said. O’Doull snorted.

  Since the medic didn’t seem to want to spread the word, O’Doull did it for him. Inside of three days, Eddie produced a horn. “Here you go,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Goodson Lord said. He took the trombone and started to play. Notes smooth and mellow as butter filled the tent. They made the Army bugles O’Doull was used to seem like screeching blue jays by comparison.

  “Wow!” Eddie said. “You really can play that so-and-so.”

  “You think I was lying?” Lord asked, lowering the trombone.

  “No, not like that,” Eddie answered. “But there’s playing, and then there’s playing, you know? You’re really good!”

  “Oh. Thanks.” The corpsman’s enthusiasm made the sergeant blink. He started to play some more.

  He got about thirty seconds into a number from Oh, Sequoyah! before a corpsman brought in a man with a piece of shrapnel in his thigh. “You can blow that thing, man,” the soldier said. “Can you keep playing while the doc works on me?”

  “Sorry,” Lord said after a quick look at the wound. “I think we’re gonna have to knock you out.”

  “Aw, hell,” the wounded man said. As far as Leonard O’Doull could remember, that was the first time he’d ever heard a man ask not to be anesthetized.

  Sergeant Lord got the patient etherized on the table. O’Doull cut away the man’s trouser leg and started cleaning out the wound and tying off bleeders. He could see the femoral artery pulsing in there, but it wasn’t cut. If it had been, the man likely would have bled out before he got back to the aid station.

  O’Doull sewed him up and injected him with penicillin and tetanus antitoxin. “These aren’t so bad,” he said. “He should heal up fine.”

  “You do like to work on ’em when they turn out that way,” Lord agreed. “How many amputations have you done?”

  “I couldn’t even begin to count ’em. They’re like burns: more than I ever wanted to, that’s for damn sure,” O’Doull said.

  “Yeah, same here,” Lord said. “They’re easy to perform, they’re fast, and the patient usually comes through ’em pretty well. But you know he’ll never be the same afterwards, the poor bastard.”

  “Ain’t it the truth?” O’Doull said sadly. “Most of the time when I do an amputation, I feel more like a butcher than a surgeon.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Lord said.

  O’Doull wished they hadn’t been talking about it, because the very next man the corpsman carried in had a foot and lower leg smashed beyond the hope of saving. The doctor pulled out the bone saw and did what he had to do. As Sergeant Lord had said, the soldier would probably pull through. Whether he would be happy about it was a different question. O’Doull wasn’t likely ever to learn his answer to it.

  Fayetteville lay south and even a little west of Atlanta. A rail line ran through it. Once the U.S. Army got astride that line, it would pinch off one more Confederate artery into the beleaguered capital of Georgia. Lieutenant Michael Pound didn’t think the enemy would be able to hold Atlanta much longer after that happened.

  Being a platoon commander, Pound wore earphones more often than he wanted to. Instead of doing as he pleased, he had to keep track of what the other units in the regiment and the other barrels in his platoon were up to. He thought it cramped his style.

  “Marquard’s platoon has lost three barrels at square G-5,” a voice from somewhere in back of the line intoned. “Need armor there to cover the infantry advance.”

  Pound checked the map. If his platoon was where he thought, they were right on the edge of G-5 themselves. “Pound here,” he answered on the same frequency. “We can cover. Do you know why they lost them? Over.”

  He waited. He didn’t have to wait long. “Roger your covering,” the voice said. “Report is that the losses are due to enemy barrels. Over.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with Marquard?” Pound asked, but not with the TRANSMIT key pressed. He happened to know that the other lieutenant had new-model machines. To his way of thinking, you had to be worse than careless to lose three in a hurry to C.S. barrels. You damn near had to be criminally negligent.

  He wirelessed the
news to the other four barrels in his platoon. By what their commanders said, they felt the same way. “We’ll take care of it,” one of the sergeants promised. “Those butternut bastards can kiss their butts good-bye.”

  “Damn straight!” Pound said. He led a bunch of hard-charging pirates, men who thought the same way he did. “Let’s go get ’em. Follow me.”

  He led the platoon west and a little south, to come in where the luckless Marquard had got in trouble. He hadn’t got far before realizing the trouble might not be what he thought. There sat a dead U.S. barrel in a field—not just dead but decapitated, for the turret lay upside down, about ten feet from the chassis.

  “Fuck,” Sergeant Scullard said. “Where’d they get a gun that could do that?”

  “Good question,” Pound said, which didn’t answer the gunner. He got on the platoon circuit again: “Be careful, guys. Use all the cover you can. I think Featherston’s fuckers just came up with something new.”

  For most of a year, the latest U.S. barrels had dominated the battlefield. If they couldn’t do that any more…then everything got harder. Michael Pound approved of easy, not that the enemy cared.

  He flipped up the lid to the cupola and stood up in the turret. He needed to be able to see; the periscopes built into the cupola just didn’t do the job. There wasn’t a lot of small-arms fire. If the C.S. gunners who nailed that U.S. barrel opened up on him with an automatic rifle or a machine gun…that was better than having them shoot at his barrel with whatever monster gun they had.

  One of the other barrels in his platoon was about a hundred yards to his left. He saw a blast of flame burst from a thick stand of bushes, heard a thunderous roar, and a moment later watched the other U.S. barrel brew up. The men inside couldn’t have had a chance—and that gun, whatever it was, would be aiming at him next.

  “Front!” he bawled as he tumbled back into the turret.

  “Identified,” Scullard answered. “I’m going to give it AP. I think a hull’s hiding in there.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see one.” But Pound added, “If you got a better look, go with what you think.”