Return Engagement (37 page)

Major Kennedy only shrugged. “Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good. Maybe some of the guys from other fields’ll get after their asses.”

“Hope somebody’s home,” Moss said. Most U.S. fighters spent as much time as they could over the corridor the Confederates had carved up through Ohio and Indiana. They’d done all they could to keep the CSA from reaching Lake Erie. They’d done all they could—and it hadn’t been enough.

What were they going to do now? Huddled in the trench, Moss had no idea.

F
lora Blackford’s secretary looked into the office. “Mr. Caesar is here to see you, ma’am,” she said, and let out a distinct sniff.

“Send him in, Bertha,” Flora answered.

Bertha sniffed again. Flora understood why. It saddened her, but she couldn’t do much about it. In came the man who’d waited in the outer office. He was tall and scrawny, and wore a cheap suit that didn’t fit him very well. He was also black as the ace of spades, which accounted for Bertha’s unhappiness.

“Please to meet you, Mr. Caesar,” Flora said. She waved the Negro to a chair. “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I gather you had quite a time getting to Philadelphia.”

“Caesar’s not my last name, ma’am, so I don’t hardly go by
Mister,
” he said. “It’s not my first name, neither. It’s just . . . my name. That’s how things is for black folks down in the CSA.” He folded himself into the chair. “Gettin’ here . . . ? Yes, ma’am. Quite a time is right. Confederate soldiers almost shot me, and then Yankee soldiers almost shot me. But I got captured instead, like I wanted to, and they sent me up here. When they did, I knew you was the one I wanted to see.”

“Why?” Flora asked.

“On account of I heard tell of you down in Virginia. You’re the one they call, ‘the conscience of the Congress,’ ain’t that right?”

A flush warmed Flora’s cheeks. “I don’t know that I deserve the name—” she began.

Caesar waved that aside. “You got it. It’s yours.” He was plainly intelligent, even if his accent tried to obscure that. “Figured if anybody would take me serious, you’re the one.”

“Take you seriously about what?” Flora asked.

“Ma’am, they are massacrin’ us,” Caesar answered solemnly. “They got camps in the pinewoods and in the swamps, and black folks goes into ’em by the trainload, and nobody never comes out.”

“People have been telling stories like that about the Freedom Party since before it came to power,” Flora said. “What proof have you got? Without proof, those stories are worse than useless, because the Confederates can just call us a pack of liars.”

“I know that, ma’am. That’s how come I had to git myself up here—so I could give you the proof.” Caesar set a manila envelope on her desk. “Here.”

She opened the envelope. It held fifteen or twenty photographs of varying size and quality. Some showed blacks in rags and in manacles lined up before pits. Others showed piles of corpses in the pits. One or two showed smiling uniformed white men holding guns as they stood on top of the piles of dead bodies. She knew she would remember those small, grainy, cheerful smiles the rest of her life.

She both did and didn’t want to look all the way through the photos. They were the most dreadful things she’d ever seen, but they also exerted a horrid, almost magnetic, fascination. Before she saw them, she hadn’t dreamt humanity was still capable of such things. This was a sort of education she would rather not have had.

At last, after she didn’t know how long, she looked up into Caesar’s dark, somber features. “Where did you get these?” she asked, and she could hear how shaken her voice was. “Who took them?”

“I got ’em on account of some folks—colored folks—knew I wanted to prove what people was sayin’,” Caesar answered. “We had to do it on the sly. If we didn’t, if the Freedom Party found out what we was up to, I reckon somebody else’d take a photo with me in one o’ them piles.”

“Who
did
take these?” Flora asked again.

“Some of ’em was took by niggers who snuck out after the shootin’ was done,” Caesar said. “Some of ’em, though, the guards took their ownselves. Reckon you can cipher out which. Some of the guards down at them places ain’t always happy about what they’re doin’. Some of ’em, though, they reckon it’s the best sport in the world. They bring their cameras along so they can show their wives an’ kiddies what big men they are.”

He wasn’t joking. No one who’d had a look at those photographs could possibly be in any mood to joke. Flora made herself examine them once more. Those white faces kept smiling out of the prints at her. Yes, those men had had a good time doing what they did. How much blood was on their boots? How much was on their hands?

“How did your friends get hold of pictures like this?” she asked.

“Stole ’em,” he answered matter-of-factly. “One o’ them ofays goes out with a box Brownie every time there’s a population reduction, folks notice. Plenty o’ niggers cook and clean for the guards. They wouldn’t do nigger work their ownselves, after all. They got to be ready to take care o’—that.” He pointed to the photos on the desk.

Ofays. Population reduction.
Neither was hard to figure out, but neither was part of the English language as it was spoken in the United States. The one, Flora guessed, was part of Confederate Negro slang. The other . . . The other was more frightening. Even though she heard it in Caesar’s mouth, it had to have sprung from some bureaucrat’s brain. If you call a thing by a name that doesn’t seem so repellent, then the thing itself also becomes less repellent. Sympathetic magic—except it wasn’t sympathetic to those who fell victim to it.

Flora shook herself, as if coming out of cold, cold water. “May I keep these?” she asked. “I’m not the only one who’ll need to see them, you know.”

“Yes, ma’am. I understand that,” Caesar said. “You can have ’em, all right. They ain’t the only ones there is.”

“Thank you,” Flora said, though she wished with all her heart that such photographs did not, could not, exist. “Thank you for your courage. I’ll do what I can with them.”

“That’s what I brung ’em for.” Caesar got to his feet. “Much obliged. Good luck to you.” He dipped his head in an awkward half bow and hurried out of her office with no more farewell than that.

If Flora put the photos back in the manila envelope, her eyes wouldn’t keep returning to them. She told her secretary, “Cancel the rest of my appointments for this morning. I have to get over to Powel House right away.”

Bertha nodded, but she also let out another sniff. “I don’t know why you’re getting yourself in an uproar over whatever that . . . that person told you.”

“That’s my worry,” Flora said crisply. She went outside to flag a cab. Fifteen minutes later, she was at the President’s Philadelphia residence. Antiaircraft guns poked their long snouts skyward on the crowded front lawn. They were new. She walked between them on the way to the door.

She was a Congresswoman. She was a former First Lady. She’d known Al Smith for more than twenty-five years, since before she was either. Put that all together, and it got her fifteen minutes with the President after half an hour’s wait. When a flunky escorted her into his office, she had to work hard to keep her face from showing shock. Smith hadn’t looked well the last time she came here. He looked worse now, much worse. He looked like hell.

He’ll never live through this term,
Flora thought. She bit her tongue, even though she hadn’t said anything at all. “Are you . . . getting enough sleep, Mr. President?” she asked carefully.

“I get a little every night, whether I need it or not.” His grin came from the other side of the grave, but his voice, though weaker than before, was still the cheerful New York bray it had always been, the voice that had made people call him the Happy Warrior. Maybe he didn’t want anyone else to know his job was killing him. Maybe he didn’t know himself. “What have you got for me, Flora? Malcolm said you said it was important.”

“It is, sir. A colored man escaped from Virginia gave me these. . . .” She set the manila envelope on the desk between them. “I hope you have a strong stomach. This is proof the Confederates aren’t just mistreating their Negroes, the way they always have. They’re slaughtering them.”

“Let’s see.” He set reading glasses on his nose, which only made him look like a learned skeleton. He went through the photos one by one, nodding every now and then. When he was through, he eyed Flora over the tops of the glasses. “All right. Here they are. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Shout it from the housetops!” she exclaimed. “When the world knows they’re doing this, they’ll have to stop.”

“Will they?” Smith said. “Remember when the Ottomans started killing Armenians?” He waited. When Flora didn’t answer, he prodded her: “Remember?”

“I remember,” she said, a sudden sinking feeling at the pit of her stomach.

“We protested to the Sultan,” the President said. “You’d know about that—Hosea was Vice President then, wasn’t he? We protested. Even the Kaiser said something, I think. And the USA and Germany had fought on the same side as Turkey during the Great War. How much attention did anybody in Constantinople pay?”

Again, he stopped. Again, she had to answer. Miserably, she did: “Not much.”

“Not any, you mean,” Al Smith said. “They went on killing Armenians till there weren’t a whole lot of Armenians left to kill. We’re not the Confederates’ allies. We’re enemies. They’ll say we’re making it up. Britain and France will believe them, or pretend to. Japan won’t care. And people here won’t much care, either. Come on, Flora—who gives a damn about
shvartzers
?” Of course a New York Irish politician knew the Yiddish word for Negroes.

“They’re
slaughtering
them, Mr. President,” Flora said stubbornly. “People can’t ignore that.”

“Who says they can’t?” Smith retorted. “Most people in the USA don’t care what happens to Negroes in the CSA. They’re just glad they don’t have to worry about very many Negroes here at home. You can like that or not like it, but you can’t tell me it isn’t true.” He waited once more. This time, Flora had nothing to say. But even saying nothing admitted Smith was right. Nodding as if she
had
admitted it, the President continued, “And besides, Sandusky’s fallen.”

“Oh . . . dear,” Flora said, in lieu of something stronger. It wasn’t that she hadn’t expected the news. But it was like a blow in the belly even so.

“Yeah,” Smith said, trying to seem as upbeat as he could. He put Caesar’s photographs back in the envelope. “So if we start going on about this stuff right now, what will people think? They’ll think we’re trying to make ’em forget about what we couldn’t do on the battlefield. And will they be wrong?”

“But this—this is the worst wickedness the world has ever seen!” The word was old-fashioned, but Flora couldn’t find another one that fit.

“We’re already in a war full of bombed cities and poison gas,” Smith said. “When we’re doing that to each other, who’s going to get all hot and bothered about what the Confederates are doing to their own people?”

“Mr. President, this isn’t war. This is murder. There’s a difference,” Flora insisted.

“Maybe there is. I suppose there is. If you can make people see it, more power to you,” Al Smith said. “I’m very sorry—I’m more sorry than I know how to tell you—but I don’t think you can.”

Flora wanted to hit him, not least because she feared he was right. Instead, keeping her voice under tight control, she said, “Would you say the same thing if they were Jews and not Negroes?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. People in the USA are more likely to get hot and bothered about Jews than they are about Negroes, don’t you think?” Smith sounded horribly reasonable. “If you can make it go, I’ll get behind you. But I won’t take the lead here. I can’t.”

“I’m going to try,” Flora said.

X

T
he worst had happened. That was what everybody said. The Confederates had sliced up through Ohio and cut the United States in half. If the worst had already happened, shouldn’t that have meant that men from the USA and CSA weren’t killing one another quite so often now? It didn’t, not so far as Dr. Leonard O’Doull could tell.

U.S. forces were trying to strike back toward the west and cut through the Confederate corridor. The Confederates, for their part, were doing their best to push eastward, toward Pennsylvania. So far, nobody seemed to be making much progress. That didn’t mean an awful lot of young men on both sides weren’t getting maimed, though.

O’Doull’s aid station lay a few miles west of Elyria, Ohio—about halfway between lost Sandusky and Cleveland. Elyria had been the town with the largest elm in Ohio: a tree with a spread of branches of over a hundred thirty feet and a trunk almost sixty-five feet thick. It had been, but no more: Confederate artillery and bombs had reduced the tree to kindling—along with much of what had been a pleasant little place.

“Burns are the worst,” O’Doull said to Granville McDougald. “Some of the poor bastards with burns, you just want to cut their throats and do them a favor.”

“This tannic acid treatment we’re using now helps a lot,” the corpsman answered. McDougald was resolutely optimistic.

“We’re saving people we wouldn’t have in the last war—no doubt of that,” O’Doull said. “Some of them, though . . . Are we doing them any favors when we keep them alive?”

“We’ve got to do what we can,” McDougald said. “Once they get the pain under control, they thank us.”

“Yeah. Once,” O’Doull said tightly. He was seeing a lot more burn cases this time around than he had in the last war. Men who bailed out of barrels usually had to run a gauntlet of flame to escape. During the Great War, barrels had been latecomers and oddities. They were an ordinary part of the fighting here. With so many more of them in action, so many more horrible things could happen to their crews.

In the last war, O’Doull didn’t remember anyone asking to be killed so he could escape his torment. It might well have happened, but he hadn’t seen it. He did now. More than once, he’d been tempted to ignore the Hippocratic oath he’d sworn and give the victims what they wanted.

“That’s why God made morphine, sir,” McDougald said.

“God made morphine—and we make addicts,” O’Doull replied.

“If you’re in pain, that’s the least of your worries,” the corpsman said. “All you want to do is stop hurting. You can get over morphine addiction once you’re not hurting any more. As long as the burns are giving you hell, you might as well be dead.”

O’Doull thought of addiction as a personal failing, even if pain relief caused it. He eyed McDougald thoughtfully. The corpsman had a different slant on things. “You look at it from the patient’s point of view, don’t you? Not the doctor’s, I mean.”

“I’m not a doctor,” McDougald said, which was formally true. He went on, “And we’re here for the patients, aren’t we?”

A lot of people at aid stations thought they were there to advance their own careers, or to stay out of the front-line fighting. And there were some men from churches that did not approve of members who carried guns, but that had nothing against helping the wounded. “Everybody ought to think the way you do,” O’Doull said. “We’d all be better off.”

The corpsman only shrugged. “Maybe yes, maybe no. My guess is, we’d just be screwed up a different way.”

“Doc! Hey, Doc!” O’Doull had come to dread that call. It meant another wounded man coming in. Sure enough, the corpsman outside went on, “Got a belly wound for you, Doc!”

“Oh, hell,” O’Doull said. Even with sulfa drugs, belly wounds were always bad news. The chance for peritonitis was very high, and a bullet or shell fragment could destroy a lot of organs a person simply couldn’t live without. O’Doull raised his voice: “Bring him in.”

The corpsmen were already doing it. They lifted their stretcher up onto the makeshift operating table that had been someone’s kitchen table till the Medical Corps commandeered it. The soldier on the stretcher wasn’t groaning or screaming, as men with belly wounds often did. He’d passed out—a mercy for a man with an injury like that. He was ghost pale, and getting paler as O’Doull eyed him.

“I don’t think you’d better wait around real long, Doc,” said the corpsman who’d shouted for O’Doull.

“I don’t intend to, Eddie,” O’Doull answered. He turned to McDougald. “Pass gas for me, Granny?” McDougald wasn’t an anesthetist, either, but he’d do a tolerable job.

He nodded now. “I’ll take a shot at it.” He grabbed the ether cone and put it over the unconscious man’s face. “Have to be careful not to give him too much, or he’s liable to quit breathing for good.”

He was liable to do that anyway. He looked like the devil. But he was still alive, and O’Doull knew he had to give it his best shot. He said, “Eddie, get a plasma line into his arm. We’re going to have to stretch his blood as far as it’ll go, and then maybe another ten feet after that.”

“Right, Doc.” Eddie grabbed for a needle. O’Doull hoped it wasn’t one he’d just used on some other patient, but he wasn’t going to get himself in an uproar about it one way or the other. This wounded man had more important things to worry about. Surviving the next half hour topped the list.

When O’Doull opened him up, he grimaced at the damage. The bullet had gone in one side and out the other, and had tumbled on the way through. There were more bleeders than you could shake a stick at, and they were all leaking like hell.

Granville McDougald said, “You don’t want to waste a lot of time, Doc. He’s just barely here.”

“What’s his blood pressure, Eddie?” O’Doull asked. His hands automatically started repairing the worst of the damage.

“Let me get a cuff on him,” the corpsman said. “It’s . . . ninety over sixty, sir, and falling. We’re losing him. Down to eighty over fifty . . . Shit! He’s got no pulse.”

“Not breathing,” McDougald said a moment later, and then, “I’m afraid he’s gone.”

Eddie nodded. “No pulse. No BP. No nothin’.” He loosened the cuff and pulled the needle from the plasma line out of the soldier’s—the dead soldier’s—arm. “Not your fault, Doc. You did what you could. He got hit too bad, that’s all. I saw what you were trying to fix up. His guts were all chewed to hell.”

“That they were.” Leonard O’Doull straightened wearily. “Get his identity disk. Then call the burial detail and Graves Registration. Somebody’s going to have to notify his next of kin.”

“That’s a bastard of a job,” McDougald said. “In the last war, no one wanted to see a Western Union messenger coming to the door. Everybody was afraid he had a, ‘deeply regret’ telegram. It’s gonna be the same story this time around, too.”

O’Doull hadn’t thought spending the last war in a military hospital had shielded him from anything. Now he discovered he was wrong. People in Quebec hadn’t had to worry about telegrams with bad news—not in the part of Quebec where he’d been stationed, anyhow. Farther west, Quebec City and Montreal had held out for a long time before falling. Francophones had defended them along with English-speaking Canadians.

Lucien doesn’t have to worry about the war. He can get on with his life.
That was a relief, anyhow. Quebec’s conscription law wasn’t universal, and Lucien had never had to be a soldier. And with the Republic formally neutral—even if it did lean toward the USA and help occupy English-speaking Canada—it wasn’t likely the younger O’Doull would ever have to aim a rifle in anger.

That bothered the elder O’Doull not at all. He’d seen too much of what rifles aimed in anger could do in the last war. The refresher course he was getting now—including the poor son of a bitch who’d just died on the table—had done nothing to change his opinion.

He discovered he was still holding the scalpel. He chucked it into a wide-mouthed jug of rubbing alcohol. The jug had a big red skull and crossbones on it, plus a warning label in red capital letters: poison! do not drink! He hoped that would keep thirsty soldiers from experimenting. You never could tell. He’d heard that sailors were draining the alcohol fuel from torpedo motors and drinking it. But that really was ethyl alcohol, and wouldn’t hurt them unless they were pigs. Rubbing alcohol was a different critter. It was poison even in small doses.

He scrubbed his hands with strong soap. He could get the dead soldier’s blood off of them easily enough. Getting it off his mind . . . ? He shook his head. That was another story. If anybody could sympathize with Lady Macbeth, a battlefield surgeon was the one to do it.
Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
And Macbeth himself:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Macbeth, unlike his lady, had borne up under what he’d done. O’Doull had to do the same.

“Can’t save them all, Doc,” Eddie said.

It was meant to be sympathy. O’Doull knew as much. He wanted to punch the corpsman even so. Instead, he hurried out of the tent. He gaped and blinked in the sunshine like some nocturnal creature unexpectedly caught out by day. That wasn’t so far wrong. He spent most of his time under canvas trying to patch up what the fierce young men on either side were so eager to ruin.

For the time being, the front was pretty quiet. The Confederates had got what they wanted most. The United States hadn’t yet decided how their real counterattack would go in. Only an occasional shot or brief burst of gunfire marred the day.

O’Doull pulled out a pack of Raleighs. They were spoil of war: taken from a dead Confederate soldier and passed on to him in appreciation of services rendered. The C.S. tobacco was a hell of a lot smoother than what the USA grew. Even since he’d got to the front, O’Doull had noticed a steep dive in the quality of U.S. cigarettes as stocks of imported tobacco got used up. These days, brands like Rose Bowl and Big Sky tasted as if they were made of dried, chopped horse manure.

He still smoked them when he couldn’t get anything better. They relaxed him and calmed his nerves even if they did taste lousy. Most of the time, his hands steadied down when he got to work. Still, a dose of nicotine didn’t hurt.

Raleighs, now, Raleighs had it all. They gave your nerves what you craved, and they tasted good, too. How could you go wrong?

O’Doull stopped with the half-smoked cigarette halfway to his mouth. How could you go wrong? He wouldn’t have been enjoying this savory smoke if some kid from North Carolina or Mississippi or Texas hadn’t stopped a bullet or a shell fragment. Things had gone wrong for the Confederate soldier, and they’d never go right for him again. O’Doull started to throw down the cigarette, then checked himself. What was the point of that? It wouldn’t do the dead man any good. But the smoke didn’t taste as good now when he raised it to his lips.

He finished the Raleigh, then stomped it out. Behind the line, U.S. guns began to roar. Shells flew through the air with freight-train noises. Gas rounds gurgled as if they were tank cars full of oil or molasses. O’Doull’s mouth twisted. The Confederates would respond in kind, of course. Each side always did when the other used gas.

“Different kinds of casualties,” he muttered. “Happy goddamn day.” He ducked back into the tent to get ready for them.

T
hey put Armstrong Grimes’ company into two boxcars. It wasn’t quite the
8 HORSES
or
40 MEN
arrangement the French had used during the Great War—Armstrong didn’t think the cars had housed horses or cattle or anything similarly appetizing. But he did come to feel a strong and comradely relation with a sardine. The only difference was, they hadn’t poured olive oil in after his buddies and him. Maybe they should have. The grease might have kept the men from rubbing together so much. Just getting back to the honey buckets was trial enough.

“How come we’re so lucky?” he grumbled.

“Can’t you figure it out for yourself?” Corporal Stowe asked. “I thought you were a smart fellow. You graduated high school and you stayed alive, right? That’s why you made PFC.”

Armstrong was convinced simply staying alive had more to do with the stripe on his sleeve than the high-school diploma did. He had that more because his old man would have walloped the snot out of him if he’d quit beforehand than for any other reason. Yeah, only about one guy in three in the USA did, but so what? It didn’t mean anything to him.

He said, “Maybe I’m a moron especially for today, but I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

“No, huh?” The grin the corporal sent his way wasn’t especially friendly or amused. “All right—I’ll spell it out for you. We’re going where we’re going on account of we ended up west of fucking Sandusky when the Confederates cut the country in half. If we’d been east of the goddamn place, they’d’ve done something different to us—I mean, with us.”

“Oh.” Armstrong Grimes thought it over. It made more sense than he wished it did. Getting from, say, Cleveland to Utah would have been hard, long, and dangerous. Getting from western Ohio to Mormon country was a straight shot—except, with luck, nobody would be shooting at them till they got there. He nodded. “Yeah, I guess maybe you’re right.”

“Bet your ass I am.” Stowe’s laugh was the laugh of a man waiting for the gallows the next morning. “I’ll tell you something else, too: I’d sooner fight Featherston’s fuckers than the damned Mormons. The Confederates play by the rules, pretty much. The Mormons, it’s you or them, and they don’t quit till they’re dead.”

“How do you know that?” Grimes asked.

“That’s how it was in the last war, anyway,” Stowe answered. “Men, women, kids—they threw everything at us but the kitchen sink. And they probably loaded that full of TNT and left it for a booby trap.”

“Oh, boy,” Armstrong said in a hollow voice. His father hadn’t fought in Utah, and so he’d never had much to say about the Mormons. History books in school made them out to be bad guys, but didn’t talk about them a whole lot. The books seemed to take the attitude that if you didn’t look at them, they’d go away. All he knew about them was that they wanted to have lots of wives and they hated the U.S. government. The wives didn’t seem to matter. Hating the U.S. government did.