Drive to the East

by Harry Turtledove

  Capital letters didn’t impress him. “And I’m the Queen of the May,” he said. “You want to come forward?” He waited for the Mormon to nod, then made a peremptory gesture. “Strip. Show me you’re not loaded with fucking TNT.”

  If looks could kill . . . But they couldn’t, and TNT might. Fuming, the Mormon major shed his boots, his jeans, and his shirt. He even took off his Stetson. That left him in a peculiar-looking undershirt and longish drawers. It was getting toward long-underwear time—nights were downright chilly—but it hadn’t got there yet. The strange getup didn’t particularly bother Armstrong; he’d seen it on other Mormons. Some sort of religious rule said they had to wear it.

  That didn’t mean he had to trust it. “Lift up the shirt,” he called. “The drawers are snug enough—don’t bother with those.” The Mormon did, showing a hard belly covered with hair a shade darker than the blond hair on his head. Armstrong waved to him. “Now turn around.” After the rebel did, Armstrong reluctantly nodded. “All right. Looks like you’re clean. Put your stuff back on and come ahead.”

  As the Mormon major dressed, he said, “I ought to complain to your officers.”

  “Go ahead, buddy,” Armstrong said. “You think they’ll come down on me? I think they’ll pat me on the back. They don’t trust you people any further than I do, and I don’t trust you at all.”

  “Believe me, we feel the same way about you,” the Mormon said, bending to tie his bootlaces. “If you would only leave us alone—”

  “If you hadn’t risen up, I’d be back east somewhere with Confederates trying to shoot me,” Armstrong said. “And you’d be here in Utah, happy as a goddamn clam. They didn’t even conscript you people.”

  “We want to be free. We want to be independent,” the Mormon said as he picked up his white flag. “What’s so wicked about that?” He came toward the U.S. lines.

  Armstrong laughed a dirty laugh. “You want to have lots of wives. Are they all in the same bed when you screw ’em? Does one lick your balls while another one gets on top?”

  The Mormon’s jaw set. “It’s a good thing I don’t know your name, Sergeant.” He walked past Armstrong as if he didn’t exist. Armstrong called for a couple of privates to take him back toward the rear.

  “He’s going to put you on a list even if he doesn’t know your name,” Yossel said. “You’ll be the sergeant in so-and-so sector, and those bastards will be gunning for you.”

  “Big fucking deal.” Armstrong laughed again. “Easy enough to get shot around here even when the bastards aren’t gunning for you. Won’t make a whole hell of a lot of difference one way or the other.”

  “You better hope it won’t.” Yossel seemed willing to look on the gloomy side of life.

  “Screw it. Nobody’s even shooting right now.” Armstrong lived for, and in, the moment. The less you thought about all the horrible things that had happened, the horrible things that would happen, and the horrible things that might happen, the better off you were.

  After a bit, Captain Lloyd Deevers came over and got down in the hole with him. Armstrong liked Deevers a lot better than Lieutenant Streczyk, who ran the platoon. Deevers actually had a pretty good idea of what he was doing. He nodded to Armstrong now and said, “I don’t think that Mormon likes you.”

  “Now ask me if I care, sir,” Armstrong answered. “I don’t like him, either.”

  Deevers chuckled. “All right. I’m not going to flabble about it—except if you want to transfer to some other outfit on the line, I won’t say no.”

  “No, thanks, sir. I already told Reisen I can stop one as easy somewhere else as I can here,” Armstrong said. Captain Deevers grinned and slapped him on the back. Armstrong asked, “Did that Mormon say why he wanted the truce?”

  “Not to me,” Deevers answered. “He wanted to talk to the high mucky-mucks. I passed him back to Division HQ, and we’ll see what they do with him. If I had to guess, I’d say he wants to dicker a surrender that isn’t really a surrender, if you know what I mean. But that’s only a guess.”

  “Good fucking luck, uh, sir,” Armstrong said. Lloyd Deevers laughed.

  “He would have had a better chance before they started blowing themselves up,” Yossel said. “If we let ’em off the hook now, it’s like they screwed it out of us. And if they want something else, they’ll think all they have to do is use a few more people bombs to make us give in.”

  “That’s how it looks to me, too, especially since we’ve almost got ’em licked,” Armstrong said.

  “Well, boys, I won’t argue with either one of you, ’cause I think you’re dead right,” Deevers said. “But it isn’t up to me, any more than it’s up to you. We’ll see what the fellows with the stars on their shoulders have to say—and maybe the fellows in the cutaway coats, too.”

  “They’ll screw it up,” Armstrong predicted. “They always do.” He waved a hand at the devastation all around. The wreckage and the smell of corpses might not prove his point, but they didn’t come out and call him a liar, either.

  Captain Deevers just shrugged. “Like I told you, I can’t do anything about it, either. I suppose what they decide to do here depends a lot on how things look in Pennsylvania and up in Canada.”

  That made sense. Armstrong might have been happier if it didn’t. Soldiers in Utah didn’t hear much news from Pennsylvania. Not hearing news was a bad sign all by itself. When things went right, nobody on the wireless would shut up about it. That same ominous quiet came out of Canada. For all Armstrong knew, hordes of pissed-off Canucks were swarming over the border toward Minneapolis and Seattle.

  “We’re off in the back of beyond,” Yossel said. “Nobody tells us anything.”

  “Wonder how much news about us gets out,” Captain Deevers said musingly.

  “You ought to ask your aunt,” Armstrong told Yossel. He kept an eye on the company CO as he spoke. Deevers didn’t blink. He was fairly new to the unit, but he knew it had a VIP’s nephew.

  Yossel said, “She doesn’t tell me a whole lot—nothing I’m not supposed to know. She’s got to worry about security like anybody else.”

  “Too bad,” Armstrong said. “What’s the point of being related to a big shot if you don’t get anything out of it?”

  “People always say that,” Yossel Reisen answered. “But if somebody important gives you a hand all the time, how do you know what you’re good for by yourself?”

  He had a point. Armstrong could see it. His family, though, had no fancy connections. He thought not having to worry about money or a good job or the right college would be awfully nice. No doors had opened for him because he was so-and-so’s nephew. His family had plenty of so-and-sos in it, but not that kind.

  Somebody called a question across the line to the Mormons: “How long is this truce supposed to last?”

  “Till the major comes back,” a rebel answered. “Then we give you thieving wretches more of what you deserve.”

  Thieving wretches. Armstrong smiled in spite of himself. The Mormons seldom came right out and cussed. Some of the insults they used instead sounded pretty funny.

  Men on both sides walked around and stretched, showing their faces without fear of taking a bullet if they did. The Mormons were scrupulous about honoring truces. U.S. soldiers smoked. Some of them probably had something better than water in their canteens. The Mormons weren’t supposed to use tobacco or alcohol, and most of them didn’t. Armstrong figured that meant screwing was the only way they could have a good time. They sure did that. They’d raised up a big new generation of rebels after getting one killed off in their uprising during the Great War.

  In midafternoon U.S. soldiers passed the Mormon officer back through the lines to his own side. His face was a thunderstorm of fury. He hardly even had an extra glare for Armstrong as he went by. The Mormons fired a warning shot into the air. A U.S. soldier answered it. A couple of minutes later, a screaming meemie came down on Armstrong’s company, and then another one. All things considered, maybe he
would rather have stayed anonymous.

  ****

  Leonard O’Doull had worked in a hospital before. He’d met his wife working in one outside of Rivière-du-Loup during the last war. If the authorities hadn’t decided Lucien Galtier was an unreliable nuisance and confiscated his land for the building, Nicole never would have come to work there. O’Doull knew he wouldn’t have settled in the Republic of Quebec if he hadn’t made family ties. Sometimes very strange things could twist a man’s fate.

  He was in a fancier hospital now. The University of Pittsburgh had had one of the best medical schools in the USA, and a large hospital where staff members trained residents, interns, medical students, and nurses. Now the hospital was full of wounded and gassed soldiers. Along with the people in training—those who hadn’t put on the uniform—the staff were getting trained themselves, by experts like Leonard O’Doull and Granville McDougald.

  “Speed,” McDougald told a surgeon with an old-fashioned, upturned Kaiser Bill mustache. “The faster we can get to ’em, the better they do. If we’re operating less than an hour after they get hit, they’ll probably make it. Every minute after that hurts their chances.”

  The white-mustached healer nodded. “I’ve also seen this in motorcar accidents,” he said.

  “It’s even more critical with gunshot and shrapnel wounds, because the trauma’s usually worse,” McDougald said. The surgeon nodded again, thoughtfully, and walked down the corridor. McDougald looked over at Leonard O’Doull and grinned. “Look at me, Doc, going on just like I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Don’t sandbag, Granny,” O’Doull answered. “When it comes to wounds, who’s seen more than you?”

  “Nobody this side of the guy who cuts up steers in a Chicago slaughterhouse,” McDougald said. “But he always sees the same ones. Not like that in our line of work, is it?”

  “Always something new,” O’Doull agreed. “People keep coming up with new ways to maim their fellow man. I don’t know why I don’t despair of the human race.”

  “Somebody once said people were the missing link between apes and human beings,” McDougald said wistfully. “Damned if he didn’t hit that one on the button.”

  “Didn’t he just?” O’Doull listened to the artillery outside. “If the Confederates get over the Allegheny, we’re going to be even busier than we are already.”

  “So will they,” McDougald said. “They’ll be busier than a one-armed paper hanger with the hives. They may take this place away from us, but Christ!—they’re paying through the nose.”

  Leonard O’Doull nodded. It looked that way to him, too. The dashing C.S. barrels weren’t dashing, not in Pittsburgh. They had to fight their way forward house by house, and a lot of them ended up as burnt-out hulks. Confederate infantry had trouble advancing without the barrels, too. Local U.S. counterattacks meant the hospital held a good many wounded Confederates along with U.S. soldiers. That might have been for the best—the more of their own men in this place, the less inclined the Confederates would be to hit it “by accident.”

  “Wouldn’t put it past ’em,” McDougald said when O’Doull remarked on that. “They fought as clean as we did the last time around. Here? Now?” He made a sour face. “I think they cheat when they use the Red Cross, and I think they think we cheat, too. Makes them more likely to hit our aid stations and hospitals and ambulances. Featherston’s fuckers, sure as hell.”

  “I hope that isn’t true.” O’Doull let it go there. The bad news seemed more likely to be true with each unfolding day. There were even rumors Featherston himself traveled in an ambulance to keep U.S. fighters from shooting him up.

  “Well, Doc, if you want some consolation, the bastards in butternut aren’t as bad as they could be,” Granville McDougald said. “It sounds like the Action Française boys really abuse the Red Cross.”

  “Yeah. I’ve heard that, too,” O’Doull said. “There’s another war as big as this one going on over there—”

  “Bigger,” the medic said.

  “Bigger, all right.” O’Doull accepted the correction. “But it’s like noises in another room to us. Oh, we’re working with the German High Seas Fleet where we can, but mostly we’ve got our troubles, and Germany and Austria-Hungary have theirs.”

  “Austria-Hungary’s got more troubles than you can shake a stick at,” McDougald observed. “All the uprisings in the Balkans make what’s going on in Utah and Canada look like pretty small potatoes.” He grinned crookedly at O’Doull. “Might as well be Ireland, matter of fact.”

  “Heh,” O’Doull said sourly—something that sounded like a laugh but really wasn’t. With U.S. help, Ireland had thrown off the English yoke after the Great War. The first thing Winston Churchill’s government did when the new round of fighting flared was send in barrels and bombers and battleships. The Union Jack flew again in Belfast and Dublin and Cork—and the island heaved with rebellion. “I wonder how long it’ll be before Irish people bombs start going off in London.”

  McDougald winced. “Those damned Mormons let the genie out of the bottle with that one,” he said. “How do you stop somebody who’s already decided to die?” By the evidence available so far, you couldn’t stop somebody like that, not often enough. McDougald added, “They’ll feel it in Vienna and Budapest, too.” Serbs and Romanians and Bosnians and God only knew how many others from the Balkan patchwork quilt of peoples and competing nationalisms bushwhacked the King-Emperor’s soldiers where and as they could. Russia encouraged them and sent them arms and ammunition, the way the British helped the Canucks, and the Confederates armed the Mormons.

  Of course, the USA armed Negroes in the CSA. (O’Doull didn’t even think about U.S. support for the Republic of Quebec, which would still have been a Canadian province absent the Great War.) Germany played those games with Finns and Jews and Chechens and Azerbaijanis inside the Tsar’s empire. And both sides helped their own sets of guerrillas inside the Ukraine, which was, in technical terms, a mess.

  An orderly trotted up to O’Doull and McDougald. “We’ve got a man with a leg wound in OR Seven,” he said.

  “We should do something about that,” McDougald said, and O’Doull nodded. They hurried toward the OR. Working in an actual operating room was an unaccustomed luxury for O’Doull. It beat the hell out of doing his job under canvas. He had a real operating table, surgical lights he could aim wherever he wanted, and all the other amenities he’d almost forgotten in the field.

  And he had a nasty case waiting on the table for him. A leg wound hardly did the injury justice. “Get him under fast, Granny,” O’Doull said after one glance at the shattered appendage.

  “Right,” McDougald said, and not much else till the soldier was mercifully unconscious. Then he asked, “You’re not going to try and keep that on, are you?”

  “Good God, no,” O’Doull answered. “Above the knee, too, poor bastard.” He picked up a bone saw and got to work.

  Like most amputations, it was bloody but fast. The wounded soldier was young and strong and healthy. O’Doull thought he would do well—or as well as you could do after you’d been maimed. How many men on both sides of the border were short an arm or a leg? Too many, that was for sure.

  As he closed up the stump, O’Doull asked, “Ever see a real basket case, Granny?”

  “No arms, no legs?” McDougald asked, and O’Doull nodded. The medic shook his head. “No, not me. You always hear about ’em, but I’ve never seen one. You get wounded like that, most of the time they take your pieces back to Graves Registration, not to an aid station. How about you?”

  “The same,” O’Doull answered. “You hear about ’em all the time. Hell, people talk about basket cases when they mean somebody who’s just all messed up. But I’ve never seen the real McCoy, either.”

  “I suppose there really are some,” McDougald said. “Would we have the name if we didn’t have the thing?”

  “Beats me,” O’Doull said. “We have names for truth and justice and libert
y, too. How often do you really see the things those names point at?”

  “Touché, Doc.” Granville McDougald gave him another sour laugh. “And then we’ve got ‘Freedom!’ too.” By the way he said the word, he might have been a stalwart in white shirt and butternut trousers getting ready to go out there and break some heads.

  “God damn Jake Featherston up one side and down the other,” O’Doull said wearily as he went to the sink and washed the now one-legged soldier’s blood from his hands. How much blood did Featherston have on his hands? But he didn’t care about washing it off. He reveled in it.

  McDougald stood beside him and scrubbed down, too. “I’ve been wishing that very same thing,” he said, holding out his arms in front of him with the wrists up so water would flow down from his hands and carry germs away with it. “I’ve been wishing for it since before the war started, matter of fact, and God hasn’t done thing one. Far as I can tell, He’s at a football game—probably standing in line to get Himself a couple of franks and a beer.”

  That was blasphemous, which didn’t mean it didn’t hold a lot of truth. “I don’t know how anybody’s going to be able to believe in anything by the time this damn war is done,” O’Doull said.

  “I don’t know how anybody believed anything after the last one,” McDougald said. “But you’re right. This one’s worse. The poison gas is more poisonous. We’re better at dropping bombs on the Confederates’ cities, and they’re better at dropping them on ours. ‘O brave new world, that has such people in’t!’ ” He quoted Shakespeare with malice aforethought.

  “You forgot one,” O’Doull said. McDougald raised a questioning eyebrow. The doctor explained: “We didn’t slaughter people just because of who they were the last time around.”

  “Oh, yeah? Tell it to the Armenians. And the Turks were on our side,” McDougald said. O’Doull winced. He’d forgotten about the Armenian massacres. He was sure most people in the USA had. McDougald went on, “But you’re right—we didn’t, not on this continent. And Jake Featherston probably noticed nothing much ever happened to the Turks, and he must have figured nothing much would happen to him if we went after his spooks. And you know what else? Looks like he’s right.”