The Grapple

“Sure, tell an Irishman to go to England for the king,” O’Doull said. “You know how to win friends, don’t you?”

“In a poker game, right?” Donofrio could be even loopier than Gra

“Poker game.” O’Doull shook his head. He couldn’t get the wounded barrelman out of his thoughts. “That poor son of a bitch sure had the cards stacked against him.”

“Yeah.” The medic scowled, too. “One good thing-his face came through pretty good. He won’t have to go through life like that guy in the book-The Phantom of the Catacombs, that’s what the name of it was. You ever see the movie they made from it? Scared the crap outa me when I was a kid.”

“I was grown up by then, but I know what you mean,” O’Doull said. “They ought to do a talking version now. They have for a lot of the old silents, but not that one-not yet, anyway.”

“Who do you suppose they’d get to play the Phantom?” Donofrio asked. “You could put anybody in one of the other parts, but the Phantom? Everybody who saw the movie would be comparing him to Lon Chaney.”

“Not everybody,” O’Doull said. “The silent version’s more than twenty years old now. Most people younger than you never saw it. They would have stopped showing it as soon as talking came along. When was the last time you saw a silent movie?”

“Been a while,” Donofrio admitted after a little thought. “You don’t even worry or wonder about crap like that, but it disappears when you aren’t looking. Like Kaiser Bill mustaches, you know? Now it’s just a few stubborn old farts who wear ’em, but my old man sure had one in the last war. Everybody did. Hell, I think even my mother did.”

O’Doull laughed. “You said it-I didn’t.”

“My mother’s a nice lady,” Donofrio said. “She heard me going on about her like that, she wouldn’t beat me up…much.”

A green-gray truck pulled up. “You guys get ready to take your aid station forward,” the driver said. “Front’s moving up again. You’re too far behind the line.”

He sounded as if he came from Kansas or Nebraska. All the same, O’Doull said, “I don’t know you from a hole in the ground. Give me the password.” Confederates in Yankee clothing remained a nuisance. O’Doull hoped U.S. soldiers with drawls were also making the enemy sweat.

“Oh-Sequoyah!” The truck driver couldn’t sing worth a damn, but that was the opening for a hot new Broadway show, and the day’s password. He pointed at O’Doull. “Now give me the countersign, or I’ll figure you’re one of Featherston’s fuckers in disguise.”

Fair was fair. “Away we go!” O’Doull said dutifully. The driver nodded. O’Doull turned to Donofrio. “Time to pack up and leave our home sweet home.”

“Leave, my ass-we take it with us,” Donofrio said, and then, with a shrug, “What the hell? It’s not like we never did it before.”

“I’d rather go forward than back,” O’Doull said, and the medic nodded.

As Donofrio said, they’d had practice knocking down the aid station. And it was designed to fit inside the rear compartment of a deuce-and-a-half. Military engineering extended to things besides rifles and barrels. Making aid stations go into the trucks that had to move them fit the bill, and the people who’d put things together knew what they were doing. Even the operating table folded up for a smooth fit.

“Let’s roll,” the driver said.

Roll they did, down past Dalton, Georgia, toward Resaca. O’Doull and Donofrio rode in the cab with the driver; Eddie and the other corpsmen who gathered casualties stayed in the back of the truck. Several bodies hung in the Dalton town square. HE SHOT AT SOLDIERS, said the placard tied around the neck of one of them. The others bore similarly cheery messages.

“They love us down here,” Donofrio said, eyeing the bodies.

“Who gives a damn if they love us?” the driver said. “Long as they know they better not screw with us, that’s all that counts.”

Oderint dum metuant. An ancient Roman playwright had put that into three words. Let them hate as long as they fear. English was a less compact language than Latin. O’Doull didn’t suppose he could expect a truck driver to match a poet’s concision.

War’s wreckage littered the landscape: burnt-out barrels from both sides, crashed airplanes, smashed houses and barns, hastily dug graves with helmet-topped rifles taking the place of headstones. O’Doull nodded to himself. The aid station had got too far behind the front. Smelling death again reminded him what war was like.

Brakes squealed when the driver stopped. Small-arms fire came from up ahead. “This about right?” the man asked.

“Should do,” O’Doull answered. Vince Donofrio’s head bobbed up and down.

They got out and started setting up what they’d taken down not long before. The corpsmen wrestled with canvas and ropes and tent pegs. As soon as they had the tent up, O’Doull and Donofrio put in the operating table and medical supplies. Before long, the doctor and senior medic were ready for business again. Eddie and his pals headed up toward the front to see what kind of business they could bring back.

“Hope we don’t see them for a while,” O’Doull said.

“That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?” Donofrio cocked his head to one side, listening to the gunfire up ahead. “You really think all that shit’s flying around and nobody’s getting hurt?”

“No,” O’Doull admitted. “But you’re right. It would be nice.”

They had a respite of most of an hour. That was about how long the corpsmen would have needed to walk up to the fighting, find someone wounded and give him emergency first aid, and then lug him back to the relocated aid station.

The first wounded man came back cussing a blue streak. A bandage swathed his left hand. Another one soaked up blood from his left buttock. “Same fucking bullet clipped off a finger and a half and got me in the ass,” he growled.

“Could’ve been worse,” Donofrio said. “Could’ve been your other hand.”

“Up yours, Jack,” the wounded man told him. “I’m a lefty.”

“Oh.” For a moment, the medic looked as foolish as he sounded. “Sorry. How was I supposed to know?”

“You coulda kept your goddamn mouth shut.”

“Let’s get you on the table,” O’Doull said. “I’ll do what I can for your hand, and I’ll see if I can dig out the bullet.”

“Hot damn! So I get to turn the other cheek, huh?” the soldier said.

O’Doull winced. Donofrio reached for the mask attached to the ether cylinder with nothing but relief. Putting this guy under would shut him up, anyway.

XIX

Rain poured down from a leaden sky. Off in the distance, lightning flashed. Irving Morrell counted hippopotamuses-or was it hippopotami? Whichever, he counted twelve of them before the dull boom shook his barrel. The stroke was more than two miles away. But the rain, dammit, was here, there, and everywhere.

The barrel squelched forward through mud that was starting to look like tomato soup. U.S. armor all over northern Georgia was squelching-except in the places where it was flat-out stuck. The low ceiling grounded fighter-bombers. Even regular artillery was less accurate in godawful weather like this, and shell bursts spent themselves in the mud instead of spreading as they did most of the time.

“Dammit, we need to keep rolling,” Morrell muttered. But how? He’d broken out of the bridgehead south of Chattanooga. No way in hell the Confederates could drive U.S. forces back into the bottle and pound down the cork.

But Morrell didn’t think small. He wanted Atlanta. He wanted it so bad he could taste it. He wanted to see Jake Featherston try to fight a war with the Stars and Stripes flying over the chief Confederate junction between east and west. And he thought he could take Atlanta-as long as his men kept moving, kept pushing, didn’t let up on the bastards in butternut, didn’t give them a chance to regroup, reorganize, catch their breath.