Drive to the East (31 page)

“That you, Sarge?” one of the stretcher bearers called.

“Yeah.” Chester forced out the word through clenched teeth.

The corpsman jumped down into the hole. He swore softly when he saw what had happened to Monroe, then turned to Chester. “How much of that blood is yours and how much is the other poor bastard’s?”

“Beats me.” Chester looked down at himself. He was pretty well drenched in the lieutenant’s mortal remains. He didn’t want to let go of the leg, though, or more of what soaked him would be his. He was much too sure of that. “Can you stick me and bandage me or put on a tourniquet or whatever the hell you’re gonna do? This hurts like a son of a bitch.”

“Right.” The corpsman jabbed Chester with a morphine syrette, then said, “Lemme see what you caught.” Blood flowed faster when Chester took his hand away from his calf, but it didn’t spurt. Frowning, the corpsman went on, “I think we can get by without a tourniquet.” He bandaged the wound, watched how fast the gauze turned red, and nodded to himself. “Hey, Elmer! Gimme a hand here, will ya? Let’s get the sarge outa this hole.”

“Sure.” The other corpsman hopped down in there, too. “Fuck,” he said when he got a look at the platoon commander’s ruined corpse. “Who was that, anyways?”

“Lieutenant Monroe,” Chester answered, a certain dreamy wonder in his voice. The painkiller hit hard and fast.

“He got it quick, anyhow,” Elmer said, about as much of a eulogy as anyone ever gave Thayer Monroe.

Despite the morphine, Martin howled when the grunting corpsmen got him up on flat ground. Mortar rounds were still landing not far away. A few fragments whistled by. Chester didn’t want to get hit again. But he didn’t want to stay at the front, either. With another grunt, the corpsmen carried the stretcher on which he lay, back toward the Rappahannock.

A white powerboat with big Red Crosses took him and the medics over the river. The Confederates weren’t supposed to shoot at such vessels, any more than they were supposed to shoot at ambulances. Accidents did happen, though.

When he got back to the field hospital, the first thing a doctor did was give him a shot. “Tetanus,” the man said. By then, Martin wouldn’t have cared if it was French dressing; he was feeling very woozy indeed. The doctor cut away his trouser leg and the bandage and looked at the wound. He nodded thoughtfully. “Not too bad, Sergeant. If it heals clean, you’ll be back on duty in a few weeks.”

“Terrific,” Chester said, more or less at random.

He got some more shots, these to numb the leg while the doctor sewed him up. Eyeing him, the man asked, “Did you have a Purple Heart in the last war?”

“Yeah. Oak-leaf cluster. Hot damn,” Martin answered.

“Heh.” The doctor sounded more tired than amused. He wrote notes on a form, then tied it to Chester’s wrist. “Orders for your disposition,” he explained.

“Yeah,” Chester said again. He’d always known the Army ran as much on paperwork as on bullets and canned rations.

He got stuffed into an ambulance and sent north up roads cratered by shellfire. Despite morphine and local anesthetic, the jolts made him groan and curse. His partner in misery, a PFC with a bandaged shoulder, was still very groggy from whatever he’d been under, and didn’t seem to feel a thing. Martin envied him.

The military hospital was up near the Potomac. Like the powerboat, like the ambulance, it was painted a dazzling white and had Red Crosses on the walls and roof. Chester would rather have been farther away, but Confederate bombers reached all the way up to New York City and Boston, just as U.S. warplanes had recently flown from New Mexico to unload hell on Forth Worth and Dallas.

A briskly efficient nurse in starched whites got him into a bed. “We’ll have to clean you up,” she remarked.

“That’d be nice,” he said vaguely. All he knew was that he wasn’t going anywhere for a while. And not going anywhere suited him fine.

A
bner Dowling could have done without a summons to report to Warrenton, Virginia. That Daniel MacArthur wanted to see him did not fill his heart with joy. Instead, the news filled him with apprehension. He feared it meant MacArthur had come up with another scheme for discomfiting the Confederates. The only thing wrong with MacArthur’s schemes that Abner Dowling could see was that they didn’t work.

MacArthur kept coming up with them, though. He had an endlessly fertile, endlessly inventive mind. If only he’d had a better sense of what was practical . . . Well, in that case he would have been someone else. Dwelling on it seemed pointless, which didn’t always stop Dowling.

The general commanding made his headquarters in a house different from the one he’d occupied the last time Dowling came to Warrenton. Then he’d chosen the fanciest place in town for his own. Perhaps knowing his habits, the Confederates had knocked that house flat—not while he was in it. Dowling tried not to think about whose war effort they would have helped more if they’d got MacArthur as well as the building.

Not that MacArthur’s current residence was anything to sneeze at. Having lost the most impressive place—and, no doubt, thereby endeared its owner to the USA for ever and ever—the American general had chosen the next grandest for his own: another Classical Revival home from before the War of Secession. Sandbagged machine-gun nests and a thicket of barbed wire around the place detracted from the air of quiet elegance the colonnaded entranceway tried to project.

Sentries gave Dowling a careful once-over before letting him inside the perimeter. Some of them carried Confederate-made submachine guns in place of bolt-action Springfields. “You really like those better?” Dowling asked a corporal who toted one of the ugly little weapons.

“Yes, sir, for what I’m doing here,” the noncom told him. “Wouldn’t care to take it up to the front. Not enough range, not enough stopping power. But for putting a lot of lead in the air right up close, you can’t beat it.”

“All right.” That struck Dowling as a well-reasoned answer. He did inquire, “What does General MacArthur say about your using a Confederate weapon?”

“Sir, he says he wished we made one as good.”

That also struck Dowling as a cogent comment. He wondered how MacArthur had come up with it. But that was neither here nor there. He walked on toward the house: Greek refinement surrounded by modern barbarity. But then, considering some of the things Athens and Sparta did to each other during the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks had surrounded refinement with their own barbarity.

One of MacArthur’s staff officers, a captain as lean and probably as swift as a greyhound, met Dowling at the door. “Please come with me, General,” the bright young man said after saluting. “General MacArthur is eagerly awaiting your arrival.”

Eagerly?
Dowling wondered. What could make MacArthur eager to see him after the way they’d quarreled? Was the commanding general going to cashier him? Dowling resolved to fight like hell if MacArthur tried. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and he thought he’d done more things right than his superior.

“Here we are—in the map room,” the captain murmured. Daniel MacArthur had had a map room in the other house he used for a headquarters, too. If he’d had the sense to read the maps instead of just having them . . .

“Good afternoon, General,” MacArthur said. A cigarette—Confederate tobacco, by the smell—burned in the long holder he affected. He also affected an almost monastically plain uniform, one whose only ornaments were the stars on his shoulder straps. Custer, by contrast, had made his clothes more ornate and gaudy than tightly interpreted regulations would have allowed. Both approaches had the same purpose: to call special attention to the man wearing the uniform.

“Reporting as ordered, sir,” Dowling said, and waited to see what happened next.

“You were the one who discovered the Confederates were thinning their lines in front of us here in Virginia.”

By the way MacArthur said it, he didn’t think Dowling’s discovery would go down in history with Columbus’. His tone declared that Dowling might have been found picking his nose and wiping his finger on a trouser leg. Ignoring that, Dowling replied, “Yes, sir, I was the one. I’m sorry you discovered we couldn’t take advantage of that at Fredericksburg.”

He’d told the exact and literal truth there. He
was
sorry the U.S. attacks hadn’t succeeded. If they had, MacArthur would have become a hero. That wouldn’t have filled Dowling with delight. Custer was already a hero when Dowling got to know him. When the pompous windbag became a bigger hero, that didn’t delight Dowling, either. It hadn’t broken his heart, though. Custer’s success had meant the USA’s success. MacArthur’s would mean the same thing. Dowling prided himself on his patriotism.
I’d admire a skunk who helped my country.
He eyed MacArthur in a speculative way.

MacArthur was looking back, also in a speculative way. He was, no doubt, trying to tease an insult out of Dowling’s remark. But Dowling hadn’t said anything like,
Only a blind jackass would have tried to break the Confederates’ line at Fredericksburg.
He might have thought something like that, but MacArthur couldn’t read minds—and a good thing, too.

Ash almost as long as the first joint of a man’s thumb fell from MacArthur’s cigarette. The general commanding ground it into the expensive-looking rug. That was bound to make whoever owned the place love him even more than he did already. He lowered his voice to a portentous whisper: “I think I know where they’ve gone.”

“Do you, sir?” Dowling was ready to get news or gossip from anybody, even MacArthur. “Where?”

“To the west.” Yes, the general commanding sounded portentous, all right. Half a dozen Old Testament prophets could have taken lessons from him.

Once Dowling had the news, it didn’t strike him as improbable. “What are they going to do there?” he asked.

“I doubt they’ll dance around the Maypole and strew flowers over the landscape,” MacArthur replied.

“Very funny, sir.” Dowling lied dutifully. Why not? He’d had practice. “But I did wonder whether they were going to push toward Toledo and Detroit or go east toward Cleveland and Akron and—what’s the name of the place?—Youngstown, that’s it.” He felt proud of visualizing the map.

“Ah.” Daniel MacArthur nodded. He took another cigarette from his pack, stuck it in the holder, and lit it. With his prominent nose and his jowls wattling an otherwise thin face, he reminded Dowling of a chain-smoking vulture. “That, I must tell you, I do not know. If the budding Alexanders at the War Department do, they have not seen fit to impart that information to me.”

Dowling snorted. He was little more fond of the functionaries at the War Department than MacArthur was. He realized he’d acquired his attitude from George Custer. That realization didn’t thrill him, but also didn’t change his mind. He said, “In case they do attack in the West, what’s the best thing we can do here?”

He could see he’d made MacArthur unhappy again. He needed a moment to figure out why. MacArthur didn’t want to be reduced to a sideshow. He wanted to be the main event. But even MacArthur could see he wouldn’t be the main event if major fighting erupted in the West once more. Reluctantly, he said, “Keep the enemy as busy as we can, I suppose. If you see a better choice, point it out to me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” Dowling said. What was the world coming to when one of Daniel MacArthur’s proposals made sound military sense?

“Very well. I may call on your corps to try to break through the Confederate defenses and threaten Richmond,” MacArthur said now.

I failed at one end of my line, so I’ll try the other.
That was what it amounted to. Dowling gave a mental shrug. MacArthur had the right to ask that of him—and the busier the Confederates were in Virginia, the smaller their chance to send even more men west. With a little luck, they might even have to bring some back. Dowling said what needed saying: “Of course I’m at your service, sir. Whatever you require of me, I’ll do.”

Nothing made Daniel MacArthur happier than unhesitating obedience. He looked quite humanly pleased as he answered, “Thank you, General. That was very handsomely said.”

For once, Dowling made his farewells without getting the impression of breaking off an artillery duel. As he headed for his green-gray motorcar, another one—a bright blue civilian Olds—pulled up alongside it. A woman not far from his own age got out. Her hair was the pinkish white peculiar to aging redheads. She moved with a brisk spryness that belied her years.

“Hello, Colonel Dowling. No, excuse me—hello, General Dowling. I didn’t expect to see you here,” she said. “Got a cigarette?”

A broad smile spread over Dowling’s face. “Hello yourself, Miss Clemens. I sure do. Here you are.” He pulled the pack from his pocket and handed it to her.

“Thanks.” Ophelia Clemens lit one and sucked in smoke. Then she stuck out her hand. When Dowling took it, she gave his a firm pump and let it go. The formalities satisfied, she nodded toward MacArthur’s headquarters and asked, “So how’s the Great Stone Face?”

One of the reasons Dowling had always liked her, as a reporter and as a person, was that she said what was on her mind. He, of course, did not enjoy the privilege of being outside the chain of command. He answered, “General MacArthur seems well.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “Then how come he’s dumb enough to keep feeding troops into a meat grinder like Fredericksburg?”

“I’m afraid I’m not the one to answer that, since he is my superior and since my corps is stationed at the other end of our line.” Having said what any loyal subordinate ought to say, Dowling couldn’t resist adding, “If you need to know his views, you’ll have to ask him yourself.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Ophelia Clemens said, and Dowling wanted to hug himself with glee. Unlike a lot of correspondents, she had no patience with bloated egos or double talk. She had cut through Custer’s pompous bluster like a regiment of barrels going through Sioux Indians. He didn’t think she’d have any trouble doing the same with MacArthur. Then she surprised him by asking, “And how have
you
been?”

“Oh, tolerable. Yes, tolerable’s about right.” Dowling batted his eyelashes at her. “I didn’t know you cared.”