All the same, it made for one hell of a war.

“You know,” O’Doull said meditatively, “twenty-five years ago I thought we’d hit bottom. I thought we were doing the worst things to each other that human beings could think of to do.” He laughed-in lieu of sobbing or screaming. “Only goes to show what I know, doesn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t suppose you were the only one with that idea,” McDougald said. “Kind of makes you wonder where we go from here, doesn’t it?”

“Tabernac!” O’Doull said, and Granny McDougald laughed at him. When he didn’t watch himself, he swore in Quebecois French. Why not? He’d spoken it every day for a quarter of a century. English was the rusty language for him. He was surprised it had come back as well as it had. He’d read it all through his time in Riviere-du-Loup, to keep up with medical literature. That had probably helped.

U.S. counterbattery fire answered the C.S. artillery. By the sound of things, the U.S. bombardment had plenty of poison gas in it. Intellectually, O’Doull understood why. The gas would either deny Confederate guns to their gunners or force the men to don masks and heavy, rubberized outfits that covered every inch of them. Those were unpleasant in cool weather. In the summer, there was some question whether gas or protection from it was more lethal.

As far as O’Doull was concerned, though, the intellect had little to do with gas. He loathed it, pure and simple. He’d never known a doctor or a medic who didn’t. How could anyone not loathe stuff made to incapacitate and torment?

People on both sides of the front seemed to have no trouble at all.

Savagely, O’Doull said, “I wish to God they’d test that shit”-he could swear in English, too-“on the people who invent it and the people who improve it and the people who make it. Then they’d be sure they’ve got it just right.”

“Works for me,” McDougald said. “Write up a memo and send it on to the Ordnance Bureau. See what they have to say about it.”

“I’ll be damned if I’m not tempted to,” O’Doull said. “What can they do? Court-martial me and throw me out of the Army? I’d thank ’em and go home, and they’d never see my ass again.”

“Do it,” McDougald urged. “I’ll sign it. They want to bust me down to private, I don’t care. I’d be doing the same thing with a lot of stripes or without any, and I won’t get rich on Army pay no matter what grade I’m in.”

Before O’Doull could say anything to that, a shout from outside the aid station brought him back to the real and immediate world of war: “Doc! Hey, Doc! You there? We got a casualty for you!”

“No, I’m not here, Eddie,” O’Doull yelled back. “I went to Los Angeles for the sun.”

“Funny, Doc. Funny like a crutch.” Eddie and another corpsman, a big, burly, taciturn fellow named Sam, carried a stretcher into the tent. Both medics wore smocks with Red Crosses fore and aft, Red Cross armbands, and Red Crosses painted on the fronts and backs of their helmets. Corpsmen on both sides sometimes got shot anyway.

The corporal on the stretcher wasn’t at death’s door. He was, in fact, swearing a blue streak. He had most of one trouser leg cut away, and a blood-soaked bandage on that thigh. His opinion of the Confederate who’d shot him wasn’t far from Sophocles’ of Oedipus.

“Round tore out a big old chunk of meat,” Eddie said. “Missed the femoral artery, though.”

“I guess it did,” Granville McDougald said. “He’d be holding up a lily if the artery got cut.”

O’Doull nodded. A man could bleed out in a hurry if anything happened to his femoral artery. “Let’s get him on the table,” O’Doull said. “I’ll do what I can to patch him up, but he’s going to be on the shelf for a while.” He spoke to the noncom: “You’ve got yourself a hometowner, buddy.”

“Oh, yeah, just what I fuckin’ need,” the corporal said as Eddie and Sam lifted him off the stretcher and onto the operating table. “Got a letter from my sis last week-my wife’s fuckin’ around with the fuckin’ milkman. I go back to fuckin’ St. Paul, I’ll beat the fuck out of her.”

A man of strong opinions but limited vocabulary, O’Doull thought. He nodded to McDougald: “Pass gas for me, Granny.” Before the corporal could editorialize about that, McDougald stuck an ether cone over his face. He got out another couple of blurry four-letter words, then went limp.

“Watch what the fuck you’re doin’ with the fuckin’ scalpel, Doc,” Eddie said.

“Everybody’s a funny man,” O’Doull said mournfully. Eddie wasn’t half so impassioned as the corporal. Of course, he hadn’t just stopped a bullet, either. O’Doull cut away still more of the trouser leg and the wound dressing, too. Had the corporal stopped the bullet, or had it just taken a bite out of him and kept on going? O’Doull would have bet the round was long gone, but he did some probing all the same. You never could tell.

“Anything?” McDougald asked.

“Doesn’t look like it,” O’Doull answered. “They can X-ray him when they get him back to the division hospital, but it sure as hell looks like a hometowner to me. I’m going to try to spread his skin over as much of the wound as it’ll cover, tie off some of the bigger bleeders, dust him with sulfa and bandage him up, and then send him on his merry way.”

“Make sure you don’t tie off the artery when you’re fooling around in there,” McDougald warned.

“I’ll be careful.” O’Doull knew some doctors would have got their noses out of joint at a warning from a mere medic. You wouldn’t make a mistake like that if you were paying attention to what you were doing. But you could if you got careless. Granny helped make sure O’Doull didn’t.

The wound wasn’t pretty after he got done with it, but he thought the corporal had a good prognosis. Whether the noncom’s wife had a good prognosis might be a different story. When O’Doull said as much, McDougald said, “This guy won’t enter the hundred-yard dash in the Olympics any time soon. Maybe she can outrun him.”

“Olympics. Right.” O’Doull turned to Eddie and Sam. “Take him back to division. Tell ’em to keep an eye on his blood pressure, give him plasma if it falls. I don’t think it will-he looks pretty good-but they should monitor it.”

“Right, Doc,” Eddie said. Sam nodded-a paragraph from him.

O’Doull let out a sigh after they carried the wounded corporal away. “Another miracle of modern medicine,” he said.

McDougald clucked at his sarcastic tone. “Hey, you did good, Doc. I think that guy’ll be fine, and he lost a lot of meat off the bone.”

“Only thing I did that a surgeon in the War of Secession couldn’t have was put sulfa powder on the wound,” O’Doull said. “That doesn’t make me feel special, believe me.”

“Leg wounds are what they are,” McDougald answered with a shrug. “Nobody in the War of Secession knew anything about X-rays or plasma, I’ll tell you that. And the old-timers couldn’t do anything about chest or belly wounds-they had to watch people die of shock and blood poisoning. We’ve got a real chance against them-well, some, anyhow.”

“Hot damn.” But O’Doull shook his head. “Sorry, Granny. I’m tired as hell.” He didn’t see that changing any time soon, either.

Honolulu was a nervous town these days. With the Japanese holding Midway and with their airplane carrier probing down from the northwest, all of the main Sandwich Islands were nervous these days. The United States had taken them from Britain at the start of the Great War, and it looked altogether too possible that they might change hands again in the not very indefinite future.

George Enos, Jr., understood exactly why the Sandwich Islands were nervous. His destroyer, the USS Townsend, was in dry dock at Pearl Harbor. Japanese carrier aircraft had pummeled her when she poked her nose up too close to Midway. There were no U.S. airplane carriers in the Pacific right now. Sending ships around the Horn wasn’t easy, fast, or efficient-and the fight in the North Atlantic was right at the USA’s front door. U.S. warships and what chunks of the German High Seas Fleet that could get out of the North Sea squared off there against the British, Confederate, and French Navies. The Sandwich Islands? The Sandwich Islands were a long way from anywhere.