“We’ll do what we can, Colonel,” he said.

“We have to do more than that,” John Abell exclaimed.

Morrell started to laugh, then checked himself yet again. Abell hadn’t been joking. Morrell looked at the map again. Abell had no reason to joke, either.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull had thought that pulling out of Fredericksburg would cut U.S. casualties. And so it would, no doubt, in the long run. In the short run… In the short run, the Confederates on the heights gleefully bombarded the withdrawing men in green-gray. They’d knocked out the pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock more than once, knocked them out and then poured shellfire into the men stuck near them waiting to cross.

“I hate artillery,” O’Doull remarked as he worked to repair a mangled leg. He’d thought at first that he would have to take it off. Now he hoped this corporal would be able to keep it, and thought he would, too, if he didn’t get a wound infection that spread to the bone.

Across the table from him, Granville McDougald nodded. “The wounds are a lot nastier than anything a bullet can do, aren’t they?”

“They’re more likely to be, anyhow.” O’Doull had seen horrors from both. A lot of the very worst horrors, he’d never seen at all. They were reserved for front-line soldiers and stretcher bearers and Graves Registration personnel. No one could hope to repair some wounds. God almighty would have had trouble repairing some men hit by artillery fire for the Resurrection.

“Get that bleeder there, Doc,” McDougald said, and O’Doull did. The bald medic went on, “I thought you were crazy when you said you were going to try and patch this leg. I’d’ve just reached for the bone saw myself. But you may get a good result out of it. My hat’s off to you.” He doffed an imaginary chapeau.

“I hope so-and thanks.” O’Doull yawned behind his surgical mask. Granville McDougald chuckled, recognizing the expression. O’Doull added, “Jesus, but I’m tired.”

“I believe it. This just never ends, does it?”

“Doesn’t seem to,” O’Doull said. “Now they’ll probably ship us back to Ohio, eh? That would give us a few days of vacation.”

“Oh, boy,” McDougald said in a hollow voice. “We’re getting plenty of practice going back and forth, anyway.”

They were still joking about it when the corpsman brought in another wounded man. They both fell silent at the same time. All O’Doull said was, “Get him under fast, Granny.” McDougald nodded and put the ether cone over the soldier’s face. Even that wasn’t easy; he’d lost part of his nose. He’d also lost a chunk of his upper jaw and a bigger chunk of his lower jaw. He made horrible gobbling noises nothing like words.

“Can you fix him, Doc?” one of the corpsmen asked. The fellow gulped afterwards, and O’Doull had a devil of a time blaming him. This was another artillery horror, and viler than most.

Before answering, O’Doull told MacDougald, “Get a blood-pressure cuff on him, and watch his airway, too-don’t want him drowning on us.”

“Right.” The medic handled his end of the business with quick but unhurried competence. “BP is 110 over 70,” he reported a few seconds later. “He’s got a strong pulse, the poor bastard.”

“He would,” O’Doull said morosely. He nodded to the stretcher bearer then. “I don’t think he’s going to up and die on us, but I’m not sure we’re doing him any favor keeping him alive.”

“Yeah.” The corpsman looked away. With the best will in the world, with the best plastic surgery in the world-which, odds were, the wounded soldier wouldn’t be lucky enough to get-people would be looking away from the man on the table for the rest of his life. Did he have a girlfriend? A wife? Would he still, once she saw him? Did he have a little boy? What would Junior make of Daddy with half a face?

“Gotta try,” McDougald said, and O’Doull nodded. Some men were tough enough to come through something like this not only sane but triumphant. Some had people around them who loved them no matter what they looked like.

Most, unfortunately, didn’t.

Knowing that made O’Doull more hesitant than he wished he were. He did what he could to clean the wound, trim away smashed tissue and bone, and make repairs where and as he could. Then he shot the man full of morphine and told McDougald, “Put him under as deep as he’ll go, Granny. He won’t want to be awake once he finally is. Let’s put off the evil minute as long as we can.”

“No arguments here. Back at a field hospital, they’ll get him all bandaged up so he won’t have to look at-that-right away. If they know what they’re doing, they’ll break it to him gently.”

“Yeah,” O’Doull said tightly, and let it go at that. Field hospitals were almost as frantic as aid stations. Would the people farther back of the line have the time to think of gently breaking the news of this man’s mutilation? Even if they did think of it, would they have the time to do it? Or would they treat him as one more body that took up a valuable cot till they could send him somewhere else? O’Doull didn’t know, but he knew how he’d bet.

Granville McDougald straightened and stretched. “I’m gonna have me a cigarette,” he announced, and headed out of the tent.

“Sounds good to me.” Leonard O’Doull didn’t want to look at or think about that operating table for a while. The Virginia countryside wasn’t much of an improvement, not battered and bludgeoned by war as it was, but mutilated meadows were easier to bear than mutilated men.

McDougald held out a pack of Confederate cigarettes. O’Doull gladly took one. The veteran noncom gave him a light. He drew in smoke. Here, he almost wished it were the harsh stuff that came from U.S. tobacco. Wanting to choke would have done more to distract him than this rich-tasting smoothness.

Off to the south, artillery rumbled. Nothing was coming down close by. He thanked the God he was having ever more trouble believing in. “Bad one,” he said.

“Now that you mention it-yes. Don’t see ones like that ever day, and a good thing, too.” McDougald exhaled a thin gray stream of smoke. “You fixed him up as well as anybody could have, Doc.”

“I know. And he’ll still look like something they wouldn’t put in a horror movie because it would really scare people.” O’Doull took a flask off his belt and swigged from it, then offered it to McDougald. He didn’t usually drink when he might be operating again in another couple of minutes. This time, he made an exception. You didn’t see ones like that every day.

“You can do things now you couldn’t begin to in the last war,” McDougald said after a swig of his own. “Thanks, Doc. That hits the spot. Where was I? Yeah-you really can. Get him to where he looks like-”

“A disaster and not a catastrophe,” O’Doull finished for him. “Come on, Granny. There’s not enough left to fix. I’ve seen a lot of wounds, but that poor fucker made me want to lose my lunch.”

He tried to imagine writing Nicole a letter about what he’d just done. That was cruelly funny. He wouldn’t-couldn’t-have written it even if the censors would have passed it. He always wrote her in French, but they would have found somebody who could read it. But you couldn’t subject anyone you loved to even the shadow of what you went through when you were in combat or where you could see what combat did to men. His letters to his wife and son were bright, cheerful lies. When somebody at the aid station said something funny, he would pass that along, especially if it stayed funny in French. Otherwise, he just said he was well and safe and not working too hard. Lie after lie after lie. He didn’t know anyone who tried to tell the truth, not about this kind of thing.

McDougald ground out the cigarette under his heel and lit another one. “Days like this, I wonder why I stayed in the Army,” he said.

“I wonder why I came back,” O’Doull agreed.

“Oh, no, Doc. Oh, no. You did more for that guy than I ever could have. You’re good. I’m not bad-I know I’m not bad-but you’re good.”