Tilting the Balance

“It’s hard, I know,” Lucille Potter answered. “But would you rather have him dead? Ten years from now, if this war ever ends, would he rather we’d let him die?”

“I reckon not,” Daniels said. In his younger days in Mississippi, a lot of the older white men he’d known were shy an arm or a leg or a foot from the States War. They weren’t glad of it, naturally, but they got on better than you’d expect. When you got right down to it, people were pretty tough critters.

He sent a runner over to Captain Maczek. Where the captain was, the company field telephone would be, too. After that, there was nothing to do but wait. Donlan seemed pretty shocky. When Mutt remarked on it, Lucille Potter said, “It’s probably a blessing in disguise-he won’t feel that foot as much.”

The forward aid station wasn’t much more than a quarter of a mile back of the line. A four-man litter team got to Donlan in less than fifteen minutes. The boss of the team, a corporal, looked at the youngster’s ruined foot and shook his head. “Nothing much we’ll be able to do about that,” he said. “They’ll have to take him back into Bloomington, and I expect they’ll chop it off there.”

“You’re almost certainly right,” Lucille said. All the litter bearers stared when she spoke. She stared right back, daring them to make something out of it. None of them did. She went on, “The sooner he goes back, the sooner they can treat him.”

The team got Donlan onto the stretcher and carried him away. “Too stinkin’ bad,” Mutt said. “He’s a good kid. Ain’t this war a-” He stopped, inhibited in his language by a woman’s presence. After a sigh, he resumed, “Lord, I wish I had me a cigarette, or even a chaw.”

“Filthy habits, both of them,” Lucille Potter said, her voice so sharp he turned to give her an irritated look. Then, with a wry chuckle, she added, “I wish I had a smoke, too. I ran out of tobacco months ago, and I miss it like anything.”

“Might be some back in Bloomington,” Mutt said. “We ever get a real lull, could be I’d send Szabo back there to see how the foraging is. You want to liberate somethin’ from where it rightly belongs, ol’ Dracula’s the man for the job.”

“He’s certainly good at coming up with home brew and moonshine,” Lucille said, “but people make those around here. Illinois isn’t tobacco country, so we can’t get hold of bootleg cigars.”

“Can’t get hold of much of anything these days,” Mutt said. “I’m skinnier’n I’ve been for close to thirty years.”

“It’s good for you,” she answered, which made him give her another resentful glance. She was on the lean side, and looked to have always been that way: not an ounce of excess flesh anywhere. What did she know about what felt comfortable and what didn’t?

He wasn’t in a mood to argue, though, so he said, “I just hope Donlan’s gonna make out okay. He’s a good kid. Hell of a thing to be crippled so young.”

“Better than dying. I thought we already settled that,” Lucille Potter answered. “I’m just glad the field telephone was working and the litter crew was on the ball. If they hadn’t gotten here inside of about another ten minutes, I was going to take his foot off myself.” She tapped her little black bag. “I’ve got some ether in here. He wouldn’t have felt anything.”

“You know how?” Daniels asked. Battlefield wounds were one thing, but cutting into a man on purpose… He shook his head. He was sure he couldn’t do it.

Lucille said, “I haven’t had to do an amputation yet, but I’ve read up on the technique. I-”

“I know that,” Mutt broke in. “Every time I see you, you got a doctor’s book in your hand.”

“I have to. Nurses don’t operate, and I wasn’t even a scrub nurse to watch doctors work. But a combat medic had better be able to do as much as she can, because we’re not always going to have a lull like this one to get our casualties back to the aid station. Does that make sense to you?”

“Yeah,” Daniels said. “You usually do-” Off to the left, small arms began to chatter on both sides of the line. Mutt interrupted himself to scramble into the shell hole from which unlucky Kevin Donlan had emerged to relieve himself. Lucille Potter jumped in beside him. Her only combat experience was what she’d had in the past few weeks, but take cover was a lesson you learned in a hurry, at least if you wanted to keep on living.

Then the artillery started up again, the Lizards firing steadily, the Americans in bursts of a few rounds here, a few rounds there, a few somewhere else. They’d learned the hard way that if their pieces stayed in one place for more than a short salvo, the Lizards would zero in on them and knock them out.

The ground began tossing like the stormy sea, though Mutt had never been in a natural storm that made such a god-awful racket. He pushed Lucille down flat on her belly, then lay on top of her to protect her from splinters as best he could. He didn’t know whether he did it because she was a woman or because she was the medic. Either way, he figured, she needed to stay as safe as possible.