In the back of her mind she keeps a running inventory. So many pressure bandages, so much tape, so many splints, so much gauze, so many ampules of morphine. She’s begun “charging” for her services, requiring patients to give up most of the contents of their emergency medical kits. But it’s not enough, and she’s already put out the word that she needs T-shirts. Her orderly, Ren—in reality just a passing white private whose nerves collapsed under the strain of combat—cuts them into strips when she doesn’t have him holding the flashlight.
Her patient, Brattle, says something that’s obliterated by the shattering noise of the remaining guns opening up again after a brief interlude.
Frangie doesn’t know anything about artillery, but she knows the pace of outgoing shells has slowed. Some of the cannon have barrels melted and twisted, others are jammed, many were lost to the Germ
an 88s, but mostly it’s the fact that they are running out of ammunition. “Ordnance,” as the artillerymen call it.
BOOM!
Everyone knows the battalion is going to have to withdraw, soon as they get orders. They are way too far forward for an artillery unit. The barrels of the big guns are trained ever higher, creating steeper but shorter arcs for the shells, a sure sign that the enemy is close, way too close.
Frangie’s probe clicks, a dull feel more than a sound. Ever so carefully she widens the tips and slides them around the slug. She grips it tightly, wipes sweat from her forehead with her free hand, and begins to tease the bullet out.
BOOM! BOOM!
The earth shudders from each outgoing package. She pulls the bullet free, drops it in the dirt, sprinkles on a precious few grains of sulfa powder, far too little but all she can spare, and wraps the arm in white gauze and a black man’s T-shirt.
“Thanks, Doc,” the sergeant says between eruptions. “Brattle, let’s go.”
There’s a rush of feet outside, and Frangie sighs, knowing that it presages yet another casualty.
Four dirty soldiers, two men and two women, come rushing in, carrying a fifth man on a makeshift stretcher of tied-together field jackets.
The white man on the stretcher is wearing captain’s bars. Blood saturates his crotch and spreads down his legs.
“What the hell? It’s a Nigra!” one of the stretcher bearers yells.
“Put him on the table,” Frangie snaps.
The table is a makeshift affair of empty ammo crates topped by a jagged but almost flat piece of a blown-up water tank.
“Get him undressed,” she orders.
“What the hell?”
“You have knives, don’t you? Cut his clothes off, and be careful not to cut him.”
One of them turns away to retch. A chunk of the captain’s thigh is gone, as if a shark had bitten it off, just a gaping nothing where muscle should be. A curious flap of skin is peeled off the front of his hip and now drapes over his privates. Blood is everywhere, not pumping, not spurting, but seeping from too many places at once. Frangie looks at his face. He’s not just white, his brown eyebrows look like caterpillars crossing a sheet of paper. His eyes are wandering, seemingly sightless.
The wound is far too grave for her skills, far too grave for anyone’s skills, and she knows she should follow the laws of triage. There are three categories: those who will likely live without treatment, those who may be saved by treatment, and those who have no chance of survival.
Hurt, hurt bad, and goners, in the shorthand version.
“What’s his name?”
“Captain Schrenk,” a soldier answers.
“He got a first name?”
“Sol, I think. Some Jew name like that. But he’s a good officer.”
“Good captain,” another confirms.
“Ren, get me sulfa, scrap sponges, and water,” Frangie says.
“You know what you’re doing, Nig . . . Doc?”
“No, I do not,” Frangie says. “You want to take over?”