1812: The Rivers of War (20 page)

No, Driscol reminded himself, never being one to shy away from the cold facts. That “one-fourth” applied to men who had their
lower
limbs amputated. The death rate was much higher for men who, like Driscol, had the cut made above the knee or elbow.

So be it
. Driscol distracted himself, as best he could, by continuing to watch the surgeon at his work.

The blade the man used to slice flesh was no delicate instrument. It reminded Driscol, more than anything else, of a smaller version of the flensing blades used by whalers. It’d make a decent weapon in a tavern brawl, in fact, even if it wasn’t quite long enough to be suitable on a battlefield.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the soldier being operated on had fainted from the agony at that point. So he missed entirely the heart of the operation, which came when the surgeon took up a saw and hacked through the bone. Driscol was impressed by the surgeon’s speed. No master carpenter could have done better, he thought.

The sergeant could only hope the man would cut off his arm as smoothly and efficiently.

That done, the severed foot was tossed onto a nearby pile of such horrid objects. The flies over there were a seething little mountain of insects. The surgeon sewed up the severed arteries; then, still working as quickly as ever, folded the flaps of flesh and skin over the end of the bone and sewed everything up.

A bandage was then placed on the bleeding stump, and it was done. The assistants heaved the unconscious soldier off the table and carried him out of the tent. He’d recuperate—and, hopefully, survive—in a different tent set aside for the purpose.

While the surgeon waited for his helpers to return, he washed his hands in a bowl of water. Then cleaned the blade and the saw using a sponge soaked in the same bowl.

Driscol couldn’t really see the point of that. By now, the water in the bowl wasn’t much thinner than blood itself, as often as it had been reused for the purpose.

The surgeon’s eyes ranged around the tent, quickly examining the dozen or so wounded soldiers who lay in it. Experienced eyes, obviously, despite the surgeon’s youth. Driscol could see him quickly dismissing about half the cases as either hopeless or so chancy that he wouldn’t spend time on them while men who might survive were kept waiting.

That meant he dismissed almost any kind of major abdominal, chest, or head wound as beyond his treatment. About the only exception to that rule was that battlefield surgeons would usually attempt to extract a bullet that hadn’t penetrated any deeper than a finger’s length. If it had …

Well, they’d just leave it alone. If the man survived, the bullet would sometimes work its way closer to the surface, where they could eventually get to it. Driscol had known a soldier in the French army who’d survived such a bullet wound—and then, eight years later, finally had the thing extracted. By then, it lay just under the skin.

For all practical purposes, the job of an army surgeon was to cut off hands, feet, arms, and legs. Nothing else, really.

Fair enough
, Driscol thought. Two-thirds to three-fourths of all battlefield wounds were suffered in the extremities, to begin with—and those same wounds accounted for almost all the survivors. Men shot or stabbed in the torso or the head almost invariably died, unless the wound was a superficial one.

The surgeon’s gaze fell on Driscol. On his mangled arm, rather. The sergeant didn’t think the surgeon had even looked at his face—and he was quite sure he wouldn’t remember Driscol if they ever met again.

“You’re next,” he said.

Driscol saw the assistants coming back into the tent.

There was no point in dallying. “Do it, then.”

“I’ve got some antifogmatic I can give you,” said the surgeon.

“Whiskey or rum?”

“Rum.”

Driscol sneered. “And it’ll be raw, too. Not that I’d touch any kind of rum. It’ll be whiskey, or no drink at all.”

“Sergeant, this is going to hurt. A lot.”

Driscol’s sneer remained firm and unwavering. “Is it, now? Sawing through my flesh and bone is going to hurt. I’m shocked to hear it.”

Driscol decided he’d teased the surgeon long enough to maintain discipline among the troops, when word got back. “Never mind. I’ve got something better in my kit. Private, my tent’s not far off. Rummage around in my pack and you’ll find a bottle of laudanum. I keep it for just such a mishap. Bring it here, would you?”

McParland was gone in a flash.

Driscol closed his eyes. The pain had become constant and savage, but the sergeant was no stranger to suffering. The more so when he still had his duty to perform. Driscol had known for years that attention to duty was a better distraction from pain than anything else.

By the time McParland got back, the sergeant’s reputation would have climbed still higher among the troops—or sunk lower, depending on how you looked at it. Word would spread like wildfire that the troll was delaying his amputation because he’d gotten into an argument with the surgeon over the respective merits of rum versus whiskey.

He grinned at the thought. Every corporal and private in the Twenty-second Regiment who heard the tale—which would be all of them, eventually—would see it as proof that the master sergeant was indeed an inhuman creature, and an insane one at that.

But Driscol was quite sure that, forever after, whiskey would be the spirit of choice of the regiment. Within a day, any new recruit
unfortunate enough to have smuggled in some rum would be forced to get rid of it. The ridicule would be unbearable.

Henceforth, for the Twenty-second Regiment, rum would be a drink for sissies.

Laudanum took a bit longer to take effect than raw spirits would have. But it hardly mattered, since it wasn’t as if the surgeon had been kept waiting. Few lumberjacks in the world used a saw more vigorously and more continuously than an army surgeon after a major battle.

“And now we’re back to you, Sergeant,” the surgeon said finally. Through blurred vision, Driscol saw the young doctor leaning over him again. The man’s cheap frock coat was a bloody mess.

Driscol was in a haze, now, but he had enough consciousness left to peer up at McParland. The private’s face was a blob, but he could still recognize the anxiety, if not quite the features on which that anxiety was displayed.

“Help the surgeon and his boys get me onto the table, McParland. And then help them hold the arm while he saws it off. I may twitch just a bit.”

The effort of moving to the table almost drained him of consciousness. He had just enough of his wits left to whisper one last request.

“Do me the favor, youngster. If I scream anything untoward, keep it to yourself, would you?”

Even with the laudanum, the brief time that followed was agonizing beyond belief.

But McParland assured the sergeant afterward that the only thing he had screamed during the operation was
Fuck the Sassenach!

“You hollered that mebbe a hunnerd times.”

Driscol thought McParland might be fudging the truth. He’d never know, since his own memory was thankfully nothing but a blur. It didn’t matter, really, so long as McParland passed the same story along to the troops.

The surgeon, as usual, just tossed the severed arm onto the pile of limbs, but McParland dug it back out. He was determined to give the troll’s limb a proper burial.

On the battlefield itself—with a squad to fire a proper salute. McParland would fire one of the muskets himself.

Winfield Scott came to visit Driscol the next day. The brigadier’s first words were typical of the man—direct and to the point.

“Will you consider that commission
now
, Patrick? With only one arm, your days as an active-duty sergeant are over. The best you could hope for would be a position in the quartermaster corps. And you’re not a good enough thief for that job. You’d wind up in the poorhouse.”

Driscol squinted at him. “And is this your idea of cheering up the troops, sir? Offering them a choice between becoming a bloody officer, or a life of squalor?”

Scott looked surprised. “Well. Yes.”

Driscol chuckled, though it came out rasping. “Napoleon would have handed me a miniature marshal’s baton—just a promissory note, as it were, not the real thing—and given me a pension that’d vanish within eight months when he needed the money for another campaign. The assurances of the mighty. Water poured on sand.”

Coming from someone else, those words might have angered Scott. As it was, the brigadier simply smiled.

“Well, to be honest, once the war is over a U.S. Army commission is likely to be about as valuable as one of Napoleon’s little sticks. I’ll try for captain, Patrick, but we’ll probably have to settle for first lieutenant. Still, it’ll be better than nothing.”

Driscol had now been given several hours to ponder bleakly on his future, and had come to the same conclusion himself. “Aye, sir, I’ll take it. And thank you.”

“The thanks are entirely due the other way, Sergeant.” The words were said forcefully, as well they might be. The brigadier’s glorious victory at the Chippewa had ensured his career, and enriched his own future prospects—assuming he survived the war, of course. And while that victory was due in part to Scott’s own skill and courage, a great deal of it was due to men like Patrick Driscol.

The brigadier cleared his throat.

“I must be off, I’m afraid. Riall’s retreating to Fort George, and General Brown wants to press the campaign. Rightly so, of
course. Now’s not the time to give the enemy any breathing space.”

He cleared his throat again. “Patrick, the worst place for you to stay is here in this tent.”

Driscol’s chuckle was even harsher, now. “Do tell. A man’s got a better chance of surviving a battle in the first rank than he does surviving a stay in a camp surgery.”

Scott nodded. “So I propose to transfer you to Washington. I’ll send along orders to have you placed in military quarters there. And”—here the brigadier’s face brightened—“I happen to know a splendid doctor there. A very fine gentleman by the name of Jeremy Boulder. He has real medical degrees and everything. Studied under Benjamin Rush himself! I’ll also send a letter asking him to take you under his care.”

That news did
not
cheer up Driscol. A real doctor, with real degrees—a fine gentleman, no less—who’d studied under the most famous medical practitioner in the United States …

He might as well just shoot himself in the head.

But he saw no point in arguing the matter with someone from Scott’s class. There’d be time enough and opportunity to evade a “real doctor” once he got to Washington.

Assuming he got there in the first place. Driscol looked down at the stump that protruded below his left shoulder. It was all that remained of his arm. The bandages covering the stump were crusted with dried blood, and the thing ached constantly. It would do worse than ache, too, once the last of the laudanum was gone. There was no way that Driscol, even as tough as he was, could survive a journey to Washington unless he gave himself several weeks to heal first.

Alas, surviving several weeks in an army surgical camp was a chancy prospect.

From the look on his face, which was no longer cheery at all, it was obvious that Scott understood as much himself. The brigadier grimaced. “Very well. I’ll leave instructions to have inquiries made with the local residents. There might be a farmer nearby who’d be willing to take you in.”

Driscol barely managed to keep from laughing aloud. The chance was just about nil that any local resident, such as were left, would be willing to take in a wounded soldier. That was just as true of American citizens living across the river as Canadian
ones on this side. The war had ravaged the area for two years—and, to make things worse, the American army had conspicuously failed to make good on its promises to carry the war past the border territories. For the citizens of upper New York, the slogan
On to Montreal!
garnered as much respect as continental money, bungtown coppers, and wildcat banknotes.

The assurances of the mighty.

Water poured on sand.

Driscol caught a sudden little motion out of the corner of his eye. McParland had more or less informally attached himself to the sergeant since the battle. As was usually the case, he was perched on a stool nearby in the tent.

He turned his head. “You wanted to say something, Private?”

McParland looked simultaneously eager and … worried. He cleared his throat. Cleared it again.

“Oh, just speak up, lad!” Driscol growled “I promise I won’t have you shot. Neither will the brigadier.”

“Well. It’s just. Well … My family’s not far away from here, Sergeant. We live on a farm just a few miles north of Dansville.” The young soldier flushed a little. “That’s why, uh, I tried to run away. My home being so close and all. It’s less’n seventy-five miles away.”

Eagerness pushed aside anxiety: “And my mother’s a right slick healer.” He gave Scott an apologetic glance. “Of course, she bean’t a real doctor. Don’t have any degrees or such.”

Scott sniffed, as well he might. McParland’s family was no doubt dirt poor. And while his mother might have some medical skills in the way of farmwives the world over, she’d be riddled with herbalist nonsense and have no proper sense at all of modern medical theories.

Driscol seized the offer like a drowning man seizes a lifeline.

“Done, then! I can survive seventy-five miles.” He cocked an eye at the brigadier. “You’d need to place Private McParland on detached duty, sir, as my escort. I couldn’t manage the trip on my own—and I’ll need him for the introductions anyway.”

To his credit, Scott didn’t hesitate. Whatever his own opinion of a farmwife’s medical care, he wasn’t blind to the fact that anything was better than leaving Driscol to rot in an army camp.

“Very well. I’ll write up orders sending both of you to the private’s home. But I’ll expect you”—here he shot McParland a stern look—“
both
of you, mind, to show up in Washington as
soon as possible. Leaving aside the fact that you do need
proper
medical treatment as soon as possible, Sergeant Driscol, there’s the little matter of your commission.”