Grantville Gazette.Volume XVI Read online

  Mauger's Counter-Remonstrant heart warmed. A true Calvinist, then. None of this creeping, compromising, semi-Papism. As Calvin himself had written, "Of course marriage is a gift of God. That does not mean that it is within the proper province of the church, any more than are agriculture or shoemaking, which are also gifts of God to humankind." He beamed.

  He had taken a comfortable room at the new Higgins hotel. He requested that for the remainder of his stay, it should be expanded to a suite.

  Velma sold the trailer. With the way that real estate prices in Grantville had skyrocketed, it brought in quite a bit. She packed a lot of the contents to take with them. It came to several wagonloads of freight, but Laurent didn't mind. He had been fascinated by the lava lamps. Luckily, they were the kind that worked with candles in the base and didn't need to be plugged in, so in their new home in Haarlem, they could sit and watch the lava lamps together when they were not doing other things.

  Mauger received the news that his wife would be bringing him a dowry with delight. Jacques-Pierre had not advised him of this bonus in advance. He did not discover it until Velma requested, very properly for a wife, that he take care of the business of switching the bank draft to Haarlem. It was not a large dowry by the standards of the merchant families of the Netherlands, but every source of investment funds helped and it would make it a lot easier to explain his decision to his family.

  Last of all, Velma packed her clothes and sent nasty-nice notes to all her relatives. She thought a lot about her wedding dress. Penny Reading managed to open the seams on the mauve faux leather just enough that she could get into it. Old Mittie Barger disguised the little needle holes that ran down under her arms with embroidery and sewed bias tape on the inside of the seams to make them stronger. She had found the matching boots. When she showed up for the wedding, she could tell from Laurent's expression that her choice was a smashing success.

  Even Jacques-Pierre had a funny look on his face.

  ***

  Two weeks after the wedding, Laurent asked rather doubtfully, "Uh, what?"

  "I'm having my period." Velma frowned. "You should know about that. I thought you'd been married before. I'm only a little past forty, after all." Well, forty-six last July, if you wanted to be picky about it. Minor details.

  Laurent swallowed. He had been married before. He did know about it. He had a feeling that Jacques-Pierre had misled him about Madame Hardesty's age. Which did not mean that he intended to forego the joys and blessings of matrimony. He wouldn't even suggest such a thing to a fine woman who had married him in good faith.

  Which was just as well. Velma was deriving a great deal of non-Spiritual comfort from her marriage. Laurent was still pretty lively about it all, fat or not. At the end of the week, they resumed matrimonial relations.

  They left for Haarlem shortly thereafter. Velma didn't have her period on the trip. She put it down to all the jostling in the carriage and the disruption of her schedule that travel brought.

  ***

  Doc

  Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett

  "Get out of the goddamned way, Little Ferdie!"

  Ferdinand Bader got out of Sergeant Sandler's way as quickly as he could. Not that he was really in the way, but it was typical of Sandler to shout, just as it was typical of Captain Lehrer to look down his rather pointed nose at "Little Ferdie."

  "Look at the mouse jump!"

  Ferdinand carefully didn't look in Corporal Melman's direction. Melman was just plain mean and looked for excuses to make Ferdinand miserable. The mouse comment was, again, typical. Ferdinand had been hearing comments much like it for most of his life. His voice was high and squeaky, commanding neither obedience nor respect. It never had. Further, by inclination, Ferdinand avoided conflict.

  He wouldn't even have been in the Army, if it hadn't been for getting drunk that night in Jena, after Papa cut off his funds for the university. The life of a student had suited him just fine. Thankfully, for once the Army had gotten it right and sent Ferdinand to medic school, where he'd finally found his calling.

  Not that the calling was easy work. Especially with a pissed off captain, sergeant and corporal. Which wasn't at all fair. Ferdinand hadn't known that medics were a separate corps, not part of the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines.

  ***

  "No!" Ferdinand shouted. For the first time in his life, he was obeyed. "Don't try to move him. He may have internal injuries!" The shocking bit was that his voice, as squeaky as ever, had suddenly been obeyed. Or maybe it was that he had given the command in the first place, or that he was running into the middle of a battle. Ferdinand was dealing with a number of shocking occurrences at the moment. Mostly by ignoring them. He had a patient and that was all that he could allow to matter.

  He knelt in the mud outside of Luebeck in the spring of 1634, after a sortie against the disintegrating Danish and French armies. With a pair of medical scissors, he cut away the heavy woolen cloth that was worn as much for its ability to slow a musket ball or pike thrust as for its warmth. That it didn't stop musket balls, he had clear evidence. In the form of what was almost a sucking chest wound.

  "You!" Ferdinand pointed at one of the men standing around. "Hold him!" He didn't realize until later that the person he was ordering about was his sergeant. "Unless you want him to bleed out into his lung. Keep him still!"

  Not exactly his sergeant. In theory, at least, the Medical Corps had a different chain of command. Sergeant Sandler had apparently not studied the theory. "Little Ferdie," since arriving at Luebeck, had been assigned every midnight guard duty and shit detail the sergeant could come up with. And "Little Ferdie" had had the good sense-or lack of guts-to put up with it. He was fully aware that the captain had a similar opinion of the medic's separate chain of command.

  Not that that was the primary reason Ferdinand had failed to complain. It was more in the way of an excuse he gave himself, but even he didn't really believe it. Ferdinand simply wasn't a very forceful person. Never had been. He pulled a biter out of his bag and shoved it into the patient's mouth. "Karl, bite down on this and try to hold still. What I'm about to do is probably going to hurt worse than getting shot did, but we can't move you till I stabilize that rib. The musket ball broke your number four left rib in two places. It's a miracle it didn't rip your left lung apart. But if you move too much, the busted pieces of your rib are going to do the job the ball didn't."

  As he was talking, Ferdinand was pulling stuff from the medic bag. Including the alcohol. That was where he had drawn the line with Sergeant Sandler, and with Karl and the other troops in the company. They had wanted to drink the stuff. But he had had it drilled into him in medic class that it was a bad idea. Not just because it would be needed for sterilizing wounds like this one. Pure alcohol was bloody dangerous to drink.

  The ball had cut a crease in Karl's chest. But to do what he was going to have to do, Ferdinand was going to have to cut some more. First the alcohol, then the scalpel, then the tweezers to grab bone fragments.

  Ferdinand didn't hear the shot, but he felt the flinch as one of the men holding Karl in place instinctively tried to duck. "Hold steady, damn it!" Alcohol on his hands again, then reaching into Karl's chest to carefully pull a large chunk of bone away from his lung.

  Someone made a retching sound. Ferdinand didn't even look up. "Johan, if you're going to throw up, let somebody else hold his arm and get away from here!" A suture used to tie the fragment of rib in place, then another to repair a nick in the lung that Ferdinand had caused while he was pulling the large fragment of rib, away from the lung. All the time, praying that Karl hadn't lost too much blood. That he wouldn't die of an infection caused by the muddy ground on which he was lying. That Ferdinand had guessed right about what to do. That the pieces of gut he'd used to get Karl's ribs together wouldn't break. Ferdinand applied the sterile bandage and called for a stretcher. Karl had lost consciousness about half way through the procedure. Which went to prove what Ferdinand had alread
y known; that Karl was one tough son of a…

  "Gently now! Gently! We can't afford to put stress on the body." As the stretcher bearers were carrying Karl away, Ferdinand looked around for another patient, only to see that the battle was over. He guessed that it hadn't been that much of a battle in the great scheme of things. The Danish forces were back where they belonged. And apparently casualties had been fairly light. There hadn't been any other calls for medics in his area anyway.

  Which is what he should have been praying about, he realized. It had taken him… Ferdinand didn't know how long it had taken him. But it was more time than a field medic was supposed to spend on a patient. His job was supposed to be simply to get them stable and transport them back to a real doctor. But Ferdinand knew that if he tried to do it that way, Karl would've been dead before he got back to Luebeck.

  ***

  The doctor was Jena trained, with six months in the Grantville teaching hospital. He was surprisingly good for a military unit. And he questioned Ferdinand about every step he had taken. The issue was how much damage would have actually been done transferring Karl back to the aid station that had been set up in a converted beer hall in the town. Then, once he was clear on what had happened, the doctor had dumped all over Ferdinand. Not because he disagreed about the effect on Karl, but because performing that kind of treatment in the field meant that Ferdinand wasn't available in case someone else needed him.

  They found someone with Karl's blood type to give him a couple of pints. And the doctor went back in and cleaned things up; made sure the rib fragments were in the right place. And that the lung wasn't leaking.

  Karl would be returning to light duty in about three weeks. He should be back to full duty, if there were no complications, about nine weeks after that.

  Ferdinand drew a deep breath. "Now, back to the company."

  ***

  Ferdinand was nervous about returning to his company. He was remembering ordering the sergeant and the men of his company about as though he was the captain or something. Especially he remembered telling Johan to get away. Johan wasn't a bad guy, but he was very proud of his courage and didn't take kindly to anyone disparaging it. For the life of him, Ferdinand couldn't remember who he had cussed out for flinching or why they had flinched. But he figured he was in trouble for it, whoever it was.

  "How's Karl?" Sergeant Sandler asked.

  "Doctor Jensen says that he will be in bed for the next three weeks or so, then light duty. That's assuming no complications, Sergeant."

  Sandler nodded and said, "Get cleaned up and get some rest."

  Ferdinand looked down at his uniform. It was covered in blood and mud with horse shit on the knees. He wondered, sort of vaguely, why the sergeant wasn't screaming at him about the uniform. Sandler was a stickler for proper military appearance. But, mostly, Ferdinand was too tired to care. He managed to get his uniform off and get some of the blood that had splashed on his face and hands up to his elbows off, then fell into bed.

  ***

  Sergeant Sandler looked at the little man as he walked away. Covered in blood. Granted, it wasn't his blood, but Sandler realized that if Little Ferdie hadn't been there, the man whose blood it was would be dead. And that man was a friend of his. Sandler was a tough man, a veteran of many battles. He had seen a lot of wounds. Karl's wound was the sort that killed people, killed them in a matter of hours and often in minutes. He, unlike Ferdinand, had not been busy with the battle. He'd been holding Karl's shoulders. He hadn't flinched from the musket ball that had come near, as that was a matter of years of experience. He didn't think Ferdinand had even heard the shot. He was too busy saving the life of a man who had been less than kind to him.

  Sometime during the battle, the notion of having a member of the medical corps assigned to his company had gone from being an irritation to a blessing. Hell, Sandler thought, half the doctors he had met couldn't have done what Little Ferdie had done. He didn't know any who could-or would-have done it with musket balls flying.

  ***

  "Hey, Doc. How's Karl?" Corporal Melman called as Ferdinand entered the mess the next morning. Ferdinand looked around for the doctor, but didn't see him. He hesitated but it was clear that Melman was talking to him.

  "He should be fine in about three months," Ferdinand answered. Melman just nodded. He made no threats and didn't do any blustering about how tough he was.

  From then on the men of Ferdinand's company called him "Doc." Ferdinand was never sure why. For that matter, neither were the men who had once teased him so unmercifully. They just knew that they needed a name for the man who would hold their lives in his hands should they be wounded in battle. "Medic" wouldn't do. They knew he wasn't a real doctor with a diploma from a university, but he was what they had. What they would have, if they were hit by a musket ball or trampled by a horse.

  Ferdinand might not be a real doctor, but he was without a doubt their doctor. So they called him Doc.

  ***

  One of the reasons Captain Lehrer was less than pleased to have a Medical Corps contingent assigned to his company was that Captain Herr Doctor Jensen was a total stuffed shirt. Who insisted that he was of equal rank and superior status to a mere military captain. Jensen was collage educated and Lehrer, though he could read and do figures, was not an especially literate man.

  When Jensen came to complain about the troops calling a mere medic "Doc" Captain Lehrer tried not to laugh for about three seconds, then he started to howl.

  Captain Herr Doctor Jensen was not amused. Oddly enough, he wasn't the least bit upset with Medical Corpsman First Class Ferdinand Bader

  … well, maybe the least bit. But he knew Ferdinand, even knew his family to say hello to. He knew darn well that Ferdinand had not insisted on or even encouraged the new nickname. Ferdinand Bader didn't have it in him to demand even the status he was due, much less more than he was due. For instance, Ferdinand had not once mentioned that his father was among the minor nobility. Nor that he had two years of college, one in Leipzig and the second in Jena, before his father had cut him off over political differences and the fact that Ferdinand didn't act like a proper noble.

  The issue wasn't about Ferdinand Bader. It was about an important principle. There were too many quacks out there pretending to be medical doctors and killing people through ignorance and superstition. Which was also the reason Jensen was so insistent on his title. At least, that was the reason that he admitted to himself.

  "You want me to tell the men to change a nickname?" Captain Lehrer asked, still laughing. "Do you think I am a fool?" Apparently you do, or you're a fool yourself… or both. "My men are killers, Captain Herr Doctor Jenson, Giving stupid orders that I know they won't obey anyway would decrease my ability to direct who they kill. And who they don't kill.

  "The men will continue to call Medic Bader 'Doc' for the same reason they call Melman 'Ogre.' Because they choose to."

  After Jensen tried to explain his reasoning, Captain Lehrer nodded "I see your point. But you're applying it to the wrong people in the wrong way. The troops calling Ferdinand 'Doc' isn't going to cause them to run off and get treated by a barber. If anything, it will do the opposite. They will go to Doc and if it's something he can't handle, he'll send them to you. Doc isn't some quack; he is a trained medic-trained enough to put Karl back together in the field and to know when he needs to send the patients to someone with even more training. I don't insist that you call him Doc, but don't expect me to give any orders on the subject and don't you try to give any either. That would make the men less likely to trust you when they need to."

  Captain Herr Doctor Jenson wasn't happy about it and he wasn't convinced but there really wasn't anything he could do about it.

  ***

  The same custom started up in other units of the USE Army, for the same reason. And where it didn't appear spontaneously, it spread as troopers transferred between units.

  And pretty soon, in spite of the stuffed shirts in both the Medical C
orps and the regular military wishing it otherwise, a lot of field medics were happier to receive the accolade of "Doc" than they were to get a promotion.

  It meant a lot more to them.

  The Galloping Goose

  Written by Herbert and William Sakalaucks

  "Okay, guys, very carefully, peel the logo stencils and coverings off the doors and I'll get the big one on the back end," Arlen instructed. The sharp smell of drying paint hung in the air, a fine mist shrouding the gathered crowd, as Mike and Martin peeled off the new door logos for the Grantville, Rudolstadt, and Saalfeld Railway and Tram Line; the rays of light glistening off the black logo. A capital G above the R and S looked like they were ready to fly with their speed lettering extensions.

  "You know, Arlen, this new logo really makes it look like it is ready for speed," Martin commented. "How's the rear logo look? You've kept it a real tight secret, I'm not even sure Francisco's spies could have gotten any hint about its design."

  "Come on back and see," Arlen said, with a smirk on his face. Everybody crowded around in the tight space behind the engine. There on the back door was a picture of a goose running flat out, neck parallel to the ground, feet in mid-stride. "I'm calling this new engine the 'Galloping Goose' class railbus after its Colorado narrow gauge ancestors up-time."

  Resplendent in its silver and black paint scheme, was an old Ford truck cab and frame with a hand-crafted wooden passenger compartment that Martin had built. Martin's prior experience as a boatwright showed in the smooth sweeping lines of the body. It could seat twenty-four passengers and could carry luggage and freight in the back. Arlen had scrounged the glass and seats from an old Blue Bird bus that was being scrapped. The interior looked like a Black Forest cuckoo clock-makers dream. Every possible inch was carved black walnut and polished to a high sheen. A small propane stove for heat was also in the rear of the car. Underneath the Goose, Arlen had installed a small set of lead wheels with a large drive wheel set in back, powered by a chain drive. The Ford's frame still had a hydraulic lift in front for machinery.