We Install by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

In civilian life, the idea would have revolted him. Now he just held out his bowl for more. The Scandinavians laughed and fed him.
    He’d hardly begun his second helping when firing to the east picked up. Gustav Pfeil looked grim. “Eat while you can. I think the Reds are trying to force the river.”
    As if on cue, a German artillery battery not far away fired a salvo. Then Sack heard the heavy diesels of the self-propelled guns roar into life to move them into a new position before Red artillery could reply.
    The Norwegian who’d led him to the field kitchen handed him a mug full of hot instant coffee. He gratefully held it under his nose. Even the rich aroma was invigorating. And the aroma was all he got, too, for a whistling in the air said the Germans hadn’t knocked out all the enemy guns. Soldiers shrieked “Incoming!” in a medley of languages. Some, who’d been around here for a little while, knew where the slit trenches were and dove for them. Sack threw his coffee away and flattened out on the ground. The burst were thunderous, and less than a hundred meters from where he lay. Splinters flew by with deadly hisses; mud splattered down on top of his helmet.
    Still on his belly, he pulled out his entrenching tool, unfolded it, and started digging himself in. The Red shells kept falling; it might as well have been a World War I bombardment. If it was going to be like that, Sack wanted himself a nice World War I trench in which to endure it.
    Then Gustav Pfeil screamed.
    Sack rolled out of his half-dug hole, crawled snakelike over to where the Wachtmeister lay writhing on the ground. Pfeil had both hands clenched to his thigh. His trouser leg was already reddish-black, his face gray.
    â€œMedical officer!” Sack shouted. Then, more softly, he said to Pfeil, “Here, let me see it.” His hands shook as he moved the staff sergeant’s away from the injury. Pfeil had never been scratched, not in more than two years of hard fighting. How could he be wounded now? And if he was, how could anyone hope to come through this war intact?
    The wound sliced cleanly into the meat of the thigh. Pfeil’s flesh looked like something that ought to be hanging in a butcher’s shop, not like part of a man at all. “I don’t think the femoral artery’s cut,” Sack said inanely.
    â€œOf course not,” Pfeil replied with the eerie calm of a man in shock. “If it were, I’d already have bled out.”
    Sack dusted the wound with sulfa and antibiotics from his aid kit, wrapped a pressure bandage around it. One of the Danes came up to help a moment later. Along with his white cross on red, he wore a red cross on a white armband. He looked under the pressure bandage to see what Sack had done, nodded, and then rolled up Pfeil’s left sleeve. He gave the Wachtmeister a painkiller shot, then said in good German, “Make a fist.” When Pfeil obeyed, the Dane stuck the needle from a plasma unit into the bend of his elbow.
    The medical officer turned to Sack. “I wish we could airlift him out, but—” A fresh barrage of incoming artillery punctuated the but. The Dane stood up anyhow, shouted, “Stretcher party!” first in German, then in English.
    â€œI’m one,” Sack said.
    The Norwegian who’d guided the two Germans back to the kitchen came out of his hole. “I’m the other,” he said in English. “I know the way back to the field hospital.”
    The medical officer pulled telescoping aluminum stretcher poles from his pack, extended them, and strung them with mesh. He fixed an upright metal arm to one of them to hold the plasma bag. Together, he and Sack got Pfeil onto the stretcher. “He should do well enough,” the medical officer said, “unless, of course, we’re all overrun.”
    Sack, for one, could have done without the parenthetical comment. He and the Norwegian stooped, lifted the