Read Chapter 14: The Long Retreat

The gas came without warning.

Élise was changing a dressing on a boy from the Somme when the first shell whistled over, and instead of the familiar crump of high explosive, the world turned sickly green. The air thickened. Men began to cough—deep, racking sounds that tore from their chests like wet paper.

“Gas!” someone screamed from the trench line. “Gas, gas, gas!”

James was already moving, his voice cutting through the rising chaos. “Wet cloths. Over the mouth and nose. Get the walking wounded to the wagons—NOW.”

Élise pressed a damp bandage over the Somme boy’s face and hauled him upright. His eyes were wild above the sodden linen. The tent flaps whipped open as orderlies dragged stretchers through, and outside the world had turned the colour of bile.

“With me,” James shouted, grabbing her arm. His fingers bit hard through her sleeve. “The field hospital is compromised. We fall back to Vétheuil.”

She nodded, throat already burning from the thin tendrils of gas seeping through the canvas. Around them, the unit dissolved into purposeful motion—orderlies carrying, nurses supporting, the wounded stumbling toward the waiting ambulances. Corporal Reeves appeared out of the murk, his face streaked with mud.

“The wagons are full, sir. We’ve got twelve stretcher cases and no room for more.”

James’s jaw tightened. “Then we make room. Lash the walking cases to the sides if we have to.”

“But sir—”

“I said make room, Corporal.”

Élise pulled the Somme boy toward the nearest wagon. A shell landed forty yards off, and the ground lurched. She fell, felt the boy’s weight crush her ribs, tasted mud and the faint metallic tang of chlorine. For a moment the world went silent and grey.

Then hands were under her arms, hauling her up. Reeves.

“Careful, Sister.” His voice was flat, but his eyes scanned her face with that particular intensity she had learned to dread. “Wouldn’t want to lose you.”

She twisted away from him and helped the boy back to his feet. The wagon was already pulling forward, wheels churning through the liquefied mud of the field track. More shells whistled overhead. The green fog was thicker now, rolling down from the German lines like a rising tide.

“James!” She did not mean to shout his name, but it came out anyway.

He was at the far end of the aid station, dragging a wounded man toward a horse cart that had appeared from somewhere. He looked back at the sound of her voice, and for a single unguarded moment his face betrayed everything—fear, longing, a desperate fury at the circumstances that kept pulling them apart.

“Go!” he shouted. “Get to Vétheuil. I’ll follow with the rearguard.”

“I’m not leaving without you.”

“You’ll do as you’re told, Sister Moreau.” But his voice cracked on the name. He turned away before she could answer and disappeared into the foul mist with the wounded man slung over his shoulder.

The evacuation was chaos with a thin skin of order. Élise lost herself in the work—binding wounds, calming the panicked, directing the flood of men toward the dwindling stream of transport. The gas was closer now. She could feel it burning at the back of her throat, a raw scrape with every breath. Her eyes streamed. The world swam in a blur of green and grey.

Hours passed. Or perhaps minutes. Time had become meaningless.

By the time the last wagon lurched away from Saint-Rémy, the aid station was nothing but canvas and splintered wood in a sea of poison. Élise stood at the edge of the road, shivering in a rain that had begun to fall—clean, merciful rain—and watched the column of wounded and walking men snake through the mud toward the horizon.

But James was not among them.

She waited. The rain soaked through her coat. Her teeth chattered. Corpses of horses and men lay twisted in the fields, and somewhere beyond the ridge she could hear the low growl of artillery resuming its patient work.

“You’ll catch your death, Sister.”

She whirled. Corporal Reeves stood a few feet behind her, a rifle slung across his back, his face unreadable as ever.

“The Captain ordered the rearguard to hold the eastern approach,” he said. “They were to fall back by midnight.”

“It’s past midnight.” Her voice was barely a whisper.

“Aye.” He hesitated—an unusual pause from a man who always seemed to be watching, waiting. “He’ll come. He’s the stubborn sort.”

Élise said nothing. She turned back to the road, and Reeves—whether from respect or calculation, she could not tell—slipped away into the gloom.

She must have fallen asleep standing. The next thing she knew, a hand was on her shoulder and she was jerking upright, heart hammering.

“Easy, Élise. It’s me.”

James.

He was before her, mud-caked and grey-faced, his greatcoat torn across one shoulder. And his left arm hung at a strange angle, the sleeve dark with blood that the rain had not yet washed away.

“James.” His name came out cracked, half-swallowed. “Your arm.”

“It’s nothing. A ricochet—caught it covering the withdrawal.” He swayed, and she caught him by the waist, guiding him into the shell of a ruined farmhouse a few yards off the road. Someone had left a lantern burning on a broken table. Élise lowered him onto a splintered bench and knelt before him.

“Let me see.”

His fingers closed around her wrist, stopping her. His eyes met hers—those grey eyes she had learned to read so well across crowded wards and sleepless nights.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he said.

The words landed somewhere deep in her chest. She wanted to pull away, to retreat into the professional calm she had worn like armour for months. But the rain was still falling outside, and the gas was still drifting across the fields, and the world was ending in slow motion around them.

“You can’t lose what you refuse to have,” she said quietly.

Something flickered across his face—hurt, or hope, or both. “Is that what you’ve been telling yourself?”

She did not answer. Instead she eased his torn sleeve back from the wound. The gash was long but clean, a deep furrow along the outer part of his forearm. She found a field dressing in her pack and began to work, her fingers steady even as her heart shook.

“I was so afraid,” she admitted, the words coming unbidden. “When I saw the gas come, and you weren’t there, and the wagons were leaving—I thought—I thought I would have to go on living in a world where you were gone.”

He was silent for a moment, watching her stitch. “Élise—”

“I pushed you away because I love you.” She didn’t look up from the needle. “It’s a stupid reason, I know. But I loved my brother, and he’s gone. I loved Luc, and he’s gone. Every time I love someone, the war takes them from me. And I couldn’t bear it if—if loving you meant losing you too.”

The needle paused. Her breath was coming fast now, the words she had buried for so long clawing their way up her throat.

“So I thought if I kept you at a distance, if I never let myself want you properly, then the war couldn’t hurt me that way. It was a coward’s logic. I know that now.”

James was very still. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “Look at me, Élise.”

She raised her eyes from the wound. His face was tired, streaked with grime, but his gaze held something she had never allowed herself to name—tenderness, fierce and aching.

“I don’t have grand promises to make,” he said. “I can’t tell you this war will spare us. It’s already taken so much. But I can tell you this—whatever time we have, I want to spend it beside you. Not hovering at a professional distance. Not speaking in clipped sentences across a ward. Beside you.”

Her hands trembled on the bandage. “James, it’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because the war will end, and you will go back to England, and I will be here, and—”

“And we will cross that river when we come to it.” He reached up with his good hand and cupped her cheek, his thumb brushing the track of a tear she had not felt falling. “I’ve seen enough men die with their words unsaid, Élise. I refuse to be one of them.”

For a long moment she knelt there, caught between the weight of her grief and the impossible pull of his touch. Then she leaned forward, and her forehead met his, and she let out a breath she felt she had been holding for years.

“Do you remember what you said the night of the truce?” she whispered. “That we must hold on to small kindnesses, because they may be all we carry through the dark.”

“I remember.”

“I think I’d like to carry you.”

His hand tightened on her cheek. A sound escaped him—half laugh, half gasp of something far deeper—and he drew her toward him, mindful of his injured arm, until her head rested against his shoulder.

“Then carry me,” he murmured into her hair. “And let me carry you. Even if it’s only for today. For tonight. For however long the world allows.”

Outside, the rain had softened to a drizzle. The artillery had fallen silent—a lull in the killing that might last an hour or a day. Élise finished the bandage with careful, deliberate hands, and then she let herself rest against him, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear.

“However long the world allows,” she repeated softly.

It was not a promise of forever. But in the ruined farmhouse, with the war prowling beyond the walls, it was enough.