Read Chapter 19: The Killing Fields

The stretcher bearers came through the flap before dawn, and the day never really began—it simply became. A grey tide of wounded washed over the triage tent, and Élise moved through it with her hands already stained rust-red, her apron stiff with blood that had dried and been rewet a dozen times.

By mid-morning, they had run out of morphine.

By noon, they had run out of bandages, and Élise tore strips from a dead man's shirt to bind a thigh wound that would not stop bleeding.

The shelling never paused. The earth shook in long, rolling tremors like a creature in fever, and the air tasted of cordite and turned earth and the sweet, sick smell that meant the dead were close and not yet buried.

James worked at the operating table with his injured arm strapped tight against his side, using only his left hand. He had developed a method—clamps braced against his chest, sutures pulled with his teeth—that was brutal to watch but effective. The men came through his hands and lived, mostly, and that was all anyone could ask.

Élise was holding pressure on a soldier's abdomen—Corporal Ellsworth, from the Manchester Regiment, a boy who had shown her a photograph of his sister's wedding last week—when the cry went up outside.

"Stretcher bearer down! Man down in the wire!"

She looked up. Through the tent opening, she could see the line of the forward trench, and beyond it, the moonscape of no-man's-land: craters, shattered trees, and the tangled coils of barbed wire that glinted in the fading light.

Private Harold Briggs. Eighteen years old, from Leeds. He had carried eleven men back from the wire in the past two days. He had a sweetheart named Mary and a stammer that disappeared when he sang.

He was out there now, caught in the wire, forty yards from the trench, and the Germans were still shelling.

Élise did not think. She pressed Ellsworth's hand over his own wound, told him to hold tight, and walked out of the tent.

The trench was chaos—men crouched against the parapet, faces grey with exhaustion and terror. The captain was shouting something about the gas, about the wounded still in the open, and Élise moved past him without hearing. She climbed the fire step. She looked out.

There. To the left, where the wire had been torn apart by a direct hit. A figure lay half-visible in the shell smoke, one arm raised, waving weakly.

Élise went over the top.

The ground was not ground anymore. It was a slurry of mud and chalk and things that had once been men, and she sank to her knees with every step. A shell burst thirty yards away, and the shockwave threw her sideways. She tasted blood where she had bitten her cheek. She kept crawling.

Behind her, she heard her name shouted, ragged and furious.

"Élise! Élise, get back here!"

James. Of course. She did not look back. She kept going.

The wire was a nightmare of steel barbs and rusted coils, and Briggs was tangled in it, his leg twisted at an angle that made her stomach lurch. His face was white, his eyes too bright.

"Miss," he said. "Miss, I'm stuck. I'm proper stuck."

She could see the shell hole beside them, deep enough to shelter them both. She could see the German lines beyond, the flash of artillery in the dusk. She pulled her scissors from her belt—the only tool she had brought—and began to cut.

The wire fought her. It snagged her sleeves, her hair, drew blood from her forearms. A bullet cracked past her ear, and she flattened herself against Briggs, covering him with her body. Another shell. Closer. The ground heaved.

"Miss Moreau," Briggs said, his voice cracking. "Miss, you need to go."

She did not answer. She cut the last strand of wire wrapped around his leg, and the weight of him suddenly collapsed into her arms. He was heavier than she had expected, all bone and muscle and fear.

She dragged him. She did not know how—she only knew that she was moving, one knee at a time, her arms screaming, and then there were hands on her, other men, the Manchester lads hauling her and Briggs over the parapet and down into the trench.

She lay in the mud at the bottom of the trench, breath coming in sobs, while someone worked on Briggs beside her. Someone was shouting. It took her a moment to realize it was James.

He was standing over her, his face white with fury, his good hand shaking.

"What the hell were you thinking?" His voice was barely controlled. "You went over the top. You went over the top with no cover, no escort, no—"

"He was dying." Her voice came out thin, reedy.

"He was one man. One man, and you—"

"They'll all be one man," she said, and heard how raw her own voice had become. "They're all someone's one man. I couldn't let him lie there."

James stared at her. His jaw worked. And then, with a movement so fast she didn't see it coming, his hand cracked across her face.

The sound of it echoed in the trench. Men stopped moving. Élise's head snapped to the side, and she tasted blood again, fresh from the split in her lip.

The silence was absolute.

James looked at his own hand as if it belonged to someone else. His face crumpled. And then he was on his knees beside her, pulling her into his arms, his mouth against her hair, his voice breaking.

"I'm sorry. God forgive me, I'm sorry. I thought you were dead. I saw you go over, and I thought— I couldn't—"

She held him. She could feel him shaking, the fine tremor that ran through his whole body, the tension of a man who had been holding himself together by will alone. She held him, and she did not cry, because someone had to be strong, and it was clearly not going to be him.

"Don't ever do that again," he said into her hair. "Please. I can't lose you. Not like that."

She didn't promise. She couldn't. They both knew it.

When she looked up, Prudence was standing at the far end of the trench, a bloodied apron in her hands, watching them with an expression Élise could not read. Their eyes met. Prudence's gaze moved to James's arms around Élise, to the intimacy of their embrace, and something in her face closed.

She turned and walked away.

Élise found Prudence in the supply dugout an hour later, packing what little remained into wooden crates. The woman did not look up when Élise entered, but her hands stilled.

"I'm not going to say anything," Prudence said quietly. "To command. About what I saw."

Élise opened her mouth to speak, to explain, to apologize, but Prudence cut her off.

"I understand. I think I understand more than you know." She reached into her pocket and pulled out the locket. It caught the lamplight, gleaming dully. "I've been carrying this since you gave it back to me. And I've been carrying what you told me about my Henry—about how he died, how you held his hand." Her voice cracked on the name. "You gave me something, Élise. You gave me the last moments of his life. You didn't have to do that."

Élise shook her head. "I had to."

"No. You didn't." Prudence pressed the locket into Élise's hands. "You've been carrying my grief for months. Let me carry it now." She pressed a folded piece of paper into Élise's palm as well. "This is a note for the records. It states that the locket was returned to me on the day of my arrival at Saint-Rémy. That you've been released from any obligation concerning its keeping." She paused. "And it states that I believe you to be a woman of courage and integrity, whatever your name might be."

Élise looked at the note, then at Prudence. The other woman's eyes were dry, but there was something raw in them, something that had been flayed open and was still healing.

"Where will you go?" Élise asked.

Prudence smiled, a thin, tired thing. "There's a casualty clearing station at Bar-le-Duc that needs a quartermaster. I've put in for a transfer." She picked up her crate. "You'll do great things here, Élise. Both of you. I can see it." She paused at the door. "But if you're going to love him, love him properly. Don't waste what time you have. God knows, I wasted mine."

She was gone before Élise could answer, and Élise stood alone in the dugout with the locket warm in her hand and the note light as a feather between her fingers.

She should feel relief. She felt, instead, the weight of something ending, a door closing softly behind Prudence Whitcombe that would never quite open again.

Outside, the shelling had stopped. In the sudden silence, she could hear the wounded beginning to moan, the endless chorus of the dying. She tucked the note into her pocket, touched the locket one last time, and went back to work.

There was no time for endings here. There was only the next man, and the next, and the next.

But as she walked past the mouth of the dugout, she passed Corporal Reeves, standing watch with a cigarette cupped in his hand. His eyes followed her, dark and unreadable, and she realized with a chill that wasn't from the cold that he had been standing close enough to hear every word.