Read Chapter 2: White Aprons, Red Crosses

The stench of iodine and old blood had soaked into Élise's hands so deeply that even scrubbing with lye soap and cold water couldn't chase it away. She didn't mind. It meant she'd been useful.

The aid post had grown in the three days since the burning of her village. What had been a stone barn with a leaky roof was now a functioning casualty clearing station, with rows of stretchers along one wall and a proper operating table in the center—a farm door laid across two sawhorses, sterilized with boiling water and prayer.

"Moreau." Matron Beaumont's voice cut through the morning bustle like a scalpel. She was a stout Englishwoman with iron-gray hair pinned so tight it pulled her eyes into permanent slits. "You're with me. Dressings. And mind you don't waste a single square of gauze—we've got four hundred men coming down the line and enough supplies for half that."

"Yes, Matron." Élise fell into step beside her, apron already stained despite it being barely past dawn.

The dressing room was a partitioned corner of the barn, where the worst of the moaning couldn't reach the operating table. Élise worked quickly, unwrapping filthy bandages, cleaning wounds with boiled water and carbolic, re-wrapping with fresh linen. Her fingers moved with a steadiness that surprised even her. On the third day of war, she'd held a man's intestines in her bare hands while a surgeon stitched him shut. Nothing shocked her anymore.

"You've a steady touch," Beaumont said, not looking up from the leg she was binding. "For a farm girl with no training."

"My mother set bones for the whole village," Élise said. "I watched her from the time I could walk. She said the body wants to heal—you just have to give it the chance."

Beaumont grunted. "Your mother had the right of it. But the body also wants to die when it's given a good enough reason. Your job is to argue the opposite."

The morning bled into afternoon. Men came in waves, pale and shaking, some with wounds so fresh they still steamed in the cold air. Élise learned to read the stretcher-bearers' faces—the quick ones were urgent, the slow ones were already lost. She moved without thinking, without feeling, until a voice stopped her cold.

"Letter for you, miss." A man with a bandaged head held out a crumpled envelope, stained with mud and something darker. "Found it on a lad who didn't make it. Address said to send it home if he fell. But it's got your name on it—Moreau. I thought you might want to see."

Élise took the letter with trembling fingers. The handwriting was her brother's—Pierre's—looping and careless, the way he wrote when he was in a hurry and his mind was elsewhere. The letter was addressed to her, their farm, their village. *Tell Maman I'm all right, don't let her worry, I've been put with the 87th at the front but it's quiet here, nothing like they said it would be—*

The letter wasn't finished. It ended mid-sentence, the ink smudged, as if Pierre had been interrupted. Or had simply stopped.

Élise folded it carefully and pressed it into the pocket of her apron, next to her heart.

"Your brother?" the soldier asked.

"Yes." Her voice came out steady. "He's been missing since August. But this—this proves he was alive at least until recently. He could still be—" She stopped. She couldn't finish the sentence.

The soldier nodded, understanding in his eyes. "The lad who carried it—he died saving my life. Took a shell that was meant for me. If your brother's out there, miss, he's got the same stubborn blood. He'll make it through."

Élise wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe it so badly that it hurt, a physical ache behind her ribs.

---

At dusk, Captain James Ashford emerged from the operating theater, rolling his shoulders and pulling off his bloodstained gloves. His face was gray with exhaustion, his dark hair plastered to his forehead. He looked at Élise where she knelt by a stretcher, changing a dressing with movements so precise they seemed almost mechanical.

"She's learning fast," Beaumont said, appearing at his elbow. "Picked up more in three days than most nurses learn in three weeks. Steady hands, no flinching. And she doesn't talk back." Beaumont paused. "Not to me, anyway."

James studied the French girl for a long moment. She was thin beneath her apron, with the kind of wiry strength that came from farm work. There was something in her face—a grief held so tightly it had become a kind of armor. He'd seen it before, in soldiers who'd lost too much and kept going anyway. It made them useful. It also made them dangerous, when the armor finally cracked.

"The wounded don't need her to be brave," he said quietly. "They need her to be efficient. Keep her focused on the work. That's the kindest thing you can do for her."

Beaumont raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

---

The night raid came at two in the morning, without warning.

Élise was dozing against a crate of medical supplies, her hand still wrapped around her brother's letter, when the first shell screamed overhead. The explosion shook the barn, raining dirt and splinters from the rafters. A second shell followed, closer. Men shouted in French and English, and somewhere a horse screamed in a way Élise would never forget.

"Evacuation!" Beaumont's voice rose above the chaos. "The wounded first—walking cases on their feet, stretcher cases by fours. Move!"

Élise was on her feet before she was fully awake, her body moving on instinct. She grabbed the nearest stretcher—a man with his leg in a splint, groaning in pain—and hauled it toward the door with a soldier who appeared at her side.

The night outside was no longer dark. The sky to the east burned orange, silhouetting the church spire of the nearest village against the flames. Shells whistled overhead, and every few seconds the ground shook with a hollow thump that made her teeth rattle.

"Where do we take them?" the soldier shouted.

"The chapel, quarter mile down the road—" James's voice cut through the noise, sharp and commanding. He'd appeared from the operating theater, still wearing his apron, carrying a box of surgical instruments in one arm and a lantern in the other. "Élise! You know the way?"

She nodded, heart pounding. "Yes, Captain."

"Then lead. Don't stop for anything. Don't look back."

They moved in a ragged column, stretchers swaying, the wounded crying out as they were jolted over the rutted road. Élise kept her eyes on the chapel tower ahead, visible in the flickering light of the burning village. She didn't think about Pierre. She didn't think about the farm, or her mother, or the life that had been torn away from her in a single October afternoon. She thought only of the next step, and the next, and the next.

A shell landed behind them, and the barn where they'd slept and worked and fought all week vanished in a pillar of fire. The heat washed over her back like a summer wind.

She didn't look back.

---

The chapel was dust and shadow, with pews pushed aside to make room for rows of pallets. The stained-glass window above the altar cast fractured saints across the wounded as they settled in. Élise worked by candlelight, her hands moving through the familiar rhythm of dressings and splints and whispered reassurances.

It was nearly dawn when James found her, kneeling by a young soldier who'd gone quiet and still in the night. She closed his eyes with two fingers and stood, wiping her hands on her apron.

"You didn't look back," James said. It wasn't a question.

"No time." Élise met his gaze, steady. "The living need me more than the dying."

James held her look for a long moment. Something flickered in his eyes—still guarded, still distant, but something had shifted, like a door cracked open an inch. Then he nodded.

"Beaumont was right. You'll do." He turned away, then paused. "Get some sleep. The morning train will bring more wounded. They'll need you strong."

He walked away into the gray half-light of dawn, leaving Élise alone in the chapel aisle. She reached into her apron and touched the edge of Pierre's unfinished letter, then folded it smaller and tucked it deeper, next to her skin.

Somewhere out there, in the smoke and the mud and the roar of guns, her brother was still alive.

She had to believe that.

If she stopped believing, she'd have nothing left.