Read Chapter 21: The Somme's Thunder

The mud was the first thing. Not the churned brown soup of no-man's-land, but the fine grey slurry that coated everything inside the dressing station—the canvas walls, the instruments, the faces of the men who stumbled through the entrance with their wounds already turning black. Élise worked with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, her hands moving on instinct now, stripping away bloody wool and field dressings to find the damage beneath.

Another shell landed close enough to shake dirt from the roof poles. She didn't flinch. None of them did anymore.

"Tourniquet here, Sister." Corporal Reeves thrust a length of rubber tubing into her hand and was already gone, dragging the next stretcher inside.

Élise knelt beside a boy who couldn't have been older than seventeen. His leg was a ruin below the knee. She tied the tourniquet high on his thigh, cranked it tight until the bleeding slowed, and shouted for a porter to take him to the evacuation point. The boy's lips were moving. She leaned close.

"Maman," he whispered. "Tell Maman I—"

"I'll tell her yourself," Élise said. "You're going home."

It was a lie. She had learned to tell them beautifully.

The day had begun with a thunder that made Verdun feel like a rehearsal. The Somme, they said. The great push that would end the war. Élise had stood at the edge of the camp and watched the horizon flash white and orange for hours, felt the ground tremble through the soles of her boots until her teeth chattered. Then the guns had fallen silent, and the whistles had blown, and the men had gone over the top into a storm of machine-gun fire that had not stopped since.

That was three days ago. She had stopped counting the hours.

"Sister Moreau."

Élise looked up from the wound she was packing. Captain Leclair stood in the entrance of the dressing station, his uniform torn across one shoulder, blood soaking through a rough field dressing wrapped around his left arm. Behind him, the sky was the colour of a bruise.

"Mon capitaine." She rose, found a clean bandage, and guided him to a stool in the corner where the light was better. "Let me see."

"It's nothing. A scratch." But his face was grey beneath the grime, and when she cut away the dressing, she saw the deep furrow the shrapnel had carved through the muscle of his shoulder.

"An infection will find its way in quickly enough." She began to clean the wound with boiled water and the last of her antiseptic. "You should go further back. The casualty clearing station at Albert has proper surgeons."

"I came to find you." He winced as she probed for fragments. "I heard you were pulled forward. The dressing station at Fricourt, they said."

"Command wanted experienced nurses at the front." She did not look at him as she worked. "I was reassigned."

"I know. I requested you."

Her hands stilled on the bandage. "You—"

"You're wasted here, Élise. Running on no sleep, five minutes of rest between cases. You'll break." Leclair caught her wrist, gentle but firm. "I can have you transferred to the officers' hospital at Amiens. Clean beds, proper supplies, a real surgical team. You'd be safe. You'd be useful."

Something cold settled in Élise's stomach. She pulled her wrist free and finished tying the bandage with efficient tugs. "And what about the men here?"

"The men here will be dead or evacuated within the week. The offensive is failing. We're feeding them into a meat grinder."

"Then they need nurses more than ever."

Leclair was quiet for a moment. His dark eyes studied her with a tiredness she recognized—the same weary weight she saw in James's face these days. "There's something coming," he said at last, dropping his voice. "The Germans have been reinforcing since the first day. Their counterattack is building. Intelligence expects it to break within forty-eight hours."

"Then I'll be here when it comes."

"You don't understand." His fingers closed around her arm again, tighter this time. "This dressing station is within two kilometres of the front line. If the Germans advance, there will be no evacuation. You'll be cut off, surrounded, captured—"

"I've been captured, Captain." Élise met his eyes. "In Verdun. In the tunnels under Douaumont. I've patched up wounds while shells fell around me and men died with their hands in mine. I've gone over the top alone to drag a soldier back. Do you think I'm afraid of what may come?"

He released her arm. A muscle twitched in his jaw. "You were never meant for this, Élise. You're a farmer's daughter. You should be in a field of poppies, not a field of corpses."

She almost laughed. The farmer's daughter was a lie, but Leclair had never asked, and she had never told. Let him keep his image of her. It was one of the few kindnesses she could offer the world.

"I have work to do," she said. "Send word to Amiens if you want. The matron will find another nurse. But I stay."

He stood slowly, testing his shoulder, wincing again. "You're a stubborn woman, Élise."

"Learned from stubborn company."

A ghost of his old charm touched his smile. "The doctor, you mean. Morgan." He said the name flatly. "He's back at the base hospital, I take it. Recovering from his wound?"

"Overseeing operations. His hand is still—" She stopped herself. It was none of Leclair's business how James's right hand shook now when he tried to hold a scalpel too long, or how he hid it in his pocket when the senior officers came around.

"I see." Leclair picked up his cap from the table. "I'll leave you to your work, Sister. But my offer stands. If you change your mind—"

"I won't."

"Then at least let me give you this." He pressed a folded slip of paper into her palm. "Authority to evacuate with the next convoy, signed and dated. If things go wrong—when things go wrong—use it. Don't be a martyr."

He was gone before she could argue, stepping out into the flash and roar of the bombardment. Élise stood for a long moment, staring at the paper in her hand. She wanted to crumple it, throw it into the mud, prove to him that she was stronger than his pity. But she slipped it into her pocket instead, beside the locket Prudence had given back to her, the one that held her father's photograph.

Outside the dressing station, a boy staggered in, holding his guts with both hands. Élise tucked the paper and the locket deeper and went to meet him.

By nightfall, she had treated eighty wounds with no morphine, no antiseptic, and only the faint light of hurricane lamps. She had watched eleven men die. She had learned the names of eight of them.

The shelling stopped just after midnight. The silence was worse.

Élise sat on an ammunition crate outside the entrance, her hands resting on her knees, the tremor in her left hand faint but unmistakable. She flexed her fingers, watched them shake, and thought of James. He would be at the base hospital now, miles behind the line, fuming at the orders that had taken her forward. She could imagine his face, the sharp lines of it, the way his left hand would curl into a fist while his right lay useless at his side. She had written him a letter before she left. It said: *Don't worry. I'll come back to you.* It had been a lie. Or maybe not. She was still deciding.

A runner appeared out of the dark, mud-splattered, gasping.

"Sister Moreau?"

She stood. "Yes."

"Orders from command. All personnel to the rear assembly point by 0600 hours. The Germans are massing. They expect an assault at first light." The boy hesitated. "They're saying we may have to fall back."

Élise looked toward the east, where the ridges were beginning to glow with the first pale grey of dawn. Falling back. There was nowhere to fall back to that the guns couldn't reach.

"Thank you," she said. "Tell them I'll be ready."

The runner saluted and disappeared. Élise reached into her pocket, felt the paper Leclair had given her, and let her fingers close around it. For a moment—just a moment—she imagined Amiens. Clean sheets. Hot food. The quiet hum of a city at peace.

She pulled the paper out and read it in the growing light. At the bottom, where the authority was written, Leclair had added a single line in pencil.

*They will come for the women first.*

Élise folded the paper carefully and put it back in her pocket. Then she picked up her medical bag and went to wake the other nurses.