Read Chapter 31: The Spring Offensive

The morning exploded out of the mist at four a.m., and by noon the world had turned to fire and mud.

Élise had never seen anything like it. The German bombardment rolled over the Allied lines like a tide of iron, and the wounded came in faster than the orderlies could carry them. The mobile hospital was a canvas cathedral of screams and chloroform and blood that pooled on the floorboards no matter how many times the nurses scrubbed them. James moved between stretchers with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, hands slick with crimson, shouting orders above the drumfire.

“We have to move,” he said, catching Élise by the arm as she passed with an armful of bandages. His face was streaked with grime, his eyes hollow. “The line is breaking. Leclair was right—they’ve split us. We pull back to Saint-Quentin or we’re swallowed.”

Élise nodded, but there was no time to speak. They packed the wounded into three trucks, lashed what they could to the roofs, and left the rest—the dead, the too-sick-to-move, the equipment that had cost so much to bring this far. The convoy rumbled down a road that had been shelled into a moonscape, and Élise rode in the back of the last truck, holding the hand of a boy who could not have been older than nineteen. His chest was a ruin of shrapnel, and he died before they reached the first crossroads.

The first truck hit a crater and snapped its axle. The second stopped to help. The third, theirs, stopped too.

And then the German infantry rose from the ditches.

Élise saw them as shapes in the smoke—grey helmets, bayonet-tipped rifles, moving with the mechanical precision that had broken so many armies. The driver shouted and stamped the accelerator, but the engine coughed and died. James was already out of the cab, pistol drawn, ordering the orderlies to form a line.

“Élise! Take the wounded into the ditch! Don’t let them see you move!”

She grabbed the nearest stretcher handle and dragged a groaning private toward the cover of a shattered farmhouse wall. The others followed, half-crawling, half-running, leaving the two trucks to the enemy. Bullets whined overhead like angry insects. The boy she’d held was left where he’d died, and she told herself she would not think about it—not now, not ever.

They were surrounded within minutes.

James stood at the edge of the wall, firing his revolver into the grey mass until the hammer clicked empty. He tossed the weapon aside and turned to Élise. “Get them through the gap at the north field,” he said, voice low. “I’ll draw them off.”

“No,” she said.

“Élise.” He gripped her shoulders, and for a moment the war fell away and there were only his eyes. “If they catch you after what you’ve done—the prisoners you helped escape, the wounded you’ve dragged from their lines—they will not take you alive. You know this.”

She knew. She had always known. “Then come with me.”

“Someone has to buy you time. It’s going to be me.” He kissed her hard, once, and then he was gone, running low across the open ground, shouting in German, waving his empty pistol like a madman. The grey shapes turned toward him, rifles rising.

Élise did not watch. She hauled the last of the wounded through the gap in the wall and into a shallow irrigation ditch that led north toward the distant tree line. She counted heads—twelve survivors, four stretcher cases, one feverish nurse with a bullet in her leg. The others looked to her.

“Move,” she said. “Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”

They crawled through water and mud for what felt like an hour, the sounds of fighting growing fainter behind them. Élise’s lungs burned. Her hands were raw. She thought she might be sick from the fear.

And then they were surrounded again—but this time, there was no wall, no ditch, no James to draw them off.

A German squad stepped out of the hedgerow, rifles leveled. The officer in front was young, with a scarred jaw and eyes that had seen too much. He looked at the wounded, at the nurses, and said something in German. The soldiers laughed. One of them grabbed Élise by the hair and dragged her to her knees.

“Please,” she said in French. “They’re wounded. They need care, not bullets.”

The officer walked toward her, tilting his head. He had a hollow look, a dead look—the look of a man who had stopped seeing people as people. He drew his pistol and pressed it to her forehead.

Élise closed her eyes. She thought of Pierre, of James, of the farm in the summer. She thought of the locket against her chest, Marguerite’s face warm against her skin.

The shot did not come.

Instead, she heard a voice—hoarse, disbelieving, speaking in rough French. “You are the girl from the river.”

She opened her eyes. The officer was older than she remembered, gaunt, with a new scar splitting his brow. His eyes were the same colour as the winter water where he’d dragged her out six years ago, burning and screaming, when she’d stumbled into the river to put out the flames of a fire that had already taken everything.

He looked at her, and then at his own pistol, and then back at her face. “Go,” he said. “Take your people. Go now, before I change my mind.”

She didn’t understand. She stared at him.

He lowered the pistol. “I told you once that no child should die like that. I meant it.” He gestured to the tree line. “Go.”

Élise rose on shaking legs. She grabbed the nearest nurse, then the nearest stretcher, and began to run. The wounded stumbled after her. She did not look back.

She was thirty metres away when the sniper’s bullet took the soldier through the chest. He fell without a sound, and the grey shapes scattered, and the man who had spared her life lay dead in the mud, staring at the sky.

Élise ran until she could not run anymore. Then she ran farther.

The tree line swallowed them, and behind her, the offensive rolled on, unstoppable as the sea.

But she was alive. Almost, she thought, she wished she were not.