I shook my head. “He’s not. Trust . . . ”
Our parting moment was shortened when Colonel Bloom impatiently jerked his arm from my grasp. “Come along if you’re coming, young woman. Here’s another group of wounded arriving. They need our help.”
Our? Had he said, “Our?”
Caferro grinned. “If it was me, I wouldn’t want to be kept waiting.” He paused. “Goodbye, Boothenay. And good luck to you.”
He was already backing toward the door. The doctor was going in the reverse direction, tugging at my arm, trying to take me with him.
Johnny saluted with two fingers. “If I see Ned, I’ll tell him you’re here.”
MORE THAN ANYTHING—well, besides finding Caleb—I wanted to lie down somewhere quiet and sleep for a week. All of last night had been spent in dashing from here to there, dodging bombs and enemy soldiers, and generally exhausting myself. Today didn’t look like it was going to be any better. If the truck ride from Caleb’s billet had been the most restful part of the day, you can tell the state I was in.
For curiosity’s sake, I wished I had my trusty pedometer attached to my belt. See how many miles I’d actually logged. Then I changed my mind. No, I wouldn’t. If I did know, I’d probably have an easy excuse just to keel over.
Trouble is, it wasn’t even noon as yet. I had a lot more miles to go.
“Where is your uniform, young woman? You can’t work in those dirty things.”
Dr. Bloom was speaking to me I realized somewhat belatedly.
“I don’t have a uniform, clean or otherwise,” I sort of snarled, trying to wrench my arm from his pincher-like fingers. “For the simple reason I’m not a nurse.”
“Nonsense,” he said, dragging me along with him. “If you’re not a nurse, what are you doing here?” He took my bag and tossed it under a desk without breaking stride. At least I think the object was a desk, one littered with a mound of paperwork.
“I’m looking for someone,” I tried to explain.
He wasn’t paying much attention to what I had to say for, as we walked past, one of the men lining the aisle broke through his makeshift bandages and began spraying blood from the end of a severed arm. I discovered why Bloom possessed those strong, strong fingers as he pinched the artery closed, but unfortunately, not before my jodhpurs were soaked. I leaned against one of the tent posts, battling a queasy stomach.
“Who?” he asked, catching the threads of our conversation. He wrapped a heavy, padded bandage around the man’s arm as he spoke. “What can possibly be so important it would bring you here?”
“Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said weakly.
“You can wash up over there,” Dr. Bloom said, pointing to a long bench with a row of tin basins set out. A woman, a French peasant type I gathered from her dress, kept busy bringing fresh, hot water to the doctors and nurses who periodically cleaned blood from their hands and arms. The arrangement didn’t look very sanitary to me.
I certainly had no objection to being cleaner, though I knew I wouldn’t feel truly clean until I’d had an hour-long shower at home. I still felt tons better after I’d scrubbed my face and hands. Almost human again.
“I’m not a nurse,” I said again, wiping my hands on a harsh, linen towel.
Dr. Bloom scowled as he dried his own hands. Blood remained caked under his fingernails. “I suppose you can write, can’t you?”
I was tempted to say no.
“If we are to be saddled with you,” Bloom said, “the least you can do is free up a nurse by coming along on rounds and writing up my notes. If you write a legible hand, so much the better.”
I wanted to argue this. His timetable certainly differed from mine, and I had begun to worry about the passage of hours. A real idea of how time worked here held a prominent place on my wish list. I’d told Dad to wait forty-eight hours, figuring that would give me long enough to find Caleb and be ready for Dad to help us return. More than twenty- four of those hours had passed. And whose time were we running on anyway? Mine or Ned Smith’s? I needed a plan. I needed to get out of this stupid hospital and quit screwing around, meeting everyone’s agenda except my own. Unfortunately, this was not as easy as one would think.
“Miss Peabody, come here, please, if you’re free for the moment.” At the doctor’s call, a tall, heavyset woman with a mustache immediately dropped what she was doing and made all speed over to us.
“Can I help you, sir?” She smiled without showing her teeth.
When Dr. Bloom picked up a white coat, she snatched it out of his hands, holding it for him to put his arms into.
“Yes, Miss Peabody,” he said. “Please find another coat for this young woman, my case book and some writing materials. She will be taking notes for me today.”
“I can do that for you, doctor.” She flashed a look my way that would have been terrifying had she actually been in a position of authority over me, or if I hadn’t been too tired to be afraid of anybody.
Colonel Bloom didn’t help matters by brushing her offer aside. “I mustn’t take you away from the boys,” he said, with less than optimum tact. “They need you more than I do. This lady assures me she is not a nurse, but that she can write. I’m taking her at her word.”
“No one needs training in the emptying of bedpans,” the woman said. “Or in cutting bandages. Or taking away the basins. Anyone can do that. She won’t know how to spell our specialized language.”
“As to that,” said the doctor, “I can’t spell our specialized language. She can hardly be any worse than I am myself.”
“But, doctor⏤”
He stopped her with a peremptory gesture. “Carry on, madam. I have patients waiting.”
Miss Peabody, snuffling through her nose gave in, saying, “Come with me.” She led me to a rack of coats, making sure to choose one that was about six sizes too big so I looked utterly foolish. If she only knew! I had absolutely zero interest in attracting Dr. Bloom and I don’t think he truly noticed me at all.
She thrust pens and ink and a clipboard with a black notebook into my hands with a motion so forceful she broke one of my fingernails. I must say, I pitied the poor patients if they had to endure her touch.
I should have cut and run when I was close to the door. Miss Peabody wouldn’t have tried to stop me, I’m sure. But I didn’t, and spent the next several hours paying for my foolishness. Talk about hell on earth!
We take so much for granted, in our world. In 1918, the war brought guinea pigs by the hundreds of thousand for physicians to practice on. I saw transfusions taking place with a thin tube passing blood directly from one person to another. So far as I could tell, they took the blood from whoever volunteered, giving it to the person who had bled out the most. No careful type matching here. No worries about hepatitis, and AIDS, of course, was unknown. The syringes they used for injections would have been banned as inhumane for use on animals.
Illness in our world is quiet. Pain is treated with powerful drugs. Bleeding is staunched immediately. If illness, pain, bleeding are present, they are addressed behind closed doors. People in my world do not want to see the suffering of others.
I should be included in that group. A field hospital actively receiving wounded is not a place for the faint of heart. Unfortunately, my heart felt extremely faint as I followed Dr. Bloom up and down the aisles and into the curtained-off cubicles where the most seriously wounded lay. Most of the men evidenced considerable fortitude and stoicism. A few did not.
The first hazard I faced—and it was an easy one—was learning what to call my mentor. Not knowing the protocol, I took a deep breath, gripped the pen firmly before it could slip away, and met the doctor’s eye.
“Am I to call you doctor or colonel?”
He smiled suddenly. “Either is correct. I prefer doctor. I apologize, ma’am. I didn’t get your name.”
I thought about calling myself Mrs. Ned Smith, on the off chance Caleb’s “girl” was anywhere around, but thinking that might cause
more problems than it solved, I opted for the truth.
“Hmm. Unusual,” he said, promptly forgetting it in the exigencies of our first case. This case was, as far as I’m concerned, a disaster.
At the first stretcher in a line that extended from the outside door to four partitioned-off treatment rooms, Dr. Bloom, quickly and in my opinion, cursorily, examined a boy with three separate wounds in his left arm. These began at his wrist, went to his elbow, and ended up at the shoulder. The upper one continued across his chest in a deep graze. Soiled bandages wrapped his arm, holding it close to his body.
His face was very pale, almost gray, but he had a cigarette lodged between his lips and answered Dr. Bloom’s questions coherently. His name, he said, was Adam. Adam Prescott; private; 132nd infantry, 90th Division.
“My arm, doctor,” he whispered anxiously. “Am I going to lose it?”
Bloom peeked beneath the bandages. “It’s a mess,” he said judiciously. He kept up a running commentary for his notes and I copied it down. So far I knew how to spell everything: ulna, radius, left clavicle, toxic gas-gangrene possible given conditions. Anti-tetanus serum to be injected immediately.
I got the most awful pain in my own belly just from watching as Dr. Bloom filled one of those gigantic horse syringes with vaccine, poking the needle deep into Adam’s abdomen. The poor kid. This being more than he’d bargained for, he fainted dead away. Quickly, I plucked the still-burning cigarette from between his lips, extinguishing it before he was more than slightly scorched.
Shaken by dry heaves, I forced my hand not to tremble. While still legible, my handwriting lost any elegance it had once claimed.
After pinning a note with instructions for Private Prescott to be taken to Neuilly-sur-Seine for further treatment, we left him to regain consciousness by himself, no more informed of his own condition than before. We moved on to the next hapless victim . . . er. . . patient.
“Dunsmore, Edward, Sergeant,” Dr. Bloom murmured for his notes. “Right leg amputated, multiple fractures left leg, severe trauma in buttocks.”
Sergeant Dunsmore lay on his stomach, crying silently with his face buried in his arms, never once looking up at us. He, too, received a note requesting he be moved to United States Military Base Hospital number one outside of Paris.
After that I quit looking at the men. Like an automaton, I wrote what Dr. Bloom dictated to me. Six patients, a dozen, two dozen. Some he treated and sent back to the lines. Some he found beds for here in the field hospital with the diagnosis that a day or two would put them right. Over a few, he simply shook his head, considering them beyond the scope of modern medicine and left them to die with no more than a shot of morphine to ease their passing. Most were tagged to be transferred to a better-equipped facility. I decided the doctor didn’t really see the men either. He looked for trauma, not at the person.
Hours rolled past and disappeared. Dr. Bloom took no breaks, so I took no breaks. My pen broke and I shifted to a pencil, sharpened and resharpened, until it wore down to a nub. The notebook grew in volume, filled with the disposition of men’s lives. I recorded men’s names, their injuries and treatment as a first priority. Second priority called for suggestions on their further treatment and sometimes, in case all failed, their addresses, so next-of-kin would not be left in doubt as to their fate.
The experience came near to pushing me over the edge as I wrote down, verbatim, the words Dr. Bloom spoke in an undertone. Caleb worked in a world like this, though possibly not so . . . so intense. Not every day. Somehow he managed to be the sanest person I knew. How did he do it?
“Are you hungry, Miss . . . Er?”
I copied these words into notes before I realized they had been directed to me, personally. I looked up. Dr. Bloom, looking nearly as pale as his patients and sporting dark circles under his eyes, stood in the darkened doorway. Somehow night had come while we worked.
“I don’t know,” I said, putting the question to my stomach. If memory served me correctly, the last time I’d had food in my mouth had been sometime yesterday, yet I felt nauseous at the idea of eating. “I could use some coffee.”
“I could as well.” He stretched out his back, his thin, esthetic face drawn with tiredness. “We should rest for a while. Try to eat something. Later, we’ll need to spell those coming on shift now.”
“Don’t things quiet down at night?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes not. We rest while we can and work through when we can’t. Come along, Miss . . . Er. We’ll find that coffee.”
“Irons,” I said.
He gave me a blank look.
“Not Miss Er. Ms. Irons. Boothenay Irons.”
Never one to long be separated from my things, I snagged up my bag as Dr. Bloom and I went outside. The dark seemed very intense after the light in the tent. While my eyes adjusted, I drew in great draughts of fresh, damp air, becoming aware of the smell of freshly shed blood that filled my nose. The doctor led the way through a passage between the hospital and a large building given over to cooking and eating.
The place, though quiet, was crowded. Any tableside conversation was conducted in low tones, as if the solemn requirements of the hospital carried over into every aspect of life. A group of white-clad women—nurses wearing funny little mobcaps over their hair— occupied one of the tables in the dining room. Doctors sat at another table, and segregated from the others were corpsmen, ambulance drivers and orderlies
Dr. Bloom entrusted me to the mercy of the nurses’ table. Hugging my bag to me, I dropped exhaustedly onto the end of a bench. I longed to take off my borrowed boots, but knew if I were to take such an imprudent action, I’d never get them back on my swollen feet. The muted dinner table conversation died. The nurses turned to watch me.
I’d forgotten to remove the oversized smock I wore over my clothes. Although I had not been working directly with the patients in the way the nurses did, I had somehow acquired an impressive number of blood spatters and stains. At first, I thought that was what they were staring at.
Then I noticed each one’s hair was covered with a net and the cap. Mine, escaped from the prim bun ages ago, straggled all over the place, curling into corkscrew shape in this damp weather. They didn’t like that and they didn’t like me being different—perhaps they envisioned me as being too exotic. In my opinion, I looked more like some stray waif.
Most of all, I could see they didn’t like the idea that Dr. Bloom had wasted his time on me, a mere civilian. And he had smiled, though briefly and perfunctorily.
In turn, I smiled blindingly at the ladies, each and every one. “Good evening, ladies. Sooo nice to meet you all.”
Not a one of them said a word.
A boy dressed in an army uniform and a dirty white apron sped by with a tray heavily laden with plates of food—goldfish loaf again tonight, I heard someone say—and tin mugs of coffee. He dropped servings of each in my place. I pushed the plate of salmon loaf away and raised the cup, the contents black as sin and hot as hell, to my lips.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said, addressing the group of women. “She works here, I think. I wonder if you might know her.”
Better, I thought, to start with the other woman, than to drag Caleb’ s—make that Ned’ s—name into the conversation. A stab of pain warred against this decision. The group, I counted six in all, looked at each other as though asking a question. A tall girl with hazel eyes elected to be their spokeswoman. “Most of the nurses only arrived here last night. If she’s new, we may not have heard her name as yet.
“Oh, she’s been here a while.” Is this the one? I asked myself. Will and Caferro had both said she was pretty. Well, this woman was pretty, judging by her eyes, and I thought she’d be very sweet if she weren’t so suspicious
“Her name is Irene Prafke,” I said.
“You know Irene?” she asked.
“Umm, no,” I said slowly. “I’m a friend of a friend, you might say. I know her . . . her boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?” one said. “Irene is married.”
I jumped. Married? What’s Caleb doing, hobnobbing with a married woman?
“Dr. Hurry has been paying particular attention to Irene lately,” whispered another, her eyes wide with excitement. “He always asks for her to tend his patients, remember? That way he can keep his eye on her.”
The others tittered, but the hazel-eyed woman raised an eyebrow at the nurse who’d mentioned Dr. Hurry. “Dr. Hurry? If you ask me, I’d have said this sergeant she’s met, the veterinarian in the Artillery Corps, is much more attractive and exciting. He is to me. Not to mention the fact he’s terribly good-looking.”
“Oh, yes,” answered the excited one. “But Dr. Hurry is a much better prospect. Who wants a sergeant if they can get a physician?”
Me. I wanted the sergeant—over anybody—whether in this world or any other. The thought nearly screamed out loud, barely muffled.
“I thought you said Irene is married,” I said instead.
“Yes, she is,” said the first woman. “Or was. Her husband is missing and the general consensus is that he’s been killed. No one has heard a word from him or of him since July. Everyone is quite sure he’s dead.”
“That’s only a couple of months.” I took a bite of the salmon, since I couldn’t chew on anything—or anyone—else. I almost hesitate to say that I actually found the goldfish loaf and “pum frits” (fried potatoes) fairly edible. “You’d think she could wait until the war is over to find out for sure.”
“Well, but the poor thing. Who knows when that will be. Years and years?”
“Try another two months.”
Six pairs of eyes stared questioningly at me. I must have sounded awfully positive. “Mark my words,” I added weakly. “We’ve got the Jerrys on the run.”
I barely had these words out of my mouth when a man rushed into the dining room. A small rivulet of blood streaked down one side, from just under his armpit, and he was breathing heavily. He looked wildly around, his gaze landing on the occupants of Dr. Bloom’s table. He darted over, grimacing with pain as he bent to whisper in the doctor’s ear. Within seconds, the nearest physicians were abandoning their half- eaten meals and rushing out the door.
Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2) Page 23