The Valiant Hearts Romance Collection

by Kristin Billerbeck

  “We’ve other things to thank God for tomorrow.” His cheer sounded forced. “The Armistice, naturally. But also, I’ve been off that liquid diet for a week and a half, so I plan to enjoy that turkey and dressing.” He wiggled his eyebrows and rubbed his palms together in anticipation.

  Glorie burst into laughter and pointed at his hands. The forgotten doll danced from them.

  Chapter 3

  Glorie glanced at the clock on the wall as she hurried down the hall toward the door; three o’clock. She’d have time for a short nap before helping get trays ready for the evening meal. She couldn’t imagine that the patients would be hungry after the huge Thanksgiving meal this noon, but a hospital was nothing without a schedule.

  The outside door opened just as she reached it, letting in a rush of chilly air tinged with the sharp scent of autumn leaves. “Surprise!” Grace, dressed in a khaki military-style coat, threw out her arms and grinned like a cat who’d just finished a bowl of cream. Behind her stood an elderly couple.

  Glorie rushed to throw her arms around first the lady and then the slender gentleman. “Grandmother Lucy. Grandpa Jere. What a wonderful surprise.” She pressed her lips to her grandmother’s soft, wrinkly cheek, then to the tougher, though just as wrinkled, cheek of her grandfather. “I didn’t think I’d see you until Sunday. I can’t tell you how jealous I was of the rest of the family for your company.”

  Grandmother and Grandpa’s Virginia-accented greetings were almost drowned in Grace’s excited, “They wanted to see where you worked. Grandpa Jere wanted to visit some of the soldiers and thank them for their sacrifices. So I offered to bring them. I knew you’d love the surprise. Won’t it be fun to show them around?”

  Glorie’s gaze took in the couple. Grandpa was tall with a lean, narrow face. Grandmother was slightly on the rounded side. She looked comfortable, the way Glorie always thought a grandmother should look. Her hair was still long; it was pulled back in a bun. Silver waves framed her face. “We haven’t seen you in five years. Grace and I agree, it was the most wonderful summer of our lives, staying with you at Hickory Hill. We felt like Southern belles. Remember the way Grace and I tried to adopt your wonderful Southern drawls? We were such children.”

  “Northern or Southern, you’re both beautiful belles in my book,” Grandpa Jere insisted.

  “Let me look at you.” Grandmother took both of Glorie’s hands and stood back. Glorie beamed and waited patiently while Grandmother’s gaze traveled from the pert white nurse’s hat to the simple white dress to the sensible shoes on Glorie’s tired feet. Grandmother’s hand shook slightly as she touched a fingertip to the gold U.S. on one side of Glorie’s shawl collar, and the medical department’s gold caduceus with ANC superimposed in white enamel on the other side. “We hadn’t such fine uniforms in the War between the States.”

  “You didn’t have uniforms at all, my dear.” Grandpa’s dry remark set Glorie and Grace giggling out of all proportion to the humor, simply because it was lovely to be with the couple again and enjoy the way they were together. Grandpa teased Grandmother Lucy relentlessly but always with a sparkle in his eye and never with a cruel undertone.

  “Let’s start our tour.” Glorie slipped one arm through Grandpa’s. “Stop us whenever you feel the need to rest a bit.” Grace hooked elbows with Lucy and the four started off.

  The couple obviously was awed by the up-to-date equipment such as the X-ray machine. “It’s invaluable,” Glorie told them. “Every day we’ve a couple of men who take bismuth meals and then are fluoroscoped so the doctors can determine problems from gunshot wounds to the abdomen.”

  Grandmother Lucy pressed a hand to her waist and her eyes grew large, but she didn’t comment. Glorie suspected she was remembering abdomen wounds of soldiers she’d nursed.

  The two surgery rooms looked pristine today. “This is the hardest duty, but rewarding beyond measure,” Glorie told them. “It takes three doctors and six nurses to handle the surgeries. Eighty percent of our patients require surgery. We’re only able to do a couple each day. The Carroll-Darkin treatment is used in all operations for diseased bones. If there’s the slightest chance an old infection is recurring, the doctors do another operation. That way gangrene can’t do its dirty work, and the wounds heal faster.”

  Next she showed them one of the two lab wards, which looked barren and cold with its stark metal furnishings. The microscopes, set where the sun shone through uncurtained windows, were life-giving. To Glorie the room looked empty without the white-aproned doctors bent over the microscopes. Only a skeleton crew remained at work today. “The labs are specially equipped to keep the detailed bacterial counts necessary for treatments.”

  The physiotherapy ward was next. “You’ve a separate ward for everything.” Lucy sighed. “I wish we’d had all these modern wonders available during the War between the States.”

  A wave of sympathy rolled through Glorie. She wished much more could be done for her patients, but they had much better medical help available than when Lucy and Jere helped the men when their generation fought.

  Glorie listed all the areas of medicine represented at the fort. “General surgery; orthopedics; eye, ear, nose, and throat; electro-hydro and mechano therapeutics; dental surgery, nerve surgery, and X-ray. Oh, and there’s a separate building for contagious diseases. Of course, when the influenza epidemic was at its peak the entire hospital overflowed with cases.”

  “Everyone at Hickory Hill had it.” Jere placed his arm over Lucy’s shoulders. “So did Jinny and her husband. Lucy brought them to Hickory Hill. Lucy here nursed us all, and the servants and some of the neighbors, too, until the grippe dropped her in her steps.”

  “You did the same.” The woman wasn’t about to be put on a pedestal.

  The fondness in Grandpa Jere’s eyes as he looked down at his wife tugged sweetly at Glorie’s heart. All couples should love this deeply and this long, she thought.

  Tears sparkled on Grace’s long lashes. Glorie wondered whether she was hoping that she and Daniel had such a long and lovely life ahead together as the couple standing before them.

  Jere shook his head. “I don’t know why a couple of old codgers like us made it through.”

  “This strain acts strangely,” Glorie admitted. “The strong young men and women who usually weather the grippe with a few days discomfort—they are the very ones who are most likely to die from the Spanish flu.” The strain had swept the busy army posts, killing thousands of the United States’ strongest men when the world needed them most. Glorie had seen more die than she cared to remember.

  “Did you lose any nurses from it?” Lucy asked.

  “None of the nurses at Fort Snelling. The army’s training school for aircraft mechanics has its own hospital. Three nurses died there. For some reason I never caught it, despite the fact that I often worked when I was so exhausted that I wondered if I was sleepwalking.”

  “They say the flu hit the boys over there hard, too.” Jere’s jaw tightened. “As if they didn’t have enough to fight.”

  “It spreads so easily and rapidly,” Lucy said. “I’m surprised your hospital isn’t closed to visitors.”

  “The flu is waning,” Glorie reminded her. She shivered, suddenly cold, and wished she was wearing a sweater over her uniform. “St. Paul has allowed all businesses to reopen and children are back in school. The city officials feared that the way people filled the streets in their spontaneous Armistice celebration would cause a sharp rise in the flu rates. The number of cases did increase, but not at the rates feared.”

  “Then we can visit the wards?” Jere asked. “I’d consider it an honor, meeting some of these men.”

  “I’d like to meet that special young man Grace told us about, the one who’s stealing your heart, Glorie.” Grandmother’s face was a study in innocence.

  “Gra–ace.” Glorie forced the name between clenched teeth.

  “What?”

  Glorie forced a smile for her grandparents. “Ther
e’s no special young man.”

  “Of course there is.” Grace leaned toward Jere and Lucy and dropped her voice to a stage whisper. “The air between them positively crackles. He’s a delightful man. You’ll like him.”

  Glorie rolled her eyes.

  A smile pulled up the corners of Grace’s mouth. “I notice you haven’t asked the name of the young man I’ve mistakenly identified as special, Sister.”

  The implication that he hadn’t needed identification heated Glorie’s cheeks in a telltale blush. “Don’t be silly.” She darted a glance at her grandparents. They didn’t say a word, but their eyes danced with amusement.

  Grace slipped her arm through Grandpa Jere’s. “Let’s visit one of the wards.”

  Nonchalance wasn’t easy to assume when her heart raced in anticipation, Glorie discovered. It was obvious the ward Grace had in mind was Johan’s.

  Laughter met them in the hallway like a barrage long before they reached the ward doors. “The movie must still be showing,” Glorie informed the others. “We don’t have a screen, of course, so it’s shown on the ceiling. It’s the new Charlie Chaplin film. Charlie is a rookie soldier. He single-handedly captures the kaiser and the crown prince. I saw it earlier today in one of the other wards.”

  The letdown of disappointment mixed with relief for Glorie. Her spirits always lifted when she saw Johan. She’d love for him to meet her grandparents. But she and Johan were only nurse and patient. Well, perhaps a little more. After he was discharged, they’d never meet again. She hoped impulsive Grace hadn’t said anything inappropriate to him, hinting a certain nurse had her cap set for him, for instance. Grace was a dear, but she didn’t understand why Glorie liked to keep her life more private than Grace kept hers.

  They met other Thanksgiving visitors and patients in the hallways. When the group entered another ward, they saw visitors dressed in their Sunday best seated beside many of the beds. Grace and Glorie went from one bed to another, introducing Jere and Lucy and wishing each man a happy holiday. Glorie found herself wishing they’d visited Johan’s ward, after all.

  Grandmother Lucy wanted to see Glorie’s nursing quarters, but Grandpa Jere wanted only a chair and a cup of coffee. Grace assured him she would find him both.

  Glorie and Grandmother had the quarters to themselves. The other nurses were either on duty or out on holiday. Grandmother looked about, commenting on the few personal and impersonal belongings before sitting down on the neatly made-up, narrow bed with its thin mattress. She pulled out a pearl hat pin and laid her fashionable, wide-brimmed hat down, then patted the army green blanket beside her. “Now, sit down and tell me about your life as an army nurse.”

  The words poured out, describing the experiences and feelings of the two-and-a-half weeks since the overseas men had arrived. “I felt cheated when I was assigned here, Grandmother. I desperately wanted to work near the front. The men there needed help most, I thought. My friend Julie is near the front. She went over with the medical corps from the University of Minnesota. She told me of her assignment when we met for dinner one evening. I was so jealous, I made up an excuse to leave early. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did.” Glorie took an envelope from her bedside drawer. “Here’s her description of the first batch of wounded she saw.”

  She opened the letter with its familiar YMCA letterhead and read:

  The injured came in a like a flood, over six hundred in twenty-four hours. Most walked from the battlefield, if you can call it walking, the way they reeled and stumbled. They leaned on each other when necessary, using sticks, when they could find them, for canes. Gassed men came in single file, cloths bound about their streaming eyes, each man with his hand on the shoulder of the man in front, the blind truly leading the blind. The ambulances only had room for the worst cases, usually meaning men without limbs or who were in danger of losing shattered limbs. The sheer numbers with horrifying wounds took its toll on our hearts and minds. It took stern stuff to turn from the continuing stream of wounded and concentrate on helping the person in front of you. And throughout all of it, the constant sound of guns and bombs.

  I wish you could see these brave doughboys of ours. All shot to pieces yet telling us to help their buddies first, and all the time talking about getting back to the front.

  The worst, for both the medical staff and the soldiers, is knowing there are more injured boys where no one can reach them out in that awful no-man’s-land between the armies.

  Glorie looked up from the letter. “When I first read this, I thought how blessed she was to be stationed where she could help these men. Her work sounded so … noble. I wanted to be there if Fred was injured. But even though many boys I know are over there, for me the wounded she wrote about were faceless.”

  “And now they aren’t.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No.” The word came out a whisper. “Now when I read these words I see the men in our wards struggling toward the hospital, or worse, lying helpless in no-man’s-land, not knowing whether help will reach them in time. It’s because some of the wounded here laid in the mud and filth so long that they’ve lost their legs and arms.”

  “It sounds like the war Jere and I were in. The weapons change, but war remains the same.”

  Grandmother stared out the window, but Glorie knew she saw the battlefields and hospitals of her own generation, not the bare tree branches swayed by raw November wind. She isn’t fragile, Glorie realized. She’s old but still strong. Strength seemed to seep into Glorie’s spirit at the thought of Grandmother Lucy and Grandpa Jere and thousands of others of their generation who had experienced war’s carnage and survived to live happy, useful lives. My generation will, too.

  Grandmother turned her gaze back to Glorie and took one of her hands in both her soft ones. “One of the men you see when you read this is Johan.”

  “Y–yes.” She stared at Grandmother Lucy, too surprised to be embarrassed. “How did you know?”

  “When the War between the States separated Jere and I, and I didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, I saw him in the face of every soldier I nursed.”

  “Today you might be scolded by your medical superiors if they heard that,” Glorie teased. “We’re to keep our contact with the patients impersonal. Some of the nurses manage that by joking and laughing with the men. Others are brusque and businesslike, concentrating on the treatments, as though the patients are toy soldiers to be rebuilt instead of humans with emotions as well as flesh and blood.

  “When I was taking my nursing course, one of the doctors invited me to dinner. I was flattered. I chattered on about how much the profession means to me, how deeply I’m affected by suffering. He said, ‘If it’s so hard for you to be around the suffering, why do you want to be a nurse?’ Can you believe it, Grandmother?”

  “What did you answer?”

  “I said, ‘How could I be anything else?’”

  Grandmother’s arms encircled her. Glorie felt the older woman’s soft cheek pressing against her own. “Yes, that is the right answer. That is the answer in every true nurse’s heart.”

  When the embrace ended, Glorie said, “I wonder if reconstruction nursing isn’t by nature more personal than other types of war nursing.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When the first overseas men arrived, they were almost drunk on the joy of the war ending and returning as heroes. They never spoke of their wounds as anything but a minor difficulty to be overcome. I suspected much of it was bluster. The longer the men are here, and as more and more arrive, the more I see that every patient has emotional problems, too—what are called the spiritual wounds, I guess. Especially the amputation cases. The greater the physical wound, the deeper the unseen wound. The men are terribly afraid of the changes their disabilities will cause in their lives.”

  “Are you able to help them?”

  Glorie hesitated. Were she and the other nurses helpful? “It seems the men respond best if we neither pity them or treat them like heroes beyon
d the reach of ordinary men. Of course, we let them know we honor them for their courage and sacrifice.”

  “It sounds like a difficult balance to find. And your friend Johan, does he have these invisible wounds you speak of?”

  Glorie looked down at her hands. “He has deep wounds, Grandmother. His greatest wound is bitterness. He’s not angry with the Germans; he’s angry that he was forced to fight against them. It’s not that he thinks the Germans were right to invade France and Belgium,” she hastened to clarify. “It’s that so many don’t understand that for him and other German-Americans, they had to chose between their countries, to make war on their own people.”

  Grandmother Lucy nodded slowly. “Yes, that is always a hard choice.”

  “I … I was afraid you would think he’s awful for feeling that way.”

  “Awful?” Surprise filled the wrinkled face. “Many people felt that way during the War between the States. Jere had a terrible time choosing which side to serve on. Didn’t we ever tell you how Jere’s father almost disowned him when he decided to serve with the Union?”

  “No. I just thought …” Glorie paused, revelation striking. “I’m embarrassed to say that I thought it natural he was with the Union army. I suppose it seemed like the ‘right’ side, since I was raised in the North.”

  “Jere and Grace will wonder what happened to us. There is something I want to tell you before we rejoin them.”

  The reluctance in her tone made Glorie draw back slightly. “What is it?”

  Grandmother’s fingertips gently touched a small pin on her round collar. “This.”

  Glorie leaned forward and studied the image of a small, old-fashioned lamp. The brooch was made of metal, polished to a soft luster. “It’s lovely. It looks old. Is it an antique?”

  Her question brought a soft chuckle from Lucy. “I expect you would think so. Jere gave it to me sixty years ago, on my fifteenth birthday. He made it himself, fashioning it after a lamp he’d seen in a picture of Florence Nightingale. You see, he knew of my dream to follow in her footsteps.”