None But The Brave: A Novel of the Surgeons of World War II

by Anthony A. Goodman

  They listened together for several minutes until the song came to an end, the needle circling endlessly in the last groove of the worn record, as Edith’s husky voice whispered, “Toujours, toujours, toujours…” Always.

  Schneider pulled the needle from the record and set it gently on its cradle, careful not to damage this national treasure.

  They faced each other and fell into each other’s arms with all the passion that had been building since the very first day in that mess tent. They lay on their sides holding tightly as their bodies sought out the curves and recesses that seemed to fit so well together. Every time her soft lips touched Schneider’s body, he shivered and ached for more. Molly released her grip on his shoulders and planted slow, lingering kisses on a path from his chest down his abdomen. He wanted her to stop there so that this would not end so quickly, as surely it was going to. But, he surrendered to inevitability.

  Then with the uncontrolled giddiness that followed, they lay head to toe, laughing at nothing and holding on for dear life.

  Finally, Molly released him and crawled up alongside him to bury her head in his chest again. She was so quiet that he thought she was asleep. His arm grew numb beneath her, and when he shifted to move it she kissed him again and pulled him back, placing her head on the pillows and staring at him with a faint smile on her lips. Looking at her there in the nearly total darkness of the blackout, he could, this once, isolate himself from all the rest of the world and give himself over to this moment for the first time since they had met, with no intruding thoughts of life outside that room.

  They dozed lightly on and off for perhaps twenty minutes or so, then began again to explore each other’s bodies. Schneider traced all the curves and lines he could find until he felt he could draw her from memory. And she did the same to him. They never spoke a word. She stroked him until he was ready to enter her. Somehow this was more serious for both of them, more formal than the impassioned play that began their lovemaking. As he moved on top of her, Molly held him gently, as if he might break.

  All at once, they entered a world that would change them forever, and though they both knew it at that very moment, neither of them could know exactly how. Together they crossed a line from beyond which they could not and would not return. A moment such as this, Schneider knew, rarely came a second time and never quite the same. But none of it could stop him from drowning in his love for her at that moment.

  They fell asleep together afterward, and Schneider woke first to the sounds of explosions outside their window. Molly woke just seconds after him. They both ran to the window to see what was happening. They pulled the curtains back, and in the darkness of the blackout, they could see the flashes of an aerial bombardment a couple of miles away, near the northeast edges of the city. Apparently, Hitler was having a temper tantrum over losing Paris and had ordered the Luftwaffe to destroy the city, an order that General von Choltitz had earlier refused to follow.

  Once they were sure there was no threat to either of them, Schneider hugged Molly and then went back to bed once again. The clock showed two in the morning. Neither of them brought it up, but they were not about to dress and go down to some bomb shelter, if there even were such a thing. The night belonged to them, and Schneider, for once, was not afraid.

  They were starving for something good to eat. Naked and happy, they uncovered the dinner trays and settled into a delicious meal of cold chicken in aspic, some fresh salad with a sweet vinaigrette dressing, new potatoes sautéed in olive oil and garlic, and a completely unidentifiable desert that made their teeth tingle. There was wine and real chocolate for a nightcap. They took the wine back to bed and fed each other the last of the chocolate while they began again to taste each other’s bodies. They explored and played and found new ways to enjoy the chocolate.

  They spent the rest of the night sleeping and waking and making love until they could no longer. Then they stayed awake in each other’s arms, talking little and catching short naps without releasing each other from their protective embrace.

  When morning came, the early light broke though a crack in the curtain, and the two lovers sighed with the knowledge that they were about to return to the reality of their war. They bathed again, this time together, and packed Molly’s bag for the walk back to the ambulance. Neither of them brought up the one subject that had to be addressed. It was too soon for that. But it was coming.

  They finished dressing with intense sorrow at the end to their time away from the war. Then they went downstairs to the restaurant and had the best breakfast they had tasted in many months. There was real coffee and real eggs. No ham or bacon, but the croissants were delicious with jam, even without butter. Then, quite unexpectedly, came the piece de resistance: Schneider couldn’t believe his eyes. Sugar. And Cream! Real whole cream right out of a real, live, fucking cow! He stirred in way too much sugar in both cups. Then he watched as Molly took over and poured the yellow thick stuff, floating it onto his coffee and, again, he actually drooled. She wiped his mouth before he took a long, slow sip. Back in heaven, even if only for a single cup’s worth. Molly tried hers, and made a face. Then laughed.

  Schneider went out to pay the bill, while Molly lingered over a last cup of coffee and another croissant.

  When the tally was made, Schneider handed over all his French francs as well as every U.S. dollar he had on him. It amounted to what he was supposed to spend for the next two months. Still, it was not nearly enough to cover the bill. He didn’t know how much Molly had with her, as her salary was less than his. But, he didn’t want to ask her for any money, so he just looked pathetic and turned his pockets inside out.

  He said to the clerk, “C’est tout. Je n’ai rien de plus.” That’s it. I have no more.

  The manager scowled at first, and Schneider thought he would be having a meeting with the Paris gendarmes or the US Military Police. But, in a moment, the man smiled and nodded his head. He told Schneider in French that his lady was so beautiful that even he would have spent everything he had for one night at the Ritz.

  “Comme Cyrano, oui?” the man asked.

  “Yes, just like Cyrano. When he gives a month’s pay away for the woman he loves. It’s all in the gesture,” Schneider said.

  The man thanked Schneider for his help in liberating Paris. He made it sound as if Schneider had done it single-handedly. Schneider reached over the counter and through the guichet to shake the man’s hand.

  “Au revoir, Monsieur le Major,” the man said. “Á bientôt!”

  Schneider said good-bye and that he hoped he would see the manager soon again someday, too.

  Molly met him at the door and took his arm. She said, “Are you completely broke now?”

  “More than you’ll ever know.”

  She laughed, and Schneider laughed, and the doorman laughed at them laughing. They stepped out into the quiet Sunday morning and started walking back across the Seine to where it all had started. They had been in Paris less than twenty-four hours.

  Chapter Twenty

  1 December 1944, 1700 hours

  Field Hospital Charlie-7, Belgium

  Pushing the Germans back toward Berlin was like trying to stuff too many items into a duffel bag. Each step forward created a pressure wanting to burst back out. In the three months since their short Paris vacation, the field hospital had followed the Allies’ relentless drive toward Germany. Now it was winter. The world was changing fast.

  As the German lines compressed backward toward the fatherland, the battles grew increasingly fiercer, and casualties piled up on both sides. The German army was on the run, but it had cost the Allies dearly. Patton’s Third Army was still moving faster than their supply lines could keep up. Almost everywhere the front was changing so fast that the medics often did not know which side of the lines they were on.

  Since Paris, the field hospital staff recognized Schneider and Molly as a couple, though no one would speak of it publicly. Hamm kept his opinions to himself, and in reality their
romance was very low on the list of his concerns. He had been awake for nearly three days without more than a catnap between cases, usually while sitting in front of a cup of coffee in the mess tent. The steady stream of wounded bespoke the intensity of the fighting as they neared the Siegfried Line. Hitler’s war machine, the Wehrmacht, knew that once the Allies crossed into Germany in force, there would be no stopping them.

  For the men and women at the field hospitals near the front, there was never enough of anything: never enough hands to do the surgery, never enough supplies, never enough time. They were all tired beyond belief, and the only thing that kept them going was looking into the eyes of still one more boy who might die if anyone took time off. How could they sleep knowing that one of these young GIs would surely pay with his life for that nap?

  Hamm worried that fatigue was making him sloppy, not to mention cranky. He was just closing the last of six big cases that afternoon, when Diane, his scrub nurse, handed him much too small a needle holder with an equally small suture in it.

  Hamm slammed the needle holder down on the drapes, where it bounced onto the tent floor.

  “We always close these cases with stay sutures, Diane. Always! This isn’t plastic surgery, damn it! We want these guys to stay closed, not dehisce and eviscerate on the way back home.”

  Diane already held the heavy stay suture in a large needle holder out for him. Her face was flushed and her hand shook slightly. Hamm took the needle holder, looked up at her, then stopped. He realized that the whole operating staff was looking at him. The only sound was the gas moving through respirators.

  “I’m sorry. I’d never do that in real life. I’m behaving like a three-year-old. It won’t happen again.”

  The outburst was so unlike him, that the staff didn’t know what to make of it. But his nerves were shot just like theirs. He was the pillar that held the whole team together in the worst of conditions. If he folded, the whole structure of the team might collapse.

  Having the front lines so close didn’t help. They were never out of earshot of the shelling. And the shelling, incoming and outgoing, never stopped, day or night. Antonelli and Marsh, not to mention the dozens of other young medics whose names Hamm never learned, were coming and going constantly. They were out there under fire all the time. It irked and embarrassed Hamm that he never heard them complain about anything but the food. Never about the danger, the fear.

  The food, for Christ’s sake!

  Bullets were whistling by the medics’ ears all the time, mortar rounds crashing in on them, and yet the medics never missed a beat. Marsh and Antonelli even made time to drop into the operating tent and post-op to see how the victims they had rescued were doing.

  Hamm half expected a chewing-out from one of these kids if one of their rescues died after they got them to the pre-op tent alive. Actually, if they did make it to the OR, the surgeons usually saved them. Most of the GIs died right where they were hit or on the rough trek back to the field hospital. It got to be very personal: if the wounded arrived alive, Hamm felt he should be able to keep them alive. There was enough plasma to go around, even if they were often short of whole blood. And they had plenty of penicillin. Still, it was a point of honor. If Marsh and Antonelli and the others could bring them back to the hospital alive, Hamm’s team would move the earth to keep them alive.

  To complicate matters, the front was constantly changing. It scared Hamm to death. He never knew when he might find himself on the wrong side of the battle lines. A couple of the nurses were captured by a German patrol, then freed by the U.S infantry again an hour later. It was that unstable.

  Winter had come with a furious series of storms. There was heavy wet snow with mud, and wet cold without letup. Tents sagged dangerously and had to be cleared of snow to prevent collapse.

  The chill went through their bones. Tents were heated with potbellied stoves, which helped only a bit. But the close quarters quickly became muggy and foul with body odors. Setting foot outside for some fresh air in the cold was almost not worth the danger.

  One afternoon, Marsh and Antonelli were sitting in their tents taking a sorely needed break. The two of them had cots very close together.

  Suddenly Marsh sat up and said, “Jesus, Gene. Your farts are killin’ me.”

  ‘Oh, right. Yours are like lilacs, huh?”

  “Screw you, man. And take a shower for Christ sake!”

  Marsh slipped into his combat boots and bolted from the tent. The air outside was fresh, and for a minute Marsh just stood there with his eyes closed just taking in deep breaths. He was cold, but the thought of going back into the tent with Antonelli repulsed him. So he just stood there. Until the first new volley of gunfire.

  The first one came from thin air. Then, he heard the bullets impacting all around him before he even heard the plane’s engine. He rushed to the cover of a nearby jeep, crawling in the snow and mud to get under the engine block. The strafing run lasted only a few minutes, but Marsh didn’t move for a long while after it was over. The engine block was still warm, and he couldn’t face going back into that tent. So he just lay there.

  Finally he pulled himself out from under the jeep, and wiped off as much mud as he could. When he straightened up, he saw Antonelli standing in the entry to their tent laughing at him.

  “I guess my farts are worth dying for, huh Andy?”

  Marsh shook his head and walked away. He went into the mess tent and sat by the stove. There was nothing to eat just then, so the place was empty. Marsh looked around and saw a series of bullet holes lined up along the roof opposite where he sat. He could follow the path of the shots right into the wooden table and canvas floor. Just chance that no one had been in there when the planes came.

  He thought about the nurse they lost, and was sad that he never knew her name. She’d only been there less than a week, when the bullets flew through the area. Marsh was helping Hamm close a chest exploration. She was standing six feet from the operating table, cleaning instruments, when the planes flew overhead. She died on the spot with eight bullets in her chest and neck from a strafing run.

  Thankfully, winter meant the cloud cover was often so thick and low that they couldn’t see the planes flying overhead, which meant the Germans couldn’t see them either.

  Nonetheless, deep down inside, the medical team was always waiting for it. Waiting for that terrible day when it would finally happen, as they knew it surely would. Hamm was unprepared both mentally and physically. His hands weren’t shaking yet, but it couldn’t be long.

  On the day it happened, Hamm had nearly finished exploring a bad chest wound. The kid had multiple shrapnel tears in his right lung, and a piece of metal had caught an edge of the pulmonary vein. God only knows why he hadn’t died in the field. This was a terrible injury, one they almost never saw in surgery because those patients didn’t make it back to the OR alive. This GI got lucky. By going into deep shock out there in the mud, his low blood pressure had allowed the torn vessel to clot for a while as Marsh and some huge infantry PFC dragged the guy’s body back to the hospital. Dragged him, literally. They were out of stretchers, and it was too far to carry him by his shoulders and ankles. So they each took a leg and just dragged him through the snow and the mud all the way back to the field hospital. Marsh figured it was better to drag him this way with his feet in the air, just like elevating the legs of shock patients to restore some of the blood volume back to the heart. The man never should have made it back alive, but he did. They had to scrape the dirt off him with an entrenching tool before they could put him on the operating table.

  Exhausted, Marsh slid down to the floor of the tent to catch his breath, and wait to see how this guy would do.

  Schneider was operating at the table next to Hamm, working on a multiple gunshot wound to the abdomen. The guy had at least thirty holes in his intestines made by about seven entry wounds. There was fecal and small bowel contamination everywhere, as well as gastric acid from holes in his stomach. Schneider held
up a fistful of food from the C-rats the guy ate before he was shot.

  “His mother should have told him to chew his food more carefully,” he said.

  “We’ll take your word for it, Steve,” Hamm said. “We really don’t need to see that right now.” Hamm was perennially grumpy these days. The tragedies of these wounded and dying young men had overwhelmed his defenses and submerged him in a near depression.

  Schneider went back to work, cleaning out the detritus from the man’s abdomen and irrigating the peritoneal cavity with gallons of sterile saline.

  “The solution to pollution is dilution,” Schneider sang tunelessly under his breath. The trauma surgeon’s mantra.

  McClintock shook his head.

  McClintock was still with the group, though several other gaspassers had come and gone. Hamm was getting anesthesia for his patient from a nurse. Technically, an MD was supposed to be giving the gas, but they were so shorthanded that McClintock would only get the case started. He would put them under and intubate the airway. Then the nurses kept them asleep until it was over. At that point, McClintock would wake them up and extubate them. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked. In surgery, as in flying, takeoff and landing were the most dangerous parts: putting them to sleep and waking them up. The flight in between was usually the easy part. McClintock got the plane in the air and landed it again.

  Hamm, in his exhaustion, had been so focused on getting the patient’s chest ready to close that he hadn’t noticed the intruder. He asked for chest tubes, holding out his right hand as he made space in the drapes for the counter-incision with his left.

  His hand remained empty.

  He looked up to see what was taking Marie, the scrub nurse, so long with the tubes. Only then did he realize that all the activity, all the chaos in the room, had stopped.

  The only sounds were the hissing and clicking of the anesthesia machines, passing the gas into and out of the lungs of the patients and, of course, the not-so-distant reports of gunfire.