“The poetry is going to your head,” I said, letting him pull me to my feet.
“Hush thy lips, sweet maiden,” he said before laughter got the best of him.
“I’m burning that book.”
But it was a joke. I would never burn it. I would keep it with me every day, tucked in my medical bag after he was sent back to the front. It was a romantic promise I’d made to him after the first day we’d read from it, but it was one I planned to keep. No matter how sappy the poems could sometimes be, the memory of reading them...of laughing and sighing and staring at one another as a phrase or verse hit just so...was special. And I planned to hang on to the memory of that while I waited for him to return to me.
The following morning we rode back to base before the sun was up, the air promising another warm day, the sheep in the fields to the left and right of us nestled in small groups, a few raising their heads, watching as we pedaled by.
“Be careful,” William whispered in my ear as we shared a last embrace behind one of the buildings. “I need you in one piece. Promise?”
“Promise,” I said, lifting my face to kiss him again. “And you don’t overdo it today.”
“I can’t promise that,” he said.
“I wish you weren’t so determined to leave me.”
I was joking, I knew he was just anxious to get back to the job he’d signed on for. To fight for not only our freedom, but the freedom of millions of others. To do his part to right this unbearable wrong that was happening. And yet I still felt a sense of sadness at his resolve to be well enough to go back to battle. I wanted him safe and here with me. But if he didn’t get well enough to fight, then he’d be sent home and be even farther away, with absolutely no chance of us seeing one another until after the war ended. It was hard to know what to wish for, so I wished for nothing but both of our safety and an end to this war that had taken so many lives and ruined so many more.
An hour later I’d stowed my bag, gas mask, and canteen, and had a bottle of morphine tucked safely in my pocket should the need for it arise.
“How was your day off?” Theodore asked, buckling in beside me.
I felt my face warm and he chuckled.
“That good, huh?” he asked.
It was no secret First Sergeant William Mitchell and I were a couple. I’d initially tried to keep it quiet, preferring to keep my private life private. But he was too much of a flirt, and my constant visits to see how he was, despite my excuses of just checking on him after so much blood loss, were smirked at. There was no point in trying to hide it. We’d fallen for one another, and while there were several female broken hearts, everyone on base seemed genuinely happy for us.
“It was lovely,” I said. “The weather was nice so we rode our bikes into town, read some books we picked up, and had a picnic with some sheep.” He shuddered. Theodore hated what he called the “British wildlife.” Anytime we had to fly livestock over he tucked himself into his seat, put a blanket over his face, and pretended to sleep the entire flight to France.
We landed and Theodore and I stood aside as troops hurried in to unload the supplies we’d brought over with us. Blankets, bandages, rubbing alcohol, IV bags...
While the plane was emptied, I made rounds, checking in with the nurses tending to the patients waiting to be loaded and reading the tags attached to their clothing, blankets, or litters.
A young man sat off to the side, rocking himself on top of the litter, his ankles bound so he couldn’t easily run off. He didn’t look to have any physical injuries, but sometimes the wound went deeper than that. Sometimes what was damaged was the mind. The heart. The soul.
“Cracked up,” one of the nurses said, seeing me watching the young man who couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
He was mumbling to himself, staring blindly at the commotion around him, his hands twitching.
“Dangerous?” I asked.
“Not so far,” she said. “But we’ll sedate him before he gets onboard just in case.”
I nodded. “Any moments of clarity or...?”
“No. Not that I’ve seen.”
It broke my heart to see these young men so damaged by war. By the realities of how brutal humanity could be. It was cruel to pull them from lives where they’d dreamed of a future—working any number of jobs, educating themselves at universities, striving for an exciting future, marrying their sweetheart, perhaps having children—and plunging them into training to kill. Training to save their own lives, as well as the lives of the men around them. Men who had become brothers as they worked side by side maneuvering, shooting, building, and discharging weapons of destruction. Destruction of towns. Destruction of lives. Not a one of them would leave unscathed. Some would wear their battle wounds on their body. Some deeply within. And others would take them to their grave.
So many graves.
I smiled at the young soldier, his baby face caked on one side with the dirt he’d been pulled from before he’d been led to safety.
“Hey there,” I said, kneeling beside him, my voice soft as I looked at the paper pinned to his torn jacket. “Your name is Joel?”
He stared blankly at me.
