So he didn’t see it at first.
And even then, his shuddering brain didn’t understand.
Winter understood before Freddie did. His hand closed on Freddie’s upper arm, andthenFreddie saw. Some of the marquees were smashed. There were raw shell holes in between. Guns still boomed away at no great distance. “Oh, Christ,” he whispered. “Oh, fucking hell. They took fire…Laura. Let me go.”
“Wait, Iven,” said Winter.“Wait.”
They bombed a hospital,his mind gibbered.They bombed a hospital.All the absurd rumors he’d ever heard about Germans over the years came back magnified a thousandfold:They hang priests as clappers in their own bells, they chain the gunners to their machine guns…He rounded on Winter with something very near hatred.“Let mego.”
Winter let go and Freddie ran. Winter didn’t follow. Freddie saw marquees freshly sandbagged, men on stretchers borne into makeshift surgical bays, orderlies loading men onto train cars.
Laura ought to be easy to find. She wasn’t the tallest, or thebroadest, but he would see the staff orienting themselves around her steady presence. He would hear her snapping orders, joking, see her face determined, her hand on some poor sod’s forehead…
But he couldn’t see her. Maybe in one of the marquees? They weren’t all wrecked. There were plenty of nurses around. They were all right, weren’t they?
Where would she be? His searching eyes fell on the head sister. Her uniform was unmistakable, her veil. He even knew her name. Laura had written about her often enough: Kate White. In the cold white light of her lantern, she looked shattered. He threw caution aside and plunged into the maelstrom of people, and came up alongside her. “Sister, where is Laura? Laura Iven, where is she?”
Kate White just looked at him. He could only imagine what he looked like: an insane stranger, filthy, pallid as a corpse. “Gone,” she said after a pause.
Freddie took the word like a fist between the eyes. “Gone?”
“I— Yes. A shell…”
He tried to muster another question, but his mouth had gone dry. The wordgoneechoed in his brain. Sinking horror collected somewhere in his stomach. He was still trying to frame his next question, but Kate White beat him to it.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Are you wounded?”
Even as she spoke, a chorus of shouting erupted from one of the wards.
She swore and turned toward the commotion. “Stay there, then.”
Freddie stood as though rooted to the spot.Gone gone gone.Ask her if she’s dead. Ask her that, you coward. She said “gone.”
He stood there like a pillar of salt. Despair and madness whispered,Gone means dead. The Rapture, remember the Rapture? Mother always talked about the Rapture. The good are taken up, and only the sinners are left. And who was better than her? She’s gone.
Before Kate White could come back, before Freddie could think what on earth he meant to do, a hand closed about Freddie’s arm.
It was Faland.
Freddie, too much in shock to speak or even be much surprised, looked from the thin fingers to the angles of his face, the hair dark with rain. As improbable at Brandhoek as he’d been in Ypres—more so. His calm was almost eerie; who could be calm when the whole world had— Faland said, “Stand there long enough, little poet, and you’ll be back with your platoon by nightfall and your German left to die with the rest.”
Freddie was too shaken to sayWhat are you doing.He stammered, “I— No. I don’t know now. My sister’s gone.”
Faland said, “Unfortunate. And you’re going to stand there, lamenting?”
What were words? What was the world? Freddie said, “I promised Winter…” Then he remembered. He’d left Winter alone. All that way, and he’d left Winter alone. Chest heaving, he wrenched away and plunged at once between the wards, through curtains of lamplight and rain, back into the night. He didn’t see if Faland followed. He hardly believed that he’d seen him at all.
· · ·
Winter had sunk to the ground. But he raised his head when Freddie stooped beside him. His eyes darted beyond him, into the darkness. “No,” he whispered. “Iven, no. Not him.”
Freddie half-turned, but there was no one near. Freddie didn’t have an answer. He didn’t have anything.Laura was gone.
What to do?
In that extreme of stress, an idea came to him.
He stripped off his own jacket, with all the scraps of belongings that he still possessed in its pockets. He wrapped the jacket round Winter’s shoulders. He was too cold to feel colder, although the rain plastered his shirt to his skin. He pressed his tags into Winter’s flinching hand. Kate White wouldn’t do anything for a nameless German. But she had real authority. She might do something for Laura. And if the nameless German appeared to know the fate of Laura’s only brother…
