Page 60 of The Storyteller of Krakow

The engine coughed before catching. I eased us forward along the narrow, crater-bitten track that served as a road. To our right, a mule train picked its careful way uphill, shells strapped to either side. To our left, the valley lay open and deceptively green.

The guns began again.

The sound was never a single thing. It was layers. British artillery behind us, German mortars answering, the crack of rifles, the cough of Bren guns, the deeper thunder of heavier pieces. It pressed against the skull until thought became difficult.

I drove as far as I dared within the outpost where we knew medics waited to hand over the injured and the dead before abandoning the vehicle in the lee of a broken stone wall.

‘Stretcher,’ Anka said simply.

As we stepped out, the earth shook with each impact. Shards of masonry littered the ground like broken teeth. Somewhere above, someone screamed.

A runner slid down the slope towards us, face streaked with soot. ‘Sanitariuszki! This way!’

We followed him upward, boots slipping on loose rubble. The incline was brutal. Every few metres lay another body; some still, some writhing. Medics worked in shallow scrapes in the earth, hands moving with desperate efficiency.

The first man we reached was little more than a boy. His uniform was dark and wet at the thigh.

‘Femoral,’ Anka muttered, already dropping to her knees.

I held the morphine syringe ready while she clamped down hard with both hands. The boy’s eyes rolled towards me.

‘Am I dying?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

Anka injected, bandaged, tied a tourniquet. ‘We need to go.’

The runner helped us lift. The boy cried out once, a thin animal sound that cut through the bombardment. We staggered back down the slope, ducking as debris sprayed from a fresh impact nearby.

Each trip over the past few weeks had blurred into the next.

A man without a foot.

A man without a face.

A man who kept asking for his mother in a whisper so soft I had to bend close to hear it.

By midday, the sky had turned white with dust. The abbey ruins looked almost luminous through it, as if already belonging to another world.

On our second climb, we found a cluster of wounded in what had once been a terraced garden. The stone balustrade was shattered; statues lay decapitated among the olive trees.

An officer lay propped against a chunk of masonry, clutching his abdomen. Blood seeped between his fingers.

‘He needs surgery,’ Anka said after one look.

‘I know.’

We worked quickly, binding him as best we could. His face was grey beneath the grime.

We lifted him, and I felt the hot slickness of his blood soak through my sleeve. I tried not to think of how many sleeves I had ruined this way.

Back at the truck, I loaded the wounded as gently as possible. Anka climbed into the back to monitor them while I returned to the driver’s seat.

‘Two critical,’ she called through the partition. ‘Go.’

The descent was worse than the climb. The track had narrowed under fresh shelling. At one bend, a wrecked lorry still smouldered, its cargo of ammunition long since exploded. I manoeuvred around it inch by inch, feeling as though we were never going to make it.

A shell landed somewhere close. The blast rocked us sideways. For a moment I saw nothing but dust.