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Emmie gave the paper to Alice for her condolence notes, which were multiplying at an alarming rate as May raged into June and the Germans kept on and on. Sirens screeched overhead; there was something far more fearsome about an air raid in a city than in the countryside. At Grécourt, they’d managed to make a joke of it, but here, in Beauvais, the planes screaming overhead were fearsome things. The cannon boomed, the antiaircraft guns fired, and the church bells rang in frenzied cacophony as the Boche planes screamed past on their way to Paris, dropping bombs in their wake.

The wounded poured into Beauvais. The train station was a terrible thing, trains belching out the dead and the dying in a fog of smoke and blood. Emmie had only just fallen into bed, still wearing her soiled uniform, when Mrs. Barrett shook her awake.

“We’re all needed at the hospital.”

They made their way through a nightmare landscape of smoldering houses and shattered glass, dodging craters in the pavement, whole streets blocked off by rubble. There were American nurses in the hospital, just shipped in from Paris, some just in from the U.S. One was being sick in a corner. Emmie couldn’t blame her. The floor was thick with stretchers, with hungry, filthy, thirsty, feverish men, all dropped wherever the stretcher bearers had been able to find room. It was almost impossible to see; lights were allowed only in the operating room. For the rest, there were only shuttered lanterns, creating more shadows than sight.

Across the way, in the operating room, under the glare of the lights, all three tables were full, Dr. Clare bending over one, Julia over another, and a French surgeon manning the third. Someone was carrying men out of the operating room, someone else lining up stretchers waiting to go in, the men so bloodied they looked less like human beings than like meat hanging out in front of a butcher’s shop.

“Anne,” Mrs. Barrett was saying. “There are forty-five grands blessés just out of surgery in there. If you could tend to them. Emmie, this lot has just come in. . . .”

Emmie didn’t even bother to take off her hat or her gloves. She found a container of drinking water and began making the rounds, one by one, checking each for fever and wounds, offering water, wiping their faces as best she could. The whistles were still blowing and the bombs falling, the walls shaking with each explosion, but the noise seemed to recede as she worked, the horror outside less than the horror within. She had never imagined anything like this, not in Grécourt, not in the evacuation, not even in Amiens.

She was balling up a blanket to try to use as a bolster for a wounded man when Kate tapped her on the shoulder. “Emmie. Emmie! Come with me.”

“But I’m not done here. . . .”

“It’s your captain.” Kate had blood on her face and her dress; her usually neat hair was straggling out of its pins. “I think it’s your captain. I’ve been helping in the operating room—”

Emmie was on her feet in an instant, feeling sick with hope and fear. “But these men—”

“Nell says she’ll stay with them.” Emmie hadn’t even noticed Nell, but there she was, behind Kate, taking over without a word, Nell, who usually had a pithy comment for every occasion, her eyes burning hollows in her white face.

“Go,” Nell said, and gave Emmie a little push.

They had to step over more stretchers to get there, to the operating room, where a man lay on Julia’s table as she dug a needle in and out of his flesh.

Emmie had only a glimpse of his face—a face pitted with burns and scrapes from exploding shrapnel—before there was a tremendous crash and all the lights went out.

She could hear Julia cursing, and then a flashlight was shoved into Emmie’s hand.

“Hold that,” she said crisply, and Emmie held the flashlight as still as she could, that momentary glimpse of his face burned into her memory, trying to resist the urge to turn the beam of the light and look again.

“How bad?”

Julia shoved wadding into the wound. “It missed anything important. He’ll live. As long as it doesn’t go putrid on him. What?” she demanded, as someone came up behind her.

“The alert has sounded,” said Mrs. Barrett grimly. “The officer in charge has suggested you stop and seek a place of safety.”

“Jamais!” protested the French surgeon working at the next table. “I operate all night.”

“While there are wounded here, I stay here.” Julia snapped her fingers at the stretcher bearers. “Take him away and bring the next one.”

On her other side, Dr. Clare, who had been operating for twelve hours straight, her usually immaculate hair matted with sweat, her apron covered in unspeakable fluids, was wordlessly humming “Onward Christian Soldiers” as she bent her head over the man on the table.

Handing off her flashlight to Kate, Emmie took one side of the stretcher, helping the stretcher bearer lower it to the floor in one of the wards. The room was humid with sweat and fear, the air acrid with the smell of burning things. The darkness was horrible, making all the smells and sounds more acute, playing tricks of perspective. The room might have been the size of a closet or a baseball field; she couldn’t tell. All lights were needed for the operating room. The men in recovery would just have to lump it.

Emmie touched what she thought was his shoulder. “Will?” she whispered.

“Emmie?” His voice was hoarse, but it was his. “Emmie? I can’t—I can’t see.”

She felt like laughing, which was an entirely inappropriate reaction, but she couldn’t help it; she was such a mix of joy and fear. “It’s the lights,” she said. “The Germans have shot the power out.”

She heard him draw a shaky breath. “Thank God. I thought I’d gone blind. I thought I was never—going to see—your face again.”

“Where have you been?” As soon as she said it, Emmie realized it was really a rather ridiculous thing to ask. He’d been fighting. She groped for his hand, clutching his cold fingers. She didn’t like that they were so cold. “I couldn’t get any word—I only heard that most of your battalion—”

“Slaughtered.” His voice was very weak. “I had pneumonia. Out of my head with it. I’d been knocked into a trench hole and apparently lay there for three days before some Frenchies found me. That’s what they told me. I don’t remember any of it. When I came to—they declared me fit for service and sent me out again. It’s all been a bit of a blur.”