Page 30 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“Carlos de Almendares! Paul Randall. Remember? From the Union Club. What are you doing out here? Last time I saw you you’d just gotten engaged to Minnie Walsh!”

The officer stood. “I was. I am. I offered to release her from our engagement when I decided to enlist—but she wouldn’t hear of it.” He smiled, a smile so full of pain it hurt to look at it. “I’m worried she may be sadly disappointed in me when I return. If I return. I’m not the man I was.”

“A shave and a visit to your tailor and you’ll be back to your old self,” said Paul encouragingly, kindly ignoring the scar that kept one eye half-closed and a series of powder burns that puckered the skin of one cheek.

“No,” said de Almendares, politely but firmly. “I have three bullet holes in me that weren’t there before. The Mauser bullets are not so bad—you scarcely feel them going in and they leave a good, clean hole. But I was struck by a shell last year, and that—it tears through your flesh.”

Paul was looking a little uncomfortable. “We’ll do our best to avoid them.”

“The Spanish use smokeless powder,” said de Almendares. “Not black powder. You won’t be able to see when they fire. But you can hear it—the Mauser bullets make a sort of whining noise, like a hum. If you hear that, throw yourself down.”

“I don’t think we’re going to see any Spanish closer than Santiago,” Edward Marshall of the New York Journal said, fanning himself lazily with his hat. “They’ve all run off.”

Major de Almendares shook his head. “I shouldn’t be so sure of that,” he said somberly. “Allow me to tell you from experience. It does not do to underestimate the Spanish.”

And then the humming started.

Major de Almendares flung himself to the ground as the rest of them stood there, gaping like idiots.

It sounded like telephone wires vibrating, louder and louder, buzzing in Holt’s ears as the forest exploded in bullets and the first man fell beside him.

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

June 25, 1898

“As you can see, we have our own telephone system on board,” said the doctor whose name Betsy had already forgotten. “You can call the dispensary from any part of the ship.”

For want of anything better to do, Miss Clara Barton and her Red Cross nurses were touring the US military sloop the Solace. Betsy trailed along after Kit and the other nurses as the doctor led them through the main ward, down in the lower deck of the United States naval ambulance ship, making the appropriate noises of admiration (at the latest in modern hospital equipment) and distress (at the state of the men).

Miss Barton, of course, was up ahead, pacing deliberately beside the doctor and doing a very good job of looking like Elizabeth I deigning to visit a minor courtier and not a woman who had been repeatedly ignored and rejected.

Again and again over the past week, Miss Barton had offered their help to the military, only to be answered by resounding silence. As soon as the troops sailed, Miss Barton had sent a telegram to the secretary of the navy, informing him that the Red Cross contingent would be sailing to Key West, where they would await further orders—and, if no orders came, they would sail directly to Cuba.

No orders came.

So they had sailed to Cuba. They hadn’t been sure where to go in Cuba, but the rumor was that General Shafter meant to land in Santiago de Cuba, so they had made for the Bay of Santiago, where the American navy had the Spanish fleet bottled up.

Miss Barton had sent her compliments to Admiral Sampson. Admiral Sampson sent his compliments back and suggested they go elsewhere.

He hadn’t put it quite like that, of course. He’d told them that General Shafter had landed at Daiquirí and that they’d find good anchorage in Guantanamo Bay, where they might await better intelligence.

So here they were, after nine days of sailing from place to place, trying to get someone to take some notice, shunted safely out of the way.

There was still no word of Ava. The promised contingent of nurses from New York hadn’t joined them before they left, but two more reporters had: Mrs. Trumbull White of the Chicago Record and Miss Janet Jennings of the New-York Tribune.

Right now all three of the reporters were trailing after Miss Barton, dutifully recording statistics as the doctor showed them the wonders of the Solace, which made the State of Texas look like the hastily converted, elderly tramp steamship it was.

Everyone on board paid Miss Barton the utmost deference. The sort of deference you’d pay to a slightly deaf, elderly maiden aunt. The condescension was so thick you could practically wipe it off the walls.

And Miss Barton knew it. Betsy could see the way her lips thinned beneath her carefully applied lip rouge, the repeated attempts to remind the doctor just who had been saving lives on the battlefield before he was even born.

“What methods do you have of treating gangrenous wounds? I find the habit of amputation both wanton and wasteful. You cannot imagine what it was to see limbs piled in great heaps behind the hospital tents on the battlefield. Why, sometimes the piles of discarded limbs would reach higher than the tents themselves. And the smell—”

“No, no,” said the doctor, cutting her off before she could go into detail about the smell. “That was a very long time ago. We have nothing like that here. We haven’t had to amputate a limb yet. That’s not to say we won’t, but we do everything in our power to save them. A lot has changed since your day.”

“Indeed. I am glad to hear it.” Miss Barton’s voice was distinctly frosty. Thwarted by the doctor, Miss Barton turned to a patient. He had one arm in a sling, a hand in a plaster cast, and a leg entirely swathed in bandages. “How have they been taking care of you, young man?”

“Very well?” he croaked.