Page 69 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“I frequently am.” Nurse Hayes gently extracted her hand, but she paused all the same. “About what?”

“All this. You told me—you told me even if we win we lose. We’re winning and we’re losing. So much—so much didn’t have to happen.”

Without saying anything, Nurse Hayes set down her basket.

“Our weapons weren’t as good as theirs.” It hurt to talk. The words rasped his throat. But once he started, Holt couldn’t seem to make himself stop. “We didn’t have the right powder. It gave us away every time we fired. The Spanish—everything we thought about them—we were wrong. They know what they’re doing. We’re like farm boys with sticks compared to them. We’ve been marching on empty stomachs. Our rations go bad. Or they forget to bring them at all. Colonel Roosevelt had to buy us beans out of his own pocket. Everyone’s sick to his stomach all the time.”

There were men sleeping all around Holt, men who had fought and paid the price for it. Holt kept his voice low, partly because he didn’t want to wake them, and partly because his voice didn’t seem to want to work properly. His brain felt cloudy too, crammed with overlapping images like a poorly exposed photograph.

“I’ve seen so many men die—men who didn’t have to die, just mown down because we were in the wrong place with the wrong weapons doing the wrong thing. They put a balloon up over us! A great, big, yellow balloon! For reconnaissance, but they might just as well have put a big sign up saying ‘get your enemy here.’ We were stuck. There wasn’t enough room on the road, so there we were, jammed up one right after another with that blasted big balloon floating over us. We were easy pickings. They didn’t even have to aim. No matter what they did, they were sure to hit someone. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel.”

“Food for powder,” murmured Nurse Hayes. “Just numbers on a report.”

For generals who couldn’t even be bothered to get out there with their men. “Did you know Shafter didn’t even come to the front with us? He’s like the Duke of Plaza-Toro,” Holt finished bitterly.

“He led his regiment from behind / (He found it less exciting)?”

She was the one person he could say this all to, the one person who understood. Holt tried to look up into her face, but the light was too dim; she was half shadow. “How did you know?”

“My father enjoyed the odd operetta,” Nurse Hayes said softly. “We saw The Gondoliers twice when it opened in New York.”

Holt blinked at her. “I meant—how did you know—it would be like this? That it would be—such a shambles?”

“Oh, that. I consulted the oracle, of course, and poked about in the entrails of pigeons. No, I’m sorry, that wasn’t fair.” Nurse Hayes rubbed her temples with her fingers. “I’ve been here before. Not here. I’ve never been to Cuba before. But I nursed. In Greece. It was not—it was not what I thought it would be.”

She looked defiantly at Holt, as though daring him to fault her for it.

“What did you think nursing would be?” he asked curiously.

Nurse Hayes bristled. “What did you think war would be?”

She had him there. A chivalric battle of armor and lances and banners. Riding to victory with pennants flying. A romanticized image of a past that never was. Even Tennyson had known it, in his Idylls of the King. He’d painted a world in which the reality never matched the ideal. But it was the ideal one came away remembering, the dream of it, not the flawed execution, the chaos and shame and loss.

“When every morning brought a noble chance, / And every chance brought out a noble knight,” Holt said woozily. Deeds noble and base, that was what Tennyson had said. And there had certainly been plenty of both. No, that wasn’t the problem. “I’d thought—I’d thought it would be more organized.”

Two armies squaring off across a field and may the best man win.

“Ha,” said Nurse Hayes inelegantly. She squatted down beside his cot. “Be grateful you’re on the winning side so far. It’s far worse the other way.”

“You’ve seen it.” Holt looked at Paul’s friend, at the snub-nosed face that was thinner than it ought to be, at the stubborn chin and wide-set gray eyes, ringed with deep purple circles.

Not a vision. Not an oracle. Not a pair of arms in a Red Cross uniform. A woman. A very tired woman, with ghosts of her own.

“Yes. I’ve seen it.” She hesitated a moment, before looking him squarely in the eye. “I was at Vólos when the Greeks were routed at Larissa. And then again when they were routed at Velestinon.”

The names meant nothing to Holt. But they clearly meant a great deal to her. “That sounds like a lot of routing.”

She shrugged, looking away. “There was a lot of routing and not a lot of winning. As they like to say, mistakes were made. The people in charge . . . they didn’t quite know what they were doing. The crown prince’s chief of staff was better known for his ability to lead cotillions than to lead troops.”

Why hadn’t he asked her any of this back in Tampa? He’d been so smug, so sure. He’d never imagined she might have experienced something he hadn’t.

“Why were you there?” Holt rasped.

Nurse Hayes plaited her arms defensively across her chest. “In Greece? Classics. I’m a classicist. I was a classicist.”

“A classicist?” As soon as the words escaped his lips, Holt wished they hadn’t. It was just that one didn’t expect a nurse to be a scholar of classics. “It must have been something—being in the land of Odysseus.”

Nurse Hayes wasn’t mollified. “You can keep your Odysseus. I never liked him. He could have got home much faster if he’d wanted to.”