There were at least two dozen patients for every medic, and Davis’s bandages were completely sodden.
“This man needs a surgeon,” I called.
The head of our medical detachment, a Major Willis, looked up at me. “Congratulations, Blumenthal. You’re promoted. If you can stitch up gums after extracting a tooth, you can stitch up a gunshot wound. I need you here.” I felt my cheeks grow cool. If he was keeping me here, it was because he knew we wouldn’t be able to treat most of the wounded men on the battlefield in time. He looked to the lieutenant who had carried Davis in with me. “You there, take Keller over there and that litter and get back on that field.”
The lieutenant saluted, and the two soldiers disappeared into the haze with their litter.
I pulled the tissue forceps, scissors, suture silk, and surgical needles from my kit, along with a healthy dose of morphine and some iodine. I dosed Davis with the morphine, hoping his heart wasn’t too weak to handle the medicine. I cleaned the exit wound again with the iodine, stitched him up from the front, then repeated the process on the back after gently flipping him to his stomach. The bleeding was minimal, and his breathing grew steadier. Now it was up to the ambulance crew. If they could get him transported to a proper field hospital and he didn’t catch his death lying in the freezing mud, he’d live to fight another battle.
The next five patients I saw weren’t so lucky. The only thing I could do was offer them morphine and make their passing as painless as I could. I wished I could stay with them as they passed, but I had only the time for a few kind words before moving on to the next man. The longer I lingered, the more patients there would be for whom there was no help to offer beyond platitudes.
Night fell, but there was no respite. We worked in the dark as best we could without benefit of the flashlights or candles that would make us perfect targets for the snipers. My hands shook with fatigue, but I forged on until Major Willis ordered me to head back to the field hospital with the next transport behind the lines. I looked out the rear window of the olive-drab truck at the men left behind, the feeling of helplessness seeping into my marrow at the thought of all those who couldn’t be saved that night.
If there was a single lesson I’d learned in dental school, it was the dire importance of sanitation. Cleanliness wasn’t next to godliness when it came to medicine—it was laced in its very scripture. But mere yards from German artillery fire, the bright lights and polished tiles of the hospitals back home seemed as far away as the craters on the dark side of the moon.
I helped the ambulance crew unload the wounded, but instead of eager doctors, patient nurses, and warm beds, they were welcomed by harried doctors onto dirty cots under a tent that was next to useless in protecting them from the elements. One thing, among many, that training never prepared me for was how the men, lying in rows under the same olive-drab blankets, all started to look the same. I vowed that when I returned home—if I returned home—I’d know my patients. I’d know their families. I’d know if they were powerful lawyers, humble plumbers, housewives, or students.
Here, they were all soldiers. The doctors developed the unfortunate habit of thinking of the men by their ailments—the right-foot amputation in bed four, the burn victim in bed twenty-three—and I couldn’t blame them. The detachment helped them get through the day with their wits intact, and we needed the doctors in good form as much as we needed the bullets in our guns. All the same, I couldn’t bear to think of the men as nothing more than the sum of their injuries.
I’d been working for sixteen hours, and the commanding officer of our detachment, Colonel Pankhurst—an eminent physician from Chicago—gave me leave to find some dinner and grab a few hours of shut-eye, but I was more likely to win the war single-handedly with a simple bayonet than to quiet my mind enough for sleep. Davis had been settled on a cot in the middle of the tent, which was the best possible place. Warmer than anywhere else, and in the constant path of the doctors and nurses if he needed help. He looked as pale as hospital linens but hadn’t yet fallen asleep.
“You look fit as a fiddle, Davis. Why don’t you free up this bed for some poor guy who really needs it?” I said, stooping next to him and tapping on his uninjured shoulder. He was incredibly weak from the loss of blood, but still managed something resembling a chuckle.
“That’s right,” he said, straining to speak. “Just get me back my rifle and I’ll get back out there in the morning.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said. “Don’t let a paltry shoulder wound get you down.”
“The litter bearer—he didn’t make it, did he?” His voice grew even weaker.
“No,” I answered, unable to think of a good reason to keep the truth from him.
“It’s all my fault,” he said. “He should have left me there.”
“Enough of that,” I said. “And that’s an order. That litter bearer was doing his job. If you want to blame anyone, point the finger at the Germans. They’re the ones who shot him. And shot you, for that matter. I don’t know you all that well, Private, but I assume that getting your shoulder obliterated by a German sniper wasn’t on your list of plans for the day, was it?”
“No, Captain, it wasn’t.”
“Good, because if it was, we’d have to get the company headshrinker in here to help with that too, and trust me, he’s busy. We’re trying to sneak him over the border to see if he can’t talk some sense into Hitler. I haven’t taken much in the way of psychology classes, but my hunch is mother issues. It usually is when you’re dealing with megalomaniacal dictators.”
“Do you have a lot of experience with megalomaniacal dictators, Captain?”
“You’ve got me there, Davis.”
“I didn’t get your name, by the way. You saved my life today. Twice.”
“Max Blumenthal,” I answered. “And I was just doing my job, kid. Where you from?”
“Boston, sir.”
“So, I guess that makes you a Red Sox fan?” I asked.
“You bet, Captain. My dad sends me the scores with every letter. He forgot once and wrote twice to apologize. Who’s your team?”
“No major league teams as far west as LA, so I’m a Yankees man.”
“We all have our faults, Captain,” Davis said, his expression so solemn, I felt a laugh escape from my chest, loud enough to earn an impatient “shhh!” from a nearby nurse. “How did a West Coast man end up over here? I thought they were sending you all to the Pacific.”
“I wanted to come over here. This is my fight, not the one in the Pacific,” I said, thinking of my extended family in Riga. “I hadn’t been drafted yet, so I scraped together the train fare to Maryland and enlisted there. They were happy enough to take another medic.”
“I expect they were,” he said. “I’m glad you came this way.”
“Get some rest, Davis. I’ll come check on you when I can. You did good today.”
Davis, lids heavy, just nodded, but there was something easier in his expression as he drifted off to much-needed sleep.
“You have a way with the men, Captain,” Colonel Pankhurst commented as I stepped away from Davis’s cot. “It’s nice to see them smile a bit. God knows there isn’t much to smile about while you’re bleeding out next to dying men in a leaky tent. It’d mean a lot to them if you made a habit of this sort of thing.”