“Are you sure that’s all?” asked Maud ominously.
“We’re almost to the hospital,” Dr. Stringfellow said, effectively cutting off further speculation. “Do I need to straighten your hats and inspect your handkerchiefs, or can we simply proceed as a party of reasonable adults?”
Two by two, they filtered out after Dr. Stringfellow and Julia, the two doctors leading the way.
“We look like an American boarding school out for a walk,” said Miss Patton, with a nervous giggle. She reached up to adjust her hat, of a rather violent purple. It was a brave hat, Emmie decided, even if it did make her complexion sallow.
“All we need are our field hockey sticks,” agreed Miss Englund equably. “Is that the hospital? It looks more like a school.”
“I believe it was a school initially,” said Dr. Stringfellow. “Before.”
There was something terribly ominous about that “before.” Emmie couldn’t stop staring. They were all staring. Emmie had been expecting—oh, not a tent, but something more makeshift. This was a grand edifice, immense beyond comprehending, wings stretching out behind wings, brick and stone and mansard roofs, more like a palace than a temporary medical facility. “It’s enormous.”
“And every inch of it in use,” said Dr. Stringfellow grimly. “They tell me there’s never enough room for all the blessés.”
There were ambulances coming and going, soldiers everywhere. One wing seemed to be devoted entirely to garaging the ambulances. Uniforms of all varieties mixed and mingled. Emmie found herself craning her head from one side to the other as they walked through an enormous arch into a courtyard thick with windows. Windows upon windows, wings upon wings, all filled with wounded. Les blessés.
“There are a lot of them, aren’t there?” Emmie swallowed hard. “It does seem like all the world has come to France, doesn’t it? Do you see the Algerian soldiers in their red fez? Is it fez or fezes?”
“Or maybe it’s something impossible like those Greek plurals you never see coming,” suggested Miss Cooper, equally glad to seize on something silly. “Pais, paides. Fez, faides.”
It was nerves, Emmie knew. Nerves made people act foolishly. She got silly when she was nervous, talking too much and telling endless stories and making horrible jokes. Kate, she remembered from college exams, got quiet and sharp. And Julia—Julia was always Julia.
Instinctively, they all huddled closer together as they entered the hospital, their noses stung by the strong scent of carbolic. There were blessés all about, blessés with faces wrapped in bandages, blessés standing on crutches, blessés waving greetings with the stumps where their hands used to be.
“They all seem so terribly glad to see us,” murmured Miss Patton, waving back to a man without an arm.
“We’re women,” said Miss Englund bluntly. “And we’re not here to stick needles into them.”
“Dr. Stringfellow?” A woman in the traditional nurse’s costume of white pinny over a voluminous gray dress came up to greet them. She had red hair tucked up beneath her cap and a dimple in one cheek. “I’m Nurse Fellowes. Welcome.”
“How did you guess?” asked Dr. Stringfellow drily.
“We haven’t many women doctors who call. You aren’t all doctors, are you?” Nurse Fellowes turned to smile at the rest of the group, and Emmie had to press her lips tightly shut to stop her exclamation of alarm. A constellation of angry stars disfigured one side of her face, patches of shiny red scar tissue puckering the skin, all the way from her eyebrow to her chin.
“N-no,” said Emmie, trying not to stare. “We’re also with the Smith College Relief Unit.”
“I’m Dr. Pruyn,” said Julia, stepping to the front.
“Welcome to all of you, then,” said Nurse Fellowes. Her voice wasn’t English but it wasn’t quite American either.
“Where are you from?” asked Emmie. It seemed a better idea than asking what had happened to her.
“Prince Edward Island,” answered Nurse Fellowes as she turned to lead them down a long corridor. “Off the coast of Nova Scotia.”
“Oh, Canada!” said Emmie brightly, feeling like an absolute idiot but unable to help herself.
“What happened to your foot?” blurted out Liza, and Emmie realized she had been so busy trying not to stare at Nurse Fellowes’s face that she’d completely missed the strange shoe she was wearing and the lopsided pattern of her gait.
“A shell,” said Nurse Fellowes, smiling back at them with the dimpled side of her face. “I was very fortunate to have retained most of the foot.”
The women all exchanged a look at that word, fortunate.
Miss Cooper took a long, deep breath. “Are you—are you a patient here?”
Nurse Fellowes shook her head. “Oh no. The work they do here is much more involved! Mine was a very simple injury. If you’ll come with me?”
She led the group into a laboratory. After the bustle of the rest of the hospital, it seemed oddly quiet. The walls were lined with cupboards. The only furniture was a table, a chair, and an operating table, from which various restraints dangled.
“This is where we perform some of the more challenging reconstruction surgery.” Nurse Fellowes opened a cupboard, taking out a pile of photographs. She set them out, one by one, on the table. “We’ve been learning as we go along, developing new techniques as the need arises. As you can see, some of these men came to us in a dreadful way.”
“Dreadful,” echoed Emmie. Her tongue felt unnaturally thick in her mouth. She had never, before, been aware of all the different features that went into a face until one looked, until one saw . . .
Nurse Fellowes went on laying out photographs on the table. “We’ve been experimenting, rather successfully, with facial reconstruction. In this case, you can see that the patient’s upper lip and nose were largely destroyed.”
The man didn’t look like a man at all. There were bulbous blobs where his nose and upper lip had been, as if a child had tried to form a mask out of clay and got bored before smoothing out those final two features.
“In our first surgery, we concentrated on restoring his upper lip.” Another photo. Then another. “Over the course of four surgeries and over a year, we were able to send him home like this.”
The man’s face was choppy, as though an artist had laid on paint too thick, but it was recognizably a man’s face again, with a Roman arch of a nose and a discernible upper lip.
“That’s incredible,” said Kate quietly, touching the photograph, carefully, with one finger.
“You do it with skin grafts?” asked Julia, looking at the photos with a professional eye.
“Skin and bone grafts,” said Nurse Fellowes, holding up another photo. Emmie took an inadvertent step back. If the last man had looked like clay, this one was all too clearly blood and bone. His face had a crater in it, a crater stretching from his cheek across his mouth, a gaping hole where the bottom half of his face had been, as though someone had smashed it like a pumpkin. “This was one of our more challenging cases. The man’s cheek was entirely blown away. . . .”
Even in the black-and-white photograph, one could see the layers of muscle and tissue revealed.