She crouched beside a soldier lying motionless on his stretcher, his arm flung to the side, his entire head swathed in blood-and-dirt-caked rags.
“Leave that one,” Jerome said gruffly. “He didn’t make it. See if the one beside him is still alive. I’ll be right back to help you load.”
She reached for the soldier’s lifeless hand and rested it gently on his chest. The gold of a wedding band glinted in the sunlight filtering through the haze.
Twenty-three widows.
She touched the band. A Hebrew word had been engraved in a familiar—
“No.” Estelle froze for a fraction of a second before she fumbled for his tags. She pulled them from beneath his stained uniform. They were sticky with congealing blood but were still legible. Alain Wyler.
Estelle dropped the tags and lurched away from the body as if that would make what she already knew less real. Her throat constricted, and she fought the urge to simply collapse and weep, because that would accomplish nothing in the face of so much suffering and death and loss. Instead, she struggled to her feet, though her vision seemed to waver and the ground tilted precariously beneath her. She found herself on her hands and knees, nausea roiling through her.
“Jesus, Allard, when did you last eat?” Jerome was back, crouching beside her, one of his hands resting on her shoulder.
“Yesterday?” It was hard to remember. It was harder still to keep the days separate.
Jerome grunted. “Here.” What looked like a piece of dried sausage was thrust in front of her face. “Eat this. I’ve got enough casualties without adding you to the goddamn list.”
Estelle sat back on her heels and did as she was told. She accepted the additional offer of a canteen and took careful sips of tepid water.
“Have you slept?”
“Enough.” An hour or so sometime between midnight and two. There wasn’t time for sleeping.
The spots before her eyes were clearing, and the nausea receding, though the tightness in her throat was still there along with a chronic, aching sadness that seemed to have settled deep in her chest. She put a hand over Alain’s for the last time.
“You knew him?” Jerome was watching her with reddened, tired eyes, unnaturally bright against the dark smudges of soot and mud that covered his face.
“Yes,” Estelle managed.
“Who was he?”
“Rachel’s brother.” My brother, she wanted to say. Because he was just that, in every way but blood. Though in Estelle’s experience, blood didn’t count for much when it came to family. “He has a wife. Hannah. And a three-year-old daughter. Aviva.”
“Goddammit.” Jerome dropped his head. “Goddammit,” he repeated.
“I should be the one to tell Rachel.”
“Yes,” he mumbled. “I’m so sorry, Allard.”
Estelle handed the canteen back to him. “Me too.”
Jerome stood and held out his hand, helping her to her feet. He had kind eyes, Estelle thought numbly as she took his hand. The color of melted caramel, steady and—
The ground in the field beyond Estelle’s ambulance suddenly erupted. She dove to the ground, soil and debris flung into the air like a geyser raining down on them and the patients. Something stung the skin near her temple but Estelle ignored it.
“Goddamn Boches,” Jerome was screaming in the direction of the front lines. “Goddamn stop for a goddamn minute so I can do my goddamn job!”
Estelle clambered back to her feet. Something warm trickled down the side of her face, and she brushed at it angrily with her sleeve.
Jerome turned and thrust an empty tin at her. “I need you to drive,” he said, hoarse from shouting. Bits of debris fell from his shoulders. “And bring back more bandages. We’re stripping corpses to use their goddamn uniforms for wraps. I can’t keep up.”
Estelle took the box and tossed it in the front of the ambulance. She returned to help load those who were still living into the back.
“Hurry back,” Jerome panted as he slammed the back shut. “Please.”
“Yes,” she said. “Don’t die on me in the meantime.”
“Likewise, Allard.”
Estelle swung back into her ambulance and stomped on the clutch, jamming it into gear. The vehicle gave a tortured groan and then rolled forward, jolting mercilessly. A soldier in the back shrieked in pain. She maneuvered the ambulance onto the uneven road and accelerated over the rise, driving as fast as she dared. She’d gone only perhaps a half mile when she was forced to slow to a crawl. In front of her, the road was clogged with people fleeing away from the front lines that were continuously inching closer. Most were walking, many with small children in their arms. Some had wheelbarrows or dog carts. The lucky ones had horse- or ox-drawn carts or bicycles, and there was even a tractor farther up, belching black clouds of exhaust. But all had fatigue and fear etched deeply into their faces.
She stayed on the road for long minutes before she veered away from the crowds and bounced into a pasture, following a rutted track that had once been a livestock trail. She burst through a hedgerow and found herself almost at the newest field hospital that had been set up yesterday in a modest manor house abandoned by its previous tenants. Surgeries were being conducted in the kitchen and what had once been a parlour. In the rest of the rooms, men were laid wherever there was space, waiting. Waiting to die, waiting to live.
Uniformed men came out to meet Estelle as the ambulance coughed and jerked past the barn and empty livestock pens. They unloaded the patients from the back, but instead of turning toward the manor, they headed for the barn.
“Stop,” she protested. “These men need to go to the manor. They need a doctor.”
“No room,” one of the men mumbled, adjusting his grip on the stretcher. “Manor’s full. An’ they all need a damn doctor.”
Estelle stared after them and sank down on the back edge of the ambulance, the doors still hanging ajar. She rested her head in her hands, her palms pressing hard against her eyes. She was tired. So very tired.
She forced herself to sit up. She had never been a quitter, and she would not quit now, not when men like Alain had sacrificed everything for her and for their country. She returned to the cab of her vehicle and checked the fuel gauge. She would not make it to the front lines and back with the fuel she had left.
Estelle stood. Perhaps in the last hour someone had secured more fuel or perhaps a cache had been brought up from—
“Estelle!” The sound of her name had her spinning, and she saw Rachel running toward her. Most of her dark hair had escaped its bindings and spilled across her shoulders in a tangled mess, and her uniform, like her face, was filthy.
The immediate relief at seeing her friend alive and whole was snuffed violently by a suffocating wave of grief. She swallowed hard.
“Estelle,” Rachel said again as she reached her and enveloped her in a hug. “I was so worried. The men coming back said that some of the shells were reaching beyond the lines and—” She stopped and pulled back. “You’re hurt.” Rachel reached up to touch Estelle’s temple, and her fingers were bloody when she withdrew them.
“I’m fine,” Estelle whispered. She realized that the tears she hadn’t shed with Jerome were now running freely down her cheeks.