“Jakob!” Max struggled to stand. “Heinrich! Otto!”
The mist swelled and rolled through the trench. His comrades scrambled from the dugout and were engulfed in thick gas.
Max staggered forward.
Jakob, gasping and choking, collapsed to his belly, as if he were drowning in a green sea. Heinrich and Otto flailed on the ground. Froth spewed from their mouths.
Max, attempting to help his friends, lunged forward. Although he held his breath and covered his nose and mouth with his arm, the gas scorched his lungs. His eyes burned, as if he’d been doused with acid. Tears streamed from beneath his closed eyelids. He retreated, stumbling blindly. His lungs heaved, desperate to expel the poison and refresh his body with oxygen. Unable to outrun the gas, he scrambled to climb out of the trench. Suffocating, he frantically clawed his hands over rock and soil. He gagged and choked. Pressing upward, he prayed for air.
PART2
GAVOTTE
CHAPTER2
OLDENBURG, GERMANY—APRIL17, 1916
Anna Zeller—a twenty-three-year-old Red Cross nurse with blond hair, a dimpled chin, and eyes the hue of cornflower—stuffed a bundle of bandages into her apron and maneuvered her way through the overcrowded hospital ward. Groans, coughs, and rasps permeated the room. She and a team of nurses and doctors, exhausted from working double shifts, labored to keep pace with the growing number of injured soldiers.
“Emmi,” Anna said, passing a young nurse with coarse black hair peeking from underneath her headcloth. “Morphia. Bed eleven.”
Emmi nodded and darted to a supply station.
The large room was filled with scores of single, metal frame beds, each containing an injured soldier. The beds were spaced an arm-length apart, allowing enough room for the nurses to navigate the ward. Despite an open window, the air reeked of sweat, carbolic, and gangrene. Several nurses, wearing blue-and-white-striped dresses with white aprons, cared for the men, all of whom had come from the western front. The nurses treated a vast scope of battlefield injuries. Bullet and shrapnel wounds. Burns. Missing limbs. Mutilated bodies. Exposure to poison gas. Infections. Fractures. Head injuries. Each day, more injured men were transported to the hospital, where doctors and nurses waged their own battle: repairing the bodies of broken men.
“I’m Anna,” she said, reaching the bedside of a trembling soldier with a turban-like field dressing wrapped around his head.Possible skull fracture.“Can you tell me your name?”
The soldier cracked open his swollen eyelids. “Johann,” he wheezed.
“You’re going to be all right, Johann.”
Emmi, holding a hypodermic syringe, arrived at the bed.
“My friend Emmi is going to give you an injection of morphia to soothe your pain,” Anna said. “A doctor will examine you, and then I’ll clean and rebandage your wound.”
He groaned and placed his hands to his temples.
Emmi touched his arm.
He flinched.
“It’s okay,” Anna said, softening her voice. “I’ll hold your hands while Emmi administers the medicine.” She gently clasped his fingers, lowered his arms to his side, and then nodded to Emmi.
Emmi injected the morphia.
He squeezed Anna’s hands. His fingernails, blackened with dirt from the trenches, dug into her palms.
As his breathing slowed and his muscles relaxed, Anna released his hands. She turned to Emmi and whispered, “I couldn’t do this without you.”
Emmi, her eyes darkened with fatigue, drew a faint smile and left to tend to another patient.
Anna delicately unwrapped the soldier’s field dressing, all the while praying that his cranium was intact.
Anna, determined to do her patriotic duty, began working at the hospital when the war erupted. The initial days as a nurse were strenuous for her. The yowls of men, suffering excruciating pain, rattled her nerves. Her hands trembled while dispensing medicine, and the duty of cleaning infected wounds turned her stomach. Also, the technical aspects of nursing had not come easily for Anna, who had needed more practice to master tasks, such as the precise measuring of drugs and the insertion of needles. To compound matters, the hospital was short-staffed, due to a number of doctors and nurses who were transferred to field hospitals. Therefore, the staff in Oldenburg often worked double shifts. When she wasn’t laboring in the hospital ward, or taking a brief rest on one of the cots in the basement boiler room, she went home—which she shared with hervater, Norbie—and collapsed onto her bed.
As months passed, Anna gradually grew accustomed to the stressful hospital environment, as well as more proficient at her duties.I need to be strong for them,she’d told herself while replacing a dressing over a severed leg. Although her father had raised her to be a pacifist, and she deeply loathed the war, Anna believed she was doing something good by serving as a nurse. However, much of her mending of bodies felt provisional, considering the bleak futures of permanently disabled men.Who will care for them after they leave the hospital?she often wondered.How will they survive on their own?Her heart ached for the soldiers, whose bodies and souls were savaged by war, and she wished that there was more that she could do to improve their quality of life.
After a frenzied morning of caring for patients, Anna joined Emmi for a brief meal break on a bench in the hospital garden. Although the vegetation was dormant, the weather was brisk and a welcome change from the dank hospital air.
