“Which ones?”
“Any of them.”
“They’ll all certainly try.”
“Great.” I turned back to the brackets. “Any ideas on what to do?”
“We remind our boys that they have to keep calm or they could make their injuries worse. As for the prisoners, they don’t always speak English so...”
“Understood,” I said and continued the task at hand.
He left then and a moment later the patients were being loaded onboard.
Theodore and I helped strap them in and make them as comfortable as we could, which wasn’t easy for the couple of men who’d managed to have casts put on their broken bones to immobilize them for the trip. And then there was the soldier with his jaw sewn shut, wicked black stitches laced from mouth to ear.
“What are the scissors for?” I asked Theodore. There was a pair pinned and hanging by a string from the patient’s uniform. Something I’d never seen before.
“If he vomits you use them to cut the stitches. Otherwise he could choke.”
“Oh.”
Most of the men had been given morphine for the trip and I hoped they would sleep, including the Germans, who were the last to be loaded and thus at the far end of the aircraft. My heart raced at the thought of having to tend to the enemy. But as Theodore had explained quietly, we were to treat them just as we would our own so that they would heal and could be bargained for or interrogated.
But it wasn’t just that they were the enemy. It was that they were German. German soldiers fighting for a cause that made me feel sick, angry, and not sorry for their pain. As far as I was concerned, they didn’t deserve my help. They had betrayed their country. And their countrymen.
I barely looked at them as I made sure they were strapped in securely, my eyes glancing over their injuries. The two younger ones had lost limbs, the oldest of the three had a head injury. They’d all been given morphine, which I hoped would sedate them and keep them from starting any trouble, but the younger two, who were situated across from one another, spoke in German to one another about what they would do to the “Ami”, their slang for Americans, once they had healed.
“De Mund halten!”the third one said from his upper bunk, nearly making me grin. He had probably been listening to them talk like this for hours now, thus his exasperated “shut up.”
“Ready?” the pilot shouted.
I gave each litter one more look as I hurried up the aisle and strapped in beside Theodore.
“Ready!” I shouted.
As soon as we were at altitude, I unbuckled.
“I’m going to make the rounds,” I told Theodore, who nodded and moved to a little desk beside us that had been fastened to the wall.
“Shout if you need me,” he said.
Most of the men were asleep, a few drowsily staring at me as I checked for fever, swelling, or bleeding. I moved down the aisle, kneeling to look over the men in the lower bunks, then standing on tiptoe to check the upper bunks, making my way slowly toward the back, dread filling my body the closer I got to the prisoners, who I hoped were sleeping.
As I reached the last of the American soldiers, I noticed a pair of eyes, a blue the color of faded denim, watching me.
My gaze skimmed the paper attached to his shirt and I reached for the blanket covering him, but he placed his hands over it.
“Don’t you think you should ask first?”
His grin was teasing, his dark hair tousled and streaked with mud. I chuckled and shook my head, looking again at the paper for his name.
“My apologies,” I said. “May I check your wound please, Sergeant Mitchell?”
“This is how they get you,” he said, his voice a quiet drawl. “They pretend they’re interested in your wound, and the next thing you know, you’re married.”
I pressed my lips together, trying not to laugh and failing.
“I promise I won’t trick you into marrying me. I just want to check your injury.”
