Page 54 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Captain Mills thrashed in his bed and Betsy hurried over to his side. “Have you ever seen anything as bright as this moonlight? I hope it’s not keeping you awake.”

Captain Mills stopped thrashing. He was horribly, painfully still. “I can’t see the moonlight.”

Of course he couldn’t. He had a bullet in his head and bandages and a compress over his eyes. Betsy felt awful, like the sort of person who pulled wings off flies and kicked puppies.

“You will. Soon,” she gabbled. “I’ll—I’ll just go get more ice for you.”

And she hurried out of the tent, trying to make it look more of a brisk walk and less of a run. The men couldn’t see her breaking down. It would be bad for morale. Never ever show doubt or weakness, even if she was so tired she could barely see straight, even if her face hurt with smiling at men who couldn’t see it, even if her heart broke a little more every time someone asked for ice and she couldn’t give it.

She made it a yard away from the tent before she broke down, covering her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking as she tried to muffle the sobs that racked her body, angry, tearless sobs, sobs of rage and frustration and helplessness.

“Betsy?” It was Kit, sitting on the steps of the hospital, her pocket notebook in her lap, her pinny hideously stained and her hair straggling down, dark with sweat. Betsy suspected she looked much the same.

“What are you doing?” Betsy managed.

“Sister Minnie told me to take an hour and get some rest.”

“Then you should.” In the moonlight, Kit’s face seemed composed entirely of angles and hollows. “Really, Kit. Get some sleep.”

“I can sleep when I’m dead—or back in St. Louis.” Kit’s eyes were too bright in her too-thin face. “The stories, Betsy—the stories these men have been telling me! I have to get it all down before I forget. Or before one of those men out there does it first.”

“You mean like your friend with the bullet in his spine?” said Betsy, and wished she hadn’t. “Don’t make yourself sick, Kit.”

“I won’t.” Kit looked up at Betsy with a shadow of her old grin. “I’m a mother. We’re the toughest people on earth.”

“Hmm,” said Betsy, and realized, with horror, that she sounded just like Ava. When had she turned into Ava?

That was something to be grateful for, she supposed, that Ava wasn’t here. Although perversely, she rather wished she were. An extra pair of trained hands would mean the world.

The work was relentless, endless. The healthier men were released from the hospital so the most severe of the new cases could be brought inside in their place. Dawn brought another influx of men, swelling the number of casualties in the tents. Betsy stopped counting after four hundred.

Betsy felt like she could sleep on her feet, like a horse. She had no idea how the surgeons were still operating. At this point, she could barely tell her ankle from her elbow, much less anyone else’s. Between her rounds, Betsy brought black coffee and hard crackers to the doctors, who gulped it down without looking at it while probing for bullets and splinting shattered bones.

“Bless you,” Dr. Stringfellow said, as he put out a hand for his mug, and Betsy thought of Ethel the Coffee Angel and how she’d mocked her for it.

There was a lot she would change if she could go back.

But she couldn’t go back. She could only try to do the best she could in the moment. She felt so painfully inadequate to the task, half-asleep, matted with blood and sweat and heaven only knew what. But the men still cheered when they saw her making the rounds, and that was something, wasn’t it? “Sister,” they called her, and clung to her hand, the ones who could talk talking, trying to smile for her.

There was no talk of shifts. They needed every nurse they could spare. Betsy gulped some coffee, grimaced, and dumped a spoonful of condensed milk in it to make it taste less like burnt toast. And that’s when she saw Clara Barton hurrying past in her traveling cloak, holding a bag of supplies.

Betsy stood, swaying slightly, by the opening of her tent. “You’re going? Miss Barton?”

“General Shafter has called upon us for our assistance.” Miss Barton glowed like a girl who had just been asked to Yale prom. “His message was of the utmost urgency. He instructed us to send food, medicines, anything, and to seize wagons from the front for transportation.”

Betsy gaped at her. The army had been resolute in not wasting wagons or men on medical supplies. If General Shafter was authorizing the commandeering of carts, the situation had to be dire.

“Do you need me—do you need me to come with you? I’ve worked at the front before.” It took everything she had to make the offer.

“I need you to stay here.” Miss Barton gestured grandly at the tent, filled to the brim with wounded. “This is your ward, Nurse Hayes. Serve these men well.”

“But—” Betsy looked helplessly at Miss Barton, too tired to think straight. It was one thing to do the rounds under direction. Another entirely to be told she was in charge. She couldn’t be in charge. “What if I don’t know what to do?”

“You know what to do.” Miss Barton took Betsy’s hands in both of hers, gazing deeply into her eyes. “These men’s lives depend on you. You cannot fail.”

Chapter Fourteen

Dear Ava,