Page 64 of Two Wars and a Wedding

“Yes, but Themistocles didn’t have me.” Betsy gave him an impish grin, flapped a hand in his general direction, and fled into the crowd before he could see her cry.

A holiday air prevailed upon the Thrace, the boat detailed to take twelve hundred soldiers, twelve volunteer nurses, and one Swedish cavalry officer to the front. On deck, the men expressed their exuberance in strange dances involving making a line and holding the ends of a knotted handkerchief. In the captain’s dining room, toasts were drunk to the king, the queen, the crown prince, Greece, Greek independence, the Swedish officer, the nurses, and, with a charming nod at Betsy, the United States of America.

Betsy toasted back to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which went down rather well, as did the rather good French wine someone had brought. She had tucked Charles’s coin down deep beneath her collar, and took courage from the press of it in the hollow of her throat. Not that she was going to need anything like the luck Charles had promised; everyone knew the Greek army would be victorious, and Vólos, where the Red Cross had a hospital, seemed like a friendly, charming seaside town, and everyone delighted to see them.

Betsy waved her handkerchief like anything at the men marching out toward Larissa, where the Greek army was encamped, ready to defeat the Turks, confident she would see them marching back in triumph in a day or two at most.

The Red Cross hospital had been set up in a private house in the town, and wasn’t at all the fearsome thing she had envisioned. There was a small operating room, sparkling clean and entirely empty, and forty empty cots, like the little beds for the dwarves in the Grimm fairy tale. Their task was only, the nurses were informed, to provide the most basic care to the wounded, who would then be transferred to hospital ships and sent on to Athens.

Ha. She wished she could show Ava. Betsy anticipated a quiet and rather dull week sitting in an empty ward, waiting for the odd grazed hand, campfire burn, or broken leg to show up.

Everyone bustled about, of course. Make-work, Betsy decided, to make them feel useful. Betsy was tasked with acquiring cradles for broken legs, which might have been easier if (a) the carpenter had been able to understand her Greek, which apparently wasn’t as clear as she thought it was, and (b) she had any idea of what those cradles were meant to look like.

Betsy was arguing with the carpenter, trying to communicate with him in a combination of broken Greek and elaborate hand gestures, when Dr. Kalopothakes stalked in.

“We need to set up an additional hospital in an old schoolhouse,” she announced, which seemed rather silly to Betsy given that they didn’t yet have any wounded in the hospital they had. “We will need five nurses. You. Miss Hayes.”

Betsy noticed she didn’t say “Nurse Hayes.” “Yes?”

“You will be in charge of the new hospital.”

“But—” She hadn’t the slightest idea of what was needed to set up a hospital. And she suspected—no, she knew—that Dr. Kalopothakes was fully aware of it. “But I’m meant to be seeing to the acquisition of splints,” she finished lamely.

There was a decided glint in Dr. Kalopothakes’s eye. “I am sure they can spare you here. You did want to be useful, you said.”

Yes, but to be in charge? Of a hospital? Well, there would be four other nurses, and hopefully they would have a better idea of what they were doing. Dr. Kalopothakes was just trying to scare her. It was punishment for elbowing her way in after Dr. Kalopothakes had failed her. That bit about being useful was straight out of her petition to the queen.

“Lead the way,” said Betsy brightly.

Her determined cheer faltered a bit at the sight of her new domain. It wasn’t a hospital; it was a hovel. The ground floor was packed earth, and damp. The second story was accessible only by a rickety external staircase. Betsy would have thought it all an elaborate practical joke but for the fact that villagers who had been conscripted to help were rushing about, setting up makeshift cots out of iron supports, wood planks, and straw. Lots and lots of cots.

Betsy stared.

“The people of the town have provided sheets, blankets, and towels,” said Dr. Kalopothakes. “An army doctor will call once a day to see the patients. Send to the Red Cross hospital for anything else you need. Good luck.”

Her tone implied Betsy would need it.

Betsy wandered into the ground floor of the hovel, absently touching her fingers to Charles’s angel beneath the high neck of her new gray uniform.

The other nurses filed in after her. Not a one of them spoke a word of English. They weren’t the society ladies with whom Betsy had trained with the Union of Greek Women. These were the old school of nurses, illiterate and innumerate. Although they had undoubtedly seen a great deal more practical nursing than Betsy had.

Yes, but how were they to communicate any of that to her? Betsy looked around the rows of cots that had been set up, at the pile of pajamas donated by the Red Cross and the supply cupboard sparsely stocked with bottles and jars labeled in Greek.

She didn’t know any of the words.

No, this wouldn’t do at all. She would have to go back.

Back to Charles, who thought she was doing something good and valiant. Back to Dr. Richardson and Ethel and the Harvard boys, who had been all too happy to see the back of her. Back to the exams she hadn’t bothered to study for.

Betsy felt a surge of raw panic.

She couldn’t go back. Not to the glint in Dr. Kalopothakes’s eye, the glint that suggested the other woman knew she’d break and run, not to Charles, not to the American School, not back to Boston, where Ava would say “I told you so” and Lavinia would make her go with her to meetings of the DAR.

“The what?” One of the nurses was saying something to her, in a thick Cretan accent that Betsy had trouble understanding. “They’re coming? Who’s coming?”

Betsy turned and saw someone shoving open the gate of their courtyard and muscling his way through carrying something, one end of a stretcher. The wounded. They came pouring in, one after another, man after man, each smellier than the last, some unconscious, some shouting out, others whimpering in low, helpless tones that went straight to Betsy’s heart.

She stood there, frozen, horrified, as the stretcher bearers eddied around her, depositing their burdens, while the Cretan nurse, in the absence of an actual leader, directed them to cots.