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"The man," he said. He struggled to speak, his throat protesting the effort of producing sound. "The man... who brought me in. Is he—"

The nurse shook her head before he finished.

"He's gone back to his unit," she said softly. "Left in the morning before dawn. The officer in charge said he'd been given orders to return, that his presence here was irregular. Proper protocol had to be observed."

She paused.

"He was asking about you. Every hour, he was asking if you had stabilized. Every time we returned from the operating theatre, he was waiting for confirmation."

Alistair closed his eyes. He did not ask for more details or seek clarification about when Tomasz left. He did not want to know the specifics of their final goodbye. What she told him was enough. The man who carried him across no man's land, who had been his shelter and survival with his massive frame, released him into this institutional space and returned to where duty called him. They carried out the crossing. The transfer was complete. The physical part of their commitment was over.

The nurse finished her assessment. She stepped away from the cot, away from the officer's devastation, and moved toward the other beds and tents that needed her attention. She did not speak.

Alistair's hand moved, slipping beneath his shirt toward the small object secured against his chest. This artifact was the only concrete proof left of the man who carried him. It was the only tangible evidence his experience was not just a fever dream or a product of a damaged mind unable to tell fantasy from reality.

The rosary was still there, secure beneath the fabric, resting against his skin. The small weight proved that Tomasz was real. It proved that he had been present and made the decision at some point during their journey to entrust it to him. His fingers wrapped around the small beads. He felt the rough, wooden texture beneath his fingertips. It was handmade, not manufactured, and its value went beyond the price of its materials. He held it against his chest and inhaled deeply.

As Alistair lay in the hospital tent, his left leg gone, his right leg in plaster, he held the rosary close and realized the journey was not over. The carrying continued, the sense of duty lingered. It persisted in the realm of faith, prayer, and the spiritual commitment that one could embed in a precious object worn close to the heart.

***

THE NURSE RETURNED later with a mug of water, which Alistair sipped in cautious increments, discovering that his mouth did not quite remember how to swallow. She sat on the edge of the cot then, and for a long minute regarded him as if weighing how much of her own time he could afford to occupy. She placed one hand on the thin blanket near his right knee, her fingers pressing gently on the wool, as though she were trying to anchor him there.

"You don't remember... the arrival?" she asked in French. Her English dissolved in the light of morning, replaced by her native tongue, which sounded softer, more private, as if a secret she was offering only to him.

He shook his head slowly. Memory was a filmstrip with frames missing. The last thing he could recall was lying in the jeep, cradled in Tomasz’s lap, an immense yet gentle hand caressing his forehead. Then he awoke here, disfigured in this hospital.

"It took four of us to get you from his arms." Her voice was matter of fact. "And then, he still would not leave you. Even when you were already inside, and the doctors were cutting away the splints and boots. We asked three times, then four. The last time, we had to bring in the matron. She threatened to call the gendarmes." A small smile, a private amusement. "It made no difference. He kept both hands on your chest, as if he were holding your heart inside your body.”

He could see it, the immense shape of Tomasz, looming and immovable, his hands still unwilling to let go of him while the doctors cut away the splints. He could almost feel them still on his skin. The memory was not his, but it played behind his eyelids anyway, a theater of the absurd in which he was both audience and central prop.

"He collapsed," the nurse said after a pause. "Just outside the operating tent. The long trek ruined his feet. I think he was walking on the bones alone. He had a fever too, though not as bad as yours. They are calling it trench-foot, but it is more than that. He would not let us cut the uniform from his body, either. He kept asking for you. In broken French, in bad German, in something else I couldn't understand."

Alistair closed his hand tighter around the rosary beads. He tried to summon a picture of Tomasz not as the unshakable pillar, but as a man undone, as a body with its own limits, its own capacity for breaking. It was difficult. The myth of the man threatened to overwrite the memory of the real.

"They put him here," the nurse said, tapping the cot with her fingers, "right beside you. He looked ridiculous, with his feet hanging out over the bed. He would wake every hour and check if you were breathing. He would not let them sedate him, even when the pain was..." She gestured, her hand rising and falling like a wave. "I don't know if he slept, but he sat there for three days and three nights. He watched you almost as if he were afraid you would vanish if he looked away."

She looked away herself then, wiping at her brow with the back of her hand as if she could brush away the residue of the story along with the sweat. "He left this morning before the sun rose, is what I heard. There was a man in an officer’s cap, and long words about policy and procedure. He almost broke the door. But in the end, he went.”

The light shifted on the ceiling of the tent. It slid from the patched seams to the pale line of canvas above his head, and Alistair watched it as if he were expecting the world itself to change shape and accommodate the new knowledge.

The nurse stood, smoothing her skirt over her hips. She was sympathetic, but she had other patients. She hesitated at the foot of the cot, as if she were wishing for some small sign that he understood; perhaps that he might even survive. In her pause, he found the courage to force his voice into the air.

“Tu étais si fort, mon ami.”

After she left, the tent returned to its quiet rhythm of rain. Alistair lay still; his hand pressed to the beads beneath his shirt as if they were a wound. The world was smaller than before; it was the size of the tent, the size of the cot, the size of a body that was no longer whole. He listened to the rain, and to the distant, indistinct sounds beyond the tent—boots in mud, the clatter of metal, a voice calling a single syllable before it was swallowed by the morning.

Sleep still eluded him. He drifted in and out, circling the perimeter of consciousness, tracing the edges of his loss and the shape of the life he had left. Once, he thought he heard the voice of the nurse again, or perhaps a different nurse, or even the memory of her voice echoing through the fabric of the tent. He imagined Tomasz at the threshold, enormous and spectral, unable to enter but refusing to leave. In the logic of fever and recovery, anything was possible. In that logic, anything could return.

The next morning the pain had receded enough that he could sit up, supported by pillows and the rigid geometry of his new anatomy. The nurse brought him a cup of broth that tasted of onions and bone; it was the best thing he had tasted in his memory.

Later, she returned with a pair of crutches. They were heavy, wooden, and scarred from earlier users. She set them beside the cot without comment. For hours he looked at them. There was no drama to it. They were there, and he was here, and the space between them measured the distance between past and future.

Since the trench, every mile had belonged to someone else’s strength. Tomasz had lifted him, carried him, borne his body across ruined fields and through the raging river. He stood guard over him night after night, protecting him from every danger, and even took a life to keep him safe. Now, for the first time, there was something waiting beside the officer’s bed that asked something else of him: to carry himself again.

Later, when the evening light was slanting in through the patched tent wall, he tried to stand. It was a process that required aid, both from the nurse and from the architecture of the cot itself. His right leg, encased in plaster, could bear little weight, so he propped himself on the crutches and wobbled precariously, balancing on the edge of collapse. The world tilted beneath him; every muscle in his arms and chest trembled with the strain of supporting this new and unfamiliar balance.

But he did not fall. He stood, swaying in the center of the tent, and for the first time since waking, he found it imaginable to admit the possibility of continuity, of persistence, to consider a future that was not just a cadence of loss.