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Ah, Frangie is wrong: she knows.
“We’re getting you out to battalion aid as soon as Manning’s back with the jeep,” Frangie tells PFC Morton.
“Okay, Doc.” She’s passive, docile. The fever ague has burned itself out. “I’m cold, is all.”
“I’m going to give you a little happy juice, okay?”
“Okay, Doc.”
She stabs the needle into her exposed upper arm and squeezes morphine into her.
“You rest easy, Private. We’re going to transport you in just a few minutes.”
Frangie has stopped thinking of statements like that as lies. They are medicine, of a sort. Death might be inevitable, but hope is a gift she can give; though with each lie she feels a part of herself wither.
The last word so many men and women in the Hürtgen hear is a lie. It feels wrong. It feels disrespectful. A person should know when they are soon to meet their maker.
But no, that’s nonsense. Injured soldiers are problems to be managed, and a lie makes the managing easier.
Suddenly the air is torn again by the shrieks of incoming artillery. Now, in a heartbeat, she must make the decision: stay with the doomed woman to the end and likely be killed herself? Or run for cover on the grounds that she is more useful to more people alive?
“Hang tight,” Frangie says.
Then she dives into the nearest hole along with Deacon. It turns out to be a foxhole inhabited by a pair of cousins from Annapolis, Maryland, named Jessie and James, Jessie being a rather chubby young woman while her male cousin, James, is so thin he’s invisible standing sideways.
“Sorry!” Frangie cries as the treetops explode again.
“Any time, Doc,” Jessie says.
The four of them are so tight in the hole that none of them can really cower as effectively as they’d like. The cousins have made a sort of shelf that allows them to just barely squeeze beneath six
inches of dirt piled on a mat made of twigs and leaves. Useless except against the weakest of splinters, but a frightened soldier will take any small advantage.
This is barrage number what? Frangie wonders. Fifteen? Twenty? One thousand? It’s been like this forever. Splinter wounds. Shrapnel wounds. Concussion. Battle fatigue. Trench foot. The eternal dysentery. She’s a doctor on rounds that never end. When she sleeps it’s in snatches of an hour. Or a standing nap, as she’s come to think of them, when she simply goes blank and weaves back and forth, eyes closed until someone or something snaps her out of it.
Now, leaning against Jessie and James and Deacon, despite the mad destruction all around, she almost falls asleep again. Splinters patter on her helmet like deadly raindrops. Deacon yelps as a small shard stabs his shoulder.
The barrage ends—for the moment. The Germans have developed the trick of pausing a barrage just long enough for GIs to start thinking it’s safe, and then dropping artillery on them as they emerge from their holes.
The lieutenant is yelling just that. “Stay in your holes! Stay in your holes!”
But that does not apply to medics. Frangie crawls to the man with the splinter wounds. He’s dead, finished off by a mercifully quick shard of steel shrapnel through his head.
She listens for cries of pain. “Anyone hurt?” she yells.
A voice calls back, “I pissed myself, does that count?”
She goes back to the Jessie and James hole where James informs her that his feet are mostly all better now. James had suffered a very common injury: trench foot, the nasty result of feet too long in cold and wet.
“Glad to hear it,” Frangie says. “In the future be careful to attend to your feet, I do not have time to be dealing with every—”
“Medic! Medic! Doc!”
Now the cry goes up, and again Jessie, James, and Deacon all unite to propel her up and out of the hole, with Deacon scrambling up after her. They run toward the cries and flop down beside a fighting hole in which a corporal is bellowing in pain. They make to pull him up, but he starts screaming that the pain is too great.
So Frangie drops down beside him and quickly discovers that he has scalded his leg with spilled coffee.
Now Frangie does her best impersonation of an exploding 88. “This is why you’re screaming like a baby? What is the matter with you? You have me running over here because you’re too clumsy to hold on to your coffee?”
