CH 63

The weather had been particularly sunny lately. As Annette was returning to the sanitarium building after lunch, she suddenly felt dizzy from the dazzling sunlight.

She closed her eyes, furrowed her brow, and resisted the dizziness.

Recently, the dizziness and migraines had become worse again. She was also overworked, but she blamed her stress on the atmosphere in the field hospital.

Standing still, her throbbing head seemed to gradually quiet down. Annette waited until she felt completely better.

“Hey…hey.”

“….”

“Hello?”

“…”

“Hey! Are you okay?”

Annette opened her eyes quickly. A strange soldier with a cigar between his index and middle fingers was leaning over her. Annette took a startled step back.

She heard voices, but they sounded a little far away and she thought they were calling for someone else.

“Yes, yes……….?”

“You were standing still and I wondered if there was something wrong.”

“Oh, I’m fine. I got dizzy from the sun for a moment………Thank you.”

Annette smiled awkwardly and tried to walk past him. Then the soldier called her again.

“Excuse me!”

“…… yes?”

Annette turned around. The soldier held up his hands as if he hadn’t meant to startle her.

“Oh, I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

Annette looked at him warily, as was her habit. Scratching the back of his head, the soldier hesitantly asked, 

“Um, I was wondering if—do you remember Martin?”

“Martin?”

“Yeah, the one with the penetrating wound on his leg  ……… you changed the bandage a few days ago.”

“…… Ah!”

Annette, who had been listening to the soldier’s explanation with a faint smile, nodded.

“I remember. But why………..?”

It was the wounded soldier who had been violently aggressive, screaming don’t anesthetize him. He was also the one who wounded her cheek.

“My name is Justin. I am a colleague of Martin’s.”

The soldier introduced himself and extended his hand for a handshake. Annette inadvertently shook his hand and introduced her name as well.

“I’m Annette.”

“I’m the one who held Martin down when he was aggressive that time, don’t you remember?”

Annette smiled vaguely. Frankly, she didn’t remember him at all. It was an unnerving and all too brief moment at the time.

“Oh, well, it’s not about me. I wanted to talk to you about Martin. Are you busy, by any chance?”

“No, I’m fine. What is it?”

Justin put the cigar in his mouth and took a deep drag, his cheeks sunken.

“My friend is in shock and a little upset. He can be very violent if not in his right mind. He was in the trenches.”

With his words, a whitish puff of smoke flowed. Annette nodded quietly, as she had guessed.

“Shell shock, I guess.”

“That’s what we call it. Well, I guess we all do, but several of Martin’s colleagues have died and been injured. But as you know, it’s hard to treat them properly in combat. We were extremely confined in the trenches, so we weren’t even in a situation to procure supplies.”

“…”

“Wounds that would normally have taken time to treat were, well, in that situation…there’s nothing you can do about it. The injured limbs were anesthetized and amputated by a military doctor. And Martin stood by and watched it happen.”

It was a common story. There was no time in wartime to carefully treat each soldier.

The treatment had to be done in the shortest possible time and in the most efficient and life-threatening way.

The military doctors could amputate limbs with their eyes closed, so much so that they said they felt like a butcher instead of a doctor.

“I don’t know when exactly Martin became that way. But when the war was over, he did. He has an extreme fear and reluctance to be anesthetized. He was afraid they were going to amputate his leg.”

“I see.”

Annette replied calmly. In fact, it was a story every front-line nurse could have predicted. Justin looked at the burning cigar for a moment, then chuckled bitterly.

“It’s a common story, isn’t it?”

“I can’t say it’s …… different.”

“Everyone said you don’t have  experience. They said if get treated by you, something might go wrong.”

Annette stared at Justin with no sign of anything. It wasn’t that she didn’t have any feelings, but she was used to the treatment by now.

The nursing officer and even her fellow nurses were asking her if she could do the dressing.

What should the soldiers think of her?

“I’m not trying to attack you, but there was a lot of talk about how you were on the frontline and pretended to work for your reputation.”

“…”

“When I heard that, I thought, well, I guess that’s true—“

“…”

“Now that I get to know you, the rumors don’t seem to be true.”

The smoke dissipated into the wind. Justin dropped his burnt-out cigar on the ground and rubbed it out with his foot.

“What my friend said—I apologize on his behalf.”

“No.”

“I know it sounds meaningless, but he wasn’t originally like that.”

Annette thought about the word for a moment.

She wondered if there were people who were originally like that. If he really wasn’t “originally such a person,” was it his birth, his raw background, or his direction of life where the guilt lies?

Did people born to be that way, or circumstances made them that way?

“Is your face alright?”

Justin asked, tapping his own cheek. Annette nodded quietly with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

“I’m glad …….”

***

“Medic! Medic! Nick’s been shot!”‘

“Heiner! Cover me!”

Heiner nodded as he ducked behind the turret. Shells exploded in all directions and bullets rained down incessantly.

Adolf injected Nick with morphine as he laid him down. Nick stared at the gunshot wound in his stomach, gasping for breath.

Heiner, who had fired over the turret, looked back at them and shouted.

”It’s about to open! We have to go now!’

“Damn it! He’s bleeding too much!”

Heiner ran over to check the situation. Nick’s face was white as flour dough.

Heiner made eye contact with Nick and shouted.

“Nick, look at me! It’s going to be okay. You’ve got to be strong. It’s going to be okay. You got it?”

Adolf stuffed gauze into the gunshot wound to stop the bleeding. Nick mumbled with a sob through his pale lips.

“Lord, I don’t want to die. I……”

“You’re not going to die! You’re going to be okay. Can you hear me?”

Heiner said determinedly, but Nick didn’t seem to hear him at all.

A gurgle of blood spit out of his mouth.

“I don’t want to die………..”

Bang! Bullets flew. Nick’s body twitched and limp. Seconds later, Adolf shouted as he was concentrating on stopping the abdominal bleeding.

”It’s done! I’ve stopped the bleeding!”

Heiner gritted his teeth and grabbed Adolf’s shoulder. Only then did Adolf finally take his eyes off Nick’s gunshot wound and look up.

Nick, who had been hit in the chest by another bullet, was dead with his eyes open. Adolf threw the gauze away with his bloody hands.

“Jesus Christ! Give them time to heal, dog!”

“I’ll cover you, go left!”

Adolf cursed and readied his equipment. Heiner removed Nick’s military tag, shoved it into his pocket, and reloaded his pistol.

His ears were deafened by the sound of shells falling as if they were going to burn the world. Ta ta ta ta! Heiner turned around as he fired into the opposing camp.

He ran, shot, and ran again. He took cover, threw grenades, killed someone, watched someone die.

At one moment, the world slowly drifted away. Heiner looked around, breathing hard. Only the sound of his breathing filled his ears.

The whole place was a sniveling mess. Bullet-riddled soldiers flopped to the ground everywhere. Some were wandering around at a loss, holding up their own arms that had fallen off.

For a moment he felt as if he had lost his way. He knew for a fact that he should not stop, but for some reason his legs would not move.

What on earth is at the end of this hell?

Just as he thought that, someone passed by him.

A soldier with a broken knee was limping toward the emergency room. The soldier tripped over a rock and fell, but finally crawled to the entrance of the clinic.

A woman in a nurse’s uniform, messed up with dirt and blood, ran out. The nurse helped him up and supported him. She then raised her head.

Her golden hair shone in the light of the noon sun. The blue eyes resembling the sea that he had pursued all his life were looking straight at him.

“Ah…”

All the noise in the world  faded away. Boom. His heart was beating wildly with the tension and excitement of the battlefield. Heiner closed his eyes and then opened them.