Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(114)
An open staff car carries the black-uniformed officer who ordered her patient shot and a second officer in the more familiar butternut khaki. There is clearly no love lost between these two as she learns from their body language, each on his own side of the car, each avoiding looking at the other.
A young German who is missing his right foot rides along in the truck and offers her a half cigarette. Frangie doesn’t smoke, and in any case fears if she takes it she’ll be accepting some unspoken bargain. She shakes her head no.
The soldier shrugs, says something to his companion, gets a laugh in return.
The ambulance is just behind them and off to one side to avoid the vast clouds of choking dust the truck tires throw up. The ambulance driver leans out of his window and yells something that Frangie does not understand but contains one word she has learned: schwarze.
Black.
The cigarette soldier gives her a light shove and waves her toward the ambulance, but they’re moving at a steady twenty miles an hour. Maybe she can jump off the truck, but she can’t climb onto the ambulance.
Another shout, an impatient wave, and Hungry Eyes, the lowering brute who seems more or less in charge of the wounded, says something that causes cigarette soldier to shove her again, harder.
She stands up, bracing against the lurching, spine-jarring assault of the truck’s suspension, climbs as far down as she can, down onto the bumper, takes a deep breath, and jumps the last two feet. Unsurprisingly she stumbles, falls on her back, and rolls onto her side to stand up.
The ambulance comes to a halt beside her. The back door now flies open and the Doctor-Major yells, “Get in here, American.”
The inside of the ambulance reeks of sweat, vomit, human waste, and fear. The sides are lined with stretchers hinged to the walls, three on each side, but there are two men in each cot, lying head to foot, and three more sitting hunched over against the front of the rectangular space.
Frangie frantically runs through what she knows about typhus, but that turns out to be almost nothing.
The Doctor-Major says, “Lice,” as if answering her query. “We raided a village, not knowing . . . Some of the men passed their time with the women, many of whom turned out to be louse-ridden with rickettsia typhi–bearing lice. It’s a nasty little disease that displays as a very severe headache, fever, cough, muscle pain . . . death in usually twenty percent or so of healthy men, but these are not healthy men, these are exhausted men who have gone too often without food or water or sanitation.”
The men are either stripped down to their underwear or buried in blankets, depending on the state of their fevers. Frangie sees rashes from the illness, but also protruding ribs and injuries in various stages of healing . . . or not healing.
“I have had no sleep in three days,” the Doctor-Major says. “I must sleep.”
His eyes are glassy, his whiskered face sallow.
“Have you taken your own temperature, Doctor-Major?”
He hesitates, bites his lip. “One hundred point five. And yes, my head aches and my muscles as well. I pray it is not typhus or who will care for these men? It is only me.”
He pulls a blanket from a man who, Frangie now sees, is dead. He spreads the blanket out on the filthy floor, lies down, mutters something about rationing the water, they always want water, and falls asleep.
Wasser. That was the German word for water. There is a tin ten-gallon tank bolted to the wall behind one of the seated men. A tin cup hangs from a chain and rattles softly.
Schwarze, give me water . . .
I want morphine, kaffer, this pain . . .
I am so cold . . .
They are the enemy, and they have come down with this disease as a consequence of attacking a village and raping the women. They are abusive, despite being sick, arrogant though prone. These are not fresh recruits, that is clear from their disease-yellowed tans, the ancient scars, and the tattoos that proudly advertise the names of battles they fought against the British and the French before them.
First: love. That was what my faith has taught me.
Love even those that hate you.
Well, Frangie Marr is nowhere near summoning love for these men, but she can dole out water and hold the bucket for men who vomited, and she can spoon-feed potted meat and rehydrated cabbage to the men who can eat. She can do that.
Hour after hour the column lurches on. An especially sharp jolt wakes the Doctor-Major, who rises groggily to check on his patients. A new one arrives to be manhandled into the back of the ambulance, and is laid on the blanket the Doctor-Major had vacated, both Frangie and the German doctor straining weary muscles.
Frangie leaves the door swinging open, squeaking and banging as the ambulance hits ruts and gullies and climbs soft hillocks of sand with grinding gears. The fresh air is worth the noise. Night has long since come and is now threatened by just a hint of gray in the east. A half-track is behind them and to one side, headlights slitted, machine limned by silver starlight.
“How much longer?” Frangie asks.
The Doctor-Major has slept seven hours and awakened at last to find his charges all well cared for. And the mood has changed. Frangie is no longer Schwarze, at least for some of the men, she has become Schwester: sister.
Nurse.
The Doctor-Major shakes his head. “I don’t know. We are to rendezvous with a tank unit. But that is only the next step, America, it never ends, you know. It never ends, this war. You’ll see.”