'Surgery is battle, not poetry.'
How perfectly Renil came to know Master Varan's words that day.
There was, in the end, a certain symmetry to the sentiment. The Rangers' healer knelt upon the dried, mud-caked stubble of the unsown field and felt his fingers tremble.
Once more he was trying to quickly thread a needle before a man-another friend and comrade- bled out. Once more he was trying to battle the relentless foe of time.
Master you spoke too well.
Rubbing a sweating forehead upon his elbow, Renil sat back upon his haunches and took a breath.
Twenty years and countless battles ago the trembling had been different. Green nerves and hesitation. Shock at the rawness of Men's pain and fear. They had made him almost weep at the frustration-the thread sliding everywhere but the blasted little hole. Not now. Sheer dint of repetition had made this elegiac dance of thread and steel almost routine. He could, and had, stitch cleanly and quickly all manner of wounds in the most egregious or ridiculous of circumstances. Under fire from an ambush of Orc arrows. In a pit trap left over from the Poros wars. In the Forbidden Pool when a none-too-sober sergeant had slipped and almost caught his death.
This day the problem was something else. Fatigue. Numbing, grinding effort through days and nights constant fighting had made his fingers tremor like an oldster's. Men fell and bled and died. They dodged the Enemy and still the black tide flowed on. An unceasing river of mud and blood that meandered uncaring of their efforts and there was, it seemed, little they could do about it.
The worst of the wounded had been sent with the wains the night before. The Captain had ordered him to go with the convoy but he could not. There had to be some hope: the Rohirrim might yet come and their spears and hooves turn back the tide, and so Renil, as much a solider as every man of the Company, could not desert his brothers to their fate.
The Captain was not the only man to have a feeling about which orders to disobey.
Every man still standing meant ten Orcs in the dirt.
Breathing out slowly as he could Renil tried to focus once again. Somewhere in this filthy morass of blood and straw he must find something clean for bandage- itt was running out but first he bent to fix a final stitch and carefully wrap a shredded shirt about the wounded private's arm. The last knot has just been set when a piercing, unearthly shriek split the sky.
'Nazgul!'
Amidst the hoarse panicked cry there came a rush of stinking air. A row of black, naked pinions brushed low, glittering mottled black and red, and all Renil could do was turn and press flat to the ground, protect the lad. He braced, certain that any second the bite of hideous rending claws would stab his back. It did not come. As the musty, earthy scent of new-crushed hay rose to tangle with the tang of sweat and fear, the deadly, raucous voice faded from his ears.
Valar, were they spared?
Dazed, Renil struggled to his feet, found himself bruised but not badly hurt, relieved to see the young private deep in a swoon but otherwise untouched. The guards who had helped him were nowhere to be seen. This raised a problem in itself. How was he move the strapping, tall tree of boy now? He scanned the field, one eye to the sky and one on the men around, hoping to find a hand but what had been an orderly retreat was now a rout. Men who did not flinch in the face of slavering, black-hearted Orcs had thrown down their weapons and been paralyzed by fright.
Heart in mouth, he saw off in the distance great black wings flapping above a knot of horses. The fell creatures had merely moved on for another strike and now dove upon the one formation held fast upon the field. Surely it was the Captain? Only Faramir could keep a steady line in the face of such gnawing terror. Renil heard his horn sound over and over—growing fainter but still the clear, high, hope of it made his heart swell within his chest. They must-they could win through. They could. But then he looked farther back.
The farmsteads inside the Rammas had been lit. Below the dusky dim of false twilight lines of red Orc-torches trickled across the brown-gold of the fields. Streams of flowing red, like rills of flower petals caught in a swift-running stream. A multitude- ghastly and quite beautiful.
A voice he knew broke across his thoughts. "Lieutenant, over here!"
Across some yards of smoke and reek his friend Mablung knelt on a grassy mound beside a pile of green and brown. Another man was down and the Ranger was gesturing hurriedly for him to come.
Renil did not hesitate-there was not more he could do for his current charge- and so he grabbed tight his kit, ran through the dim and knelt beside the Ranger. "What is it?"
"Can you help him?" Mablung's voice was strained and hoarse far beyond the normal range of shouting orders.
Renil swallowed and looked down.
Damrod, that caustic and beloved veteran of more battles then Renil had years, lay shivering and deathly white beneath his friend's smoke-streaked, once green woolen cloak. His grizzled face was wrecked. Seeping cuts crossed his silvered beard. One eye was gone. A cheekbone had been smashed.
He was in shock. That one eye wide with pain, not leaving his comrade's face.
Dismayed, Renil looked up once into Mablung's imploring gaze before steeling himself to lift one ragged edge of fabric. Great bloody rents ran from the old sergeant's cheek to thigh- the Nazgul's claws had raked deep and long.
"Mab…" These were mortal wounds. The quiet urbane voice of Minas Tirith's Master Healer rang in his ears. Some battles we cannot win. No, and though he had inured himself to hard decisions, Valar still this hurt. "There is nothing…." he said softly, shaking his head, acres of regret seeping through his ragged voice, but Mablung gripped his arm.
"No. Please." The man's strangled moan and look of mute entreaty were almost too much for Renil bear.
"I cannot…" he began, but then he stopped. Looked down at the ruin of Damrod's face. What did he mean? Save him? For a certainty, for already too much blood had spilled, had watered the parched the earth. Try? Somehow that felt wrong. Damrod, the toughest of old dogs, a survivor, was the longest serving sergeant in the unit. If any man could last through this hell it should be him.. spitting in the face of the Enemy.
After an eternal and sickened heartbeat, Renil nodded. He would try.
Hurriedly, he pulled out a clean needle and his sutures; his precious vial of poppy syrup. Mablung held up the grizzled head and he tipped as much of the viscous liquid as he could spare onto Damrod's tongue, watching for the glassy look of the drug to take over the soft grey of the man's eye. Praise Este. Renil began to set in stitches quickly as he dared. Inch by inch: cheek, shoulder, chest, the neat little stitches wound down, as inexorably as the bright points of light beyond upon the field. Hurry, man. Hurry. He had won this battle once. But then the wound had been not so very long.
"Tulkas' rod. Now don't you go leaving us now, old man. You still owe me twenty castars and your sorry sword won't fetch but half." Mab's whispered words from lips bent next to the Ranger's bloody ear did not surprise. The running bets and jests between these two were part of the fabric of their life.
Damrod, incredibly half-aware despite the pull of the opiate, chuckled weakly. Drops of blood, like thick and painted rain, flew everywhere.
Renil stitched. His arm ached and his vision swam. It was sweat, not tears, or so he told himself. Every minute seemed like an age as fingers held jagged skin together for the quiet whisper of the thread.
Not enough. Not swift enough. His fingers flew still faster. After minutes of cramped and desperate work, when Mablung spoke at first he could register the words.
"He's gone."
The tear-streaked, quiet voice came again and a hand laid upon his arm. "Renil, he's gone."
"No!" Unwilling to accept, he turned and felt quickly for any sign, any hint of a weak rush of tide still in the Ranger's blood. None. The glassy stare had faded. Light had already left the dove grey of his eye. Dunadan, he thought, bizarrely noting it's colour and it's shape. Damrod had the eyes of a high born lord. Why had he never noticed that before?
"My father's name? No ruddy clue. Mam cared now't for what she called the 'unimportant' details, but she knew right enough the gold sheen of his coin."
The old joke choked his throat with tears.
"Mab, I am so sorry…."
"Aye…" Grey-faced, salt-tracks winding downward through the grime, the older lieutenant said a hurried prayer and wrapped the cloak round his dead friend's face. Struggled slowly to his knees and reached over to lift up his sword once more.
'You're wounded!" Renil exclaimed, suddenly realizing that Mablung had used his left. His right was cradled to his chest. The fingers stood out at awkward angles.
"It's nothing."
It was next to the total shredding of a man. Renil drew breath to protest but he did not get the chance. From away down the lines the double note of the Captain's horn blew stridently again. Regroup.
Weary and in pain, the older man accepted a helping hand, climbed to his feet and stood swaying for a moment. Mablung gazed down again, closed his eyes before lifting his dark head to the City gate. It was a scant half league away.
So close and yet so far.
"I must go," he said grimly, testing the weight of the blade within his grip. "The Captain calls."
Renil set a steadying hand upon his shoulder. "You cannot fight like this."
"I have to." Mablung stood stiffly, every sinew and fibre crying out to avenge his friend but that was not what they needed most.
Tomorrow the host of the Enemy would be at the City's gate.
"No." Renil shook his head, surprised himself with the vehemence of his words. "They need you, healed, for another day. Some battles we cannot win…and there is no dishonour to leave the field." No dishonour and still something that Mablung could do. Every man that they could save would be needed inside the walls.
Dark eyes held his. A grimed and swollen hand came up to lie against his breast in a facsimile of salute.
"Valar guard and guide you," Mablung whispered thickly. He turned away and began to march; shoulders back, head high, calling to the men nearby, drawing then out of their frightened stupor.
"And you," Renil whispered, and then mechanically began to put needles back in their little case, slipped the vial back into the leather pocket that held it safe. He turned to watch the tall Ranger retreating into the reddened mist.
Would it be better if he too were inside Minas Tirith's walls? Helped the Houses as Captain Faramir had said?
Looking down one last time at the man he failed to save, he shook his head. The moment would be sharp and clear as crystal for ever in his memory. The mud. The red rivulets of pooling blood. The frustration that, sometimes, he could do naught in the face of a greater foe.
Surgery is battle. Aye master.
And the battle is out here.
He turned and walked the other way.
.
On this Remembrance Day.
The phrase: "Surgery is battle, not poetry' comes from Kevin Patterson's 'In Flanders Fields: 100 Years. Soldier Surgeon, Soldier Poet. a retrospective of Dr. John MacRae's life'. A doctor with the Canadian Field Artillery in the First World War, MacRae wrote his famous poem after the death of a friend at the battle of Ypres. The poem is a central part of Remembrance Day assemblies at schools across Canada.