p class="MsoNormal" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"In truth, he'd barely spoken in the last couple of days, often choosing that he would rather sleep or simply wait by the beds of his friends and dying acquaintances while he pressed their wounds and spoke to them in a hushed, careful tone about how it would all soon be over; over by Christmas, even. It should have been fair enough to assume that he hated lying alone in his own bed, with his aching limbs and his sunken eyes, holding a cloth to his own stained and pierced chest whilst constantly suffocated by the thought of the suffering that existed all about him in all the misery of a thinly veiled Hell. Never was he the sort to sit by and watch, after all. /p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He couldn't watch innocent men die all in vain, whether it was from something as wasteful as disease, or as devoid of dignity as the holes and wounds burned into their bodies by guns and the blast of the ever falling shells. No human being deserved that sort of horrific death; and so he told them, in that gentle voice of his. He never knew whether or not what he told them was believed in any form imaginable, but doubt was something he'd grown to find painful, and while he did not enjoy actually putting the subject behind him entirely (he felt far too much guilt when he was not thinking consistently of it), it was simply military pragmatism that called him to not let it dominate his mind. Such shameless, emdemanding/em practicality, indeed!/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The other soldiers always made light humour of his ways, calling him the nurse of the place for his kind hands and his soft eyes, and that he belonged at home with the women. Perhaps it was that they didn't know better, or were simply emdesperate/em enough simply to be able to carelessly laugh once more in their hoarse voices, to maybe even emsmile/emamidst their constant tears and the cracked and broken lines around the dead crevices of their eyes. Yet, he thought no less of them for it, knowing he had no proper reason to do so; the only thing really setting him apart from the rest wasn't to do with his uniform and the imbedded metal of a broken bayonet that he still hadn't been able to pull from the charred, split skin of his chest. It was nothing to do with his medal or the blood that still clung to his throat and his face. In truth, the only one, separating difference was the choice he'd made not to crumble, and to not yet allow himself to die and throw himself into the barbed wire and the roar of the guns. Had he been anymore like the rest of that condemned, burnt cluster of wilting flesh they called a regiment, he would have already been dead for many, many days./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Even so, there were most certainly times when he faced the utmost difficulty, simply in the act of convincing himself he was a grown man; he fought to exactly cement the idea in his mind, to make it unquestionable. Back home, the idea of what made a respectable young man of upright morals and character were so emremoved/em from what he believed of himself while he was dutifully tending to the patients with not a medical credential to his name. He was doing things of which he had never dreamed nor imagined, in stark contrast to who he really was and emcould/em be. He was a soldier, of course, but he was not the responsible, collected, slender young thing he had been in school, a year before he left and enlisted to join a war he didn't properly understand. He was no longer exactly what he had once thought he would come to be; now, he was merely a soft, uncertain wanderer, completely undecided as to what and emwho/em he actually was. He did not know whether he could entirely go by the name of emJames/em any longer./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Still, there were those who called him an emangel/em, and a perfected being with the purpose of comforting and lulling the dying into sleep. For the blood and the wounds, he would stitch them clean. For the bullets, he would pull them loose. For the ailments, he would do all he could, and maybe, just emmaybe/em spare a little of his own water. For the trauma, he would talk./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"They called him emimmortal/em; they called him a man of God, and they called him hope. And yet, even this selfless fellow of beautiful words and cheerful pleasantries was slowly, ever slowly dying, being gradually and painfully pulled into the void. It was a simple thing, he said often; never did he dare to call it something more, or make something of his illness for fear of letting panic seep into either himself or the minds of the others in that wretched place./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It began with the hacking cough, and the fever, but still he would not speak of it./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"And yet, it was a far different matter at night. Only in the darkness did he lie in his own bed and think without restricting himself in reverence of necessity. Only emthen/em did he consider the extent of death, and the waste. Only then did he allow himself to feel the pain in his legs and his arms, and flinch as the thin cries ripped from his raw throat and his fingers clutched for invisible things that were never there. /p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Gone were the carefree smiles, and gone was the shine of his eyes, all while he lay writhing and undignified in a sodden hospital bed./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Yet even emstill/em he was to be selfishly woken, earlier some nights than others, shaken from his stupor of illness by the harsh coughs and sobbing resonating in the dullness of the room. Even still, he was to be forced awake, his blank eyes narrowed and timidly regarding of the person lying beside as his exhaustion forced him to turn onto his side in search for sleep. The person on the opposite bed, so frequently convulsing and sweating in their agony, was not the same boy that had laid there only eighteen hours before. James knew that immediately, despite what little notice he had paid to the boy before; as for the prompt discovery of the new, it had all begun with an exclamation, a trembling and poignant cry, a solid mingling of suffering and resignation in the pitch of the soldier's tone./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"emHad the other one already died? Did they take him away?/em/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The New Zealander shuddered with the mere idea of it, the usual sense of bewildering guilt settling within him, and he fell into a grim, meditating silence. emOnly boys/em, he thought dimly. emNot yet /emmenem, but soon enough they'll be either veterans or corpses/em./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It was no simpler than that./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"But what emwaste/em, that these men with families and lovers were to be trampled so emreadily/em underfoot, nothing other than cannon fodder for the starving artillery! What emsuffering/em, that still rang so clearly on those battlefields and fronts, lingering in the dips of waterlogged duckboards and trenches, residing within the cold stillness of the hospitals where the sobs of dying soldiers went ignored and legs and arms were hacked away./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"However, his bitter thoughts were quickly and suddenly halted, his tears of futility kept back at that moment as he found himself looking once more upon the person at his side. Throwing his stiff and clammy legs over the edge of the filthy sheets, James crept to the bedside to better see the boy. Eyes flicking upwards, he caught sight of movement from the person, and saw their vacant eyes focus on him. They looked surprised; fearful, even, but still they did not speak a word./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Silently, James felt for the soldier's thin, worn shirt, and began peeling it back from their flesh to better see what wounds ailed them. Yet as he did so he had to stifle a yell of shock, biting harshly down on his already white knuckles, his surprise heightened when he felt the cold fingers of the person reach for his hand, clumsy and weak. Laying wide eyes on the soldier's tightly bound chest, the New Zealander, this emangel/em, was silent./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"That was no boy lying on the bed, with cropped hair and dim eyes. It was a emgirl/em- a girl in the bloodied and torn uniform of a man./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"emBut what could he do? What could be done?/em/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He didn't know what to make of her, or perhaps whether she had come to escape the prison of her own home or to fruitlessly rush after the body of a loved one. The truth of any of it was impossible to say, and he felt terrible with the mere thought of it. What had she done to deserve this? What had she done to persuade herself to join in the most terrible war that had ever inflicted humankind, and find herself lying there in the middle of nowhere with her chances of survival numbering a million to one?/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""emWhy?/em"/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Out of the two of them, the fact that he actually managed to bite out those words surprised him more. He'd firmly believed his throat was too dry and too raw to even breathe by that time./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Yet still, she didn't answer, only allowing her head to loll freely to the side, seemingly without any personal control. Whether or not she was asleep or awake, he couldn't tell, but for one of many moments in all the years of that horrid war he felt his own misery at himself sink deeply into the cavern of his stomach. There was nothing he could do for her. emHe/em was nothing./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Slowly lifting his trembling fingers, he clasped the girl's left hand, feeling the start of tears pricking like needles at his eyes as his thumb brushed over the valleys of her bones beneath the burnt skin, and he saw the sickly appearance of her cheeks in the blackness of the hospital. If he was correct, she would not last the night./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"God knew, perhaps they would die together./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Suddenly, though, he started, hearing a low and throbbing groan of agony - like the prolonged notes of the bugle at dusk - being drawn from her lips. Unable to stop himself, he clambered up to sit beside her, with his pale fingers pressed to the angle of her forehead - all at once he was again in his pseudo role of a nurse, completely lacking in knowledge but left with no other alternative. He was only in the hospital while he recovered, and he could not bear the thought of returning to the trenches, to boredom, to paranoia, to restless emmadness/em. While he remained in the hospital, he would do what he could, for not only his own sake but for those of unknowns. Quickly, trembling and exhausted, he attempted to come up with and prove a feeble diagnosis./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"emFever, /emhe concluded, and he closed his eyes./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"There was not a thing he could do, not when they scarcely had enough water in that place to last a week at a time. The only waters were those that hammered against the roof of the hospital and fell against the tin hats of young men, still languishing in the trenches at the mercy of terror. Nobody, not even this dying girl, was desperate enough to drink water that had for so long hidden bones and bodies./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Shaking away his thoughts with a jerk of the chin, he gingerly brought the other hand to rest behind her head, forcing himself only to speak a handful of short, intermittent syllables, despite the scrap of confidence that had lingered in his words of beforehand./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Would you tell me your name if I asked, soldier?" His voice was patient, considerate. "Would you do that?"/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He hadn't expected her to answer the obvious stutter in his words, or to even be conscious enough to hear the almost frantic note invading them; it was surprise enough when she responded./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Yet, it was an unearthly, breaking, strangled sort of sound when she managed to speak, so much so that he was nearly convinced it was emhurting/em him, simply to hear the words being forcefully drawn through her vocal cords. He could not make out what she said, both to his dismay and to his disgrace. He could not face asking again./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"She said nothing more after that; he would not have expected her to, knowing it would have been a pointless exercise in itself to wish for her to talk, and for her to be able to assure him that she would last the night. There was no hope of that, he knew. People died every day, so what was the use in mourning and grieving the life of one lost, abandoned soul? All those men and boys, on a hundred different battlefields around the earth, were suffering and falling and slipping in the mud, being slaughtered in campaigns and wild dashes over No Man's Land at emany/em given moment, pierced clean through by barbed wire and the stray edges of bayonets. She was no different. Her sex didn't matter, nor her name, nor her family back in her own country. Nothing mattered./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"In truth, perhaps he emshouldn't/em have cared, or should not have cried for them, but never could he bring himself to forget it all at whatever minute of the long day. She died right there in the arms of a foreign stranger, with his thin lips pressed to her head in a moment of chilled, resounding quiet and mercy. For a second in time, and in the midst of all that destruction, he didn't care that she was still bleeding and that the liquid had spilled from her dead lips onto his uniform, or that her hands were cold and her face was colder. For a second in time, he didn't care that he was allowing himself to feel remorse over just another dead body, left to rot in the wrong hospital, and that the same body was that of a German girl./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"If only one thing in all of that solid minute, he found himself wondering whether, in those last seconds, she had perhaps lived a moment - if only a moment - of peace./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He couldn't watch innocent men die all in vain, whether it was from something as wasteful as disease, or as devoid of dignity as the holes and wounds burned into their bodies by guns and the blast of the ever falling shells. No human being deserved that sort of horrific death; and so he told them, in that gentle voice of his. He never knew whether or not what he told them was believed in any form imaginable, but doubt was something he'd grown to find painful, and while he did not enjoy actually putting the subject behind him entirely (he felt far too much guilt when he was not thinking consistently of it), it was simply military pragmatism that called him to not let it dominate his mind. Such shameless, emdemanding/em practicality, indeed!/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The other soldiers always made light humour of his ways, calling him the nurse of the place for his kind hands and his soft eyes, and that he belonged at home with the women. Perhaps it was that they didn't know better, or were simply emdesperate/em enough simply to be able to carelessly laugh once more in their hoarse voices, to maybe even emsmile/emamidst their constant tears and the cracked and broken lines around the dead crevices of their eyes. Yet, he thought no less of them for it, knowing he had no proper reason to do so; the only thing really setting him apart from the rest wasn't to do with his uniform and the imbedded metal of a broken bayonet that he still hadn't been able to pull from the charred, split skin of his chest. It was nothing to do with his medal or the blood that still clung to his throat and his face. In truth, the only one, separating difference was the choice he'd made not to crumble, and to not yet allow himself to die and throw himself into the barbed wire and the roar of the guns. Had he been anymore like the rest of that condemned, burnt cluster of wilting flesh they called a regiment, he would have already been dead for many, many days./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Even so, there were most certainly times when he faced the utmost difficulty, simply in the act of convincing himself he was a grown man; he fought to exactly cement the idea in his mind, to make it unquestionable. Back home, the idea of what made a respectable young man of upright morals and character were so emremoved/em from what he believed of himself while he was dutifully tending to the patients with not a medical credential to his name. He was doing things of which he had never dreamed nor imagined, in stark contrast to who he really was and emcould/em be. He was a soldier, of course, but he was not the responsible, collected, slender young thing he had been in school, a year before he left and enlisted to join a war he didn't properly understand. He was no longer exactly what he had once thought he would come to be; now, he was merely a soft, uncertain wanderer, completely undecided as to what and emwho/em he actually was. He did not know whether he could entirely go by the name of emJames/em any longer./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Still, there were those who called him an emangel/em, and a perfected being with the purpose of comforting and lulling the dying into sleep. For the blood and the wounds, he would stitch them clean. For the bullets, he would pull them loose. For the ailments, he would do all he could, and maybe, just emmaybe/em spare a little of his own water. For the trauma, he would talk./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"They called him emimmortal/em; they called him a man of God, and they called him hope. And yet, even this selfless fellow of beautiful words and cheerful pleasantries was slowly, ever slowly dying, being gradually and painfully pulled into the void. It was a simple thing, he said often; never did he dare to call it something more, or make something of his illness for fear of letting panic seep into either himself or the minds of the others in that wretched place./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It began with the hacking cough, and the fever, but still he would not speak of it./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"And yet, it was a far different matter at night. Only in the darkness did he lie in his own bed and think without restricting himself in reverence of necessity. Only emthen/em did he consider the extent of death, and the waste. Only then did he allow himself to feel the pain in his legs and his arms, and flinch as the thin cries ripped from his raw throat and his fingers clutched for invisible things that were never there. /p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Gone were the carefree smiles, and gone was the shine of his eyes, all while he lay writhing and undignified in a sodden hospital bed./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Yet even emstill/em he was to be selfishly woken, earlier some nights than others, shaken from his stupor of illness by the harsh coughs and sobbing resonating in the dullness of the room. Even still, he was to be forced awake, his blank eyes narrowed and timidly regarding of the person lying beside as his exhaustion forced him to turn onto his side in search for sleep. The person on the opposite bed, so frequently convulsing and sweating in their agony, was not the same boy that had laid there only eighteen hours before. James knew that immediately, despite what little notice he had paid to the boy before; as for the prompt discovery of the new, it had all begun with an exclamation, a trembling and poignant cry, a solid mingling of suffering and resignation in the pitch of the soldier's tone./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"emHad the other one already died? Did they take him away?/em/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"The New Zealander shuddered with the mere idea of it, the usual sense of bewildering guilt settling within him, and he fell into a grim, meditating silence. emOnly boys/em, he thought dimly. emNot yet /emmenem, but soon enough they'll be either veterans or corpses/em./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"It was no simpler than that./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"But what emwaste/em, that these men with families and lovers were to be trampled so emreadily/em underfoot, nothing other than cannon fodder for the starving artillery! What emsuffering/em, that still rang so clearly on those battlefields and fronts, lingering in the dips of waterlogged duckboards and trenches, residing within the cold stillness of the hospitals where the sobs of dying soldiers went ignored and legs and arms were hacked away./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"However, his bitter thoughts were quickly and suddenly halted, his tears of futility kept back at that moment as he found himself looking once more upon the person at his side. Throwing his stiff and clammy legs over the edge of the filthy sheets, James crept to the bedside to better see the boy. Eyes flicking upwards, he caught sight of movement from the person, and saw their vacant eyes focus on him. They looked surprised; fearful, even, but still they did not speak a word./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Silently, James felt for the soldier's thin, worn shirt, and began peeling it back from their flesh to better see what wounds ailed them. Yet as he did so he had to stifle a yell of shock, biting harshly down on his already white knuckles, his surprise heightened when he felt the cold fingers of the person reach for his hand, clumsy and weak. Laying wide eyes on the soldier's tightly bound chest, the New Zealander, this emangel/em, was silent./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"That was no boy lying on the bed, with cropped hair and dim eyes. It was a emgirl/em- a girl in the bloodied and torn uniform of a man./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"emBut what could he do? What could be done?/em/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He didn't know what to make of her, or perhaps whether she had come to escape the prison of her own home or to fruitlessly rush after the body of a loved one. The truth of any of it was impossible to say, and he felt terrible with the mere thought of it. What had she done to deserve this? What had she done to persuade herself to join in the most terrible war that had ever inflicted humankind, and find herself lying there in the middle of nowhere with her chances of survival numbering a million to one?/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""emWhy?/em"/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Out of the two of them, the fact that he actually managed to bite out those words surprised him more. He'd firmly believed his throat was too dry and too raw to even breathe by that time./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Yet still, she didn't answer, only allowing her head to loll freely to the side, seemingly without any personal control. Whether or not she was asleep or awake, he couldn't tell, but for one of many moments in all the years of that horrid war he felt his own misery at himself sink deeply into the cavern of his stomach. There was nothing he could do for her. emHe/em was nothing./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Slowly lifting his trembling fingers, he clasped the girl's left hand, feeling the start of tears pricking like needles at his eyes as his thumb brushed over the valleys of her bones beneath the burnt skin, and he saw the sickly appearance of her cheeks in the blackness of the hospital. If he was correct, she would not last the night./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"God knew, perhaps they would die together./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Suddenly, though, he started, hearing a low and throbbing groan of agony - like the prolonged notes of the bugle at dusk - being drawn from her lips. Unable to stop himself, he clambered up to sit beside her, with his pale fingers pressed to the angle of her forehead - all at once he was again in his pseudo role of a nurse, completely lacking in knowledge but left with no other alternative. He was only in the hospital while he recovered, and he could not bear the thought of returning to the trenches, to boredom, to paranoia, to restless emmadness/em. While he remained in the hospital, he would do what he could, for not only his own sake but for those of unknowns. Quickly, trembling and exhausted, he attempted to come up with and prove a feeble diagnosis./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"emFever, /emhe concluded, and he closed his eyes./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"There was not a thing he could do, not when they scarcely had enough water in that place to last a week at a time. The only waters were those that hammered against the roof of the hospital and fell against the tin hats of young men, still languishing in the trenches at the mercy of terror. Nobody, not even this dying girl, was desperate enough to drink water that had for so long hidden bones and bodies./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Shaking away his thoughts with a jerk of the chin, he gingerly brought the other hand to rest behind her head, forcing himself only to speak a handful of short, intermittent syllables, despite the scrap of confidence that had lingered in his words of beforehand./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;""Would you tell me your name if I asked, soldier?" His voice was patient, considerate. "Would you do that?"/p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"He hadn't expected her to answer the obvious stutter in his words, or to even be conscious enough to hear the almost frantic note invading them; it was surprise enough when she responded./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"Yet, it was an unearthly, breaking, strangled sort of sound when she managed to speak, so much so that he was nearly convinced it was emhurting/em him, simply to hear the words being forcefully drawn through her vocal cords. He could not make out what she said, both to his dismay and to his disgrace. He could not face asking again./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"She said nothing more after that; he would not have expected her to, knowing it would have been a pointless exercise in itself to wish for her to talk, and for her to be able to assure him that she would last the night. There was no hope of that, he knew. People died every day, so what was the use in mourning and grieving the life of one lost, abandoned soul? All those men and boys, on a hundred different battlefields around the earth, were suffering and falling and slipping in the mud, being slaughtered in campaigns and wild dashes over No Man's Land at emany/em given moment, pierced clean through by barbed wire and the stray edges of bayonets. She was no different. Her sex didn't matter, nor her name, nor her family back in her own country. Nothing mattered./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"In truth, perhaps he emshouldn't/em have cared, or should not have cried for them, but never could he bring himself to forget it all at whatever minute of the long day. She died right there in the arms of a foreign stranger, with his thin lips pressed to her head in a moment of chilled, resounding quiet and mercy. For a second in time, and in the midst of all that destruction, he didn't care that she was still bleeding and that the liquid had spilled from her dead lips onto his uniform, or that her hands were cold and her face was colder. For a second in time, he didn't care that he was allowing himself to feel remorse over just another dead body, left to rot in the wrong hospital, and that the same body was that of a German girl./p
p style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #2c3635; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.5px;"If only one thing in all of that solid minute, he found himself wondering whether, in those last seconds, she had perhaps lived a moment - if only a moment - of peace./p