full like hearts made great with shot
(Sybil fights a losing battle in the hospital of Downton. Title from "Greater Love" by Wilfred Owen, with my apologies.)
There's a number like a shade that hangs over Nurse Crawley's days, and, as the war drags on, it grows and darkens like a shadow in the evening.
She cannot stop counting the wounded and the dying that pass under her hands, for she never started. With each passing day, though, she knows there is a father doomed to outlive his son, a sister who has seen the last of her brother, a soldier alone in a muddy crater, a sweetheart who will never again feel the ghost of a kiss on her cheek. Each man and boy who she looks down on – faceless, limbless, hopeless, lifeless – is beloved by someone, somewhere. If she can only help them, she can prevent a hole from opening in the fabric of life.
1917 has dragged on, breathed its last, and faded. 1918 has come in, a year born from the mud and rot of the previous years' grave, promising only rancidness and loss. Still, she cannot give up the fight. Field Marshalls are painting their masterpieces with thousands of miles of trenches and oceans of gore. Nurse Crawley's campaign is here. It is the area of a hospital bed, and the most precious and worthwhile war that has ever been waged.
Some days, she is successful. Major Clarkson and the VAD nurses carry the day and field, bringing a man out of a fever, or ridding a boy of a ragged and gangrenous stump. They staunch bleeding, change sick pails, murmur soothing words and gentle hopes by the bedsides of the restless and the despairing.
Other days, she is not, and a bed is emptied not by a recovery, but by defeat.