"What happened?" Emilie yelled, switching back to Deutsch fluidly, as she erupted into a building where some of the men were gathered, breathless. "Who's hurt?" She had a painful, nagging cramp in the flesh at the back of her shin, but she paid no attention to it.
Only a few men turned to her, snarling questions like "and where have you been?" But the rest remained silent, sitting down with their shoulders hunched and the butt of their guns resting against their foreheads. Defeated. The smell of gunpowder filled the air, filling her nostrils and tickling her nose so she had to stifle a sneeze.
Her CO was staring glumly out an open window that faced the huge 205mm railway gun that lay a few kilometres away, that had been used in World War I and fired shells as large as the 16-inch naval guns that had supported the Americans at Utah beach during Normandy. They still used it now, in Hagenau, to counter the American's own artillery.
He turned to face her, his voice deadly but exhausted. "The Americans have taken an Unteroffizier and a Feldwebel prisoner. They would have taken a third, but that man was wounded by a bullet that punctured his lungs and has been left to die on the river bank. No one can get to him without drawing fire. He is dying a slow and painful death. They came across the river on boats like ghosts in the night. We had little time to react, and by that time, it was already too late." She saw him swallow; he was clearly struggling to remain calm and collected. When he finally spoke again, his voice was stiff, anger forced down. "And where, sergeant Demont, were you?"
Emilie's eyes widened as she struggled to take it all in. Finally, she managed to croak, "No excuse, sir." She cleared her throat and tried again, though her voice still wavered slightly. What had been unimaginable joy not fifteen minutes ago had become an unspeakable tragedy and another name to add to her list of people she had gotten killed. But the others had all been clean, quick deaths, with no pain, and at least that had been some consolation: Kattenstroht, Drechsler, Tobias. But now there was that man, with a drawn-out, agonising death, panicking because he couldn't suck in enough air, all alone. "I'm… so sorry."
"Don't be sorry!" her CO roared through gritted teeth, spittle erupting from his mouth and flying into the air, before collecting himself and turning his back to her, rubbing his forehead with one hand. He let out a sigh, voice lower now. "Be here when we need you."
Saluting weakly, which made her feel even more terrible as she was usually so strong and unbreakable even in the toughest of situations (well, at least, she had been before the war), Emilie turned, grabbed a pistol from one of the tables the men were sitting at, and limped out of the building, jaw set so they wouldn't see her quivering chin. She had been yelled at before and had hardly blinked; indeed, she had often purposely provoked her ranking officers just to get a reaction. But never for such serious matters. And now it hurt more than ever.
The men mumbled curiously, the man she had taken the gun from calling out after her questioningly, demanding his pistol back, but she ignored them all. "Where are you going?" her CO called out after her, "What are you doing with that gun? You are a medic; you fight wounds, not people." People. Most officers called them 'soldiers', as though they were no longer human beings.
"I'm going to go get my soldier back," she replied, voice low, cocking the pistol, "Even if I only bring back his corpse."
