Summary: Madge, a nurse at the end of the Great War meets a young, wounded soldier in her hospital in France. This is their story. Rated T for mentions of violence and gore.
A/N: This is my first historical piece! I tried to be accurate with dates, places and the symptoms of some medical conditions, but I can't promise it's all accurate, I build the facts around my original idea.
Rouen, France - 1918
"Madge, it's over. I swear it's over," Mags Flanagan shouts. The head nurse is shaking the girl, barely able to contain her joy when she pulls her in for a hug.
Everyone in the hospital is either cheering or in absolute shock. Madge is the latter, she lets Mags throw her arms around her tightly with no reaction, only wide eyes and a loud, beating heart. "It just doesn't feel real."
"But it is, girl. Our boys can finally go home. We've won."
Madge has only been deployed as nurse for almost a year, but the war has been going on for years before that. Her entire teenage life was watching the horrors happening in Europe unfold in the daily news and on the radio. It's what caused her to sign up for the nurses corps as soon as Wilson declared America was joining the fight.
And Madge never considered herself a healer, she grew up to privilege that shielded her from those who were hurting. But when she thought about those wounded soldiers and civilians, she knew she had to at least try. For them, but also in a way for herself.
Perhaps the reason she's in a state of disbelief is because there's still so much work to be done. There are still men lined up on the hospital beds with every wound and illness imaginable, and Madge knows the nurse will still be here working hard for many months to come.
Her weariness is warranted too. A couple days after joyous celebration for the armistice and positive emotions pulsing through the hospital, a team of Red Cross soldiers come back with bodies, apparently still alive, found in the trenches. The short-lived happiness is gone and then solemn weary tone of dying soldiers comes back far too soon. Madge looks at the men they're carrying in onto the hospital beds, covered in mud and some of them moaning in pain. Knowing that this means she has to do her job now, and well, she heads over to her station and scans the man on her bed.
"Condition?" she asks routinely.
"Mustard gas poisoning, we suspect it burned the inside of his throat. That's the major problem, but there's also a bayonet wound on his right arm."
The soldier's arm is heavily bandaged and when Madge lifts it slightly to take a look, she sees dark oozing flesh and flinches. Even if she is a nurse, infections still unsettle her. She's going to have to clean it, and she is thankful that he looks to be asleep, or in a coma. He won't be shouting in pain when she presses iodine to the stab wound.
"Thank you, I can take over now," she nods, thanking the Red Cross member and immediately grabbing a towel to soak in the warm water bath.
Madge wrings it out methodically and steps over to the head of the cot, and she begins to wipe away the mud and the grime from his face. Underneath it all, the man looks peaceful, she notices his long eyelashes and his coarse, dark hair. He looks like he is just taking a nap after a long day, not like he'd been brutally attacked in the trenches just days ago. If they were in a different circumstance, perhaps if Madge had ran into him in a coffee shop back in Baltimore or if he'd asked her out to the movies, she would've thought him to be rather handsome. But she doesn't have time for that right now, not when his body is failing him and she needs to save him.
The medical team that found him did a good job of taking care of his skin, it looks clean enough, they probably wiped it off to prevent too many blisters. His torso is wrapped in a wool blanket, and when she unwraps it to take a look there are only a few that have formed on his tan skin. So Madge starts to wash him in a solution made to treat gas poisoning like this. Hopefully it will do something to soothe the pain he must be feeling behind his eyelids.
After a day, the biggest problem becomes the fact that this soldier isn't waking up. He barely stirs, and when Madge sits on the chair at his bedside she only feels reassures by the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He's comatose, that much is certain. The nurses have seen countless cases of comatose patients that just wouldn't wake up, but Madge hopes this one is different. The war is over, the suffering should've ended. She does all she can, cleaning his skin and taking care of the bayonet wound as her job intends.
"How is he doing?" asks Nurse Cresta one day as she passes by her makeshift hospital room. The beds are only separated by dividers and curtains in a large hall but the nurses still try to value the privacy of the soldiers.
"He's healing well," Madge replies, perhaps trying to convince herself more than her friend. "The infection is dying down. Perhaps he'll awaken soon."
"How long has it been?"
"The man from the Red Cross said that he was stirring when they rescued him. So I suppose it's been four days? Five?"
Annie looks hesitant. Comas that last that long are usually helpless. Before the war ended, they didn't have time to treat comas that lasted that long. There were men coming in everyday requiring immediate attention, the soldiers who wouldn't wake up were taken away, brought to a different hospital to heal, apparently. Madge has no idea what really happened to them, but she's grateful the stream of aching bodies has ended, so that she can watch over this one.
Madge considers it a blessing, the fact that she can look after him properly. Each day she sits by the foot of his bed, observing him in his unconscious state. Occasionally he stirs, squinting his eyes and bobbing his Adam's apple in a way that make Madge jump up and prepare for him to wake up, but every time he doesn't open his eyes. She sighs, heading back to her seat and continuing to wait.
And she wants to know his name too. She wants to know so that she can write it on the stupid patient information card and say it to herself in her head. A handful of generals come by trying to identify some of the dead bodies and the unknown soldiers, but when Madge ushers them in to try and name her sleeping man, the effort is fruitless.
"Are you sure you don't recognize him? Not by name, just by division, rank, anything?"
"That's not how it worked in the trenches, Missus," one man explains to her. "I know my own corps, never saw anyone else. I'm sorry, I can't help you."
She knew it was true before the asked the question. It was a stupid one, but she's desperate to help him at this point. He has a family, friends, maybe even a wife that loves him dearly and they deserve to know that he's safe.
Madge has never found the need to be an optimist, always trying to be pragmatic in the facets of her life. But right now she needs to see the better outcome and convince herself of things that don't even make sense, because everything around her is telling her otherwise.
"He's not waking up," Clove asserts one day while she passes by with a cart of clean towels. "It's almost been two weeks, you can't believe that he'll wake up now."
"Why not? He's still breathing and his wounds are practically healed. He has to."
"Why do you need him to wake up anyway, Madge?"
"Because I am a decent human being? And a nurse. It's my job."
"As long as you don't confuse your job with your feelings, Madge," her colleague points out. She really is that transparent isn't she? "He probably has a girl at home, maybe even kids. Don't fantasize a little story for him if you don't know the real one. You've done everything you could, that was your job."
Clove is right, nothing good is pointed her way. And yet Madge stays as she is. She writes home telling her parents that she's planning on coming home after at least two more months, and she continues to change all of his bandages, even when the wounds are practically healed with only bumpy scars in their place.
Her soldier's state makes her cry. Once at night, right before she was ready to retire for the evening, she looks back at him sleeping peacefully with his arms to the side. Over the weeks he's been here his beard has grown out quite substantially, a thick dark mass of hair that doesn't detract from his good looks, but Madge strokes his face nonetheless.
"Please," she whispers. "Please live."
Partially she wants it because the war is over. For him, it's because he needs to go home and celebrate the victory. But for her, Madge can't lose her last patient. That would do awful things to her hope, she needs to save him so that she can sleep at night. But also, there's that other thing, that thing Clove alluded to. This man holds a mystery that she has to solve, and she's drawn to him in a way that she can't describe.
She prays and she prays. Madge never really listened at Sunday School and she always peaked her eyes open when her father was giving grace before a meal, but she thinks the best thing right now is to pray. In her sleep she whispers to whoever is up there and begs for his recovery.
She begs even when everyone says it's useless.
She begs even when she doesn't know this man at all.
But the strangest thing happens.
One day, while she's sitting in her compartment at the foot of the cot and reading a book that Delly sent to her so long ago, he begins to stir.
It's unlike the way he used to fidget in his coma, but Madge sees his fingers twitching and eyelids blinking. Immediately she goes to fetch a glass of water, a warm towel, anything he might need.
His eyes fly open after a couple of minutes. Madge stands back not wanting to confuse him, but soon he's reaching for his throat, either trying to speak or because he is thirsty. She tends to both.
"Don't speak, don't try," she urges, coming up beside him and noting his fear of his surroundings. "Don't fret, please. Your throat is still swollen from inhaling the mustard gas, it might be hard to speak. Please, drink this water."
He takes it and sips it gently, wincing at the feeling of something cool sliding down his throat. Although he's been responsive in his sleep and she's been able to feed him soft foods down his throat, it's definitely different when he's awake and aware.
"You've been at a hospital in Rouen for three weeks now. The war is over, the allies have won."
He doesn't believe her; she can see it in his grey eyes that he doesn't believe her. She's opened them countless times with a light shining on them hoping for dilation when he was in a stupor. Now that they're fully open and curious, they look even more shocking than before, glassy and deep like a mirror in a dark room.
"Please, could I get your name sir?" she asks, handing him a pad of paper and a pencil. "I need your name so I can contact the army, so I can help you find your family and let them know you're okay."
His hand is shaky when he holds the pencil, and it looks as if he needs to concentrate extremely hard when he begins to write. It's barely legible and the letters are wiry, but Madge makes it out. Gale Hawthorne.
It makes her smile. This man she's been looking after for almost a month, he has a name and it's Gale. She feels a warm hand nudging her arm, and when she looks up he's nodding back at her, asking for a name too.
"Madge," she responds. "You can call me Madge."
His recovery is quick after that. Madge helps him walk around the hospital and they communicate through a notepad where he asks for help and talks to her. Gale is quite the flirt, from what she can tell through his notes. If he has a girlfriend back home, she's lucky.
Sometimes, he doesn't ask for anything health related and just asks for company.
"What were you doing before the war?" he asks one day, written sloppily on the notepad. It's a miracle that he's left handed, otherwise Madge doesn't know what they would've done with the muscles and tendons in his bayonet wound still healing.
"Nothing," she admits. "I was attending an all-girls school in Connecticut." Gale looks surprised, not too many girls bother going to high school at all, let alone during wartime. He cocks up one brow and Madge nods. "My parents were always occupied with other, busier things. I suppose they had the funds to send me away, so I did. I was home for the holidays when I decided to join the Nurse Corps."
"So how old are you?"
"I'll be 19 in the spring," she responds. "And yourself, Mr. Hawthorne?"
"21," he scrawls.
Madge is surprised. That's still rather young, and they are close in age. "And why did you enlist?" She waits eagerly for his answer, observing the way he bites his lip and furrows his brow as he writes.
"Family needed the money. I enlisted as soon as Wilson announced that we were joining the Allies."
"How's the throat?" she asks sympathetically, nodding at it. They haven't even tried to help him talk yet out of the fear that it would hurt too much. Gale just shrugs, he probably thinks this waiting is stupid anyway. "We'll rest it for a bit longer and then try speaking in a couple days," Madge promises, wanting to satisfy him and keep him happy.
But as she will learn, Gale Hawthorne has no patience. She's walking through the hall in the morning when she hears someone call her name. Automatically she turns to Head Nurse Mags, but the old woman is just smiling and looking down at a patient.
"Mags?"
"Yes?"
"Did you call for me just now?"
"No, it was your soldier, Madge. He's speaking."
She hurries over to their divide and sees him sitting upright, breaking his pencil in half. Madge almost laughs, but instead hurries to him side.
"You're speaking."
"I think I've been alright for days," he chuckles, and suddenly she's guilty for making him stay silent and use that awful notepad. "Don't worry though, thank you for thinking about me on that one. Would've been bad if I wasn't ready, right?"
Madge nods slowly, taking in the way he sounds. His voice is gruff yet smooth, his accent is similar to hers. She thinks he might be from Massachusetts or Maryland, but she'll ask him soon enough.
"Um," she tries to start, but she's smiling too hard. "Uh, did you want anything? Was there a reason you called for me?"
"Yeah, I was hoping you could help me with shaving today," he answers, glancing down at the untrimmed beard that's been left uncouth for weeks now. Madge is still in awe at the way he speaks to her, his humour that barely translated onto paper is evident in his antonation. She zones out for a while just thinking about it before Gale calls her name and brings her back.
Madge shakes her head at how absurd she's being. "Yes, yes of course. We can do that. Do you want me to just bring you soap and a razor? Or do you need me to assist you."
Gale raises his good hand, showing the way it trembles. "That might be a good idea. I mean, I'm not scared of blades or anything, I'm just shakey."
"Alright. We can go to the lavatory, come," she beckons. Gale walks to the lavatory while she grabs the equipment they need, and soon Madge is rubbing soapy foam into his beard and giggling while Gale stands over the sink. "Does it tickle?"
"No, you're fine," he replies. His eyes are trained onto his reflection and Madge concentrates on the task at hand, but every so often she sees him glance over at her and she purposely looks away trying to hide her smile.
Under his beard there are tiny nicks and scars across his jaw. Madge instinctively touches them, rubbing them with her thumb and looking at them with apprehension. Already, she hates thinking about the pain he's gone through, no matter how small.
"They're just shaving cuts," he explains when he notices her fixation on them. "In the trenches they made us shave, but I only had this dinky old mirror that I shared with three other guys and a dull blade. Wasn't able to do a good job like you can."
Madge bites her lip and shrugs at the odd compliment, not speaking until his scruff has disappeared. She wipes the fresh chin with a warm towel and throws it to the side. "There, you're all handsome and done."
Gale cocks his head to one side and looks at her fondly. "Was I not handsome before?"
"You were," she jibes back. "Perhaps like a handsome caveman."
"Shush," he laughs, shaking his head. For a second while she cleans up, and he helps her to wring out the towel and wash away all the hair they share a moment of silence. After a while, when the razor and the towel are all in her tub and they should be walking back to the hall, he clears his throat. "So, you gotta bimbo back home?"
"A boyfriend? No, I don't, boarding school made that kind of hard," she jokes. "And yourself?"
"Naw. No time for that when I was working three jobs, I guess," Gale replies, and Madge sympathizes for what sounds like a hard time back at home. She hopes the war changes things; he's a veteran now, and veterans get a bunch of things from the government even if it meant almost sacrificing their life. But the purpose of this line of questioning is not lost to either of them. Gale walks back grinning all the way through, and Madge tries to hide hers until she walks away to leave him be.
And Madge keeps trying to help him find his family or his higher up so that they know where to ship him home. He told her than he was in the 12th division of the infantry, that was helpful information, but she keeps failing to come in contact with the commander, a Major General H. Abernathy.
Gale is getting better, and she supposes that's what's important. Except she sees that the minute he's of good health they'll ship him off and bring him across the Atlantic even if they haven't contacted his family or the army so that he could be dispatched from their record books. The thought makes her lethargic, unwilling to keep talking to him if it just means more pain, but she could never do that. She loves talking to him, and she's assume that he's the same.
He tells her about his family, his siblings and his widowed mother who was left to fend on her own. And Madge's heart breaks for him and the reason he decided to enlist, but with one look at his crew cut and his toned body anyone could only guess that he's been a soldier his entire life.
And she tells him about her life at school and at home, how she loves Baltimore but her parents always make her go out of state to study.
"There's corner of the city, where there's a library on one corner, a candy store on another and on a third, a block of apartments, it was right next to Druid Park," Madge explains one day while she's sitting on the side of his cot. "When my aunt used to take me around downtown, I used to think, 'Gee, wouldn't it be perfect to live there, work there, and go to the candy store for dinner?'" She giggles at the thought.
"Do you still want to be a librarian?"
"Maybe," she shrugs. "Who knows what will happen now that this war is done."
It's fully winter outside so they have nowhere to go, but one night Madge notices that a private hospital room is lit from the inside. It's the rooms that they would give to the severe patients, but now there are only a few more nurses and soldiers lingering in the French hospital.
When she peaks in she sees him, lighting a candle with a match that almost burns him.
"Gale?" she asks softly, and he raises his head with a smile. "What is this?"
"It's Christmas Eve," he answers obviously, and Madge is at a loss for words. He's taken the sloppy meal that the chef prepared for them and set them neatly on plates with chunks of stale bread. "You didn't forget, did you?"
"No, I didn't-" she starts, but decides to be honest. "Yes, I forgot, unfortunately. But I think you compensate for the two of us."
He shrugs shamelessly. "That's probably true. Come, sit down," he says, motioning her over to the bedside table where the food is set up. Everything is there, even a bottle of wine.
"How'd you manage this?" Madge asks while laughing, observing the label of the expensive French wine.
"It was somewhere deep in the kitchen cellar. It's probably been sitting there for years, before the war for sure. But they get better with age, don't they? I think I heard that from somewhere once."
They dine and it's wonderful - not because the food is particularly good, it's only slightly better than the food they eat on a daily basis. Perhaps the cook took sympathy tonight, it is Christmas afterall. The wine is probably good, Madge knows she should enjoy it but she hasn't tasted enough wine and liquor to get used to it. She winces at the first sip and so does Gale, which makes them both laugh.
"I thought it'd be a good idea," Gale admits sheepishly after he returns with two glasses of water.
"It was. It just wasn't perfect in practice. Our fault, of course."
"I feel bad though. Our palettes are so… undeveloped."
Madge snickers, looking up at Gale through the candlelight to observe his expression. He's relaxed and boyish, exactly like she thought he'd be like when she first saw his sleeping face. When he notices her staring though his face softens into something else, something more solemn and serious.
"You're really beautiful, you know that?"
She doesn't even bother to hide her blush, laughing defensively and shrugging it off.
"Madge, I'm serious. You're so beautiful, like a bluebell or a sunrise. I could look into your eyes all day."
Madge swallows hard and nods. If it was any other circumstance she'd be flattered, but right now she's just sad that this is all not real, that it will all go away soon. "You're beautiful too."
"If we were back home I'd ask you out, take you to the local diner and treat you right."
"Gale, I don't like 'what if's' and I-"
"But I would, I'd get to hold your hand and kiss you like I mean it and not feel guilty about it. I'd feel proud, you know?"
"If you keep going you're going to make me cry," she threatens truthfully, because she feels her breath catching and tears swelling in her eyes. Gale take a step back then, breathing out and sighing. He looks like he knows something she doesn't, but she doesn't bother to ask.
"Okay," he concedes after a while. "But just know that I meant all of that okay? I meant it."
They finish their dinner peacefully and go to sleep in their own rooms, leaving the mess to clean for tomorrow. Madge sleeps with dreams that Gale cruelly planted in her head, dreams of seeing him in the streets and taking him home to meet her parents. They would've loved him, but she vows to tell him tomorrow that they can't talk like that. Not when they're parting ways so soon, not when reality is coming back.
Madge means to do so the next morning, but she can't even hold in her gasp when his cot is empty and made the next morning. The sheets are pressed, his clothes are gone, everything is different and the air feels heavy.
She runs to find a nurse, anyone who will know what's going on.
"Clove! Clove, have you seen Mr. Hawthorne. His bed's empty."
"He left last night, got on the first ship back. I think his general got in contact with him and made arrangements last week," her fellow nurse responds with no emotion, until the question really registers. "Wait, didn't he tell you this? He's been talking to Mags about getting him to the seaside for days."
"No, he didn't say anything to me," she cries, appalled that this is happening. That means that he's gone, it means that he isn't coming back. He said all those things to her because he was leaving, and couldn't bear tell her. And now he's on his way to the sea, where he'll be shipped back to America forever. She hadn't even gotten the chance to ask where he was from.
Madge runs back to the private room where they dined yesterday and it's all tidied up. There's no trace of him anywhere, it's almost as if he was just a ghost who came and left. The tears can't be held back at this point, they're uncontrollably falling to the floor and all over her uniform.
She steps closer and there's a note on the bed, folded and left there with the bottom half of a wooden pencil that was once hers.
I'm a coward, I'm sorry Madge.
Please remember my words, and wait for me.
Gale.
It doesn't make sense, none of this make sense. If his message was supposed to help her in some sort of way it hasn't. Instead it twists her insides and makes her sob. Madge sits on the edge of the bed to balance herself and fold the note neatly so that her tears don't stain it any further.
Her heart feels bruised and nothing is certain except for one fact: Gale is gone, and Madge is grieving.
Baltimore, One Year Later
Madge is surprised how quickly she got the job at the library, she barely needed to fill out any forms and started to be paid a decent salary. It's not enough to get by, but she's staying at her parents' home while she's living in the city anyways.
Every morning she walks a long way to the busy downtown library and begins to file books. She takes the ones that people read and put them back in their designated shelves. Even if it slows her down sometimes she'll crack them open and take a look and file the interesting ones away in a bottom shelf of books she needs to read on her own time.
She had returned from France just a couple weeks after Christmas morning, her family was overjoyed to have her home, unscathed. When she brought up the idea of staying in town rather than going back to Connecticut they had no objection either, and in fact her father offered his advice for the interview she had scheduled for the following week.
Today, she's organizing the library cards, sorting the envelopes and making sure that they're properly labelled in the side office. It's a slow day, week days usually are, so there's only only lady at the information desk readily available.
Madge doesn't expect anything interesting when the doorbell chimes, signalling that a patron has walked in. She doesn't even acknowledge the low muttering chatter happening between the customer and the other librarian until his voice grows louder.
"Are you sure she doesn't work here? Or maybe, have you seen her around."
"I'm sorry Sir, I don't know any Madge around here."
Her ears perk up and she heads outside to see who's here to find her. Probably a childhood friend or a neighbour, no one ever calls her by her nickname anymore.
"Is someone here looking me?" she asks with eyes pointed at her colleague.
"No Margaret, this man is mistaken, he's just-"
"Madge," he calls, and finally her eyes fly up to make contact with piercing grey pupils that make her suck in her breath. It's him, it's Gale, she could barely recognize him anything but a uniform or a hospital gown.
"I'll tell you again Sir, there is no one called Madge that works here and if you don't leave I'll have to call the-"
"Mindy, it's fine. I know him," she insists, making the older woman die down. "I'm just going to take a short break, I'll be right back."
She practically jogs out of the building and just hopes that Gale followed her out. When they're far enough from the library, far enough for Mindy not to spy through the glass walls Gale takes her hand and spins her around.
"Madge," he repeats.
"How did you find me?"
"You said, the library across from the candy store near Druid Park. I looked at a map, figured you had to be working here, or someone would know something about you," Gale answers plainly.
"And why did you need to find me?"
"I asked you to wait for me, didn't I?"
"In a letter, after you'd been scheming to leave for days," Madge spits. She still wants an explanation, her heart still hurts when she thinks about the way it was shattered. "Why would I take your vague plea seriously when you'd just abandoned me without notice."
"I couldn't bear to tell you, Margaret," he explains. "Everything was perfect with you. I wanted to believe that it was lasting forever when I knew that it wasn't and I'm sorry for that, I am."
"I knew it wasn't lasting forever too, Gale."
"I didn't want you to stop believing in us though," he sighs, and Madge can't help but scoffs.
"Why? So that I'd run into your arms when you found me here? That's selfish of you."
"No, because I went home to work for months so I could buy this," he replies, reaching for a small box from his pocket and opening it. It's a simple band with the most beautiful ring, and Madge looks at him with disbelief. "I'm not proposing to you right now, so don't gape your mouth like that. I don't even know your last name. But I know that I feel something for you Madge, I think about those weeks at the hospital every day and pray that I feel even a fraction of that happiness again."
Madge can't stop looking at his grey eyes, trying to detect a farce or some grand joke. She feels the same, every day she wishes she could be with him and every night she dreams about him. And here he is, in a loose white shirt with suspenders and hair that's longer than it used to be.
"I've been working hard and I just moved here," he starts, but Madge shakes her head.
"You moved to Baltimore? Gale, that's crazy I don't-"
"I'm sending cheques back every month, renting a place in the busy parts. If you want me gone, I'm gone. But if you missed me too, if maybe in your heart you really did wait for me, please give me a chance."
Madge hugs him then, tight and hard inhaling his scent like she never could when she was a nurse and he, her patient. All her reservations are gone when she touches him, and she thinks his are too when he wraps his arms around her waist and buries his head in her hair.
"You're crazy, Gale," she whispers again with a smile, knowing that he must be smiling too.
"I know," he mumbles into her shoulder. "But I'm just glad I found you."
They hug for what seems like hours and at the end Madge finds it silly that she ever thought she saved his life. Because really, he saved hers.
A/N: Please tell me what you think and if you'd like to read more historical pieces like this! I know Nurse Madge/Soldier Gale is such a cliche, this is just my take on it.
Also, I didn't realize it had been so long since I updated here! A busy period of my life just ended, so I'll try to be better from now on. Thanks so much for reading, reviews, follows and favourites always appreciated.
