Lucy turned when she heard Scarlet’s soft voice. She smiled back at the other nurse.
‘Don’t I know it,’ she replied. She hadn’t told the others a lot about her first experience in Normandy, what she’d already lived through, but she had the feeling that what they were about to see would be every bit as bad. The fighting had only got worse, with more troops arriving and more men being slaughtered and injured. She shuddered just thinking about how many bodies she’d helped to stitch up and bandage before sending them off, sometimes straight back into combat.
‘I don’t know what’s worse, to be honest. Here or where we were before.’
Scarlet had a hard-to-read look on her face, her eyes downcast. Lucy walked closer to her.
‘Honestly? I think each hospital, each place we work, is just another version of awful. We get through by helping as best we can.’ She shrugged. ‘Nothing more, nothing less. Some of us are better at it than others.’ To her, this mobile hospital they were in now was closer to the front but not much different from the last one.
‘You mean Ellie?’
Lucy reached out and touched Scarlet’s arm. ‘Ellie has you. She’ll be fine as long as we keep a close eye on her.’
Scarlet nodded and Lucy cleared her throat as a team of doctors came in the door.
‘The camp is definitely worse here,’ Scarlet said as they walked out, side by side. ‘If this rain doesn’t stop it’ll be like living in a pigsty.’
They stood outside, the rain lightly falling as Lucy turned her face skywards. She didn’t even care about getting wet. Before the war, she’d never have gone out in the rain and happily stood in it. Now, it was a reminder that she was alive, something to make her smile, just because she could stand and poke out her tongue and taste the wet nothingness of rain.
She straightened and looked around, wishing she’d kept her eyes shut instead of taking in the reality of their surroundings. There were twenty-five of them to a tent, which made privacy impossible, and the planks set out for them to walk around were the only things to separate their boots from the muddied, sloppy ground. She was used to such a very different environment, being more similar to Scarlet than she cared to admit.
‘I know our soldiers don’t have much, that they must be living in even worse conditions, but it doesn’t stop me feeling sorry for myself every once in a while,’ Scarlet confessed to her. ‘Seeing James, seeing the pain in his face and wondering what he’s been through . . . it’s awful.’
Lucy nodded. She was so right. ‘There is nothing selfish about the way you’re feeling,’ she said, thinking of how badly she wanted to go to the toilet and how desperately she was holding on to avoid the inevitable trip. ‘Just remember that one day we’ll think back on this and . . .’ She had been about to say ‘laugh’, but she doubted they’d ever actually do that. ‘Well, we’ll be proud of the fact we made it through. How is James, by the way? Still here?’
Scarlet shook her head and Lucy saw the sadness in her gaze. ‘Gone. By the time my shift was over they were already evacuating him. I kissed him goodbye moments before he left and . . .’ Lucy watched as Scarlet wiped quickly at her cheeks. ‘I think I’m praying more than I ever have in my life!’
A loud boom made the ground beneath them tremble and Lucy glanced at Scarlet again. There was another, more distant rumble, then the repeated noise of gunfire.
‘All hell is about to break loose,’ Lucy muttered.
Scarlet gave her a friendly smile and they both turned to walk across the wide plank of wood leading back to their tent. ‘At least it’ll keep my mind off things I can’t control.’
‘I’m going to the toilet first. I’ll see you back there,’ Lucy said, taking a different plank in the opposite direction. ‘You’ll see him again, Scarlet. He’s going home and he’s not missing any body parts. That makes him one of the lucky ones.’ She envied the fact that her friend was in love, that she felt so strongly about another person. She’d never fallen for a man, had never met a man who’d made her want to question her desire to become a doctor. It wasn’t that she didn’t want a family or a husband, but she wanted a man who made her feel . . . She sighed. She had no idea. She was only certain that if she ever met a man who made her want to let her guard down and let him in close, she’d know it.
Scarlet smiled and waved goodbye. Lucy gritted her teeth when she finally reached the screen that was the only thing separating their toilets from the elements. She opened and closed it, keeping her eyes downcast when she realised there were two other women in there already, sitting on the board that was their makeshift toilet seat. The smell made Lucy want to gag, so she tried to breathe through her mouth only, taking little, silent gasps as she dropped on to the board of wood. There were a number of holes cut into it, just wide enough for them to sit over and do their business, suspended above the large trench. Of all the things she’d seen and done since her arrival in Normandy, this was what Lucy found the worst. And the smell of human waste and the indignity of going to the toilet seated on the same plank as two other women who were no doubt as embarrassed as herself was something she’d never forget.
‘Incoming!’
Lucy grimaced, eyes shut against the yell from outside. Surely she wasn’t about to be bombed off the toilet. Could life actually get any worse?
A huge boom made her forget her decision not to make eye contact with anyone else using the toilet. She looked across into a pair of eyes that appeared even more desperate than she felt.
‘We’ll be fine,’ she said, always finding it easier to calm others than deal with her own fears.
The other nurse, one she didn’t recognise immediately, nodded, but Lucy doubted she’d made her feel any better.
When she pushed the screen door aside and emerged back into rain that had become heavier in the few minutes she’d been under cover, Lucy decided to wash her hands in the hospital rather than head back to her tent. Granted, she might have been able to find food if she hadn’t gone straight back, but something was telling her that they were about to be inundated with patients. Like that first night after landing.
After the longest weeks of her life, she was now almost immune to gunfire, but it was the booms that terrified her, reminded her of the ambulances being blown up, holding the young nurse in her arms as the life drained from her. They were the things she struggled with, the fact that even those helping the wounded weren’t protected from the cold hand of death.
‘Here we go!’ a man yelled.
Lucy didn’t know where it came from, which man had said it, but she braced herself. Waiting. Ready.
‘Hi, Lucy.’
Ellie suddenly stood beside her, their shoulders almost touching.