Page 53 of Two Wars and a Wedding

They knew what they were facing now.

Holt rather wished he didn’t. He would have preferred to have clung to his illusions about the romance of battle, Cavaliers and Roundheads facing off at Naseby. The Light Brigade charging forward with sabers raised.

They can write a lovely poem about you when you’re all rotting beneath the palm trees.

For a moment, Holt thought he saw her there, Paul’s Miss Hayes, like a wraith between the vines. His own personal oracle.

Holt rose, taking a lurching step toward her, then another—when the sky exploded in a confusion of bullets and metal fragments, right over the place where he had been sitting a moment before.

Siboney, Cuba

July 1, 1898

“No time for sitting.” Sister Bettina made shooing motions at Kit, who had just finished her shift and was frantically scribbling in a tiny pocket notebook. “We’ve got wounded coming in.”

“More?” Betsy set down the bedpan she’d been holding with a thump. Fortunately, it was empty. “There are more?”

They’d only just got their new hospital in order, all spick-and-span with the Red Cross flag flying proudly above it, just so no one would forget who was actually in charge here. They’d inherited eighty patients from the army, eighty men who hadn’t been fed or bathed for days, eighty men who were sicker than when they’d arrived, suffering from everything ranging from heatstroke and dysentery to measles. And wounds, of course. All sorts of wounds. The shell wounds were the worst.

But no typhoid. Not yet.

“There’s been a major engagement,” said Sister Bettina briefly. “Everyone’s needed. Didn’t you hear the noise?”

Betsy and Kit followed her out the door, where a scene of chaos greeted them. Men were staggering alone or in pairs down the road, clutching each other for balance, faces grimed with mud and powder smoke, their uniforms torn and bloody. Crude carts disgorged men too badly hurt to move under their own power. Orderlies were carrying men out on hastily contrived stretchers, putting them on the ground wherever they could find room, in the full glare of the afternoon sun.

“Get those men out of the sun.” With the supreme confidence of someone who had seen it all before, Miss Barton was supervising the erection of two large tents. “I want six tables in there. That will be our surgery. Cots in this one. Put plenty of straw down in each. We’ll shovel it out and replace it as needed.”

People were scurrying back and forth doing Barton’s bidding, some dispatched to fetch supplies from the ship, others putting down straw or putting up cots. Orderlies had been dragooned into dragging out cots and kettles, scrounging up blankets and bandages.

“You. Tell them on the State of Texas we need everything. These men don’t have a cot to lie on or a kettle to boil a bit of gruel in.” Barton turned toward her nursing sisters, who had already lined up, ready for service. “Sister Bettina, Sister Minnie, Sister Isabelle, Sister Blanche, you’ll assist the surgeons. Nurse Hayes! These men need feeding.”

A man pulled himself up by one arm over the edge of a wagon. “That’s Clara Barton,” he rasped. “Now we’ll get something to eat.”

A feeble cheer went up from the men.

“I’ll start the cider,” said Betsy, and ran off to find their largest kettles to make Clara Barton’s own special Red Cross Cider, a fortifying slurry of dried apples and prunes. Miss Barton swore by it.

With little time for meals in between shifts, Betsy might have taken a few stray swigs of it herself and found it . . . well, not exactly what the Ritz Paris would be serving next season, but certainly sustaining.

Gruel, cider, malted milk. As fast as she brewed it up, it was gone, and there was always another hand reaching out, another cultivated voice asking, “Please, if I could just have a drop of something . . .”

“What were they thinking?” Betsy fumed to Kit as they passed each other between tents. “They let these men march empty!”

“That’s men,” said Kit, clutching cans of condensed milk to thicken the gruel. “Can’t trust them to do the packing. They’ll bring the cannon and forget the picnic basket.”

Betsy gave a snort of laughter, which quickly faded as she reentered their open-air ward. Patients were packed as tight as they could reasonably put them, and still the wounded were coming. Just what kind of battle had this been, anyway? Not that it took a major battle to cause major harm. She knew that. She’d seen too many skirmishes in Greece not to underestimate all the ways a man could be hurt.

“I’ve got a head wound that needs special care.” It was one of the regimental doctors. What was his name? Stringfellow. It suited him. He was thin and grim, pale brown hair receding from a high forehead. “Captain Mills. Do you have room for him?”

There wasn’t room for a reasonably sized flea. “If we move this cot a few inches this way and that cot a few inches that way . . . There you go.”

“It’s those blasted Spanish snipers. They shoot for the head.” Dr. Stringfellow waved the orderlies forward, snapping at them to set him down gently. “This man requires the constant application of cold compresses to his eyes. Ice wrapped in a bit of cotton works best. Do you have ice?”

“I’ll find it,” said Betsy, but Dr. Stringfellow didn’t hear her. He was already gone, back into the fray of arriving casualties.

Night fell; lamps were lit and brought to the surgeons and still the wounded kept coming, some making their way on foot, goodness only knew how far, others piled into wagons, jolting and jostling down the road to Siboney. Betsy couldn’t feel her feet anymore. Her legs seemed to move without her volition. Up and down the ward. Spooning gruel, changing dressings, giving sips of cider to those well enough to drink it, sponging foreheads, sneaking outside to chip ice where the men wouldn’t hear it and be tormented, back inside to refresh compresses on the eyes of the worst head wounds. Moving cots to make room for more. And more.

There weren’t enough lamps to spare. The surgeons needed them. So Betsy worked by a single lantern and the light of the moon, which was brighter than any moon she had ever seen, even in Greece, where everything had seemed sharper and clearer. The moonlight bathed the ward in an unearthly glow, as if everything had turned to mother-of-pearl or suffered a sea change to something rich and strange.