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Roe doesn’t move all the way from the forest to the town. The jeep bumps and skitters over the icy track, but he concentrates all his being on staying as still as he can, his hands twisted in Lieutenant Welsh’s jacket.
Bastogne is burning: they crest the hill and see the flames billow like flags , explosions blossoming in the snow-clouded night. This is where he moves. This is where he leaps suddenly forward to cover the wounded man’s body on the stretcher lashed to the hood of the jeep.
This close he can hear Welsh’s breath, shallow and absurdly peaceful amongst the swarming hellfire raining down on them. His eyes are closed, the skin of his face slack.
This close it is eerie. He has never been this close before.
When the jeep stops, he has to urge himself to rip his gaze from Welsh’s face, barely two inches from his own. But the rage of noise spills out of the church doors, spewing dust and shattered beams, a few limping figures, and this he cannot ignore.
Somehow he is at the church. He’s trying so hard to push back all thought.
And it’s only when he sees that little smudge of blue amongst the dust and rubble that he thinks of her, it really is. He’s managed to keep her out of his mind all the way to Bastogne, all the way to this door.
The headscarf feels like nothing between his fingers. He wants it to feel cold, feel wet with blood, feel something. But it’s only cloth. It’s not Renee.
He can see the back of her head in the rubble. Her hair is red and matted. He doesn’t want to touch her.
“Medic!”
Go away.
“Get your ass out here!”
He walks away by imagining carefully the precise movements: pick one foot up, swing, bring it down. Pick the other foot up, swing, bring it down.
*
They choose a house, one of those still standing, despite the gaping hole in one wall and the beams poking like ribs through the slate roof.
Then they start moving in the wounded.
The town is quiet now, it’s as though all the noise has been spent and now there is nothing left.
It’s later, picking their way through the rubble towards the church, that Roe recognises the other medic.
“We can’t evacuate, we’re cut off. This is as far as it goes.”
He stops dead in his tracks. It seems amazing that anyone got out of there alive.
“We met before. You was in the church.”
The man turns round and looks at him, coldly, just like he did that day in the church crypt.
“Yep.”
And then he carries on walking.
In the church doorway Roe swallows down the bile and walks past Renee without looking. The other medic doesn’t stop either.
There is no one left alive in the church, but there are plenty of dead. Most of the beams have fallen and there is little roof left. Down in the crypt the great stone pillars have collapsed and there is barely enough to support the ceiling.
“This way.” The medic calls quietly. Roe follows him and recognises the small antechamber where Renee gave him boxes of supplies and bed sheets cut up into bandages. He catches a foot and stumbles, wanting pain to distract him from her, feels nothing.
The other medic grunts as he struggles with a fallen beam and pushes it aside enough to reach down at the pile of boxes beneath, strewn with glass and rubble. He hands one silently to Roe. It’s so dark here in the gloom, the only light coming from the flames still raging outside, flickering through the dirty bombed-out saints in the stained glass windows. Roe is glad for the darkness.
“You in here when the bombing started?” Roe asks, too loud, as the medic hands him some plasma bottles. The question surprises him as much as it does the other man. Even to his own ears his voice is brittle and false.
The man pauses for a second. He can see the filtered light glimmer in his eyes for a second, but other than that he is barely visible.
“Yes.”
He turns and starts picking up more bandages and sulffa packets, strewn amongst the jigsaw pieces of rubble.
Later, laden down with boxes, pockets stuffed with bandages, they make their precarious way back up the stairs.
“How’d you get out?” Roe asks.
The medic in front of him mumbles a curse as he slips a little. It’s too dark for Roe to see his back tense.
Outside they pause and gulp in the night air, coughing away the dust. Roe steps away until he is out of sight of Renee.
The other medic turns to look at him. “The roof started caving in so I ran. I was close to the door, alright?”
“Where was Renee?”
“What?”
Roe points to the mess of rubble inside the doorway. “She must have been close too.”
“Yeah. Guess she must have been.” He picks up a box and walks towards the house.
Roe looks around him blindly, frowning at the night. He pulls the headscarf from his pocket and grips the blue material. He’s too cold to feel the sharp crescents of his fingernails through the cloth, but he imagines it, imagines his fingers tearing right through, right through his flesh, keep on going.
He doesn’t want to let it go. He wants to keep it in his hand. If he does, things will be alright, somehow. He knots it carefully around his wrist, tugging out the corner so it fits in his palm. So he has something to hold.
And he won’t cry. He hasn’t cried yet. He won’t do it now.
*
The house smells of blood already. It has many rooms, but some of the doors won’t even open because of the rubble piled high behind them. Crammed in every available room are the wounded. They are mostly civilians: the only soldiers to escape from the aid station were those capable of walking out. The more seriously wounded men are still down in the church crypt, beneath the rubble.
“It’s probably for the best, poor sons of bitches.” Roe hears one of the aid men say. “Quicker than laying on those goddamn tables and waiting to bleed out.”
He pauses for a moment. “Hope it was quick, anyhow...”
Roe turns away and looks back at Harry Welsh, on the bed. The mattress is already crimson.
“Can you feel anything?” he whispers. Roe’s voice seems harsh, too loud.
No, a voice says. But that’s a lie. He made that up. Welsh lies drugged and stupid and mute on the bed: he’s forgotten how to talk.
“What’s it like?” Roe whispers, shame prickling into the back of his neck like watching eyes.
The whole world shrinks away to nothing until it feels like the very beginning.
And no one and nothing exists. It is Still. It is Quiet.
He’s heard of it before, just rumours. A syrette missing from time to time. A medic who won’t get out of his foxhole one morning, eyes glazed and dull.
But there he is, with their blood flecked across his face like war paint, and their gore crusted beneath his fingernails. Like some bloodied angel with miracles at his fingertips. They’d look the other way.
In Normandy they talked about medics who use their own morphine - about how they’d never do a thing like that. He wonders if they still believe, or if they doubt their strength, like him.
And who is he to judge? He’s spent hours battling the lulling promise that sings to him of a few hours sleep and a mind wiped of everything.
And sometimes, when he closes his eyes and the light shining through the flesh and blood of his own eyelids makes his stomach heave, he prays.
“You know what I hope for? You know...” He trails off, looking around and hoping no one can hear.
“I make a promise to myself.” The words tumble from his mouth like water. “One day I’m going to find someplace so far away from everyone...feel like I’m the last person in the world. Won’t ever need to see another man again.”
He hitches in a breath and looks around nervously.
“You think that’s wrong?”
“I do.” He nods firmly, unconsciously. “It ain’t Christian to have so much hate.”
This world is not Christian, says the voice that’s not there.
Roe sits back in his chair, still for a moment. Then he starts opening and closing his left fist, the one that still clutches tightly at the blue headscarf.
He doesn’t want to let it go. He wants to keep it in his hand. If he does, things will be alright, somehow.
He won’t cry now, either.
*
Sounds come first: hushed whispers, footsteps creaking across wooden floorboards and the hiss of an oil lamp.
His eyes were open blindly when they gave him the first syrette, but after some time they closed. The muted echoes of morphined pain ease themselves through him still. Now he feels as though his lids have been welded shut, there is no feeling outside of this enclosed pain, and he smells nothing.
So his world is one of sounds, and he lies there for some time, trying to map it. He feels disorientated, panicked but too lethargic to do much about it. He can tell that he’s inside: he can’t hear the wind, there are no crunching footsteps. Where has the snow gone? The trees and the men and the artillery?
The world is rocked with a blast, the whispers stop, and even the oil lamp hushes its hollow slither for a moment. Ah yes, there it is, like an old friend: the muffled explosions rage around the house, around him,
Harry Welsh challenges an unwilling eye to crack open a little, and after some minutes of persuasion and coercion and bullying, it obliges. He can’t make out much of the room except the corner he is in. The lamp’s dull glow is off somewhere to his left, but the dancing light of candles is flittering across the ceiling above him.
Beside him, in a chair, is Doc Roe, fast asleep. His head is titled against the wall, his hands clasped tight beneath his armpits. He is sleeping right through the bombardment that is once more shaking Bastogne to its core.
His vision begins to adjust to the dark - across the room lamplight glitters from frightened eyes.
Harry’s leg twitches a little, as if to remind him exactly why he is here, enjoying this luxury of bed and walls, a roof between him and the shells.
The pain is surging back and forth like the tide, every time it inches further, slowly filling every space inside him.
He screws his eyes shut as his leg heaves again, jumping off the bloodied sheets. He tries not to sob, but he must have made a noise because Roe is awake, and his hands are cold against Harry’s forehead as he tries to calm him.
“Morphine...we need more morphine!” the medic calls. Someone is moving towards them, round the edges of the room, mindful of the sagging ceiling and the fallen beams.
Later, when the world has receded once more and somehow left him beached here on this bed, Welsh tries to keep a thread of thought straight in his mind - it’s dancing around and won’t stay still.
“Where are we.” He tries to make it a question, but it took ten minutes just to form the words in his mind, and he can’t quite manage anything more.
The reply takes some time to come, as though Roe were thinking hard about the answer too.
“In a house, in Bastogne. The aid station in the church got hit.”
Harry takes this in. Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he just lies and lets the words wash over him, staring at the medic’s face.
They can’t tell if the bombs are falling anymore. The shelling and then the silence, then shelling and silence, over and over again, is enough to drive you mad. Like all the sounds in the world all at once, and then nothing.
“You ever get sick of if all?”
Roe thinks about sitting by Welsh’s bed and talking to a man who couldn’t even hear him. Some rich dark fantasy, this confessing of sins. It was safe, to just open his mouth and let it all come out.
But now…the words are still there, but he can’t bring himself to voice them, even though he knows Harry is too far gone to even realise what he’s saying, let alone remember it the next day.
“Sometimes,” he manages.
“You been giving me morphine Doc?” the wounded man says heavily. His tongue is thick and slow. “Why you been giving me morphine?”
“For pain.” Roe shifts slightly, looking around for the other medic, hoping someone will come over and end this conversation for him.
“I do.”
“What?” Roe asks, after a moment.
“I do. Get sick of it.” Welsh’s eyes are locked on the ceiling now.
“Guess everybody does, lieutenant.”
Harry makes a little noise that could be a laugh. He smiles up at the ceiling as though he can see someone there.
“Funny how...how the more we get sick of killing the….more we want to kill people.” He’s still smiling, that tiny, secret smile. Roe doesn’t know what to say, in the face of that peaceful little quirk to Harry’s lips.
“You wouldn’t know though. You ever just want to kill someone Doc?” Welsh doesn’t look at him.
“No.” He can’t tell if it’s a lie or not.
“Everybody does.” Welsh nods as though Roe had not spoken. “Everybody does...fucked up...” he spits, face suddenly creasing into a grimace. He cries out and kicks his bloodied leg, as though he’s trying to shake away the pain.
“Hush,” the medic says, kneeling down next to the bed and holding him still.
“Hush now.”
“Fucked up,” Harry whispers, tears cutting through the grime on his face. “Am I fucked up, Doc?”
“No you ain’t. You’re just fine,” he soothes.
*
Outside the snow falls softly and unheeded. Roe is the only who hears the way it sizzles as it melts into the fire that’s burning itself out across the road.
Roe looks at Renee’s scarf, tied around his wrist. He’s been worrying it’s edges, pulling and picking at the fabric without realising. His fingertips are chilled numb with the cold - he runs them over the neat little stitches hemming the edges but feels nothing more than a second-hand sensation, distant ridges, clumsy and undefined.
He tries to imagine Renee sewing the spare patch of fabric: her fingers are clean, she carefully folds over the edges, the needle flashes dully in the light. Her brow is creased a little, a slight frown as she concentrates. She pauses, tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear.
But he can’t really see that. He can’t really imagine it. It’s just what he thinks he should imagine.
He breathes in the cold night, the taste of snow on the air, as though he has never breathed before. Great shuddering gasps. He worries if he doesn’t remind himself to breathe he may just stop. If he doesn’t force his lungs to expand and compress again and again and again they may forget how.
Roe thinks he may be losing what grip he has on reality, and somehow he can’t seem to care. What kind of reality is this, anyway? He stops concentrating on breathing and is almost surprised that his lungs keep moving without him.
A sudden stillness floods him, and he sways slightly. It’s so quiet - how could his body ever make such little noise? How could life exist and keep on living in this silence? He’s never listened like this before, and yet the desperate thought suddenly pops into his brain: perhaps this is dying. Perhaps his body is quietening, closing down, giving up?
A jolt of panic rips through him, quickening his heart and dispelling the blanket of quiet that had fallen over him momentarily. After all, after everything, he wants to live. He is so very afraid that he might be dying.
*
The medic wipes the worst of the grime and blood from his hands and steps out into the cold night. He pauses to pluck at his collar, pulls it up, hunched shoulders and tightened back.
Lighting a cigarette, he sighs out the smoke and sets off in the direction of the ruined church. He doesn’t notice the eyes that narrow and fix on his back, watching as he trudges down the street.
One of the heavy oak church doors is hanging from hinges, while the other lies where it was thrown, 6 feet from the doorway and into the street. The red cross banner that once hung above the archway is tangled and torn in blackened shreds, woven between beams and splintered wood.
And there is a hand. A woman’s hand, reaching out from the rubble. There is half an inch of snow nestled in her palm.
The medic stubs out his cigarette with a boot, squats down, worrying his lip as he stares at the hand. He reaches out, fingers wavering just above the hand, before he shakes his head.
“Shit.”
He stands up and backs away. A noise behind him makes him turn: there is a man walking up to him, shoulders hunched. His left fist is clenching and unclenching around a flash of blue.
“Get away from her, “ Roe says, his voice coiled tight and low with anger.
“What the hell you talking about?” the other man spits.
“If you touch her I swear I’ll kill you.”
“You’re insane.” The other medic shakes his head dismissively and moves as if to walk away.
“How come you got out, huh?”
The medic stops, but doesn’t answer. Roe lashes out blindly, his palms connected solidly with the medic’s chest. The man staggers backwards and jolts his ankle, He breathes heavily, leaning against the wall for support.
“How come you got out and she didn't? How come you didn't help her? Did you leave her in there? To die, like all those men down there?”
The medic shakes his head, eyes wide.
“You think I left her?! I didn’t even know she was in there!”
His eyes flick over towards the hand. In the angry light of the flickering fires he can just see the dark smudges that are fine traceries of blood ingrained in skin and beneath fingernails. He looks at his own hands, and Roe’s, and they are all the same.
“She wasn’t supposed to be in there,” the man says, looking at his feet.
Roe heaves in a shaky breath. The anger is flooding out of him with each lungful of cold air. He feels betrayed without it, empty and used. It isn’t meant to go this way: the man is meant to be guilty, a coward, a murderer. He has to be responsible for Renee’s death, because that’s the only way Roe can feel innocent. And he desperately needs to be absolved of the irrational but terrible guilt for something that he knows he had no control over.
“I didn’t kill her,” the medic says, looking Roe in the eye. “This wasn’t her war.”
The man starts to limp away, and Roe lets him go.
“I think I’m dying.”
Roe hears the words before he even realizes he’s said them, has the disorientating feeling that the whisper was pulled from his lips by some unseen force.
The man stops, but doesn’t turn around.
“We all are.”
*
“You been crying, Doc?”
Roe sits back after changing the bandage on Harry’s thigh, and wipes his hands on a rag.
Welsh reaches out to touch Roe’s face but his hand waves around and can’t find him.
Roe just looks for a moment, then shakes his head.
“Huh,” Welsh says, blinking once, heavily. “Looks like it. You got them...” His hand waves around again, as if looking for the words. “...got the...you..stripes..”
“Stripes,” Roe echoes.
“Stripes,” Welsh says. “Stripes.”
Roe looks away and then scrapes his face roughly with his sleeve. They sit in silence for a little while longer.
“I would.” Harry says, as though the conversation hadn’t ended five minutes ago.
“You would?”
“Cry.” says Harry distantly.
“My ma, she used to say….she’d say, ‘where’s the tears gonna go?’ ”
“Tears?”
“Yeah. If they don’t come out, they just sit there right? Make you all bitter,” he frowns, “And….salty.”
“Right.” Roe smiles a little, surprised that he is still capable of it. “I guess you’re right, sir.”
“Always am, Doc.”
There is more colour in the lieutenant’s cheeks now, and though he is still wandering erratically between pain and a morphined haze, he is less distressed, his wound clotting and healing.
“That’s pretty,” Welsh says, shifting on the bed.
Roe frowns, and Harry rolls his eyes, sure that he is making perfect sense.
“That – whatever it is. The blue thing.”
“Oh…” Roe says, fiddling with the cloth, pulling it down from his sleeve where he’d tucked it in an effort to keep it clean of blood.
“Yeah. It is, ain’t it?”
*
Ironically - though everything else has moved, broken or burnt, been re-arranged by some giant hand – the pile of furniture to the side of the church is untouched. The two chairs, where he sat with Renee the day before yesterday, are exactly where they left them. They are two fixed points in a world that keeps changing beyond recognition, faster than he can keep up.
Roe brushes the snow from the seat and sits down. Arms boneless and legs crumbling to dust beneath him, he sits and stares at the church until the hellish light of fire is robbed by the pale glow of dawn. He’s turned to stone, unmoving but for the spasm of his left fist, opening and closing, opening and closing around a blue headscarf.
He doesn’t want to let it go. He wants to keep it in his hand. If he does, things will be alright, somehow.
But that’s stupid. That’s irrational. And there is no bright flash of understanding, no epiphany. There is only the dawn - one without night, or light of morning – just a hollow
unfolding as the knowledge eases out: this is it. Endless forward motion, periods of slowing to a trudge to allow yourself the thought of stopping. But never stopping.
He pulls in a breath around the hot lump in his throat, feels his lungs buoyant and ready to float away. Feels everything, like a catalogue of working pieces: heart that still beats, despite it all; blood that rushes; toes numb and heavy at the end of his boots; fingers flexing; ear-tips and nose burning cold; spasm of cold muscles, tightening in his back and jerking a-rhythmically in his thighs. The sudden on-rush of sensation rocks him, bodily, and the shaking builds and builds inside him, his body fighting back against this slow cold death.
And through it all the light that binds and makes him something other than the sum of parts.