Story: Belleau Wood V.
Clockwise from upper left: Cait, the hospital at Bezu (real photo), Seraphim, Seraphim as Madonna statue, HellBitch, Cait again since that picture shows the correct colour of her hair.
Significant music to listen to quietly whilst reading if you so wish:
Click to viewBezu-le-Guery, 10th June 1918.
Bezu-le-Guery was a village of not more than fifty buildings, placed on the heights to the north of the Marne, built along one winding street. At the extreme northern end was a small church with a two-story school-house huddled in its lee. The Allied forces had set up Field Hospital One in the relative space and safety of the church, spilling over into the schoolroom two days later when the first influx of wounded arrived en masse.
The pews and desks had been removed and given place to litter racks. A portion of the schoolroom had been partitioned off by means of blankets and canvas into a resuscitation ward where the heat from several primus stoves was conserved to the maximum. The remainder of the schoolroom was arranged as a dressing room for the seriously wounded; stationary cupboards and bookcases were filled with bandages, blankets, cloths and clothes.
Beside the water pump and temporary bathhouse outside was a shed in which was piled the men's discarded equipment, which was tallied and removed daily by a salvage truck along with the tags and the bodies of those for whom succor had come too late.
Although surprisingly efficient and well run for the shear number of wounded it tended, Bezu lacked both the equipment and expertise required to do anything but the most rudimentary of procedures. The nearest hospital for complex surgery was forty kilometers West at Juilly Seine-et-Marne, if one could stay alive long enough for the medicos to operate; or twenty kilometers beyond that the U.S. Military Base Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine on the outskirts of Paris.
Still, Bezu was better than nothing, and it was all those at the front had.
The walls, grey with age, appeared yellow in the light of the candles and lanterns that were used for illumination. Blankets and bits of canvas and carpet had been tacked over the apertures where once stained glass windows and huge oaken doors had been. The precautions were necessary to prevent the lights from shining outside and betraying the hospital’s location to the eyes of the ever-circling German Albatros whose motors could be heard, humming in the black sky above.
The wounded (mostly American with a handful of French and a smaller handful of prisoners added to the mix) were lying on stretchers all over the floor. Near the door a number of pews had been pushed to one side and there the ‘walking wounded’ sat; smoking cigarettes and passing observations on every fresh case that came through the door.
So far the biggest stir had been caused by the fellow a few days back - a newspaper reporter of all things - who’d been shot three times. The last bullet had been a ricochet which had skittered up through his eye and out through his forehead. Despite this, with the aid of a friend, he’d walked for five miles towards the hospital before finally being picked up by an ambulance and driven the final stretch to Bezu.
“My God, look what they're bringing in,” had been the general comment. “Give the poor bastard a cigarette.”
The next entrant that night was considered by many to equal the reporter for shear unlikelihood. They arrived a little after dawn, just after the burial detail had left but before the morning truck arrived with supplies. The first to nose its way past the tacked blankets was a ghost-grey wolf-dog, eyes alert, paws weary. Close on its tail was a thin young woman in a dirty woollen cap and a ragged coat that had once belonged to a French Lieutenant. She was dragging a stretcher behind her on which lay a wounded soldier and an evil-looking wild cat.
“Jesus, what the hell is that?” one of the soldiers muttered around his smoke.
There was a second’s silence amidst his comrades. “You mean the wolf, the cat, the girl or the corpse?”
“All of ‘em,” he clarified, still staring.
The Ward Sister had run up to the new arrival and was rattling off questions, reassurances and instructions in French.
“Hey, he’s one of us,” a soldier offered.
“What?”
“Look at the marks. He’s a damn Captain with the Marines.”
There was a low rumble of chatter and the craning of necks.
“The Fifth - they’re at Bois Belleau.”
“Like hell - that’s miles - how’d she drag him that far?”
“Christ knows.”
At that point it became clear to the Ward Sister that not a single one of her words had been paid the slightest bit of attention to. The young woman was staring ponderously across the length of the nave, fraying focus marshaled to some point no one else could see. Her knuckles were clenched white around the poles of the stretcher; she swayed. The dog whined. “Help him,” she said clearly in a voice that had been born to molasses, tin stars and gun leather.
The Sister clapped her hands and called to an orderly who had been in the midst of some fetch-and-carry task. He hurried over and claimed one side of the stretcher as the Sister claimed the other and the woman informed the world, “I need t’sleep,” and dropped forward into a heap on the flagstones.
==========
She slept like one dead for five hours, undisturbed when the soldiers shuffled themselves about and two of the least wounded awkwardly manhandled her into the space they’d made amidst their number. Undisturbed too by the camions and ambulances that arrived in a steady stream throughout the morning, disgorging their cargo of ruptured, burnt and bleeding men, before starting the journey back to the front lines once more.
The short-tempered looking wild cat that had accompanied her disappeared from general view and reappeared later nested amidst the folds of her coat, looking smugly as if it had been there all along. The dog (there was much discussion as to its breed and how close to true wolf its blood ran) trailed after Captain Morrow’s stretcher like a mourner following a bier, a fact that displeased the Ward Sister greatly. Had she been less busy she would have ordered the animal tied out in the yard; she’d asked Joseph to do so four times, but somehow he’d never got around to it. She noticed with some vexation that Joseph had found time to wash the dog’s hind leg and tie a bandage around it however. The Sister was of a steely and disciplined disposition, but she was also eminently practical: she recognised a losing battle when she saw one and let the dog be - there were far more pressing matters that required her attention.
==========
Field Hospital One, Bezu-le-Guery, 11th June 1918.
Before he had died, Crowfeather had taught Cait a lot about the Kachina: it was unlikely there was anyone living who knew more about their abilities and history than she. But as Seba-seshka she had also been told what he knew of the other Clans, those living, broken or lost. Common wisdom said the stone-walkers had died out, but she knew one of the Ran when she saw them.
She was sunk down on the floor close to the statue of the Madonna that stood, regal and sorrowful in the chapel. It was the one tiny corner of the church that had been left as holy and set aside for prayer and quiet. “I know you’re there,” she said to the walls. “Don’t care if you don’t wanna talk t’me, I’ll be gone soon as I can an’ I don’t mean no hurt t’you. But I know you’re there.”
She said nothing further but leant her head back against the wall and allowed her eyelids to droop. It had been a long day on top of countless long days before that and the small mercy granted her was that there’d been no time for nightmares because there’d been precious little time for sleep save for the few hours that had felled her so dramatically after her arrival. She had a lot to do; she needed to soul-take and she needed to pull the bullet and bone shards out of Preach’s shoulder since he wouldn’t last the time it would take for the surgeon to see to him. (Her way was neater anyhow and dispensed with the need to gouge into already ravaged flesh with metal rods and tweezers.) But for now, just a moment or two, she needed to rest and hope the Ran wouldn’t take offence to her being here...
She opened her eyes with an effort as she heard a soft rippling noise, like someone stroking their hand across the surface of a pool.
A woman stood before her; she had long limbs, pale greyish skin and eyes like a hunting hawk; she wore peasant clothes and her arms were bandaged with strips of material from the hem of her skirt. “Parlez-vous Francais?”
Cait shook her head. “No. Parle pas beaucoup. Anglais.”
“I speak... some.”
She nodded vaguely with not much idea of what else to say. The woman for her part seemed content to wait. “What happened to your arms?” she asked after a bit.
The marble lips curved into a slow smile. “I kill many German soldiers. Some fight at me.” She shrugged.
“Why’re you here?”
The woman glanced to the far end of the nave towards the door of the crypt. “I watch him.”
There was a worry and possessiveness in her tone that Cait recognised all too well. She gave a queasy sort of a smile. “Me too. What’s his name?”
Hesitation, and then, “Viajero.”
She blinked, her head twitching to the side as if slapped. She didn’t want to remember that other people had feelings, didn’t want to see other faces she knew. If the world was just her and Preach and a bunch of strangers she knew she could get through this: she didn’t want to care about anyone else, doubted she had the strength for it. She licked her lips with a tongue almost as dry. “He here?”
She tipped her chin, both affirmation and a direction. “Down.”
Cait could feel the blood drain from her face and a week’s worth of skipped meals and skipped sleep make its presence felt. The crypt was were they stored the bodies.
The woman read her mounting hopelessness and waning strength. “No!” she said sharply. “Not dead.” She searched through the scant words she knew. “Il est très malade,” she muttered. “Bad. Very bad. Not dead.” The repetition held an edge of desperation.
She sat up straighter as if she’d just been poked with a sharp stick, brows furrowed and eyes wide. When they’d met briefly in Thierry he’d introduced himself as one of the Dolya, which meant he sure as hell wasn’t French, which meant... “He don’t live here - this ain’t his home!”
The woman’s forehead creased.
“Viajero - he ain’t French.”
“No. Tshekki. Bohémien.”
She raised an eyebrow at that; Bohemia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and allied with Germany. But she supposed a person could have any number of reasons for fighting and who they chose to fight for, it was neither her business nor her point. “Does he have a box or a little bag with ‘im?”
Eyes narrowed in confusion; she could sense the importance and excitement in the words but was having trouble untangling them into her native tongue.
Cait tried to start again, slower and simpler this time. “Viajero. He have a little box?” She mimed it with her hands, showing something small one could open like a cigarette case. “Or a bag? In his pocket or tied round his neck?” She mimed a necklace with something hung beneath a shirt.
Her tawny eyes widened in recognition and understanding, one hand closing over an imaginary pendant at the nape of her neck. “Kaulakoru. Un collier, yes.”
“Does he have it now?”
She looked towards the crypt, biting her lip and at last shook her head.
“He’ll die.”
“No!” It was a whisper delivered with the force of a shout and seemed to hum in the walls until the whole church reverberated with it.
“The Dolya can’t leave their home else they get sick. If they travel they gotta carry a piece o’home with ‘em,” Cait mumbled as she scrubbed her hands across her face and tried to gather her wits for another round of charades. “The necklace - the little bag - is full of earth.” She patted at the stone floor and then scraped up a fictitious handful of soil and scrunched it through her fingers. “Earth. From his home. From Bohemia.”
“La terre de Bohême?” She sounded skeptical.
She nodded tiredly. “You need to find it. Or you need to take him home. Otherwise he’ll die.”
The woman with the sharp and slightly aquiline features stared into the middle-distance, looking, Cait thought, rather like a medieval saint or that girl the French were so fond of who became a soldier - Jeanne d’Arc. It was a gaze that took in none of the outside world and was focused solely inwards, calculating time, distance and possibility. “Hän ei kuole,” she said with grim certainty. She looked at Cait. “He will not die.”
“No,” Cait agreed with equal conviction. “He won’t.”
She inclined her head, a few long corkscrews of hair the colour of birch-bark escaping from her shawl. “Thank you.” She smiled, hesitant and at a loss as how to prove her gratitude. “I am Seraphim, daughter of the Ran.”
A tired twitch of a smile in return. “Cait, of the Kachina.” The briefest of scowls as she tried to sound the words out in her head before speaking them. “Bonne chance.”
“Bonne chance,” she echoed, and in a swirl of skirt and scarves she stepped into the floor and disappeared with the speed of one stepping off a cliff.
==========
“Preach wouldn’t do this,” she told no one in particular. “But then he’s better than me. I ain’t.” Cait moved quietly towards a pallet that held the sad remains of a man who was, due to the unpleasantries of fate, still alive and whimpering. She leant close to him. As the last of the summer evening sun cut across the room and turned her eyes to solar orbs, his attention snapped to her like a prisoner watching the flare of a match. “What’s your name?” she asked quietly.
“Private Schumann... Anthony,” he added as the part of him that was a soldier gave way to the part of him that knew he was dying.
“What do you want, Anthony?”
Hope, resignation and understanding danced briefly in the reflection of his eyes. “To go home.”
Had he said ‘to live’, had the pain and acceptance not been swallowing everything else, she would have left him. But instead she nodded. “Where d’you live?”
“B-Burlington. Vermont.”
“If I said I could send you there right now, would you go?”
A flicker of fear, and then acceptance. “Yes.”
“Then let’s pack you home, Anthony Schumann,” she said softly as she burnt his world to gold, sent him high above the earth and sped his spirit homewards while she drank down the last of his strength. Less than a minute later, his body was still and beginning to cool, blood congealing around open wounds as it hadn’t managed to in life.
She reached out and touched his eyelids closed, whispered “K’dewa-netjer en te,” against his forehead and moved on to the next in line who was ravaged enough and pained enough that they couldn’t think of living, could only think of the agony ending... and she granted their wish.
Eight soldiers died in the hospital that night, not a one of them unexpected. What surprised the nurses more was that Captain Morrow had not been amongst them.
==========
Cait had passed fatigue and moved into that strangely bleak and nerve jangling stretch of exhaustion beyond it. Her skin was clammy, her hands shook and her neck and shoulders ached from the strain of being hunched and tense for so long. She had no watch to mark the passing of the hours, but she had started when Joseph finished his rounds and now birds were singing in the cool light of dawn that struggled to slip passed the blankets and canvas pinned against the windows.
Her fingers tremored as she held them above his chest; finally, like a worm emerging from an apple, the last chip of bone rose from the pulp of his wound. She snatched it from the air with a sigh and a shudder, adding it to the little pile of debris: a scattering of threads and ivory-ish fragments around a single lump of lead. She felt like she had been navigating a labyrinth blind - a living labyrinth that bruised and bled each time its walls were touched.
She pressed the stained lint pad back against his shoulder; bandages were becoming scarce so she had washed the ones he already had beneath the pump outside - it was either that or take them off the dead. When the wound was dressed she fished a brass tin half-filled with lucifers from her pocket and placed the bullet and bone with the matches.
Thin strips of greyish light had invaded the church, heralding the new-formed day. Cait wrapped the blanket and Morrow’s greatcoat back around his shoulders, stationing herself to one side of him and allowing HellBitch to lie along the other.
She touched her fingers anxiously to his cheek, his skin was like tallow candles, features so sunken they looked bruised.
He shivered into consciousness, fighting futilely against the pain and weakness that held him.
“Preach?” she whispered. “Preach... How d’you feel?”
His eyelids flickered again, rose with an effort and managed to focus on her. His lips curled into a cracked smile. “Blessed,” he uttered before coughing, as blood rose in his throat and the darkness claimed him again.
==========
NOTES:
The story about the reporter who walked for over five miles to reach Bezu field hospital after being shot three times is all true.
Seraphim is originally from Finland, and as such words not French or English are Finnish, however everything she says in that language is repeated in French if not English so I don't feel the need to translate =P
Viajero is Czech, which prior to the end of WWI was the country of Bohemia.
Seba-seshka: Lore Keeper of the Clan, one who knows the Clan's history and is in some ways the heart of the Clan.
“K’dewa-netjer en te." - Formal thanks. Lit. 'I thank the gods for you' (Kachina)