Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

Doon looks at her. He says something, words she can’t hear. Then he dies.

Someone is shaking Frangie’s shoulder roughly, yelling at her, a sound she cannot parse, cannot understand. But the face looking at her is anguished. She nods.

She leaves Doon and the weeping lieutenant behind and in a trance follows the soldier who guides her by the hand to a second soldier. He’s lying against an unharmed howitzer. His foot is gone.

“Traumatic amputation.” That’s the term for it. Something has been blown off. Something is missing.

His ankle is a mess of red worms, arteries and veins and shreds of meat and a circle of white bone oozing marrow, but half of it has been cauterized, seared shut by the heat of the shrapnel. It saved him a lot of blood, that’s a good thing. She tightens a tourniquet around the stump. Instinct. Training.

Humanity.

She slaps a bandage on, inadequate, laughable if laughter is ever possible again. She stabs a morphine syrette into his thigh.

There’s more. A dead woman. Frangie cannot raise the dead, not this PFC, and not Doon Acey.

A man with shrapnel in his chest and belly roars in pain, the first real sound she’s heard since the bombardment. More morphine. The man has to go to the field aid station; there’s nothing she can do with a belly wound. She sends him off on a cloud of morphine.

There’s a broken arm, a scalp laceration, a few small burns. And there’s a body without its head. The head is never found. A male soldier with a superficial wound—hot shrapnel grazing a thigh—demands to be sent home.

“Can’t do it,” Frangie says as she sprinkles sulfa powder on the wound. “That doesn’t even rate stitches.”

“I coulda been killed.”

“And if you had been, you’d be going home.” She’s pleased with the steadiness of her voice, she likes the toughness of it. And she’s coping, that’s the important thing, she’s coping.

Despite the hammering they’ve taken there’s only three deaths: the PFC, the headless man, and Doon Acey. He was the only one she knew in the outfit, the only one she could talk to.

If I were a real doctor, maybe . . .

After doing all she can for the urgent cases she sets up an examination office of sorts, an upturned ammo crate for a chair, another one for her patients. Three men and one woman line up, all with minor injuries.

Frangie is in charge. She’s the doc, at least for this part of the battalion.

All around her there is frantic activity as soldiers run a length of chain to a surviving truck and haul an overturned howitzer upright. The battery must be moved if they are to avoid another barrage.

“Sergeant Acey.” It’s the young lieutenant. His pale skin is covered with dust, so even in firelight he looks more gray than white. “There was nothing you could do for him?”

She is busy picking at a stubborn roll of medical tape. “No, sir. It was . . . Um.” She grabs the tape end and pulls. “It was . . . It was bad.”

“He was a good soldier.” The dust on Lieutenant Penche’s face reveals the track of a tear. He is shaken up.

He’s not much older than I am.

“Yes, sir,” she says. “I knew him. I know his folks. I can write them.”

He shakes his head. “No, I’ll write them. And the others. I mean, of course you can, but I must. It’s my duty.”

“That’s the captain’s job, isn’t it, sir?”

“The captain . . . Well, he’s not . . . I mean, with colored troops and how . . .” Lieutenant Penche realizes he’s said too much and finishes lamely by saying, “Let’s both write to his folks, you and me, Doc.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is there anything you need here?” He doesn’t seem to want to leave.

“Water, sir, if there is any.”

He’s relieved to be given something to do. “I’ll do what I can.”