At first she didn't even bother looking at his face. Instead she mechanically began to cut away the charred uniform, stopping only when she exposed a wound that was bleeding too badly. The cutting was not easy, for the burned skin often stuck to the shredded uniform. When she ran across this, Cole was careful to lift the uniform slightly, and then separate the skin from the material with scissors or a scalpel. While she was doing this to one particularly nasty wound on the inside of his thigh, Cole noticed that the soldier didn't move or jerk. Looking up at his face for the first time, she checked to see if he was breathing. To her surprise, he was awake and staring up. Finishing what she was doing, Cole moved over to check the soldier's vital signs. As she did so, he still didn't move as he continued to stare vacantly into space. Satisfied that he was still hanging on, Cole was about to go back to work when he softly called out, "Is it all there? Am I, am I going to be all right?"
Knowing that he was concerned about his genitals, Cole hesitated for a second. She didn't know, since she hadn't gotten that far. Torn between ignoring the soldier's gentle plea and responding, Cole flashed the best smile that she could and turned to face the soldier. With her right hand, she brushed several dirty strands of hair away from his forehead and leaned over close to him. "Well, honey, I'm sure you're going to be all right. I just need to do some more cleaning up so the doctors can take care of you. Now if you promise to relax and try to stay still, I'll do my best to finish as quickly as possible without causing you any more discomfort than I have to. Is that a deal?"
A weak smile was the best response that the soldier could muster before he returned to staring into space. Taking a deep breath, Cole straightened up, looked at his face one more time, then got back to work. Though she did her best to keep the amount of distress she was causing him to a minimum while working as fast as she could, Cole knew that she was putting the soldier through agony. Still he did not move. Every time she looked up, all he did was lie there staring at the ceiling. Only when she finished and turned back to tell him that she was done, did she find that at some point during her efforts the soldier had quietly slipped into unconsciousness and died.
Suddenly the full weight of all the emotions that she had been holding back, all the horror and suffering that she had been defending herself against, came crashing down on Cole. With her face stiff with panic, Cole stepped away from the table, unable to turn away from the soldier's eyes frozen open in death. Without realizing it, Cole began to shake and tremble. She didn't hear the high-pitched squeal that came from a soul unable to continue with her gruesome labors. Slowly, uncontrollably, Cole was beginning to break down under the stress.
From across the way, First Lieutenant Renée Ritter heard Cole's screech and looked up. In an instant Ritter knew what was happening. Shouting to an orderly to come over to where she was and finish cleaning a burn, Ritter rushed over and grabbed Cole's arm from behind and spun her around. Cole's face was taut with terror. Her eyes, wide open and unblinking, were focused on some unseen object past Ritter's shoulder. Holding Cole's arms firmly in her hands, Ritter gently shook her.
Finally Cole looked up and searched Ritter's face for a second before speaking. Even then Cole was able to utter only a few weak and fluttering words. When she did, those words were disjointed and almost whispered. "He died! He did what I asked and he died. He just lay there like I asked him and he died. I told him if he just relaxed and kept quiet, he'd be all right. And he died!"
On the brink herself, Ritter fought back her own tears as she took Cole's chin in her hand and tilted it up to look into her eyes. "Hilary, you're doing your best. You can only do so much. God, I hate to see this too and I hate to admit it, but not everyone in here is going to live. We can't stop that. You can't, I can't, even the colonel can't. We can only do our best to save those we can." Pausing, Ritter let go of Cole's chin and wiped away the tears that were streaming down her own cheeks. She didn't realize that in the process she was smearing across her own face blood that was still on her hands from the last casualty she had been working on. "Hilary, you've got to stay with me. If you don't, we'll lose more. Do you understand that? Do you hear me? You've got to stay with me."
Cole, fighting her tears with the last of her strength, looked into Ritter's eyes as she inhaled. She couldn't answer. All she could do was nod just before she wrapped her arms about Ritter. Putting her head on Ritter's shoulder, Cole began to cry. Without hesitation, Ritter wrapped her arms about Cole and leaned her cheek against Cole's.
While other nurses and orderlies around them went about their work, ignoring the two nurses, Ritter slowly rocked Cole, saying nothing, for there was nothing that could be said. No words could drown out the moans and screams of the wounded that waited to be tended to. No promises that everything would be all right could reassure Cole. Only the warmth of another human being, suffering and needing a kind and gentle touch just as badly as Cole did, could ease the suffering that was tearing at Cole's heart.
Though the wounded kept coming in, they would have to wait for a moment while the Army's caretakers took care of their own invisible wounds and suffered for a moment in silence together.
Outside, in any direction you cared to turn, officers and soldiers of the U.S. Tenth Corps and the Bundeswehr moved about through the woods and around the hills of central Germany hunting each other like animals. For at company and platoon level, the grand strategy and sweeping maneuvers discussed by commanders and staff officers at corps and division had no meaning. War to the company commander, platoon leader, and the soldiers entrusted to them was nothing more than a series of chance meetings, sudden firefights, and swift mad charges and countercharges as attacker and defender rushed forward to tear blindly away at their enemy whenever they were found. For the next two days, opposing German and American companies and platoons collided in the cold, damp, snow-covered hills, fields, and woods. When that happened, they would hurl themselves at each other, exchange fire, and push for an advantage. In this way they generated more wounded, more broken bodies, broken bodies that would eventually find their way to Cole, Ritter, and other nurses, German and American, working hard to undo the damage caused by officers doing their duty and national policies run amuck.
CHAPTER 14
While the problems faced by all the commanders throughout the 1st Brigade, 4th Armored Division, up to this point of Malin's March to the Sea had been varied, complex, and numerous, they were for the most part taken in stride and carried out swiftly and efficiently. Even the sudden change in orders, jerking them from the nerve-racking task of playing rear guard for the corps to an offensive mission that would require them to charge off into the flank of an advancing German panzer division, was taken in stride with hardly a break in the tempo of the brigade. Scott Dixon, after all, had gone to great extremes during training exercises to stress and test the flexibility, both physical and mental, of all of his commanders. "Every conceivable problem and difficulty in war," he told his officers and noncommissioned officers at every opportunity, "is possible. The only thing that any of you can be sure of," he warned his subordinates, "is that in war, the next mission or next problem you face will probably be the one which you were never trained to deal with or weren't prepared to deal with." While these words were coming back to haunt every officer and sergeant in Dixon's command the further north they went, they had special meaning to Captain Nancy Kozak that morning.