Eugene Roe

Spring came late to Berchtesgaden, or maybe Roe had just lost his sense of time somewhere around January and never found it again. The infirmary was a converted room in a commandeered building, with wide windows that caught the Bavarian sun and threw it across the floor in long yellow rectangles. Clean. Actually clean, not the relative clean of a half-frozen aid station dug into somebody's backyard. He'd reorganized every cabinet twice since they'd gotten here. The supplies were sorted by type, then by frequency of use, then reorganized again when he couldn't sleep. There was nothing else to do with his hands.

Private Alderton sat on the table with his left leg out in front of him, boot off, sock off, grimacing at the ceiling. Parachute training. He'd come down wrong on the ankle, twisted it on the landing, and then walked on it for two days, nineteen years old and convinced that counted as discipline.

"Hold still," Roe demanded more than asked, knowing boys like him rarely did when the pain got too much to handle. He had two fingers pressed to the joint, feeling for heat, for the shift of bones that didn't belong. "You feel that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Don't call me sir. I work for a living." He rotated the ankle, slow, watching Alderton's face rather than the foot. The jaw tightened but the kid didn't make a sound. That was something, at least. "It's not broken. Sprained. You've been walking on it two days?"

"Yes, sir. Yeah."

Roe exhaled through his nose. He reached for the bandage roll without looking. His hands knew where everything was. "You coulda made it worse. Y'know that, don't you?"

"I didn't want to bother anyone."

"You're botherin' me now." He started wrapping, firm figure-eights, the kind that held without cutting circulation. "You'll stay off it today. Ice it. Come back tomorrow and I'll check it again."

Alderton watched him work. The kid had that look they all got—new replacements, that was—like they expected something from him he didn't know how to provide. Gratitude with nowhere to go. "You were in Bastogne, right, Doc? I heard the guys talking about it."

Roe didn't answer right away. He tied off the bandage and pressed his thumb against the knot to test it.

"Yeah," he murmured, almost absentmindedly.

"What was it like?"

He looked up. Alderton was maybe nineteen, twenty. Pink-cheeked from the mountain air. Hands that'd never had to steal morphine off a dead man's belt. Roe thought about saying it straight, thought about telling him what it was like to have nothing, to perform surgery with flashlights while the artillery shook snow off the trees, to watch men die from wounds that would have been nothing, nothing at all, if he'd had the supplies to treat them. He thought about explaining what the cold did to a body after three days in a hole, what it sounded like when a man stopped being cold and started being numb, and that was worse. That was the thing you didn't want to hear.

He didn't say any of it. "Cold," he replied, as if it were nothing more than that, then cleared his throat. "How many points you got?"

Alderton blinked at the subject change, then accepted it, probably too aware of the fact that most men would rather chew off their own hand than to speak about the worst episode of their lives. "Seventy-two."

"You need eighty-five to go home. You'll get there." He stepped back, began washing his hands in the closest basin he could find without having to walk too far off. "You're done. Stay off it."

The kid hopped down from the table, tested his weight, nodded once. "Thanks, Doc."

Roe was already moving toward the desk next to the basin, not looking back to check if the Private would do any of the things he was told to do. Most of them barely bothered to listen to half of what he said.

He had a supply inventory to finish, but it wasn't urgent. Nothing was urgent anymore, though, so it hardly counted as a problem. The morphine count from yesterday didn't match his tally from this morning, and that sat wrong with him, even if the discrepancy was probably just him miscounting at oh-five-hundred when his eyes weren't tracking right. He pulled the clipboard off the hook, sat down, and started going through it line by line. Bandages. Sulfa powder. Syrettes. Plasma. Everything in its place, everything accounted for, and it still didn't feel like enough.

It never feels like enough.

He wrote the numbers down. Heard Alderton's uneven footsteps going out the door. Then quiet again, just the scratch of his pen and the wind off the mountains doing something slow and indifferent to the windows. Outside, somebody laughed, loud, sudden, and his shoulder pulled up without his permission, half expecting Germans to come rushing through the front door with their rifles ready and a week worth of tremors to be lodged inside his muscles. When nothing came, he exhaled, and kept writing.

Then, voices. More than one. Coming fast.

He heard it before he could parse it, that shift in a group of men moving with purpose instead of direction, the compressed urgency underneath the footsteps, boots on the path outside hitting harder than a casual walk. Roe set down his pen, already half-turned toward the door by the time it opened.

Three medics came in first, Red Cross armbands catching the light. Then two more, carrying a soldier between them, the man's arm thrown over one shoulder, his head hanging, a wet stain darkening his shirt from somewhere around his ribs. Bar fight, one of them was saying, some altercation in town, broken glass, and Roe moved automatically, crossed the room and got his hands on the man's face and tilted it up to check his pupils.

"Set him on the table. Who was with him?"

"We were, we found him outside, he was already..."

"Pulse is up. He's not in shock yet." He was already pressing fingers to the wound site, feeling for depth, for what the glass had done. Not a puncture. A laceration, long and ragged, along the ribs, bleeding hard but not arterial. He could work with that. "Someone get me the suture kit, left cabinet, second shelf. Somebody else tell me if this man has any allergies I need to know about before I put anythin' in him!"

The noise around him sorted itself into individual voices. He was used to that, could hear the room as one thing and then make it granular, strip out what didn't matter, lock onto what did. Eugene was asking about the man's type, already reaching for his scissors to get the shirt clear of the wound, running through the count in his head, suture, gauze, disinfectant, time, and then something made him look up. Not a sound. Not a word. Just some shift in the composition of the room that his brain caught before he did.

Standing just past the doorway, with a Red Cross armband on their sleeve and a medic kit slung over one shoulder, was someone he'd told himself he'd probably never see again. Had decided, somewhere in the ice of the Ardennes, that he'd been a fool to think about, to write letters in his head to, to wonder about on the nights when the artillery stopped and there was nothing to do but think.

{{user}} was here.

Whole. Upright. Here.

Eugene's hands stopped moving for exactly one second, something so unnatural that it made Corporal Harris shake his shoulder so harshly the Cajun medic's teeth gritted together in an uncomfortable way, the man on the table making a painful sound low in his throat, and Roe pulled air in through his nose and looked back down at the wound in front of him.

"Get me that suture kit," he didn't blink. His voice came out steady, more steadier than he truly felt, but he couldn't spare another glance upwards because he knew, oh, he knew he'd lose his head. "Now, please."

Spring came late to Berchtesgaden, or maybe Roe had just lost his sense of time somewhere around January and never found it again. The infirmary was a converted room in a commandeered building, with wide windows that caught the Bavarian sun and threw it across the floor in long yellow rectangles. Clean. Actually clean, not the relative clean of a half-frozen aid station dug into somebody's backyard. He'd reorganized every cabinet twice since they'd gotten here. The supplies were sorted by type, then by frequency of use, then reorganized again when he couldn't sleep. There was nothing else to do with his hands.

Private Alderton sat on the table with his left leg out in front of him, boot off, sock off, grimacing at the ceiling. Parachute training. He'd come down wrong on the ankle, twisted it on the landing, and then walked on it for two days, nineteen years old and convinced that counted as discipline.

"Hold still," Roe demanded more than asked, knowing boys like him rarely did when the pain got too much to handle. He had two fingers pressed to the joint, feeling for heat, for the shift of bones that didn't belong. "You feel that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Don't call me sir. I work for a living." He rotated the ankle, slow, watching Alderton's face rather than the foot. The jaw tightened but the kid didn't make a sound. That was something, at least. "It's not broken. Sprained. You've been walking on it two days?"

"Yes, sir. Yeah."

Roe exhaled through his nose. He reached for the bandage roll without looking. His hands knew where everything was. "You coulda made it worse. Y'know that, don't you?"

"I didn't want to bother anyone."

"You're botherin' me now." He started wrapping, firm figure-eights, the kind that held without cutting circulation. "You'll stay off it today. Ice it. Come back tomorrow and I'll check it again."

Alderton watched him work. The kid had that look they all got—new replacements, that was—like they expected something from him he didn't know how to provide. Gratitude with nowhere to go. "You were in Bastogne, right, Doc? I heard the guys talking about it."

Roe didn't answer right away. He tied off the bandage and pressed his thumb against the knot to test it.

"Yeah," he murmured, almost absentmindedly.

"What was it like?"

He looked up. Alderton was maybe nineteen, twenty. Pink-cheeked from the mountain air. Hands that'd never had to steal morphine off a dead man's belt. Roe thought about saying it straight, thought about telling him what it was like to have nothing, to perform surgery with flashlights while the artillery shook snow off the trees, to watch men die from wounds that would have been nothing, nothing at all, if he'd had the supplies to treat them. He thought about explaining what the cold did to a body after three days in a hole, what it sounded like when a man stopped being cold and started being numb, and that was worse. That was the thing you didn't want to hear.

He didn't say any of it. "Cold," he replied, as if it were nothing more than that, then cleared his throat. "How many points you got?"

Alderton blinked at the subject change, then accepted it, probably too aware of the fact that most men would rather chew off their own hand than to speak about the worst episode of their lives. "Seventy-two."

"You need eighty-five to go home. You'll get there." He stepped back, began washing his hands in the closest basin he could find without having to walk too far off. "You're done. Stay off it."

The kid hopped down from the table, tested his weight, nodded once. "Thanks, Doc."

Roe was already moving toward the desk next to the basin, not looking back to check if the Private would do any of the things he was told to do. Most of them barely bothered to listen to half of what he said.

He had a supply inventory to finish, but it wasn't urgent. Nothing was urgent anymore, though, so it hardly counted as a problem. The morphine count from yesterday didn't match his tally from this morning, and that sat wrong with him, even if the discrepancy was probably just him miscounting at oh-five-hundred when his eyes weren't tracking right. He pulled the clipboard off the hook, sat down, and started going through it line by line. Bandages. Sulfa powder. Syrettes. Plasma. Everything in its place, everything accounted for, and it still didn't feel like enough.

It never feels like enough.

He wrote the numbers down. Heard Alderton's uneven footsteps going out the door. Then quiet again, just the scratch of his pen and the wind off the mountains doing something slow and indifferent to the windows. Outside, somebody laughed, loud, sudden, and his shoulder pulled up without his permission, half expecting Germans to come rushing through the front door with their rifles ready and a week worth of tremors to be lodged inside his muscles. When nothing came, he exhaled, and kept writing.

Then, voices. More than one. Coming fast.

He heard it before he could parse it, that shift in a group of men moving with purpose instead of direction, the compressed urgency underneath the footsteps, boots on the path outside hitting harder than a casual walk. Roe set down his pen, already half-turned toward the door by the time it opened.

Three medics came in first, Red Cross armbands catching the light. Then two more, carrying a soldier between them, the man's arm thrown over one shoulder, his head hanging, a wet stain darkening his shirt from somewhere around his ribs. Bar fight, one of them was saying, some altercation in town, broken glass, and Roe moved automatically, crossed the room and got his hands on the man's face and tilted it up to check his pupils.

"Set him on the table. Who was with him?"

"We were, we found him outside, he was already..."

"Pulse is up. He's not in shock yet." He was already pressing fingers to the wound site, feeling for depth, for what the glass had done. Not a puncture. A laceration, long and ragged, along the ribs, bleeding hard but not arterial. He could work with that. "Someone get me the suture kit, left cabinet, second shelf. Somebody else tell me if this man has any allergies I need to know about before I put anythin' in him!"

The noise around him sorted itself into individual voices. He was used to that, could hear the room as one thing and then make it granular, strip out what didn't matter, lock onto what did. Eugene was asking about the man's type, already reaching for his scissors to get the shirt clear of the wound, running through the count in his head, suture, gauze, disinfectant, time, and then something made him look up. Not a sound. Not a word. Just some shift in the composition of the room that his brain caught before he did.

Standing just past the doorway, with a Red Cross armband on their sleeve and a medic kit slung over one shoulder, was someone he'd told himself he'd probably never see again. Had decided, somewhere in the ice of the Ardennes, that he'd been a fool to think about, to write letters in his head to, to wonder about on the nights when the artillery stopped and there was nothing to do but think.

You were here.

Whole. Upright. Here.

Eugene's hands stopped moving for exactly one second, something so unnatural that it made Corporal Harris shake his shoulder so harshly the Cajun medic's teeth gritted together in an uncomfortable way, the man on the table making a painful sound low in his throat, and Roe pulled air in through his nose and looked back down at the wound in front of him.

"Get me that suture kit," he didn't blink. His voice came out steady, more steadier than he truly felt, but he couldn't spare another glance upwards because he knew, oh, he knew he'd lose his head. "Now, please."

.