Prideful Loyalties

If it weren’t for the fact that Major Dubois wasn’t holding a gun and had a long cut near raking his arm, I would have thought he was an enemy who came to put a bullet between my eyebrows.

This is for your country. For your pride. For your home. My living mantra rings between my ears, and despite the fact that those words are only a reminder to keep me going in this battle craze, I’ll force them to calm me. It’s not time for me to die. Not yet, at least. Not until I’ve completed my part.

So I take a breath, manage a smile, pretend not to see his injury. “What brings you in today, Major Dubois?”

He chuckles hoarsely. “Voice crack a bit, nurse?”

My breathe hitches.

He inspects my uniform. The navy green trousers and buttoned seersucker clung tightly around my throat. From the path of my breasts, his eyes roams upwards and see through to the cyanide pill hidden in my necklace, the last result if any of us are captured. To die before an enemy takes us, breaks us, and then disposes of us. While most soldiers I meet are a bit hazy-eyed, the only thing I notice through his are flatness. Empty.That makes me a bit more relaxed.

His accent is richly thick and French.“Lieutenant sent me to take care of this. This isn’t my first battle, and something as small,” He gestures to the long wound on his arm as if it were only a scratch, “as this shouldn’t matter, but orders are orders. And I need to be back there as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” I murmur, taking steps across the tent to find some water and perhaps bandages across the main table. Yes, bandages, those would do fine.

He doesn’t respond. Despite the fact that neither of us attempt to make conversation, silence is nowhere to be seen. Beyond the thin tents surrounding us are the large yells and hollers of the soldiers fighting and dying outside. My heart prays that all of this will be over soon.

I quickly unlock boxes to find scarce medical supplies. I contempt using what rarities there are being stored there as the Major claims that he is fine. Still, I unravel a tube of bandages for Major Dubois to use as I prepare some medicine to disinfect the wound.

There’s a hesitation in my voice. “Is the fighting going… well?”

I look back to the Major and immediately regret it. Almost a moment ago those eyes were empty, but now, they were molten with rage and anger.

It had been six weeks since Germany’s surprise attack on Ardennes with new weapons. It’s as if Germany dripped the word more when asking of what it dreams of. More tanks. More guns. More spies. More artillery. More power. And now they’ve gained a part of France by surprise with that thirst of more, besting their Maginot Lines and not expecting an onslaught of tanks and aircraft.

The soldiers tell me that France is fine. It is okay. That I should not worry and only feel grateful for the Allies and their contribution. But whenever I hear news of more battles and struggles, my heart only thunders in a mysterious desire.

The glimmers of images in Major Dubois’s eyes are only a reflection of what is happening out there, on the battlefields, and it can’t be good for them.

“So...no.” I say quietly, my voice somber, only a bit, as that desire floods throughout my veins.

“Amelie! Where are you? We need you, right now!” I jump at the sound.

To my left, the tent door flaps open, revealing a red-headed woman with a matching nurse uniform like mine. Jeanne, I immediately tell myself. My head nurse Jeanne. A very scared Jeanne.

Jeanne struts towards me, holding a pack of envelopes. “You owe me one, I really mean it Amelie. It took me forever to find-”

Jeanne notices Major Dubois and completely freezes. If it weren’t for her tone, I would have laughed at the sight.

“M-Major Dubois,” Jeanne says, forcing a smile to come on her red-painted lips. She cups both of her hands together. “Are you well, Major?”

She then sees his injury and blinks slowly, embarrassment swallowing her whole.

He immediately dismisses her. “What’s happened?”

Jeanne’s face is grave. “Another attack on the Western Front, a full one at that. Horrible, half of the soldiers are injured.” Jeanne looks to me with red-rimmed eyes. “We need you out there stat, Amelie. Right now. Everyone is being sent. They need our necessities.”

“Right.” I say tightly, slowly processing her words one by one as shock overwhelms the room.

A glance to Jeanne, a look to his injury, and then Major Dubois walks right past us in a hurried scuffle outside the tent, paler than ever before.

I pull Jeanne by the elbow, taking the envelopes she brought for me to a station at hand and begin to rip out pens and papers to write quickly before heaving to the front lines. Jeanne starts to pack supplies like a true nurse, storing and dividing supplies as lines of stress folds the wrinkles on her forehead.

A few minutes pass. I watch her so closely while she unloads and reloads cabinets of scissors, balms, pins, and swabs. I write swift, scarce words in fast-paced, hurried sentences at moments when Jeanne’s back is turned from me and her mind is elsewhere.

“Jeanne?” I ask, starting to finish my thoughts. “What’s the date today?”

“Wednesday.” She answers, not bothering to face me.

I frown, looking at filled paper in front of me. “I meant the month, Jeanne.”

I hear a huff and sigh before, “Wednesday, June 19, 1940.” Jeanne pauses. “Need the time too?”

“Quiet,” I say loudly only to be received by a soft snicker.

Once finish, I seal the letter and press the paper against my chest. The crinkle of burned goodbyes clutches between my heart, and I pray it won’t be so dangerous to enter the battlefield and digest oneself in the soldiers.. I imagine that I won’t die at the arms of an enemy in the upcoming hours.

I finally join Jeanne. Only as we work, questions plague me and I submit to them. “How did the attack even happen? Wasn’t France supposedly fine?”

Nearly done, Jeanne pauses in her rearranging to rub her knuckles. My heart caves for her worries. If only this war would end soon. She speaks. “General Gamelan made an error.”

Errors cost battles. Cost lives. Cost wars. Cost futures.

Jeanne grazes her tightly-pulled hair. “We thought Germany would take time to strengthen after winning at Ardennes. Only we just received words that Sedan was captured with little to no resistance. And that they are coming very, very soon.”

An emotion rips from my chest, burrowing itself down my throat, and then makes my fingers prickly.

Clasping my shoulder by wrapping my arms around myself, I paint a forceful smile. “Well then, we should be helping our boys, shouldn’t we?”

Jeanne only nods, as if there were no other choice.

There is no other choice.

The whole lot of nurses and doctors and medics squeeze together in armored cars, each one fickling and fidgeting with every bump and crack and boom of turmoil we pass.

Sweat drips down my neck, as an unpresentable one drolls down my spine, no doubt nerves.

I signed up for this, I tell myself. This was your choice. This was the pride for your country you wanted. Digest all your suspicions and go out there and work.

My chest thunders and burns with each second closer we have to reaching the lines. A shock of explosions and rockets splintering and bursts grow louder and louder as the armored car moves. My eardrums strain at the unpredictable volume of destruction and yet, I still listen.

The cries of pain are never ending.

Wounded men, most of which are young boys or thrashing fathers-both choosing to help pull their strings in the threads of war pride, are all lined up, laying on the floor awaiting treatment. I swallow vomit and bile just itching to release itself at the sight of amputations, injuries, and the moist smell. So many hurt, and so many needing to be cared for.

There weren't enough medical supplies, and at the sight of this battle, our head nurse Jeanne had to rip open boxes and boxes of supplies which were chained down to avoid wasting material for all of the medics. But it wasn’t enough.

Jeanne and I slaved the night away, trying to see each wounded soldier that laid there. Each one was almost seconds away from meeting hell, or imagining that they were already in it, succumbing from tortures unimaginable. Despite the pungent smell of blood and sweat, no one stopped for a breath of air or a swallow of saliva, much less the nurses than the soldiers.

It wasn’t enough. It never is. No one could stop the packs and packs of soldiers dying overnight, an endless supply of corpses staring hollow-eyed at the blazing sky full of shells and rockets overcrowding the heaps of medical tents.

“When I came here,” Jeanne begins, rubbing sore fingers from countless of hours of disinfecting, stitching, and then bandaging, over and over again. We had manage to spare a moment to regroup ourselves. “I expected a vacation. Come on! It’s France for Christ’s sake.”

An empty attempt of positivity, I noticed. But her glimmering hope is only met with harshful truth.

I rub the back of my head, only to feel my damp hair breaking with sweat. “France is weak and at war, Jeanne. There is no time to relax, not when violence is brimming.”

“I guess,” She says quietly, a bit of sadness running into her voice. She rolls up her cuffs in spite of the heat and mosquitoes that surrounds us.

A year of this. Running around with Jeanne, dreaming of the end of all this, writing letters to my family, tending to soldiers, working rigorously near battles, all that and yet… the war goes on. My heart sickens at the thought of the enemy living through the endless spilled blood. Blood that I continuously see, and it only reminds me of why I’m here, and my purpose in this hell.

For your country. For your pride. For your home.

“Why’d you need the envelopes, Amelie?” Jeanne says next, trying to change from the dull topic to something more conversational-wise.

I choose my words carefully. “Letters, to my family. They live on the other side. I tell them of what’s happening over here. And knowing that this might be the last battle… I needed to let them know.”

Jeanne crosses her arms. “Do they know that you’re here?”

I cough quietly, trying hard not to pry into my past. “Of course. My family only told me that if I took the job, it would make my home proud-my country would be proud.”

“You did this only for pride?” Jeanne asks, a bit of a rattle riddling down her throat.

My eyes roll. “And for the paycheck it brings.” It was true, each penny was being used up by this stupid war. And even if the pay was a sliver of a dollar less than what I could take at home, it was worth it. If only the war will end soon, and with my contribution…

I look down to the Red Cross armband wrap tightly around my left cuff. My thoughts grew in the dark. This separates you. You are not a little girl anymore. You are a soldier doing her country proud.

I give Jeanne a sad smile. “Do you think I can send the letter I wrote today? With the pigeons?”

“Don’t know,” She says, giving me a slight frown. “The soldiers say we’re not technically safe.”

As being head nurse, Jeanne received the latest orders from the generals as knowing when to direct her league of medics to the battlefields. As being her friend, I heard the news on the daily.

I shut my eyes. Of course we weren’t safe. In these conditions, no one was safe.

“Don’t worry,” Jeanne says next mistakenly taking my reaction of displease as disappointment. She pulls up towards me and braces her hands on my shoulders. “We, and France, will be fine.”

Screams blast out to our right, making both of us, as well as the the rest of the nurses in the tent jump up in fright.

Oh no.

Gunshots. The noises loud and far explode everywhere in the corners of the room. Shrieks and cries run throughout the tent becoming a living nightmare.

“They’re here!” A soldier screams, blasting inside our tent to all us now barely awake and in terror.

“What’s happened?” Jeanne immediately begins in the chaos, staying in her place while each of us take a step back.

The man stutters, blood running loose from his mouth. “G-Germans, they’re everywhere. France is overwhelmed. They’ve come to take our weapons and kill us.”

A small part of me cracks insides.

The man throws his hands in the air. “Quick! I’ve come to warn you. They’re advancing, every life is for his own!”

Jeanne, head nurse of the lot of thirty that came from across the seas, meets each eye of those who followed her to France for battle. Me, included.

She makes no attempts to flee like many choose too. Instead, she clasps her hands once more like she did earlier in the day, smiles hazily at all of her subordinates and says, “Thank you.”

Confused as we all are, Jeanne responds by breaking the chain of her necklace and then raising it into the air, for all of us to follow.

A heartbeat later I understand.

Opening the vial, Jeanne speaks softly as her words pass beyond the thirty medics shaking in the corruption of war. “My lovely workers, you have done all that you can do for this war. But we have lost. Take the pill before the Germans find you and break your pride. We cannot run, we were not made to fight, but we were made help others. So,” Her eyes glimmer with tears dripping and bursting through her lashes, “Let our fathers and mothers remember us as we did. We will help France by protecting its secrets. Let them know that we died fighting and not sitting in our homes, reading about the war through a newspaper in our kitchens. Let them know that this is the end for us, but not for France. Vive La France.”

Bleak eyes of each nurse and doctor stare at her throughout the commotion, and try as I might to object, each single one of them nods. Repeating according: “Vive La France.”

There must be a better solution to this, I want to say. To kill oneself rather than fight is an escape. A cheat. A cutout. Pathetic.

But I don’t stop them.

So, one by one, they start taking the cyanide pills as I watch comrades and workers fall down to the ground in agony and in death.

The gunshots stop, and beautiful, sad Jeanne looks at me. Wide eyes, with only realization burning though them. Her voice breaks. “It’s too late. They’re here.”

My mantra rolls throughout my head. This is for your country. For your pride. For your home.

I stare at the pill that I had taken out beforehand, waiting to take it. A doctor in front of me devours his and goes down. Jeanne besides me coughs loudly. She looks at me in horror.

This is for your country.

In one swing, with tears streaming down her cheeks, Jeanne drops the pill inside her mouth and swallows.

For your pride.

Jeanne falls in a matter of seconds, unpresumably dead. My friend, dead.

For your home.

I let the pill drop between my fingers onto the ground.

This is for my country.

I smile wickedly. Let this war end.My letters were a success.