The Sculptress V.S. Alexander (ebooks that read to you .txt) 📖

“As you are.”

His tired, dark eyes fixed upon her. “You must wait until I finish with this soldier, then we can talk. Find cover on the other side of the path.”

Tom turned back to his patient. Emma picked up her helmet and walked across the clearing, crossing over vehicle tracks partially obscured by weeds. She sat on a grassy slope away from the horse carts and watched as stretcher-bearers disappeared and emerged from the surrounding thickets, passing back and forth in front of her in a chaotic military procession.

“Put on your helmet,” a gruff voice commanded. The soldier who had guided Emma plopped down beside her, his backside sliding a little on the grass because of his weight. “Boche snipers are everywhere.”

Emma again complied with his request. “How do you do it?”

He pulled at his beard. “Fight?”

“Yes. How do you stand the mud, the cold, the heat, and every atrocity that comes with this war? And face death as well?”

“We have no choice. We must fight or surrender . . . and to surrender is to die.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to live?”

“What—turn France over to our enemies? The war has dragged on and there have been mutinies, but how could we face ourselves if we allowed the Boche to prevail?”

An unearthly stillness hung in the air after a round of distant blasts. Everyone, including the stretcher-bearers, halted. A few cocked their heads and turned their eyes upward.

The soldier swung his face toward Emma’s, his eyes sparkling with terror.

Pressure, like a wave, bore down upon them. Emma’s ears crackled as the soldier threw his body over hers.

“Cover your head,” he shouted as the shell plummeted toward them. She shielded her face with her arms as his weight knocked the breath out of her.

A concussion pounded in her ears and rippled across her body.

The world floated around her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw men, horses, carts, and chunks of earth twirl in the air in a slow ballet and then fall carelessly to earth.

After the shock, the world was strangely silent and black.

* * *

I am dead.

She stifled a scream. Blood dripped from the mouth of the soldier on top of her and ran warm down her cheek and neck. She pushed the lolling head away, the helmet rolling to the ground, her ears barely hearing the muffled screams around her.

Gradually, more screams and a chorus of moans filtered through the pressure filling her head, as if she was swimming in the depths of a cold lake.

“Tom!” Clutching the soldier’s body, she tried to push it away, but his bulk was too much. She struggled, jerking her neck back and forth, in a paroxysm of fright, kicking the man’s legs and punching his shoulders, but the weight remained unmoved, as if a heavy slab had been placed upon her.

For a moment, terror filled her—convinced that this Poilu would be her sarcophagus. Like a ghost, the face of another Poilu floated above her. Blood streaked the side of his tunic, but his legs moved with vigor. He dislodged the soldier with a powerful shove from his booted foot. He leaned over the body, shouted “mort,” in Emma’s ear, and went on his way.

She rose on her elbows and viewed the carnage. The soldier who had saved her lay dead: his bloody legs across hers, his uniform jacket shredded by the clumps of dirt, rocks, and shards of metal protruding from his back. Ten meters to the right of the dressing station where Tom had attended his patient, smoke rose from a newly formed crater surrounded by splintered trees. Not far from her, a dying horse screamed on its back and kicked its legs in the air in anguish. A soldier came to the animal, withdrew his pistol, and fired two shots into its head.

Emma kicked at the soldier’s legs, finally freeing herself. She ran to the dressing station to find overturned tables, shattered glass, and operating instruments strewn across the brown earth. Tom’s patient lay on the ground, eyes frozen open in death. The soldier’s arm, the one that held the bullet, had been ripped from his shoulder.

She stepped over the jumbled equipment and found Tom partially concealed by an operating table and stretcher.

His eyes, at first closed, blinked open. Blood streamed down the side of his face.

Emma lifted the table from him as gently as she could and gasped. An open wound cut across his left thigh and upward toward his stomach, the apron and pants he wore ripped away in pieces.

He reached for her. “Emma, what happened?” His hoarse whisper barely penetrated the ringing in her ears.

She knelt next to him, calling his name, telling him to hold on, praying that help would arrive soon. She grabbed a cloth and pressed it against his thigh to staunch the flow of blood, looking for anything that might act as a tourniquet, crying out for help, but hearing only the moans of the dying in response. She pressed harder on the wound and Tom’s eyes rolled back in their sockets.

She was holding the crimson cloth over the laceration and shivering, her hands soaked in blood, when French soldiers emerged from the forest like columns of angry insects.

“Please help my husband,” she begged, and collapsed beside him, her own eyes closed in shock.

* * *

“How are you?”

Emma shook herself from her lethargy in the Toul hospital lobby. The day, the night, the morning had run together in a blur of dark trails and trenches that led away from the Front, men speaking maddeningly fast French, an uncomfortable, bouncing, ambulance ride, and a slow, exhaustive, collapse at the hospital. As she twisted in the chair, she couldn’t remember the day or the time, or whether she’d had anything to eat or drink.

“Madame? Are you with me?” The lines around Claude’s eyes contracted with his piteous look as he stood by her. “You need to rest. Let Richard take you to the cottage.”

“No.” She massaged