Page 20 of The Secrets We Left Behind
Elise’s stomach turned as she touched the bone, wanting to work fast now that he was unconscious, hating that she’d caused him so much pain he’d blacked out. When he woke up, he was possibly going to be in even more pain than before, though, and she didn’t want to still be working on him.
“Should I try to push the bone back in?” she asked Harry, swallowing down bile as she felt a part of a human that was supposed to be hidden on the inside behind flesh and muscle. “Or just try to straighten it as best I can?”
Harry was silent, and she didn’t think anything of it until she looked up, expecting that he was just thinking over the best option. But he fainted so fast and so hard, she didn’t have a chance to save him, his head whacking on the table before he hit the floor.
“Addy!”
She appeared almost immediately, the broom in her hand and a bucket in the other.
“What happened?” Adelaide dropped the stick and ran to Harry, hands fluttering over him as if she really had no idea what to do.
That makes two of us.
“Just make sure he’s breathing and put a blanket around him to keep him warm,” Elise said. “Then come here and help me splint this leg before this one wakes up.” He might have been condescending, but at least Harry had known a little about patching his fellow soldier up, and she wished he’d held on a bit longer before passing out.
She had no idea how they were going to attach Peter’s leg to the stick, or whether she was supposed to clean it or not, but the only thing worse than doing it wrong would be to not do anything at all.
Elise grimaced as she looked at both men, unconscious, knowing she was completely, utterly out of her depth.
An hour later, Elise sat beside Harry on the floor. He was propped up against a chair, and she was sitting cross-legged as she carefully wiped at his wound. Addy was sat quietly beside her; Peter was still asleep, albeit lying flat out on the floor now, where they’d managed to put him after securing his leg. It was only a temporary fix and she had no idea what she was actually going to do with him long-term, but for now she’d done her best. Incredibly, although he’d managed to sustain a shocking injury, perhaps from men falling on him, he hadn’t been shot at all.
Harry was another story, though.
“I’m going to have to get the bullet out,” Elise said confidently, as if it were something she’d done before. “If I don’t, I suspect an infection will eventually set in.”
Harry’s breath seemed to whistle through his teeth. “Just get it over and done with.”
“Should I get you a stick to bite on or something?” she asked.
“Just more whisky,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”
She had tweezers that Addy had found for her, and although they’d already been cleaned in boiling water, she tipped a little alcohol on them for good measure. And as Addy passed Harry the bottle of whisky, Elise shuffled even closer to him, one hand pressed to his chest, the other ready to dig into his shoulder.
“Ready?” she asked.
He took a quick sip. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
She carefully inserted her tweezers, being as gentle as could be. Harry grunted.
“Tell me what happened,” she asked, wanting to keep his mind off what she was doing. “Where did you all come from?”
“So now you want to chat?” he asked, wincing.
Elise gave him a sharp stare before going back to work on his wound.
“There were ninety-nine of us in our regiment,” he eventually rasped, groaning as she dug deeper into his flesh. “We were trying to stall the Nazi advance, so the rest of our soldiers had a fighting chance of making it.”
“An advance toward the coast?” Elise asked, leaning even closer to see the bullet as she pulled.
“Yes,” he gasped. “Trying to delay them as long as we could so the evacuation could go ahead. The entire British army is going home, if they make it, that is.”
She cringed as her tweezers slipped off the bullet. If only she had pliers or something sturdier to use.
“And do you think they did? Evacuate, I mean?” She couldn’t believe the British were leaving France.
He went silent, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the pain or whether it was more telling of what might have happened to the troops trying to evacuate.
“We were watching what happened in the barn, from upstairs,” she continued, squeezing tightly with the tweezers and finally, slowly extracting the bullet. “Why did you surrender?”
