Page 62 of The Forbidden Love of an Officer
He had no feeling in his arms or legs, though his heart beat even in the darkness, but his blood and energy drained away.I am going to die.
‘Tell my wife…’ He forced the words from his dry lips into the emptiness beyond him, and felt a man’s hand touch his face. Then… the last image in his head was Ellen, her face, as around him shots still screamed above his ahead, and swords and bayonets clashed.
Life ebbed, creeping away into nothing.
‘Captain! Captain!’
21
Ellen moved from man to man, and each time she knelt down beside another she prayed it would not be Paul. They were all so bloody and mud-stained she could not tell until she was close. This was hell on earth. So many men. So many wounded, and for every man here, they were saying there was a dozen left on the field.
Please, God! Please, God!Her mind called a constant prayer that Paul was safe.
‘Would you like water?’ She knelt beside another man. The lower half of his leg had been torn off by cannon fire. The rags he lay on and his clothes were covered in dried blood. The doctor had stopped the bleeding with a tight tourniquet around the man’s thigh, but he would need the upper limb amputated, he may have survived the battle and die from infection in a day or two.
Nausea twisted through the knots in Ellen’s stomach.
She would hold Paul so tightly when he came back and love him even more.
He nodded, a look of terror hovering in his gaze. The man’s skin was starkly pale beneath the stains of gunpowder, mud and blood, and his eyes were whiter from blood loss. She smiled, trying to ease his fear, though she was terrified herself. She filled the ladle in the bucket with water and held it to his lips, letting it trickle into his mouth. He caught the ladle with both hands and drank more thirstily. She refilled it and let him drink again. Then he sighed and lay back, closing his eyes.
As she stood, to offer the next man water, a surgeon waved her over. ‘I need bandages. Have we more bandages?’
The women had been ripping up sheets for hours and she rushed now to fetch some of the strips that were left; there were not many.
Paul’s image was constantly in her mind, as her heart continued praying for his safety.
She handed the bandages to the doctor and watched him wrap them about a wound he had just removed a bullet from. Behind her, another man was brought into the room, shouting out in agony. The doctor looked at her. ‘Carry on here.’
‘Tie a tourniquet,’ Paul had said months ago, when she had mourned a single highwayman. She could not have imagined this then.
22
When it was dark, the sounds of cannons suddenly ceased.
Everyone helping in the house in which she worked stopped and looked at one another as the world fell silent apart from the groans of the men in the room. Her heart skipped a beat.Was it over? Had the Allied forces won? Was Paul alive?
But she had no time for such thoughts – the men here needed help, and more wounded came every minute.
It was very late at night when an uninjured rider raced through the city gate. ‘Napoleon is defeated!’ he shouted repeatedly as he rode. Ellen rushed to look from the window, as did all the women in the house as people cheered in the street. Even the wounded men lying on the street, waiting to be moved to houses, hollered with joy.
Ellen’s heart filled with hope.
‘Back to work, ladies,’ a doctor called. ‘These men need us.’
The first light of dawn showed on the horizon when Ellen heard the footsteps of the first regiment marching back into the city. She looked from the window; it was not the 52nd.
Numerous times she rushed to the window to see another regiment arrive, to the cheers and applause of the occupants of Brussels. None were the 52nd, and each regiment brought more wounded with them.
She asked soldiers who were brought into the house for wounds to be cleaned and bandaged if they knew where the 52nd were. But the numbers of men fighting were so many, no one she asked had seen or knew the fate of the 52nd Oxfordshire Regiment of Foot.
‘Mrs Harding, go and rest.’ Ellen turned to face Mrs Beard. She was the wife of a Colonel from another regiment. It was her house that had become a makeshift hospital in the last four and twenty hours, like a dozen more along the street.
Now Ellen wished she had socialised more during their time in Brussels. Not at the parties but among the officers’ wives.
She had judged all the women by those who’d fled, but now she had discovered another society. These women were also resolutely waiting for their men, while fighting to save those who had served beside them.
‘You have done enough now, and you will only be able to do more if you sleep.’
