Bill turns back to his job of organizing the wounded to gather together in a “muster station,” and he watches Izzy out of the corner of one eye as she strides down the hill toward a line of trees. The postern is watching her too, hand on rifle in case this is an attempt to escape. The trees must line a frozen brook, and Bill can see her breaking the icy surface with the heel of her boot, to dip in the tins. The postern relaxes as Izzy carefully carries back the filled mess tins. She takes a sip from one to demonstrate to him that it’s clean water, and he sends a younger guard to fill bigger water containers.
Izzy returns to the stream time and time again, with as much water as she can carry—giving it to men to drink and cleaning wounds.
Bill is busy separating those who can still walk from those who can’t go any farther. A man with his foot blown off leans on Max and hops to the mustering place. On Bill’s orders, the bodies of the dead are lifted and carried to the ditch at the side of the road. The posterns stand in groups smoking, watching as the prisoners clear the road of their comrades and bind up the wounded as best they can.
Eventually, someone comes from a local village with a horse-drawn wagon, and those too injured to walk any farther are loaded onto it. As Bill helps one of them to the cart, Izzy notices a dark stain on the back of his coat, near the shoulder.
She turns him round. There’s a small tear in the center of the stain.
“You are bleeding,” she whispers accusingly. She presses the place gently and he winces.
“I didn’t notice,” he says.
“Take off coat.”
Bill pulls off his coat, straining to look over his shoulder, and now that she’s pointed out the wound, the pain begins. As he removes the coat, Izzy can see his battle dress and the jumper below that are still bloodier. Bill can’t tell if he is badly wounded, or whether the bleeding has stopped, but the pain is spreading and throbbing insistently. He runs his hand up through his hair, looking at the semiconscious men laid out on the wagon. Izzy presses a wad of rags to his bloody jumper and he wrenches away from the pain. He’s got more important things to think about than a little flesh wound.
“Someone ought to go with the wounded,” he says, “to speak up for them, make sure they’re treated well.” He yanks away from Izzy and tries to put his battle dress back on, but his left arm won’t work anymore, and he can’t push it through the sleeve. Izzy drapes the bloodstained battle dress and coat over his shoulder.
Bill looks around for someone who could go with the wounded, and a wave of nausea overtakes him as the pain grows stronger. All about him the survivors are busy helping to carry the dead into the ditch, or lying, exhausted, or sitting with their heads bowed. There’s nobody he can send.
“You,” whispers Izzy. “You are best man. You go.”
“But…” The wagon lurches forward. Bill looks from it to Izzy, torn by indecision. He can’t leave her. But he could come straight back once he’s seen that the men are being looked after. He could easily catch up. “Will you be…?”
“Go. Make doctor look at your shoulder. And your nose.”
He looks again at the bodies on the wagon, men hardly moving, unable to demand the care they deserve, and he decides. “I’ll catch up and find you as soon as I can.”
Izzy gives him a half-push, her eyes dark with worry.
Bill runs a few steps to catch the moving wagon, and with difficulty, now unable to use his left arm, he climbs up, and turns to Izzy, trying to hide from her the pain of his wound, forcing his face into a smile as the wagon pulls away.
Twenty-nine
I feel sick to my stomach as I watch the wagon begin to trundle off, and run to climb aboard myself, but the postern won’t let me. “Wounded only,” he says, pushing me with the butt end of his rifle.
“I promise I’ll find you as soon as I can,” calls Bill weakly, and I can only stand and watch him, his broken nose and black eyes still visible against the white of his face, carried away from me, half-slumped on the wagon floor, trying to smile. What have I done? How can I let him go? I need him to see a doctor as soon as possible. But how could he leave me? Perhaps it’s only because he knows how badly he’s wounded and doesn’t want me to watch him die.
As the wagon turns a bend in the road, Bill raises his hand in salute, just as he did when he first came to the farm, and I suddenly know, with the chill of absolute certainty, that I’ll never see him again. I pray, with fierce intensity, “Bring him back, please. I’ll do anything, give up anything if you let him come back to me.” But I don’t know if God is listening. I think of the lifeblood pulsing from Bill’s wound, wishing they’d let me go with him. It all happened too quickly. We didn’t say good-bye.
As Bill’s wagon disappears, I try to hear Cousins stemming my panic, telling me it will be all right. “Steady now,” he says. “There’s work to do.”
I join Max and help to lay body parts and whole dead men into the ditch, and I carefully collect up their identity tags so their families will know, so the world will know. We have no tools to dig the frozen soil to cover them. Again I go to the older postern and demand, in German, “The dead must be buried.”
He wafts me away like a bluebottle. “Yes,” he says. “We’ll get the townspeople to do that. It will all be done properly.” Then he looks hard at me. “Your accent?” he asks. The younger guard, with an almost shaved head and many angry pimples, lifts his head and looks at me too, and I realize it might all be over. Somehow I’m too tired to care, because without Bill nothing matters anymore, but as the young guard picks up his rifle, my brain leaps to a plausible answer.
I cough my voice down low and try to iron out my Czech vowels, to speak my mother’s perfect High German. “My teacher was from”—I search my memory for the German name for Jeseník—“from Freiwaldau. I think it’s in Silesia.”
He still looks suspicious, and the young guard steps forward, but then the postern shrugs. “Ah, yes, a Silesian accent,” he says. “Country bumpkin.” And he turns aside from me. The young guard looks at me for a moment longer, and I meet his eyes, defiantly, as Cousins would, before he also turns away.
I stumble back to where Max is sitting and briefly lean my head on his arm. Bill, Bill, where is Bill? Every cell in my body wants him. Every few minutes I find myself looking in the direction he disappeared, willing him to come back. I make a bargain with God. “If one of us has to die, let it be me, not him. Kill me and let him live.”
The strafing has killed a horse as well as so many men, and that night we have soup with meat, brought around in buckets. But there is no joy in the meal. It’s almost as if we are eating the flesh of our dead comrades.
Perhaps it’s the richness of the meal, or from drinking dirty water before I brought clean water from the stream, but by the next morning, Max has developed dysentery. Bill isn’t back, and I want to wait where we last saw him, but the posterns force us to walk on without him. Sometimes they let Max crouch by the road, and I stand beside him, feet planted apart like Cousins, guarding my friend, but sometimes they make him keep walking, and the thin feces trickle down his legs. He keeps turning to me. “Sorry. I’m so sorry,” he groans before the pain doubles him up again. By the afternoon he’s so weak that he sits down by the side of the road and refuses to get up. If I left him, I know he would die in hours, from dehydration, or the cold at night, or a gun-happy Hitler Youth would use him for rifle practice.