“Are you really so eager to see the inside of an American stockade?” I hissed. “Because it sure seems that way.”
“Come with me, please.” She took my hand in hers and tugged me deeper into the forest. “The man I tried to treat is still doing poorly. I’m worried he’ll die without proper help.”
“I’ll be in the brig tomorrow if I do,” I said, not allowing her to pull me farther. “I can’t leave my post. This right here is enough to land me in a cell myself.”
“You’re charged to help men on both sides if the need arises, are you not?” she pressed. “He is a good man. I swear it to you. And he has a chance to live if you come with me.”
“You’ve been reading up on the Geneva Convention,” I said with a scoff. “But it doesn’t apply if he isn’t a soldier.”
“Everyone should read it,” she said. “If the party members read it and took it to heart, the war would be over. The problem is that they’re convinced they’re on the right side of things. And he may not be a soldier like you, but he is fighting in this war all the same.”
“Everyone thinks they’re on the right side of the war until it’s over,” I said. “How do I know you aren’t leading me into a trap?”
“You don’t. You’ll have to trust me.”
I looked into her eyes. They were hardened, no doubt by seeing too much evil at too young an age. They were lined with fear, appropriate given she knew I held her freedom, if not her life, in my hands. But I saw no malice in them. It was exactly the stupid risk my mother begged me—literally on bended knee—not to make while I was away, but I followed this girl into the woods.
We’d walked for no more than ten minutes when the girl made a signal with a rectangular battery-operated flashlight, a bit bigger and bulkier than a pack of playing cards. German army issue. The acid churned in my stomach, but I wouldn’t run to be shot in the back like a coward. Another girl, even younger than the one who led me here, emerged from behind a tree. Her eyes widened at the sight of me, and she raised her hands in the air as though I were a police officer in a moving picture.
“Calm down, I won’t shoot,” I said, barely above a whisper, pointing to the red cross on my armband.
The girl who had escorted me said a few words in German that I parsed to mean He’s come to help.
The younger girl’s shoulders dropped perceptibly, but she still looked at me as though I were a wolf that might devour her at any turn. She waved me over to the base of a tree where a man—more aptly a boy about eighteen—lay gripping his side. He wore plain clothes instead of a uniform, which lent some credence to the other girl’s story. His color was that of a freshly starched handkerchief, save his hands, which were stained reddish brown with the old blood from his injury.
Politics were forgotten as I knelt by his side to assess the wound. He didn’t have the strength to arch a brow at my uniform but complied willingly with my commands to remove his hands from the wound. I was grateful for the design of my medic’s uniform, which made it so that I always carried a small infirmary’s worth of supplies on me rather than in a pack that could be left behind. The bandages and antiseptic the girl had stolen would have done their job well enough, but he needed sulfanilamide and sutures if he was going to have a chance at recovering. The wound was more superficial than Davis’s, but the blood loss had weakened him enough for concern.
After I closed the wound, I turned to the girl who had stolen the supplies. “What’s your name?”
“Margarethe,” she replied. “My friend there is Heide, and this poor man is Jonas.”
“I’m Max. Why did we shoot him?” I asked, calculating the time it would take for me to get an MP back into the woods. The girls might escape, but there was no way he could move at any speed in his condition.
“Your men did not. It was the goons on our side. They saw our flyers,” she explained, pulling a folded square of paper from her pocket. It was a propaganda poster meant to convince the men to surrender to the American and British forces.
“I could see why they’d be upset,” I said. “Doesn’t seem like the thing that would bolster morale, now does it?”
“The war is all but over,” Jonas said more forcefully than I’d thought him able. “We’d do better to surrender while there is something left of Germany to salvage. If we wait too long, the Russians will extend their borders to the Rhine and it’ll all be worse than before.”
“Rest,” I ordered. “If you believe in this cause, you’d do better to heal and get the word out than to martyr yourself for it.”
“You believe us then?” Margarethe asked, hope laced in her voice like sugar in coffee.
“There is no way you’d be able to make up a story like this on the fly,” I said. “I ought to report you anyway, and I’m risking my own neck if I don’t.”
“But you won’t,” Margarethe supplied.
“I won’t,” I said. “I don’t see what good it’ll do anyone to have you three locked up in our stockade for the duration of the war.”
Margarethe crossed over to me and kissed my cheek. I blinked, shaking my head a bit as I looked down at her. She took a tentative step backward. “Jonas owes you his life. Heide and I owe you our safety. We’re in your debt.”
“Just keep to your mission,” I said. “If it does any good, the gratitude will be mine. But Jonas needs a warm bed and clean linens if you want him to survive.”
“You might as well be asking us to give him the moon,” Margarethe said. “There is nowhere we could keep him where he wouldn’t be found.”
“I’ll keep him hidden here,” Heide said. She was kneeling by his side and looked up at us both with determination. Heide held Jonas’s hand, and his breathing had grown easier. The toll of the chill of the early fall weather on his body would slow his healing, but they were right, the cold night air was less of a risk to his health than a German firing squad. “And you need to go, Margarethe, before you are missed.”
She nodded. “Thank you for saving his life, Max. You’ve done a good thing.”
Though I ran the risk of being missed as well, I watched her slip into the darkness, back toward the German lines. I considered pressing Heide with questions about the paradox of a girl who spoke better than passable English, as though she’d had a series of British tutors, but who dressed like a street urchin out of a novel by Dickens or Hugo. But the dark-haired imp of a girl looked up at me warily and I knew any questions of that sort would be met with silence.
“Do you have plenty of food? Some blankets?”
Heide blushed in response. Even after a long war, all the people we’d come across were ashamed to admit to the poverty the war had imposed upon them.
“Send Margarethe back to the camp tomorrow morning. I’ll see what I can do.”
Heide nodded, her expression still guarded but softened. She didn’t want to trust me but would stifle her pride for her Jonas.
After breakfast, I took a spare field kit and ferreted away two worn blankets and a few packets of hospital rations. A couple of fresh bandages and some antibiotic powder as well. The risk of Jonas developing an infection out in the woods was high, but the powder might help stave it off. The kit wasn’t much, though it might see them through a couple of days. But it wouldn’t be enough. Jonas needed to be kept warm and dry if he was going to survive. There was a stack of shelter halves among the discarded gear from the wounded, and I took the two kits needed to make a full pup tent.