“Anna you have to stop!”
“NO!”
“Anna, look at me.” Mary placed her bloody hand on her friends shoulder, “There is nothing left of him. He’s gone.”
Anna took her hands away from the dead man's body. Her white apron, now the color of roses, dripped warm crimson blood on the floor. Anna turned toward Mary, “Each time they stop breathing I think what if this one, this boy, was William.”
“You won’t find him here Anna; he doesn’t know how to stop.”
Anna stepped outside the tent without so much as a glance back at the man she had desperately tried to save. There was no caution in her movement. She couldn’t sit, couldn’t slow down. Her steps hurried. She paced undecidedly in front of the tight canvas of the tent and lit a cigarette. The blood from her hands, now on the cigarette, stained her lips crimson like her apron. The soft glow from each inhale, like the glow in her heart each time he kissed her, each time she inhaled the scent of his body. Her eyes turned toward the front, towards her William.
The sounds of shells impacting the frontlines seemed to be neverending, always going. Even though night had long ago wrapped the front in a cold unforgiving shroud, the horizon dazzled under the light of distant explosions. Anna felt as if the shells had somehow been more accurate and deadly now that darkness had come to the battlefields. This was the seventh man, no boy, to die in her tent, on her table, in the last five hours. It was as if her medical tent was a voracious beast, whose insatiable appetite for blood would never end. She took a last drag of the cigarette and snubbed it out with her foot.
“You going out tonight?”
Anna looked up questioningly at her friend Mary. “What?”
“You have blood on your lips.”
Anna shrugged.
“Don’t worry, it looks...sorta...pretty.” Mary mused.
Anna wiped her hands on her hips and then her lips on the back of her arm. She regarded the stain of blood now there.
“You know William loved crimson lipstick. When he took me to see my first musical, Roses of Picardy, I wore one almost this exact color. I guess this is the only makeup appropriate for this horrible place.”
The renewed sounds of shouting and wailing assailed the girls ears. A new batch of boys for them to cut and sew up had just arrived. As Anna turned to go into the tent she paused, her eyes glued to the bloodsoaked floor, away from the young faces twisted in pain. She dared not see the hazel eyes of her William among the broken.
She recalled what he said to her just before he left for the front.
“ Will you always love me?”
“ Yes.”
“ And the pain won’t make a difference?”
“ No.”
“I love you, I have to go.”