Outlander: Book 1

Sassenach 🪻

My mother use to say people disappear all the time; how young girls run away from home, children stray from their parents and are never seen again, housewives take the grocery money, and a taxi to the train station.

Most are found eventually. Disappearances, after all, have logical explanations.

Well usually.

It is strange, the things you remember; single images and feelings that stay with you down through the years.

Like the moment I realized I'd never owned a vase.

Before the war, I'd never once had any long placed moment to enough to justify having such a simple thing.
But now in that moment in time, I wanted nothing so much in all the world as to have a vase of my very own.

It was a Tuesday afternoon. Six months after the end of the war.

My mind was cast back to when I was working as a trainee combat nurse.

My mother had not long since passed during the fight and even though there were allies around me, I felt alone.

I had followed after my parents for the war effort.

I not only wanted to do my part but I wanted to be with my mother, helping her in the trenches in any way possible.

We was in the midst of chaos in a makeshift British field hospital, with mangled men and soldiers on cots under cover.

Grown men were moaning, crying in pain and I was required to help them.

"Oh, God! Oh, God!" The one soldier cried out as myself and the rest of the team in that moment were trying to stop him from bleeding out.

"Hold him! Hold him right now! You hear me?" I shouted out.

Several men were holding the soldier down as I was trying to stop the bleeding and wiping away the sweat that gathered on my forehead.

He wailed even more as the pain was unbearable.

As I worked on him, another soldier was calming him down, telling him he will go home and survive this.

Various voices were yelling the background, asking for assistance, moaning, calling for any doctors available.

"I'll have to clamp the femoral artery before he bleeds out" I said finally.

"It's all right, Jackie boy. You're going home, mate. You're going home" comforted the soldier holding his comrade down.

But he wailed out even more as I clamped down on the artery I was looking for.

As I did, I said comforting " It'll be alright. It won't be long now, I promise you".

Just then, another medic arrived.

He then pushed the soldier holding him down out of the way and started to administer medicine through a syringe.

"We've got him now, Nurse.  Good work. Scalpel" he said to me.

I backed away as the medic took over and started to work on him.

Most likely the man will survive but he would lose a limb in the process.

I walked down an empty alleyway apart from boxes of supplies.

I came around a corner, wiping blood from my hands.

My apron was covered in blood, and I was exhausted.

I had been working on many paitents for what seemed like days without a proper night's sleep.