Genesis: the Beginning and the End | Band of Brothers

【Ｃｈａｐｔｅｒ ７４ － Ｐｎｅｕｍｏｎｉａ】

Chapter 74 - Pneumonia

It was cold.

Colder than her house in January.

Colder than her house after her dad died.

Fucking cold.

But Peggy wasn't going to admit that. No. She'd grown up in a house so cold that it was possible to die. From pneumonia.

The threat here was hypothermia.

And the Germans. But this wasn't about them.

Peggy knew the cold.

She'd spent two winters in France either living outside or attempting to hide in a barn, wearing clothes that had thinned so much you could hardly call them clothes.

So of course she wasn't going to complain about her hands feeling like ice blocks, about her feet being cold even in two pairs of thick socks, about her tits being numb. Ok, actually she did once loudly exclaim that she couldn't feel them. But that was only because everyone else had been complaining, for ages, about all the appendages they couldn't feel.

"No matter what I do, I can't get the feeling to come back to my fin-"

"Yeah? Well I haven't been able to feel my tits for two days. Get over it. We know you're cold. Everyone's cold, they've said so enough times today for me to want to walk into enemy fire-"

Someone cleared their throat behind her, so she rolled her head back and bent over to see who it was.

Captain Dick Winters.

"Peggy, I'm not sure that was very...professional of you."

Bringing her head back up, she turned her body a bit to look at him properly.

"What're you talking about, sir? I'm the epitome of professionalism. In fact, I was just doing my bit, keeping morale up by stopping Perconte from telling us all about how fucking cold he is! For the billionth time. "

He didn't look entirely convinced, but the small smile he couldn't hide showed he didn't exactly disapprove.

"Just maybe try and be a little more professional, Dike's already looking for a reason to get you thrown out."

"Oh boy, I should complain about my period around him then. He can't kick me out for a perfectly normal bodily function can he?"

Dick gave her a hand up, and asked if she wanted to go wake Nix up with him. She was all for that. She bid the guys she was sitting with goodbye, and wandered off with Dick. It wasn't really a wander, for it had purpose.

Unfortunately, Peggy never got the chance to yank back the cover of Lewis' foxhole and shout "morning sunshine!" at him.

The Brass got in the way of that.

The reports were not good. She hadn't known about the Germans wandering into CP. They didn't have the men to fill the gaps, or the food to feed them, or the ammunition. The one good part about all of that was that she got to see Captain Lewis Nixon emerge, squinting like a mole, from a hole in the ground. But it got worse from there. 1st Battalion pulled out of Foy with a lot of casualties, and all that shit was heading for them.

They'd only been there a few days.

Peggy decided that she'd best wander off now, not wanting the General to stare at her anymore, so she tapped Dick to let him know she was going and headed back to the hole in the ground she'd previously been sitting around.