Just A Nurse

One

In the nineteen forties, a woman was just a woman. She was expected to smile and be pretty and quietly correct and look the part. Her roles included wife and mother if she was lucky. Granted it would have been worse twenty years beforehand, nevertheless, it was a man's world.

The nineteen forties was a time of crisis, the world was at war and the conflict had leaked off the battlefield and into the drawing board, colonels and lieutenants arguing about the next move to make, testosterone spilling into the air as the men grouchily debated, with bitter tones in their differing accents, as to how the war could be won. Quietly in each corner stood an Agent of the United Special Forces, three men and one woman, a girl really, barely eighteen; she'd already managed to prove her worth to the world. Not even able to vote, yet she stood alongside men twice her age and held the same status.

"We cannot continue to keep telling our men to sacrifice themselves this way." One guy with a tufty moustache yelled

"We need to outnumber those bloody Nazis in order to win, don't you understand?" another old guy with a patchy beard replied, just as loudly "How else do you propose we win the bloody war?" the room fell silent and she frowned, to her, it appeared obvious.

"Excuse me, sir," she raised her voice, all eyes flicked to her; the tension was almost audible to her "With all due respect sir, isn't it obvious how you should decide your next move?"

"Name Agent?" the bald old guy at the head of the table questioned, his tone unreadable, but his furrowed eyebrows, or rather what was left of them anyway, showed intrigue.

"Agent Olivia Evans, sir." She replied confidently. In a room full of men, with a whole history of oppression on her shoulders, she found her voice.

"Go on Miss Evans,"

"Sir how much front line experience do you have?" she queried, careful not to sound accusative, but courteous that she did not know this man very well and she was aware she could be misjudging him.

"I have never, technically, fought on the frontline." He replied, trying desperately not to appear sheepish "None of us have." He added before anyone could remark.

"Nor have I," she appealed, appearing to them as if she knew as much about the topic as any of them "So it does appear logical, Sir, that you simply ask the men fighting on the frontline, awaiting the orders from yourselves, how they believe they should instrument the destruction of the German line. They have the most experience in dealing with them face to face, do they not?" the room fell silent again, everyone still staring at her.

"Soldiers are trained to follow instructions, Agent-" Tufty moustache refuted but she boldly interrupted him.

"Foot soldiers yes, but not Junior Officers. Officers are men of position, they have their rank for a reason. But they are also in the midst of the action, they see both sides of the war, they think like you but they see what you can't."

"Ask the Officers." The bald man echoed ponderously.

And that was how Agent Evans, became Agent 21. No longer just an advanced bodyguard, she was a fully fledged agent, being shipped out on a mission to make sure the front line was not being corrupted by the deprivation installed by the war. She first arrived at a training camp somewhere in the North of England in the February of nineteen forty-one- where her Southern Welsh accent stood out a mile against the English troops. She was 'training' as a nurse to help along the front line; her cover was as Alice Jones, from Swansea. Not long after, she found herself quickly shipped out to the French line, where her fellow nurses found themselves unprepared for the conditions awaiting them. Evans, however, remained calm. While she'd been just a simple security agent, she had seen many mangled bodies and herself had been part of a few smaller mission- this was not the first time she'd seen men carrying their own arms. Instead of dwelling, she threw herself into her work. She'd grown extremely efficient at compartmentalizing her emotions in her five years as an agent- following the death of her father when she was only fifteen.