The Secretary ; T . S

Chapter Four; Red

Chapter three ;
Red.

I was back there.

In my Red Cross uniform; in that tough blue cotton of my dress, half-covered with a white apron and the bright Red Cross switched onto my chest. But it was not yet drenched in dying men's blood.

I knew this night.
It haunts my dreams.
I had three months of training, that's all. I hardly knew a thing about taking care of patients. Especially, screaming crying men.
Nothing could prepare you for that.

A lantern swung in the harsh winds, the darkness loomed and the sound of gunshots and bombs echoed off the sky.
My hands started to shake as us women stood around in the silence of the ward. The ward was in a tent, no building just a tent, the walls of fabric flapped in the wind. All-day we had been piling sandbags outside in case of an air raid.
The Red Cross nurse next to me, Mary, no older than I was, grabbed my hand.
It was our first night.
The professional nurses were busy preparing for the calls, I never felt as useless as I did in that moment.

Then it came.
The sound of ambulances rolling up to the tent with men piled in, hollowing in terrible pain.
I looked at Mary,
She looked at me with fear and our hands dropped back down to our sides.

Men; covered in a white cast of dust, they had been crushed in a building. The plaster from the walls turned them the colour of clown paint but the red from their bleeding wounds were even more vibrant because of it.
I felt my stomach turn and heart in my throat, the long night had begun.

Everyone was dashing around, frantically.
I was dressing a man's gashed arm when another was being carried in on a stretcher.
The moaning of all the soldiers was making me feel ever so sick. But this was were the nightmare truly began,
"Nurse Millar! Come here! Hold this man down."
The matron came out of the surgery room.
I took the order, dashing behind her and there laid a very young-looking man, I couldn't believe he was more than seventeen.
His leg was smashed.
The bone sticking out of his skin and I knew this boy was going to be losing his leg.

That white dust painted his face but stained with tears from his eyes, begging me to tell them not to take his leg.
"Please! Please! I will die! Please!" He grabbed hold of my arm ever so tightly, it hurt.
It was all getting too much.
My eyes started to tear.
I looked down the bed, trying to sooth the solider when the doctor began to sew the bone.
The blood.
The screams.
The death.

"STOP! STOP!" I could feel a pressure on my arms holding me down as I started to awake from my nightmare. My legs uncontrollably wailing around wildly, trying to kick off the sensation of becoming the lad who was about to be amputated.

"Poppy? Poppy, you're alright." The thick Brummie accent flickered my eyes open. "You're here. Not with the soldiers anymore."

I searched the room as my vision came back to me; I was neither in the Red Cross uniform nor on the cobbled street outside the garrison. I wasn't sure what room I was in, but either side of me was two familiar faces; Polly and the owner of the husky tone that awoke me, Thomas Shelby, holding my arms. Aunt Pol rested her left hand on my forehead, wiping my brow from the beads of cold sweat that appeared every time I would have one of my traumatic flashbacks.