The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

33: So Little Fanfare

Aldbourne was much quieter the second time around. So many men hadn't come back with them. Whether wounded, missing, prisoners of war, or killed, it was sobering to walk the streets of Aldbourne and know that the quiet was mostly a result of everyone who'd once been there and now simply wasn't. There one moment and gone the next, with so little fanfare it felt wrong not to acknowledge it somehow.

But no one did.

The first thing Charlie did upon arriving back at the house was tidy up her room. In her haste to get out of the door that last morning she'd left her nightclothes strewn about and hadn't had time to pack away any of the things she'd left out the night before. Now, even as her eyes drooped and burned with fatigue, she ensured everything was neatly back in its place before letting herself change out of her ODs, crawl into bed, and sleep.

She woke up again a few hours later and, when she went downstairs, found the other three nurses already sitting around the kitchen table, talking over cups of coffee. Each of them smiled when Charlie pulled out the remaining chair and sat down, and the conversation progressed naturally as if there had been no interruption.

"... says they're all going to the pub tonight."

"Should we go?"

"Not sure I'm in the mood."

"Might be fun."

"Might be."

"Do you wanna go, Charlie?"

Charlie shrugged one shoulder. She didn't really care. Whilst it would be nice to spend the evening curled up on the sofa with a book, it might also be a good idea to try and escape her thoughts for a while. Alcohol had been a good way to do that in Normandy, thanks to Autumn, so she couldn't see why it wouldn't be a good way now. But she didn't honestly mind.

"If you want to go, then I'll go. If you don't, then I won't."

It was only early afternoon, and they had that day and the next off. They decided unanimously to wait until the evening and then decided if they wanted to go, which was perfectly fine by Charlie. She'd at least be able to get some reading in before later, and maybe even have time to sit down and force herself to write a letter home, too.

Charlie picked up the book she'd left on her nightstand before leaving for France, a book she'd bought the day before they'd been deployed with the intention of starting it that fateful day. She was excited to start it now and allow herself to sink into an imaginary world where wars didn't exist and no one feared the dark corners of every room they walked into, lest there be the ghost of a wounded man hiding there, but she couldn't concentrate on the words on the page. Her mind kept wandering back to France, to the chaos of the field hospital after each battle, to spending her nights trying to sleep in a hole in the ground gradually flooding with rain water. To sitting quietly in the tent with Floyd and reading to him.

Gnawing on her bottom lip without realising she was doing it - without, in fact, realising she'd looked up from the pages of her book and begun to stare at the wall opposite her - she wondered about Floyd. He would be in a hospital in England somewhere, probably not very far away at all. There would be other nurses caring for him, now, but still Charlie worried about him. Even more, she worried that there was some other nurse sitting at his bedside and reading Wuthering Heights to him.

Shaking her head, Charlie looked back down at The Waves and forced herself to focus. It didn't matter if there was someone else reading to him now - that's what books were made for. Reading. And she didn't want him aggravating his wound just to hold a book up over his face.

Before she ever even got to the second chapter, Charlie fell asleep again. She'd lost so much of it over in France she hadn't even realised how exhausted she'd been. Now, in clean clothes in a clean bed with curtains drawn and a roof over her head, sleeping was easy. So much easier than it had been overseas. She could just sleep and sleep and sleep, for days on end, and never feel she wasn't tired enough to sleep just a few hours more.