The Undaunted

Orders

Over the next week, Jenny settled into life as a photojournalist. She propped her typewriter on a small table she had found that would also double nicely as a shelter to roll under should the Germans start bombing the hospital again and she sat there every day, wearing everything she owned, layered and doubled: socks, trousers, shirt, jacket, overcoat, and scarf. It still wasn't enough to keep out the cold, nor was the oil stove enough to warm the tent; it was only when she stepped outside that she realized it was actually a couple of degrees warmer inside. Freezing, instead of several degrees below.

The stories she collected were about Natalia, who was a small sun bringing light and warmth to a place otherwise bereft of those things. Each day, she and Natalia visited the convalescent tent to sit with the men and, each day as they entered, like today someone would call out for Natalia.

"Hey, Natty!"

Natalia spun around crossly and stalked, as much as a four-year-old could stalk, into the ward. "You are one of Jack's men," she pronounced to the man who had called her name. "My name is Natalia."

"Sorry, miss," the soldier apologized, and Jenny realized it was Private Owens, the man who had wanted his face in Vogue. He nodded at Jenny. "Lieutenant Snow."

"You have a dirty arm," Natalia scolded him.

"What happened?" Jenny asked, remembering that he was a new replacement, and he was already in the hospital, his face pale and his leanness all the more childlike against the hospital blankets.

He flushed. "Hurt my head," he mumbled, and Jenny could see that he had a row of stitches holding together a split eyebrow.

"Somehow he managed to trip over and crack his head on a long Tom," Leah said sardonically as she was passing by.

Owens blushed even deeper, turning so red he looked as if he might explode, and Jenny again had the impression of enduring innocence, a wholesomeness worth preserving.

"Look!" Natalia cried, pointing to the patch of clay on Owens's arm. "The mud is shaped like a..."

Rabbit. Bird. Fairy. Horse. Jenny waited for Natalia to say, imagining it was like the game she had played as a child when she had lain on her back on a sandy beach before a Tahitian storm watching clouds coalesce into fantastical shapes.

"One of the gray metal pineapples nobody lets me touch," Natalia grumbled, as if it were wrong that nobody would let her touch a grenade. "See," she continued, "it has lines across it. And the funny bit on top."

Jenny met Owens's eyes and saw in them a shock she imagined was mirrored in her own. Then she took the photograph of the little girl tracing the mud on a man's arm that she'd compared to a deadly weapon, such were the limitations of what she had been exposed to in her short life.

"It doesn't matter how you got to the hospital," Jenny said to Owens, hoping to make him feel better, and herself too. "Now you'll be in the pages of Vogue."

Owens grinned and said, "You're a swell gal, Jenny!" Then, looking chagrinned, he dropped his soulful brown eyes to the covers. "I mean...thanks, L-lieutenant Snow, ma'am," he said softly.

After that, Jenny took Natalia back to her tent where Natalia had, without asking, been staying in Jenny's bed since Jenny arrived. Jenny lay down next to Natalia and began to tell her the fairy tale Thumbelina, a favorite story of hers that her mother had told to her when she was little.

Later that night, as nurses came in and out, always exhausted, always cold, always wet, always with blood stains on their uniforms because having a shower in the middle of an Italian winter was a feat of hardihood that most hadn't the energy for, Jenny continued to write her story, in between shivering and heating cocoa in empty plasma cans on the stove.