The German commander of the troops surrounding the 101st Airborne had demanded the honourable surrender of the encircled town of Bastogne. The German commander had threatened to bomb not only the troops but the civilians in and around Bastogne if the Americans continued to hold the line.
Earlier on, Colonel Sink had reported that the American General McAuliffe had replied with one word to the German commander: "Nuts!" This word had been translated for the German general as, "Go to hell!"
How many lives were going to be lost tonight for the sake of holding the line?
Earlier, the men had thought McAuliffe's reply was funny.
Charlie couldn't imagine they'd think it was funny if they saw what she was living now.
She'd gone into town before the barrage had started, accompanying a frightened replacement with a nasty case of both frostbite and trench foot. With no immediate reason to go back to the line, Charlie had lingered. She'd sat with the replacement, whose name turned out to be Jack, for a while, then helped Renée and the black nurse, Anna, with some of the other wounded.
Charlie had been shocked to hear the whistling of shells so close by.
When the town of Bastogne started to burn, she understood why.
What looked like hundreds of German bomber planes were flying overhead, all of them raining fire on the people below. Buildings collapsed, windows were shattered, roofs burned. Medics rushed around, frantic as they attempted to get the wounded who'd remained outside of the church inside it.
"Nurse!" the driver of an arriving jeep shouted.
Charlie raced over.
"Shrapnel in the stomach," the medic beside him informed her. "No morphine."
"Get him inside!" she ordered them over the noise.
Jeep after jeep arrived from all of the various companies holding the front line. The Germans were hitting them everywhere. The men coming in hadn't even realised Bastogne itself was also being bombed.
To the driver of a returning jeep, heading back to the line to pick up more men, Charlie shouted, "Tell whoever's there to spread the word that Bastogne is being bombed! Only send back wounded who are critical - no nurses or medics!"
"Yes, ma'am!" the driver replied before speeding away.
Inside the church was chaos. Newly wounded men screamed and groaned while the world shook around them. Charlie's hands became so slick with blood she couldn't make out her skin anymore.
Every bomb sounded like it was getting closer to the church. They weren't supposed to hit hospitals or places of worship but Charlie wasn't sure the Germans particularly cared about that rule anymore.
She kept her head down and worked.
The heat in the main room of the church was stifling. The air felt thick. It was the warmest Charlie had felt since Holland. Sweat dripped off of her like water in a shower.
Man after wounded man was brought before her, crying and writhing around in pain. With the few medics who had stayed inside, she did her best to help them.
"We need a nurse!" cried a man at the top of the stairs.
The cold night air slapped her in the face when she emerged from the church doors.
"Over here!" continued the man who'd asked for her.
She followed him to a parked jeep, its back end caught on fire.
Charlie took one look at the man lying on the stretcher on the jeep's hood and knew there was nothing she could do for him. She told the driver and the medic who'd come with him to carry the wounded man inside the church anyway.
The two of them lifted the stretcher off of the jeep just as the church windows shattered. Fire burst through the glass.
"No!" Charlie screamed, but her voice was lost to the noise. There were wounded in there, nurses and medics and civilians who had come to help. "Stay here," Charlie ordered the driver, "Come with me," she ordered the medic, the dead man they were carrying no longer a thought in her head. Without a second more of hesitation, Charlie ran into the burning aid station.
A section of wall had already collapsed, the people beneath it crushed and already dead. Charlie turned her attention to trying to get the wounded who were still alive out.
"Start getting them out," she called to the medic who'd followed her inside.
The two of them joined the surviving medics and nurses in half-carrying, half-dragging wounded men up the stairs and out of the church. They laid them down where two medics ordered them to, in a small section of the road which hadn't been hit.
When she was back inside the church the back wall was hit. The blast knocked Charlie off of her feet. As the dust settled and the wood beams went up in flames, Charlie coughed and coughed, trying to hack out the dust and ash in her mouth and lungs. Her eyes burned, her throat was caked in dirt, sweat ran down her cheeks like tears. Her skin felt like it had been scorched and she wouldn't have been surprised if her hair had been burned off. When she lifted a weak, shaky hand to check, she found it was still there, but her helmet was gone.
A hand grabbed her under her arm and yanked her up to standing. "Keep going!" the man yelled in her ear and shoved her toward a man lying on a stretcher, waiting to be evacuated.
Charlie took one end of the stretcher and the man, a surgeon by the looks of him, took the other. The pair of them hauled the wounded soldier out of the building and hurried back inside.
Charlie managed to get two more wounded men out, one of them a paralysed Smokey Gordon, before the church collapsed in on itself under the weight of another direct hit. She fell to her knees before the burning building. She'd been seconds away from being inside. Two more steps and she'd have been racing down the stairs.
"Nurse, I need help over here!" shouted a voice from behind her.
Shoving the hair out of her face and wiping the sweat from her forehead, Charlie turned and followed the voice through the thickness of the air, clouded by dust and ash and smoke, and helped to carry the man he'd been dragging over to the other wounded.
Charlie worked through the night to tend to the wounded. Those who'd been evacuated from the church needed their wounds tended to again, the frantic movement having ripped most of them wide open. A lot of them also had burns or new wounds from falling debris that needed seeing to. More wounded were being brought up in an unsteady stream from the line, and medical personnel who'd just barely escaped the church were also brought before her, their skin completely covered in blood, dust, and ash. Charlie was sure she looked the same.
At some point, Henry found her. She took one look at Charlie and said nothing, instead helping her with her patient in silence. Together, they worked faster to get to everyone who needed help. They didn't exchange a word.
When the sun started to rise, Henry told Charlie to sit down somewhere. It was with eyes half-lidded, somewhere far away, that she obeyed. She didn't have it in her to fight Henry on it. In fact, she knew that it was good advice. If she didn't sit down she knew she'd collapse, and then she'd be one more casualty for everyone else to look after.
Boo arrived a few hours into the early morning and sat beside Charlie in silence. Gently, tentatively, she put her arm around her, and Charlie rested her head on Boo's shoulder.
"I think Renée..." Charlie began, her voice scratchy, her throat sore. She couldn't finish the sentence.
"It's okay, Charlie," Boo said, quiet and soothing. "Just get some sleep."
The idea of sleep seemed impossible. Charlie didn't think she'd ever be able to sleep again. But she did. Sitting in a pile of rubble that had yesterday been a house, Charlie fell asleep with her head resting on Boo's shoulder, dirtying up her friend's ODs wherever she touched.
Charlie didn't return to the front line until dinnertime. It was only then she recalled that it was Christmas Day.
"Ay, Lancaster!" Malarkey called from a group of men sitting in a circle, eating together. "Merry Chr-"
However she looked, it must have been a sight, for the greeting cut off the moment he saw her.
Mabs appeared out of nowhere. "Come on, honey," she said quietly. She guided her to their foxhole. "You ain't got a helmet on."
"I lost it," Charlie said pathetically, her voice small.
"That's okay," Mabs reassured, settling her down in the hole in the ground they shared. "I'll go get ya some food. We're having C-rations, how's that sound?"
Dumbly, Charlie just stared. It didn't sound like anything. They were just words.
Mabs disappeared and returned with a cup of warm food, which Charlie ate without thinking about it. She waited until Charlie was finished eating to speak. "Boo said Bastogne was hit," she began slowly, warily.
"Yeah."
"Badly, she said."
"Yeah."
"The aid station...?"
"Three hits. The final one direct."
"Oh."
"We didn't get everyone out in time."
"Oh."
"I think Renée died."
"Oh."
Charlie didn't blame Mabs for everything she didn't, couldn't, say. 'Oh' was the only thing she would have been able to reply, too.
They sat together quietly until footsteps approached.
"Lancaster," Frank called quietly as he crouched outside the foxhole.
It was only because Charlie hadn't been expecting him that she looked up.
"I finished your book," he said, holding it out to her. It was the copy of A Tale of Two Cities she'd given him back in Mourmelon, the one she'd brought from home, and he'd taken perfect care of it, even through everything they'd endured since then.
"I liked it," he informed her as she took it from him. She stared down at it like she'd never seen it before. "Pretty writin'," he offered.
"Yeah," Charlie agreed in a whisper.
"Thanks for lettin' me borrow it," he went on.
"That's okay." Charlie's mind was a million miles away, even as she spoke. Her thoughts were stuck in her childhood bedroom. Would she even be able to set foot in there when she got home, after how much she'd changed since she'd been there last? She didn't feel like the same person who'd slept there, read there, written poetry there. Would she even recognise herself in her dressing table mirror?
Frank left and Mabs gently took the book from Charlie's hands. With no explanation, she opened it and began to read aloud. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."
Charlie sat and listened to Mabs read quietly, all the while thinking she understood the words she'd once loved far better now than she had when she'd first declared it her favourite book. How had she ever thought she'd understood the story, the characters, the entire book? She'd had no idea. Now, it rang more true to her than any of the words she'd written herself in her letters home.
Malarkey, Skip, and Alex picked their way over when Mabs was part way through Chapter Two. Each of them crouched down at the edge of the foxhole the same as Frank had and offered tentative smiles.
"Merry Christmas, Charlie," Don said, finishing the greeting he'd tried to offer earlier.
It wasn't a merry Christmas at all, but she echoed his words back to him, and the others, all the same.
"How you holding up?" Skip asked.
Charlie heaved a heavy sigh, then coughed as the remnants of the dust, ash, and smoke of Bastogne irritated. "Alright," she managed to choke out at length.
"We wanted you to have this," Skip said when she'd finished coughing.
From behind his back, Alex produced a blanket.
Charlie wasn't aware of herself making any sort of facial expression but she must have, for all three of them cracked a smile.
"You must've thought you were pretty slick, huh?" Don said with a small laugh. He was referring to how all of the nurses had decided to forgo the luxury of blankets to allow as many of the men as possible to have one. It had been a secret, because they hadn't wanted any of the men to give theirs up in a display of chivalry, and they'd clearly been right to keep the information quiet.
"I'm okay," Charlie said while Mabs let out an, "Aw!"
"You guys keep it," Charlie continued. "I really, really appreciate the gesture, but I want you to have it."
"Eh, we're sleepin' all three of us crammed into one tiny hole in the ground, what do we need a blanket for?" Alex asked with a tiny grin.
Skip scoffed a laugh. "Yeah, and Penky farts in his sleep, so it's hotter than an oven down there."
Alex protested this comment while Charlie tried to smile and couldn't.
"Take it," Don insisted. "We want you to have it."
Charlie shook her head. It felt so strange to no longer carry the extra weight of a helmet. How vulnerable she felt now. And how much colder her ears were. "I'm really okay."
"Well, now you're okay and warm," Alex said, dropping the blanket over her.
"See?" Skip said with a grin. "Snug as a bug."
The back of Charlie's throat grew tight and her head began to hurt as though she was about to cry, but no tears formed in her eyes. Instead, she was left with a gaping emptiness in her chest where her heart used to beat.
"Thank you," she whispered, pinching the fabric of the blanket between two fingers. It was so soft, so precious. She couldn't remember the last time she'd slept under a soft blanket.
"You just keep on hanging in there, alright, Charlie?" Skip said. He leaned down and poked her knee and smiled when she nodded.
"Yeah," she agreed, but she shouldn't have. She could make no promises on the matter. Who knew what tomorrow would hold?