A/N:
Content warning: this chapter contains explicit depictions of a concentration camp.
***
Landsberg am Lech was beautiful, but there was a strange smell in the air. Charlie couldn't be sure what it was but it wasn't pleasant.
"Jesus," Mabs said as she hopped down from the truck they'd been sitting in. "Did someone's pipes kick up?"
"More like everyone's," Autumn said with a grimace, looking around as if she expected to find the source of the stench in the town centre.
The buildings were all painted bright, pretty colours, injecting cheer into the air, but the clock tower to Charlie's right had a distinctly gothic feel to it. Charlie felt this suited the town better. "There's something off about this place," she said to no one in particular, and was answered with murmurs of agreement.
"We're only supposed to be here for a little while," Henry said, coming up beside her and looking around. "Maybe not even for the night."
Mabs gave a short laugh. "We travelled for four days to get to somewhere we might not even be stayin' for a night?"
Henry sighed and nodded. "Yeah."
Major Winters distributed orders and sent out patrols, and everyone else was free to mill around and wait for further instruction. Since their stay was predicted to be short term, Henry didn't have the nurses set up the field hospital. Instead, she let them join the men as they waited to find out what they would be doing.
Over by one of the trucks, some of the men were starting to toss a baseball around between them. Floyd, Lieb, Babe, Skinny, and Moe Alley allowed Charlie and Autumn to join their game, while Boo went to stand with George and Mabs slipped away in what she thought was a discreet manner (and wasn't) to go and find Speirs. As she did, Charlie exchanged a look with Floyd and had to look away at the expression he pulled in case she laughed and blew her cover.
Charlie wasn't very good at the throwing and catching game they were playing, which constituted, funnily enough, throwing the ball to each other and then catching it. The men made a joke of getting irritated with her about it until she decided to back out and leave them to their fun.
"No, Freckles, don't go," Floyd complained when she announced her departure. He pulled a pouty face which pulled at her heartstrings but she rolled her eyes nonetheless.
"Nope, you hurt my feelings," she joked, recalling the time he'd actually hurt her feelings with the fondness that accompanied looking back on memories of a self so different to your current one they felt like a different person. She smiled at Floyd. "I'll be your cheerleader."
He smirked. "Hear that, fellas? I've got a cheerleader."
They all made jokes about this, because of course they did, and Alley demanded that Charlie be his cheerleader instead, before Frank came running straight through the centre of their circle, demanding of anyone who would listen, "Anyone seen any of the officers?"
He carried on running before any of them could reply, asking the same question of anyone else he came across, and the group who'd been throwing the ball looked between each other in confusion.
Charlie watched as Major Winters emerged from a building across the street and spoke briefly with Frank, then as Winters sought out Speirs and spoke briefly with him, too. A second later Speirs said something to Mabs, who came running over, and Speirs was ordering all of the men who had remained in town to load up into the trucks again.
"What's happening?" Charlie asked Mabs as she slowed to a stop beside her.
"The patrol through the woods found something," Mabs said, breathless. "We're all goin' to check it out. Perco said we gotta come too."
Charlie nodded, so confused she couldn't even think what question to ask next, and climbed back into the truck she'd arrived on, closely followed by Mabs and then Autumn, Boo, and finally Henry.
The smell they had all noticed and complained about when they'd arrived in town got steadily worse as they drove towards the suspicious opening in the trees. It took them longer to get there than it might have if they'd gone on foot, since they'd had to go the long way round, but even that didn't give them respite from the stench.
When, eventually, the trucks started to slow, Charlie turned to look behind her at where they'd ended up and couldn't make sense of what she was seeing.
There were two sets of barbed wire fences, an outer and an inner, and behind the inner fence were people. Only, they all looked the same - had been made to all look the same.
All of them were men, and they had all had their heads shaved. They wore the same striped clothes, long shirts and pants, and were thinner than any human beings Charlie had ever seen.
Many of them clung to the barbed wire fences, interlocking their fingers with it or simply leaning their weight against it, too weak to stand. And for reasons Charlie couldn't yet understand, she knew this was where the smell was coming from.
The five nurses departed the trucks and, upon Henry's order, headed up to the front of the gathering company of soldiers to stand among the officers. If anyone was needed more than the others right now it was medical personnel, and all of them were doing their best to greet the responsibility about to be thrust into their hands head on.
Here were more people than they had ever had to care for in one go before - more, even, than on Utah Beach. But there would be no triage. Not this time. These men would all get the help they needed.
There was smoke in the air, blowing with the wind, all of it emerging from behind the men in the... uniforms? Was that what they were? There were wooden towers further into the place beyond the fences - watchtowers, perhaps - and huge gates close to where the men were gathering, with a wooden building right beside them. It looked like some sort of camp, but the men in no way looked like they were here by choice.
Captain Nixon approached Gene while Winters headed towards the gates and ordered for them to be opened.
As Frank and Pat Christenson cut the chain on the gates and pushed them open, Charlie saw more men making their way towards them. Most of them were in pairs or threes, leaning on or carrying each other, and only a few were walking upright.
Charlie couldn't look away even as she heard Mabs ask Henry, "What do we do?" Her voice sounded a million miles away.
Henry spoke to Gene and, together with the medics, the nurses entered the camp ready to help in whatever ways they could. Charlie walked forward as though she was wading through water, feeling like she was in a dream.
The men who watched them enter the camp were skin and bone, so thin they were emaciated. Their eyes were sunken in with deep, dark circles beneath, their cheekbones razor sharp. They had symbols sewn into their shirts, all of them different colours; some she recognised as Stars of David, and others were simply triangles turned upside down, sometimes with a letter in the middle or a line overhead, but most often just the triangle or the star.
Hands gripped Charlie's sleeves and at some point she lost her helmet. She saw it all as though from behind a thick screen of glass. Up the path ahead were more people, emerging from tiny buildings which could only be described as huts, and the enormity of the situation still wouldn't register in Charlie's mind. So many people, all of them so sick...
How could this have happened? How could somebody have done this?
"Charlie," Floyd said, appearing at her side. "What do you want us to do?"
Charlie shook her head, trying to focus her eyes on him, but they kept being pulled away.
"Charlie," Floyd said again, louder.
"Um," she mumbled, her eyes studying the area, still trying to take it in. "Uh..."
"Charlie, look at me," Floyd said, stern and authoritative, but it was what finally got her attention. When he had her eyes on him he asked, slowly, making sure she understood, "What do you want us to do?"
"Okay," Charlie said, forcing her mind and her body to reconnect. "Right, um." She shook her head, clearing the fog, and squared her shoulders. "Any of the men who have any sort of sickness need to be sent back into town. Coughs, colds, allergies - I don't care. Anyone who isn't the picture of health needs to be as far away from these people as possible. They're too vulnerable."
"Done," Floyd said. "What else?"
"Give them water but hold off on the food for now, we don't know how their stomachs will react to a sudden intake and overfeeding could be dangerous. Other than that, give them blankets and comfort, if they want it." She shook her head, feeling the weight of her helplessness like a boulder on her back. "That's all I can think to do to help."
Floyd went to leave but she thought of something else. "Oh," she said, and he came right back. "And get the men to stop holding handkerchiefs to cover their noses. It's disrespectful. These men have had to live like this for months and they can't bear to smell it for a few hours?" She scoffed, disgusted by it. "Tell them to knock it off."
Floyd gave her a nod and hurried off to tell the necessary people her orders and spread the word, and it occurred to Charlie vaguely that she should have let Henry give the orders, but it hardly mattered now. There were much more important things to worry about than rank and the chain of command.
Charlie got to work trying to help people, in whatever ways she saw fit. A lot of the men came to her simply for comfort, wrapping their arms around her and holding on tight to make sure she didn't go anywhere, and it was all she could do in return to hug them back for as long as they needed.
As Autumn passed she asked her briefly for some German words, and she gave her Wasser, meaning 'water', Decke, meaning 'blanket', and Essen, meaning 'food'. Charlie told Autumn to be careful with the food and she nodded, though Charlie wasn't sure she really understood, before she continued on her way, looking haunted, and Charlie had continued on hers, likely looking much the same.
What must have been hours passed Charlie by in the blink of an eye as she tried to tend to man after man. She checked countless pulses for mourning men whose friends and family members had died at some point very recently. And it wasn't just men in the camp; there were teenaged boys and children, too, and all of them had been tortured here by what must have been the Nazis. Charlie's head ached with the magnitude of the tragedy.
At some point some of the trucks had been sent back into town, and Charlie had assumed they'd been transporting men who weren't the picture of health, as Charlie had told Floyd, but they'd returned carrying bread.
She watched, alarmed, as men from Easy climbed up on two trucks they'd driven into the camp and began handing out broken off bits of bread to starving men who probably hadn't eaten anything as dense as that for months - years, maybe.
"Oh, God," she muttered under her breath. She finished with the bandage she was tying on a wound long since infected before vaulting to her feet and running for an officer. "Major Winters," she said, breathless as she came to a stop before him. "Sir, you have to put a stop to this. These men have probably been living off of water and water-based food for months. All this bread - it's too dense, sir. Their stomachs won't handle it. It's dangerous."
"What do you suggest, Lieutenant?" he asked. His eyebrows were furrowed in a way that promised her he was listening and taking her seriously.
"We need to stop the intake of the food, give them water only, and we need a higher ranking medical professional. We don't have any surgeons just yet, sir, but someone from up at regiment would know what to do." This was all so beyond the realm of what she'd been trained for she had no idea where to even start.
"Okay, Lieutenant," Winters said, nodding and turning back to the trucks where soldiers were all but throwing bread out to waiting hands.
Charlie trusted him to get it done. She just didn't know why Floyd hadn't.
The regimental surgeon arrived and told the officers the same thing she'd told Floyd, Autumn, and Winters: that the men in the camp needed to stop being given food. The surgeon advised to lock the men back in the camp until somewhere else could be found for them to be monitored in, wherein they could be fed in a controlled environment.
Charlie stuck around at the camp long into the night, after all the men in the company, save for the medics, had gone back to town to set up for the night.
Henry gave out orders for the nurses and the medics to split up and help the men in the camp stay warm while they waited for somewhere better, and it broke Charlie's heart to see how the men feared being forced back into the huts they'd been sleeping in, how they clearly feared being left here.
At dawn, when the sun was just starting to rise, word came from town that there was a hotel there they could put some of the men in, and an apartment complex they could use for more. Charlie didn't know if that would be enough - there were so many of them, staggeringly many - but if at least some could go somewhere better then that was a start.
She helped to load some of the men onto the transports, then stayed behind with the others while the first group were driven into town. A lot of them were sick, probably with any number of illnesses, and she did her best to get them stable as they waited for access to sufficient medicine and better medical advice. She couldn't just go and inject penicillin into them, not with how weak they were.
She was so out of her depth.
It must have been midday by the time she was relieved, almost a full twenty-four hours since she'd first arrived, and the nurses and medics from Fox Company came to take over.
Charlie watched the horror make its way onto their faces, and this was less than half of the men who had been here yesterday. She felt numb to it. There was nothing she could imagine that was worse than this. Not even Bastogne. This was... this was the worst. This was the most evil thing she could comprehend any human being doing to another. Worse than any 'worse' she'd ever known.