Holly had cheered up when a couple of days after their arrival she had received a letter from her fiancé Harry Crowe. Holly would never stop talking about Harry. About how he was the only one out there for her and that when he got back he'd find her and marry her and live the rest of his life with her at his side. It hadn't yet got on Clara's nerves but most of the soldiers they had taken in to nurse back to full health were beginning to get a bit peeved by it. What kept the men going wasn't the morphine, although it had a strong baring, was the constant flirting with the more than eligible nurses. The number of men far outweighed the number of women to the point where even the simplest of nurses had a crowd of four or five men after her. All except Holly, who had made it quite clear that she would soon be a married woman. All this talk of fiancés made Clara's mind wander, no matter how hard she wished it didn't, to Bucky.
They had been stationed in England for a couple of weeks now and had been steadily taking in soldiers who had minor injuries over the weeks they'd been there. The hospital had almost reached full capacity as the nuns insisted that every patient should have the correct amount of bedrest. At their training hospital in Brooklyn, each soldier had had three days bedrest minimum whereas the nuns insisted minor injuries received minimum four and major injuries up to a month. It was no wonder the soldiers were restless. The flirting started two days after the first soldiers were referred.
Clara went about her rounds as cheerfully as she could. It was important that the men's moral was kept up as soon they would be back on the front lines. Clara couldn't help but think it would only be a matter of time before they were back again.
"There we are Private Smith, all done." She announced cheerily as she finished the final touches of applying a clean dressing to a gunshot wound. Treating gunshot wounds had become routine.
"Thanks, miss. You're an angel." He thanked her, a over exaggerated smile beamed up at her, "It's no wonder you look like such an angel with all that rest you get. Imagine, proper beds!"
Clara had let slip as she was making small talk with her patients that the nurses were given actual beds rather than the makeshift beds the soldiers had consisting of pillows and a stretcher. All the patients had been moved to the basements to protect them from bombings. So far, they had had none but the looming threat that at any moment during the night the nurses bedrooms could be blown to pieces had never left the back of Clara's mind.
"When can I have a turn in a proper bed?" The soldier asked cheekily and winked at her as she crossed the ward to tend another patient.
Holly was working the ward with Clara that morning and rolled her eyes at her as they past. It had become tradition that the two girls worked the ward together, experiencing the same horrendous attempts at flirting to then complain and laugh about it in the lunch break they shared and in their one hour period before lights out in their room. It was also a sort of ritual that Holly would always relate it back to the man she would marry, as if by never failing to mention him he would continue to be around to mention. So far, his letters to Holly had not stopped. Clara was still awaiting any form of correspondence from Bucky. She was beginning to lose hope.
That morning they had received orders from the army via the nuns that all soldiers in their hospital were to be evacuated and sent back to the front lines. As Clara and Holly made their rounds they had to fill in a release form indicating if the patient still had any major injury or whether they were fit enough to fight. It worried Clara that most of her patients didn't qualify for having a major injury, apparently only amputation of limbs counted as a major injury now.
By their final evening shift, all of the patients were ready to be released. The nurses had escorted their wards down the entrance where they were awaiting an army convoy to carry them back to the front lines. In the distance they heard a rumble and wrongly assumed it to be the convoy. A terrible quiet fell over the hospital, giving way to a piercing note of descension followed by an almighty tremor. The hospital's very foundations shook. Dust fell from the ceiling and the lights flickered off. No one moved. Another whistling note and another temor, this time closer as the hospital shook more violently. The mother superior quickly took charge, barking orders at nuns, nurses and soldiers alike to get down to the basements. They were still awaiting the wards on the upper levels who hadn't made it down to the front entrance but there was no time to go and find them. They had tried their best to accommodate every injured soldier in the basements but there just wasn't enough room.
The mob of people flowed down the halls in a still and terrified silence. No one dared break it. Only the sounds of the not so distant bombs disturbed their prayers. Holly was at Clara's side. The two of them followed the congregation in dead silence as if they were back at the training hospital, making rounds with a frightened stiffness, as if the ward Sister would suddenly spot you were doing some insignificant action so very slightly wrong and unleash her wrath upon you. No one dared make themselves a target.
The basements were filled with people, their shaky breaths echoing back and forth in the chamber space. The hospital was once an abbey, and the basement was once a crypt. A mausoleum doomed once again to entomb an entire platoon of soldiers and nurses alike. As the bombs landed closer and closer, the deep breaths and scared whimpers were drowned out by the calamity of explosion. The deafening whine of the descent signalled the imminence of the explosion itself.
Clara never actually heard what a bomb sounded like once it had fallen. She remembered the descending whistle as it plummeted then the whooshing sound that rang through her ears, her body's response to being deafened. Then all she could hear was the sound of smashing glass and crumbling brick. The upper levels of the hospital had been hit. Who knew how many had been lost. How many of those soldiers that they had spent weeks nursing back to complete health had had their lives wasted?
In the complete silence, the survivors emerged. The scene they were greeted with was of utter devastation. The upper three levels of the hospital were now strewn across the ground, some a good thirty feet away from the building itself. Clara's ward was now a gaping hole. The main doors had been blocked with rubble that the two strongest men had struggled to dislodge. Amongst the abandoned brick were lumps of human flesh. A mere fifty soldiers were left alive and even fewer nurses. Clara and Holly received news that they were to be sent to Italy where they were in desperate need of more nurses. All of the survivors were shipped off in the army convoy less than ten minutes after their friend's had had their lives robbed of them. There was nothing left to bury.
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