CHAPTER 2 - OLDENBURG, GERMANY—APRIL 17, 1916
Anna Zeller—a twenty-three-year-old Red Cross nurse with blond hair, a dimpled chin, and eyes the hue of cornflower—stuffed a bundle of bandages into her apron and maneuvered her way through the overcrowded hospital ward.
Groans, coughs, and rasps permeated the room.
She and a team of nurses and doctors, exhausted from working double shifts, labored to keep pace with the growing number of injured soldiers.
“Emmi,” Anna said, passing a young nurse with coarse black hair peeking from underneath her headcloth. “Morphia. Bed eleven.”
Emmi nodded and darted to a supply station.
The large room was filled with scores of single, metal frame beds, each containing an injured soldier.
The beds were spaced an arm-length apart, allowing enough room for the nurses to navigate the ward.
Despite an open window, the air reeked of sweat, carbolic, and gangrene.
Several nurses, wearing blue-and-white-striped dresses with white aprons, cared for the men, all of whom had come from the western front.
The nurses treated a vast scope of battlefield injuries.
Bullet and shrapnel wounds. Burns. Missing limbs.
Mutilated bodies. Exposure to poison gas.
Infections. Fractures. Head injuries. Each day, more injured men were transported to the hospital, where doctors and nurses waged their own battle: repairing the bodies of broken men.
“I’m Anna,” she said, reaching the bedside of a trembling soldier with a turban-like field dressing wrapped around his head. Possible skull fracture. “Can you tell me your name?”
The soldier cracked open his swollen eyelids. “Johann,” he wheezed.
“You’re going to be all right, Johann.”
Emmi, holding a hypodermic syringe, arrived at the bed.
“My friend Emmi is going to give you an injection of morphia to soothe your pain,” Anna said. “A doctor will examine you, and then I’ll clean and rebandage your wound.”
He groaned and placed his hands to his temples.
Emmi touched his arm.
He flinched.
“It’s okay,” Anna said, softening her voice. “I’ll hold your hands while Emmi administers the medicine.” She gently clasped his fingers, lowered his arms to his side, and then nodded to Emmi.
Emmi injected the morphia.
He squeezed Anna’s hands. His fingernails, blackened with dirt from the trenches, dug into her palms.
As his breathing slowed and his muscles relaxed, Anna released his hands. She turned to Emmi and whispered, “I couldn’t do this without you.”
Emmi, her eyes darkened with fatigue, drew a faint smile and left to tend to another patient.
Anna delicately unwrapped the soldier’s field dressing, all the while praying that his cranium was intact.
Anna, determined to do her patriotic duty, began working at the hospital when the war erupted.
The initial days as a nurse were strenuous for her.
The yowls of men, suffering excruciating pain, rattled her nerves.
Her hands trembled while dispensing medicine, and the duty of cleaning infected wounds turned her stomach.
Also, the technical aspects of nursing had not come easily for Anna, who had needed more practice to master tasks, such as the precise measuring of drugs and the insertion of needles.
To compound matters, the hospital was short-staffed, due to a number of doctors and nurses who were transferred to field hospitals.
Therefore, the staff in Oldenburg often worked double shifts.
When she wasn’t laboring in the hospital ward, or taking a brief rest on one of the cots in the basement boiler room, she went home—which she shared with her vater, Norbie—and collapsed onto her bed.
As months passed, Anna gradually grew accustomed to the stressful hospital environment, as well as more proficient at her duties.
I need to be strong for them, she’d told herself while replacing a dressing over a severed leg.
Although her father had raised her to be a pacifist, and she deeply loathed the war, Anna believed she was doing something good by serving as a nurse.
However, much of her mending of bodies felt provisional, considering the bleak futures of permanently disabled men.
Who will care for them after they leave the hospital?
she often wondered. How will they survive on their own?
Her heart ached for the soldiers, whose bodies and souls were savaged by war, and she wished that there was more that she could do to improve their quality of life.
After a frenzied morning of caring for patients, Anna joined Emmi for a brief meal break on a bench in the hospital garden. Although the vegetation was dormant, the weather was brisk and a welcome change from the dank hospital air.
“How is our patient in bed eleven?” Emmi asked.
“Surgery won’t be needed,” Anna said, unwrapping a hunk of bread. She broke it in half and gave a piece to Emmi. “He might make a full recovery.”
“It’s your bedside manner that makes them well,” Emmi said.
“Danke,” Anna said. “But everyone knows that I’m one of the least technically adept nurses on the floor.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Emmi said. “There’s more to medicine than picking shrapnel from wounds. You give them compassion and hope.”
Anna smiled, feeling appreciative for her friend’s kind words. She took a bite of bread and turned her thoughts to Emmi’s husband, who was serving as an army medic at the front. “How’s Ewald?”
“I received a letter from him yesterday,” Emmi said. “His spirits are good, although I know he would never tell me otherwise.”
“I’m sure he’s safe and well,” Anna said.
Emmi picked at her bread. “I can’t stop worrying about him.”
“I feel the same way about Bruno.” Anna rubbed Emmi’s arm. “We must have faith that the war will end, and they’ll come home.”
“Ja.” Emmi blinked her eyes, fending off tears.
Anna met Bruno, an army officer with an arm fracture, soon after she began working at the hospital.
He was one of her first patients. Despite the ugly cast she had created for him out of plaster-soaked bandages, he asked to see her after he was released from the hospital.
She initially declined, but after his numerous requests, including two that were written in the form of a poorly constructed poem, she agreed.
Bruno stayed in an Oldenburg boardinghouse for his entire three-week medical leave, rather than return home to his family in Frankfurt.
Although they had different upbringings—Anna’s vater was a humble clockmaker and Bruno’s family owned a large dye manufacturing business—she was smitten by his charm.
The day before he returned to the front, he proposed.
She accepted, and they planned to marry after the war, which they both suspected would be in a matter of months.
But months turned into a year, and now, nearly two years into the war, there appeared to be no end to the conflict in sight.
As Anna and Emmi finished their lunch, a bespectacled doctor with fine, stubbled gray hair entered the garden. In one hand, he held a leash, tethered to a German shepherd. Using his free arm, he guided a battlefield-blinded soldier, who was staring ahead and shuffling his feet.
“It’s kind of Dr. Stalling to bring his dog to the hospital,” Anna said. “It enlivens the patients.”
“Ja,” Emmi said. “I wonder how many dogs he has at home.”
“Why do you say that?” Anna asked.
“He’s a director of the German Red Cross Ambulance Dogs Association.”
“Oh,” Anna said, feeling a bit embarrassed by her ignorance about Stalling’s work.
“Ewald often writes about the ambulance dogs, and how they help medics locate and recover wounded soldiers on the battlefield.”
“They must be incredibly brave,” Anna said.
“And smart,” Emmi added.
“I’ve always wanted a dog,” Anna said, glancing at Stalling’s shepherd, wagging its tail.
Emmi nudged Anna with her elbow. “Maybe you and Bruno will get one after the war.”
“That would be lovely,” she said.
Emmi stood and brushed bread crumbs from her apron. “I should get back to work.”
“I’ll be there in a moment,” Anna said.
Emmi nodded and went inside.
Anna left the bench and stood in the garden, observing the trio maneuver over the grounds.
She admired the gentle manner in which Dr. Stalling walked with his patient, and the obedient behavior of the dog, padding alongside him.
Most of all, her heart ached for the blinded soldier, who would soon face monumental challenges upon leaving the hospital.
A nurse flung open the door to the garden. “Dr. Stalling! We need you in room twenty-eight!”
Dr. Stalling waved. As he led the patient and his dog to the building, his eyes locked on Anna. “Fr?ulein Zeller.”
Anna straightened her back. “Ja, Dr. Stalling.”
“Could you take over for me?”
“Of course, sir.” Anna darted to him.
Stalling handed her the leash.
She glanced at the dog. Its coat was black, except for wisps of brownish gold on its ears and neck, like it was drizzled with caramel. Her pulse quickened. She inched close, doing her best to pretend that she knew how to handle a canine.
“No need to worry, Fr?ulein Zeller. She won’t bite.” Stalling patted the patient on his shoulder. “And neither will Horst.”
Horst gave a weak smile.
Anna’s shoulder muscles relaxed.
Stalling left and entered the building.
“It’s nice to meet you, Horst,” she said. “I’m Anna.”
“Hallo,” he said. His eyes were dark and motionless. Deep scars covered his brows and cheeks.
“Would you like to continue walking?”
“Ja,” he said, extending his elbow.
Anna clasped his arm and looked at the dog. “Does she have a name?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Dr. Stalling didn’t have much of a chance to introduce us. He saw me in the hallway, and he suggested we go for a walk.”
The dog perked its ears, as if she was listening to the conversation.
Anna tugged the leash. “Okay, girl. Come with us.”