William Monk 11 - Slaves of Obsession

had been able to gather themselves, their weapons and equipment, and form into any sort of order.
    Hester waited in an agony of suspense as she heard the gunfire in the distance. Merrit kept glancing towards the door of the church where they were waiting for the first wounded. Nine o’clock passed. A few men were brought in, half carried, half supported. The military surgeon took out aball from one man’s shoulder, another’s leg. Now and then word came of the fighting.
    “Can’t take the Stone Bridge!” one wounded man gasped, his hand clutching his other arm, blood streaming through his fingers. “Rebels have got a hell of a force there.” Hester judged him to be about twenty, his face gray with exhaustion, eyes wide and fixed. The surgeon was busy with someone else.
    “Come and we’ll bind that up for you,” she said gently, taking him by the other arm and guiding him to a chair where she could reach him easily. “Get me water,” she said over her shoulder to Merrit. “And some for him to drink too.”
    “There’s thousands of them!” the man went on, staring at Hester. “Our boys are dying … all over the ground, they are. You can smell blood in the air. I stood on … someone’s …” He could not finish.
    Hester knew what he meant. She had walked on battlefields where dismembered bodies lay frozen in a last horror, human beings torn or blown apart. She had wanted never to see it again, never to allow it back into her mind. She turned away from his face, and found her hands shaking as she cut his sleeve off and exposed the flesh of the wound. It was mangled and bleeding heavily, but as far as she could judge the bone was untouched, and it was certainly not arterial bleeding, or he would not still be alive, let alone able to have staggered to the church. The main thing was to keep the wound clean and remove the shot. She had seen gangrene too often. The smell was one she could never forget. It was worse than death, a living necrosis.
    “It’ll be all right.” She meant to say it strongly, reassuringly, soothe away his fear, but her voice was wobbly, as if she herself were terrified. Her hands worked automatically. They had done it so many times before, probing delicately with tweezers, trying not to hurt and knowing that it was agony, searching to find the little piece of metal that had caused such damage to living tissue, trying to be certain shehad it all. Some of them fragmented, leaving behind poisonous shards. She had to work quickly, for pain, or shock which could kill, and before too much blood was lost. But equally she had to be sure.
    And while she was working her mind was caught in a web of nightmare memory until she could hear the rats’ feet as if they were around her again, scuttering on the floor, their fat bodies plopping off the walls, their squeaking to each other. She could smell the human waste, feel its texture under her feet on the boards overrun with it, from men too weak to move, bodies emaciated from starvation and dysentery or cholera. She could see their faces, hollow-eyed, knowing they were dying, hear their voices as they spoke of what they loved, tried to tell each other it was worth it, joked about the tomorrows they knew would never come, denied the rage they had so much cause, so much right, to feel at their betrayal by ignorance and stupidity.
    She could remember some of them individually: a fair-haired lieutenant who had lost a leg and died of gangrene, a Welsh boy who had loved his home and his dog, and talked of them until others told him to be quiet and teased him about it. He had died of cholera.
    There were others, countless men who had perished one way or another. Most of them had been brave, hiding their horror and their fear. Some had been shamed into silence; to others it came naturally. She had felt for all of them.
    She had thought that the present, her love for Monk, all the causes and the issues there were to fight now, the puzzles, the people who filled her life, had healed the past over in forgetting.
    But the dust, the blood, the smell of canvas and wine and vinegar, the knowledge of pain, had brought it back again with a vividness that left her shaking, bewildered, more drenched with horror than those new to it, like Merrit, who had barely guessed at what was to come. The sweat was running down Hester’s body inside her clothes and turning cold, even in the suffocating, airless heat.
    She was terrified. She could not cope, not