The Beginning

The first chapter.

Outside the injured were coming in droves, dragged or carried by fellow injured, or using sticks and the rare crutch to get themselves to the big green tent with the red cross, the field hospital, inside the tent were women and men, Nurses and Doctors, running this way and that trying to deal with short supplies and too many screaming men. More than any person should have to deal with in a life-time let alone in the few minutes it had taken for this particular tent to be filled with the dead and dieing. Beds were overflowing, there were men lying on the muddy floor of the tent, their blood mixing with the mud and turning it a strange maroon color. In the center of the tent there was a fire, large metal plates sat in the fire heating up, ready to cauterize any large open wounds. At the back of the tent, with doctors and nurses running to and fro sat a large cabinet with a large mixture of now dwindling medical supplies. Even in all this madness, one nurse still managed to stand out to the weary soldiers who still had eyes to see, her name was Josephine and she was beautiful, her features all seemed to complement the next, her black hair tied in a bun above her head, so as to stay out of the way of her work (her Nurses hat was lodged in a mans chest to stop him bleeding out). Her eyes, perfect ovals set in perfect cheeks, bright emerald green that seemed to light up her face, her nurses apron, now torn and bloody falling over the perfect curves of her body, an Angel, in the middle of hell, nobody could have prepared her for this. She had spent her early life on a farm in England, far out in the countryside, she had been her families vet, tending to the animals, midwifing for them, mending them, as she now tried to help mend the gaping hole where a mans leg should have been, there were shards of bone of his own leg sticking out of his other leg and back, small fragments of metal were oozing out of the stump that should have been a leg, there was no time to remove the metal, the man would bleed out in the process and there just simply wasn't enough time for everybody. They were going to have to cauterize the wound and deal with the shrapnel later. The doctor was shouting at Josephine to get more morphine, she ran to the cabinet. All around her were the sounds of the injured, screaming, crying, begging, praying, a constant noise in the background, yet somehow the screams of the particular person she was helping always seemed the loudest, she felt to blame for their suffering, their sobs and their screams. She was at the cabinet, other than some small bandages and a bit of broken glass the cabinet was empty. She turned around and signaled to the doctor that there was nothing. The doctor wasted no time, he grabbed one of the red hot metal plates from the fire in the center of the tent, shouted at Josephine to hold the man down, she ran forward, bumping into another nurse on her way, no time to apologize. She reached the dieing man and put all her weight on the poor man, who had been screaming, begging and crying since his arrival, but was now deathly quiet. The doctor pressed the hot plate against the open wound, the man screamed louder than ever, then stopped. He was dead, no time to grieve, to even think, on to the next screaming man, blinded in both eyes from who knows what, Josephine had long since given up on trying to guess what had caused her patients to be in her tent, she wasn't even sure if she cared anymore. The doctor was wrapping a blood-soaked bandage around the mans head and over his eyes, Josephine gave a quick glance at the man who had just died, in time to see him roughly shoved out of the bed and into the mud, to be replaced by a man with half his face melted from fire and shrapnel sticking out of almost everywhere, or so it seemed. She turned her attention back to the blind man, the doctor had finished with the bandage, it was time to move on. Just then there was a loud BANG!!!, extreme heat, the feeling of someone stabbing her with hundreds of needles, a sensation of flying, then nothing. Josephine, the vet, midwife and nurse, most beautiful woman (or girl really, she was only 17) in her area and probably the whole country, her life ended, along with many others, by a small artillery crew and their big gun, years of life ended in seconds blood and fire, mud and steel, all becoming one and none.

Author's Note

This is the start, here you meet some of the characters whose stories are told later on.
Its a little hectic, but its to try and give the feeling of what it could have been like in that situation.