Prologue

Someone was always screaming.

The shrieks of the dying were like no other; the sound bounced off the stone walls of the old Methodist church. The wails of the damned did not even come close to comparison to the agonizing sound of a dying soldier. Sometimes the screams aren't even from the pains of the wounds, mostly it was from the deterioration of the mind. Joanne had become accustomed to everything: blood and gore, but the screaming, she could never get used to that. Sometimes the cries were so horrible that Joanne felt a scream rise in her own throat, but she never let it out. Her job was to remain calm for the soldiers, if she started to scream along with the injured men she would be dismissed by the chief nurse immediately.

Even observing the men screaming made her heart drop like a brick to her stomach. The eyes would always bulge, the carotid artery would throb under the skin of the neck, they would sweat so profusely as if they had a bucket of water dumped on them. It didn't matter if the soldier was American, French, Canadian – they all screamed the same. Joanne would often have to hold them down, grasping their shoulders as they fought against her like a rabid animal. When they screamed, spittle would fly from their mouth, spewing the nurses until a doctor had finally arrived to sedate them. By the end of each ordeal Joanne's hands would start to tremble, a tick that had started a few months after she had first arrived in the fall of 1917. She couldn't even hold a scalpel when her hands started shaking like an alcoholic going through withdrawal. Another nurse would take over and Joanne would leave, hurrying away from the cries of pain and to the remote safety of the outdoors.

Joanne sat on the steps of the church, now named Base Hospital # 5, pressing her hands in between her knees to try to stop the shaking. Outside wasn't peaceful, the Great War was raging from a distance outside in Brest, France. But Joanne would take the sound of artillery strikes over screaming. Silence could be just as bad as the screaming when her shift was over; anything to fill in the space of that dreadful sound was welcome to her.

Joanne stared down at her white nurse's cap. Her shaking hands were stained red with blood, as was her white apron with the giant red cross on it. The red matched her fiery crimson hair, which she desperately tried to contain. Some of the blood on her slender fingers was fresh, so it left smears on her once immaculate white cap. Twisting her cap with her hands helped eased the shaking for a bit. She wrung her cap like it was a hated German's neck until the trembling subsided. She placed her now still hands in her lap and dipped her head as she sighed deeply. It hadn't been long since she trained and was shipped overseas with thousands of other nurses, and she was already showing signs of stress. America got involved in the war late, her time of service had only been a few months. She felt pathetic and slightly scared at how quickly war was affecting her mind.

The fresh air suddenly felt like breathing in smog. She felt like she was suffocating and stood up to head back in. There were plenty of wounded men to treat and she was no use to anybody sitting outside ruining her white cap. She placed her cap back on her untamed, curly hair, and went to find her next patient.

0000

Joanne preferred to work the nightshift. Other than occasional moans of a wounded soldier, stirring in a cot, nighttime at Base # 5 was mostly peaceful. Sometimes a truckload of wounded would pull up and drop off the critically injured, but not too often. Night was a time of tranquility. The other reason Joanne preferred the nightshift was because of her restlessness when she tried to sleep. Wakefulness gripped her tightly and refused to let go, even when the dark purple bags under her eyes had formed. She couldn't take the silence, and the nurse's quarters were oh so silent. The women breathed quieter than mice and most slept right when their heads hit the pillow, but not Joanne. She gripped her covers until her knuckles turned the color of milkweed, her mind unable to rest. Her eyes were wide and alert, even in the dark. She wasn't sure if it was fear keeping her awake, and if it was she didn't know what exactly she was afraid of.

Soldiers pass away here all the time, she was used to death and the terrible injuries that caused it. Germans raiding the hospital was always a possibility. One of the soldiers going mad from shell shock wasn't uncommon, sometimes nurses were attacked because they were mistaken for an enemy solider in a trench. None of that struck fear into her heart, they were all awful things, but sympathy was fading with familiarity. That was probably what made her so afraid: fear that she was losing who she was. She never imagined she could be so cold, direct, and analytical when she watched a soldier die and move on to the next man to be treated. She cared about her patients as much as any good nurse, but she found herself being able to withstand so much death without shedding a single tear. It frightened her, but the same went for the other nurses. They all had a professional and serious responsibility, and mourning was not part of their job.

Losing basic human empathy in such an awful time made her feel ill. She wanted to be caring, loving, and sympathetic to those who died or crippled. She had been exposed to the extreme horrors of what man could inflict on one another. Eventually sleep would find Joanne by pure exhaustion, and hold her in a vice-grip of restlessness. She would be suspended between being awake and asleep; that strange purgatory that forced her to remain alert. On the rare occasions when she would drift into a deep sleep, her dreams would haunt her subconscious.

She would dream of the screaming.