Chapter Three
Dr. Kate Allegra clung to the side of a rattling truck, her medical bag wedged between her knees as the convoy lurched through Normandy's torn roads. The air was thick with diesel fumes and the acrid bite of smoke, shells bursting in the distance like thunder that never stopped. The field hospital's evacuation had begun in a panic at midnight; German tanks were closing in, their treads grinding closer with every hour.Kate's hands, raw from hours of stitching wounds and packing crates,trembled as she gripped the truck's frame. In her coat pocket, the bloodstained Russian letter pressed against her ribs, its weight a quiet anchor amid the chaos. The truck hit a rut, jolting her against a wounded soldier strapped to a stretcher. His eyes, wide with morphine haze, met hers. "We getting out, Doc?" he rasped, voice barely audible over the engine's roar."We're trying," Kate said, forcing a smile. The convoy was a target, exposed on the open road, and the sky above churned with smoke, hiding any hope of stars. She pulled the letter out, its frayed edges catching on her cracked nails. Yesterday, a French nurse named Claire, who knew some Russian, had translated a few lines: "Babushka, the war takes everything. I miss them; Anya, Mikhail, Svetlana. I don't know if I'll see the spring."
The words had lodged in Kate's chest, sharp as a knife , mirroring her own fear of losing her father, her home, herself. She didn't know the soldier who wrote it, but she felt him, his grief, his fight to keep going. She needed to find him, not just for him but to prove she could still feel something beyond the numbness creeping in.A shout from the driver snapped her back. "Planes!" The convoy screeched to a halt, soldiers and medics spilling into ditches as the drone of German aircraft grew louder. Kate threw herself into the mud, shielding a patient's head as dirt rained down from a near miss.
Her heart pounded, but her hands moved on instinct, pulling a scalpel from her bag to cut a tourniquet for a soldier hit by shrapnel in the chaos. The man gasped, blood soaking his leg, but she worked fast,tying off the artery under the flicker of a distant explosion. When the planes passed, she collapsed against the ditch's edge, her breath ragged, the letter still clutched in her fist. "I'll find you," she whispered, a vow to the stranger who'd poured his soul onto that paper. Captain Ellis, the British liaison, appeared through the smoke, his face streaked with grime. "You alright, Doctor?" He offered a hand, pulling her up. His touch was steady, and for a moment, she wanted to lean into it, to let his warmth chase away the cold. But she stepped back, nodding. "Fine. You?" "Been better." He glanced at the letter in her hand. "Still carrying that, eh? Any luck with it?" "Claire translated some. It's… personal. A soldier, lost his family." Her voice caught, and Ellis's eyes softened.
"War's full of ghosts," he said quietly. "Keep it close. Might mean more than you think." He turned to help load the wounded, leaving Kate with a pang of guilt. Ellis was here, real, kind but the letter's writer felt closer, like a piece of her own heart.
...…
In a Prussian village turned to rubble, 2nd Lieutenant Gavriil Milen led his squad through streets choked with ash and broken stone. The 22nd Battalion had hit the village at dawn, expecting to clear it fast, but the Germans fought like cornered dogs, their machine guns raking the alleys. Gavriil's arm stung where a bullet had grazed it, blood seeping through a hasty bandage, but he pushed forward, revolver raised. "Left, now!" he barked, directing his men to flank a sniper's nest in a shattered bakery. A burst of gunfire answered, and Private Ivanov grunted, collapsing with a hole in his shoulder. Gavriil dragged him behind a wall, cursing under his breath as he tied a cloth around the wound. "Stay down," he told Ivanov, whose face was pale but defiant. The squad took the bakery, but the cost was heavy two men down, one dead. Gavriil's chest tightened, the weight of each loss carving deeper into him than the bullet in his arm. At twenty-two, he was their officer, but every death felt like his failure. In a brief lull, he found shelter in a gutted house, its walls pocked with bullet holes. A child's drawing lay in the debris,a family under a starry sky, the lines wobbly but full of hope. Gavriil's throat closed, memories
of his own children flooding back: Mikhail's clumsy sketches, Svetlana's laughter as Anya pinned them up. He sank to the floor, clutching his grandmother's rosary, its beads worn smooth by years of prayers."I'm sorry," he whispered, tears burning his eyes. He'd lost his letter to his grandmother in that forest skirmish, and with it, a piece of himself. Now, this drawing felt like a cruel echo of what he'd never have again.
A German prisoner, hauled in by his men, knelt in the rubble, hands bound. He was young, his face gaunt with fear. "The Allies are coming," he stammered in broken Russian. "From the west. You'll meet them soon." Gavriil's jaw tightened. The war was closing in, fronts colliding, and he wondered what that meeting would bring;more blood, or something else. He waved the prisoner away, his mind elsewhere. Later, as the battalion regrouped, Major Petrov clapped a hand on his shoulder. "You did well, Milen. Kept most of 'em alive." His eyes flicked to Gavriil's bloody sleeve. "Get that fixed. Berlin's waiting." Gavriil nodded, but his thoughts were on the drawing, now tucked into his coat.He pulled out a scrap of paper :a torn page from a looted book and scrawled a few words:
"To whoever finds this: I fight for them. For a tomorrow I can 't see".
He meant to keep it, but in the retreat from the village, as shells tore the earth apart, the paper slipped from his pocket, lost in the mud.