Estelle swung back into her ambulance and stomped on the clutch, jamming it into gear. The vehicle gave a tortured groan and then rolled forward, jolting mercilessly. A soldier in the back shrieked in pain. She maneuvered the ambulance onto the uneven road and accelerated over the rise, driving as fast as she dared. She’d gone only perhaps a half mile when she was forced to slow to a crawl. In front of her, the road was clogged with people fleeing away from the front lines that were continuously inching closer. Most were walking, many with small children in their arms. Some had wheelbarrows or dog carts. The lucky ones had horse- or ox-drawn carts or bicycles, and there was even a tractor farther up, belching black clouds of exhaust. But all had fatigue and fear etched deeply into their faces.

She stayed on the road for long minutes before she veered away from the crowds and bounced into a pasture, following a rutted track that had once been a livestock trail. She burst through a hedgerow and found herself almost at the newest field hospital that had been set up yesterday in a modest manor house abandoned by its previous tenants. Surgeries were being conducted in the kitchen and what had once been a parlour. In the rest of the rooms, men were laid wherever there was space, waiting. Waiting to die, waiting to live.

Uniformed men came out to meet Estelle as the ambulance coughed and jerked past the barn and empty livestock pens. They unloaded the patients from the back, but instead of turning toward the manor, they headed for the barn.

“Stop,” she protested. “These men need to go to the manor. They need a doctor.”

“No room,” one of the men mumbled, adjusting his grip on the stretcher. “Manor’s full. An’ they all need a damn doctor.”

Estelle stared after them and sank down on the back edge of the ambulance, the doors still hanging ajar. She rested her head in her hands, her palms pressing hard against her eyes. She was tired. So very tired.

She forced herself to sit up. She had never been a quitter, and she would not quit now, not when men like Alain had sacrificed everything for her and for their country. She returned to the cab of her vehicle and checked the fuel gauge. She would not make it to the front lines and back with the fuel she had left.

Estelle stood. Perhaps in the last hour someone had secured more fuel or perhaps a cache had been brought up from—

“Estelle!” The sound of her name had her spinning, and she saw Rachel running toward her. Most of her dark hair had escaped its bindings and spilled across her shoulders in a tangled mess, and her uniform, like her face, was filthy.

The immediate relief at seeing her friend alive and whole was snuffed violently by a suffocating wave of grief. She swallowed hard.