Of exactly what a mortar could do to a leg, tearing away flesh so that only bone held the limb to the body, of the screaming sound of a shell, which caused everyone to drop to the floor of the theater—but only after, Jess noticed, petite but gutsy Anne had paused to check the position of the plasma needle in the boy’s arm—and then, once the explosion was heard and the shell thus detonated, to stand up, retake their positions and continue operating as if they wouldn’t all die at any moment. And so it went on, the whooshing sound, the dive to the floor, the explosion, the standing up, the return to the operation, the endless changing of blood and plasma bags.

Man after injured man came in, faces lacerated, bones smashed. So many men needing so much blood that, after midnight, supplies ran dangerously low. The staff gave their arms over to needles to draw out their blood and so did Jess. She saw a surgeon, Major Henderson he’d said his name was, trying to stop an injured soldier—whose lungs were full of blood—from drowning, by drawing the blood out of his lungs with a tracheotomy tube and feeding that same blood back to the soldier intravenously. Wounded men arrived unabated and Jess couldn’t believe that ambulances were still driving through the sleeting rain and pitch dark outside.

“Hold his foot,” Major Henderson ordered Jess at one point.

Jess put down her camera and found herself staring at a leg being sawn off. She followed instructions, forcing herself to look at the face of the injured soldier without crying; he was the one losing his legs, not her.

The soldier grabbed Jess’s hand. “My feet are cold,” he murmured. “Blanket.”

And even though the soldier had no feet, Jess found a blanket and tucked it around the empty space. It was that one small act of comfort that finally tipped her over into tears. She tried to dam them but Anne saw her face and touched her shoulder gently.

“Keep busy,” Anne said. “When it’s quiet, we have too much time to think, which only leads to crying. Try not to think, as much as you can.”

Jess tried, she really did. But when she saw the pile of amputated legs stacked against the side of the tent, she had to stop, breathing hard to keep the nothing in her stomach from pouring out. She wanted to go home.

Thankfully, the shelling lessened around the same time and Jess and three other nurses were sent off to bed where Jess struggled not to let the sudden and aching homesickness show on her face.

“Best put your bedroll under the cot,” Anne advised. “If this keeps up we might need the protection.”

So Jess did as she was told, watching while Anne heated water in an empty ration can on a little oil stove in the middle of the tent before tipping the water into her helmet to begin a rudimentary wash. One of the other nurses scrubbed her thin and shivering back. Anne kept her boots on throughout because even the dams the women had built around the tent couldn’t stop the rainwater from oozing across the floor. She finished by removing one foot at a time from her boots and sprinkling each one liberally with the contents of a yellow tin of Marathon foot powder.