She had tweezers that Addy had found for her, and although they’d already been cleaned in boiling water, she tipped a little alcohol on them for good measure. And as Addy passed Harry the bottle of whisky, Elise shuffled even closer to him, one hand pressed to his chest, the other ready to dig into his shoulder.

“Ready?” she asked.

He took a quick sip. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

She carefully inserted her tweezers, being as gentle as could be. Harry grunted.

“Tell me what happened,” she asked, wanting to keep his mind off what she was doing. “Where did you all come from?”

“So now you want to chat?” he asked, wincing.

Elise gave him a sharp stare before going back to work on his wound.

“There were ninety-nine of us in our regiment,” he eventually rasped, groaning as she dug deeper into his flesh. “We were trying to stall the Nazi advance, so the rest of our soldiers had a fighting chance of making it.”

“An advance toward the coast?” Elise asked, leaning even closer to see the bullet as she pulled.

“Yes,” he gasped. “Trying to delay them as long as we could so the evacuation could go ahead. The entire British army is going home, if they make it, that is.”

She cringed as her tweezers slipped off the bullet. If only she had pliers or something sturdier to use.

“And do you think they did? Evacuate, I mean?” She couldn’t believe the British were leaving France.

He went silent, and she wasn’t sure if it was from the pain or whether it was more telling of what might have happened to the troops trying to evacuate.

“We were watching what happened in the barn, from upstairs,” she continued, squeezing tightly with the tweezers and finally, slowly extracting the bullet. “Why did you surrender?”

He yelped as she did one final pull, triumphantly holding up the bullet as Addy gave a little clap from behind her. Elise passed her both the bullet and the tweezers, before picking up the whisky and pouring some in the wound.

“Jesus Christ! Why didn’t you warn me?”

“Sorry.” She gave him the bottle by way of apology, and then tried to figure out how to bandage his shoulder.

“We defended until the bitter end, but we were out of ammunition. There was no way we were getting out of there alive if we didn’t surrender, and so that’s what we all decided to do.”

She slowly looked up at him. His eyes were swimming with tears. Up until now, he’d seemed so angry with the world, but now he just looked plain sad. And vulnerable.

“But they killed most of you, anyway,” she whispered. “We saw.”