The air was heavy with smoke and fear.
Elena Moreau pressed the back of her wrist against her damp forehead as another stretcher was rushed through the doors of the field hospital. Outside, the thunder of artillery rolled across the Normandy countryside, rattling the tent poles and sending a fine dust down from the canvas ceiling. The war had found them again.
She had long stopped counting the number of wounded she had treated. Faces blurred together — pale, broken, gasping — yet she tended to each one as if he were her brother, her father, her own beating heart. Her hands shook, not from fear anymore, but from exhaustion that had settled deep in her bones.
"Over here!" the surgeon barked.
Two medics carried in a man whose uniform was torn and darkened with blood. His head lolled to one side, his lips faintly moving. Elena's heart skipped as she hurried to his side.
The soldier's eyes fluttered open — hazel, soft despite the pain. "Please… the others," he murmured, his accent clearly British.
"They're being cared for," she said gently, cutting away the shredded fabric from his arm. "But right now, it's you who needs saving."
He tried to smile. "Nurse, I think that may be a taller order than you think."
She almost smiled back. "We'll see about that."
The bullet had grazed his shoulder and lodged near his ribs. Not fatal, but dangerous if infection set in. Elena moved quickly, her fingers steady, her focus absolute. The surgeon stitched; she cleaned and wrapped; and when it was done, the soldier was breathing more evenly.
As the chaos quieted for a moment, she noticed his gaze fixed on her name tag.
"Elena Moreau," he read aloud, his voice a low whisper. "That's a beautiful name."
"And yours?" she asked.
"Lieutenant James Whitaker," he said, managing a faint grin. "Of Her Majesty's Royal Engineers… though at the moment, a rather broken one."
Something about his voice — soft-spoken, carrying both humor and sorrow — lingered in her mind long after she left his bedside.
That night, the rain fell hard against the tents. Elena sat on a wooden crate, writing in her small leather-bound journal by the flicker of a candle.
"Another wounded officer today. British. Kind eyes.
He smiled through the pain — such courage, or perhaps madness.
I keep wondering if I will ever grow used to this — to saving lives while the world burns."
Her pen hesitated. She glanced toward the row of beds, where James lay sleeping peacefully for the first time since he arrived.
"I hope he survives. He looks too gentle to die in a war like this."
She closed the journal softly. Outside, thunder cracked across the horizon, but inside the tent, there was a rare silence — the silence of two souls beginning to recognize each other amidst the storm.