seemed to fill the forlorn field.
“Can I help you, sir?” the driver asked David.
“Is it all right if I go in now?” David told him. “Have a look around?” The driver spoke to one of the ambulance men, who managed to shrug despite the weight of the dead body — a marine, his arm in a cast, face jaundiced- looking and frozen in pain.
“They say you can have a look,” the driver told David. “But do not move anything. More ambulances are on the way. The police may want photographs.”
“What for?” put in Parkin, returning down the track. “Nothing to investigate, is there?”
The Belgian driver shrugged. “Regulations.”
Parkin drew heavily on the cigarette. “Regulations ain’t gonna help those poor bastards,” he said, looking at the ambulances filling up on this, their second trip, eight shrouds in each, dead laid out on the wet grass for the additional ambulances on the way.
David hesitated before going in as Parkin, heading on down to the other end of the carriage, called out, “Beg pardon, Lieutenant, but what’s she look like?”
“About five four,” said David, entering the second to last carriage, looking at the slumped bodies which the ambulance men still had to clear. “Blue eyes—” he told Parkin.
“Very good, sir, but I mean, what was she — is she— wearing?”
Brentwood tried to think, recoiling from the stench. “Well, she had a sort of yellow raincoat on — the kind fishermen wear over here—”
“Slicker,” said Parkin. “Right, but I mean, she wouldn’t be wearing a coat in the train — probably bit stuffy in here before— I mean, not when she was busy looking after the wounded—”
“Yes,” replied David, “I guess you’re right. I don’t know — a kind of floral patterned dress — skirt,” he said. “Red and yellow flowers — I think — white sweater. A bonnet. Blue.” David eased his way down the body-strewn aisle, each hand on the corner of one of the day-sitters, the upholstery torn here and there where the bullets had passed through, some of the beige-colored sponge rubber filler oozing from the seats speckled with blood. He remembered she was wearing a red poppy, too, for Remembrance Day, even though the actual day was weeks ago.
David paused, wiping the sweat from the cap’s band before he could bring himself to move deeper into the carriage. He could still hear the heavy, muffled tinkling of the boiler, steam still rising, floating back past the carriages even though Parkin had shut down the main valve.
He moved farther into the carnage, having to step over the bodies gingerly, trying not to disturb anything, finding a footfall wherever he could and using the web of the overhead luggage racks to keep his balance, recoiling one moment from pinkish-gray ooze of brains sticking to one seat, the upholstery black with blood.
One of the American reinforcements was slumped in a corner, and from the pinkish-white pulp that David guessed must have been bone and flesh, David could tell the SPETS had probably used high-velocity mercury or depleted-uranium tips, which would penetrate the target like a white-hot rod, exploding through the other side with the force of a sledgehammer.
“Jesus!” said Parkin softly, now entering the carriage from the far end. “Get away, you bastard!” He was waving his hand ineffectually at a large blowfly crawling, bloated, through the mash of a GI’s eye dangling by a thread. Suddenly Parkin put his hand to his mouth, and rushed back toward the toilet door. As it flung open, David heard Parkin utter another half-choked oath and saw him reappear, rushing out the doors at the end of the carriage.
As David reached the washroom, he saw the reason— another GI, crumpled against the outer wall, one leg bent impossibly between the toilet stem and sink pipe, hands protectively over his face — the impact of two SPETS bullets having blown him clean off the seat even as he’d tried to cower in the corner. Or had he simply been too terrified to move? Again it had been a head shot, and David saw the splattered slug that had ricocheted, ending up, after smashing the cistern, embedded in the copper float. There were empty nine-millimeter brass jackets all over the place — same ammunition as used by NATO forces.
David pushed open the carriage’s end door and saw Parkin, head over the rail. Beyond him David could see through the doors of the fourth carriage, another carnage of khaki bodies strewn about, several of them clustered by the water fountain. “You okay?” he asked Parkin.
“No — Jesus, never seen anything like it. Bloody slaughter. The bastards.”
David passed by him, heading for the doors of the fourth carriage, and heard ambulance men behind him starting to clean out the remaining bodies now that more stretchers had arrived. As he opened the door, he saw several bodies that had fallen from upper bunks where the wounded had been. David felt his nostrils assaulted by a stringent mixture of spilled antiseptic, saline drip bottles, medications, and excrement.
He stood still looking about for her, for any sign of movement, still having a gut feeling that as she was of slighter build than most, she could well be buried but alive under the crush of bodies. He heard something and motioned the ambulance men coming in behind him to be quiet, listening for the faintest sound of breathing — for anything. But all he could hear now was the sound of the boiler condensing, its melancholy sound still with them. Outside, more ambulances were arriving.
“Should check those who’ve been taken away,” suggested Parkin, reappearing, smelling of sick. He meant those who the Belgian had told him had been stacked earlier in the Roosbeek morgue.
“Damn it — she isn’t dead,” David said. “I just know it.” He turned, looking at Parkin. “Sorry. You don’t have to come. Wait back at the Humvee if you like.”
Parkin didn’t answer but followed Brentwood as he entered the last carriage.
She was the first one he saw — spread across a wounded youth, both his arms in casts, one eye bandaged, the bandage bloodied now and rust-colored. At the base of her head there was a small, ugly hole, the edge of her white sweater stained. David knelt down and felt her wrist. No pulse. Cold. He couldn’t breathe and tore at his collar. Parkin moved up behind him. “Oh Christ, Lieutenant! Oh, shit!”
David, biting his lip, bent over her, still clinging to hope, and saw a phantom breeze blow the soft baby hair on the nape of her neck. It was his own breath. He took her right hand in both of his, holding it gently, feeling for the faintest pulse. He doubled over, pulling her hands to his face, his head moving side to side, sobbing in desperate denial that it was Lili, that the bloody mush that had been her face was Lili. But the poppy of Flanders Field that she’d worn, like those poppies she had told him sprang form from the artillery-plowed earth after the 1914 war, was still there, crushed against her by the body of the soldier she’d been trying to protect.
David didn’t remember the walk back to the Humvee, nor much of the ride back to the convalescent military hospital in Liege where he was to await orders, possibly for light supply duties in France. Parkin had put the poppy, her ID bracelet, and a lock of her hair — he’d had to wash it first — in a white linen envelope marked “Lieutenant Brentwood — Personal” and left it at the front desk. He wanted to stay at Liege but couldn’t. In the morning he’d have to report back to Brussels as what supplies were making it through the renewed Russian sub attacks on the convoys had to be shipped up quickly to the front if Freeman’s army wasn’t to be halted, and a counterattack risked all along the line. NATO needed every driver it could get its hands on.
“You take care of yourself, Lieutenant,” Parkin enjoined.
David nodded. “Thanks for bringing me back, Corp.”
“Anything I can do, sir? I mean, if you’re not feeling up to it — someone should let your folks know.” Parkin was holding out a packet of cigarettes, momentarily forgetting that the American didn’t smoke.
“No,” said David. “They know nothing about her.” He looked up at the Englishman, his lip quivering. The corporal, embarrassed, offered him a light. Brentwood looked down, cleared his throat, and asked in a strained voice, “Can you fix me a ride to Bouillon? It’s in the Ardennes. Her parents live there. I’d like to — I mean I should —”
“No problem!” said Parkin, relieved he could do something, anything, to help. “I’ll go over to the motor pool right now.”
“Thanks,” said David.
Sitting on the edge of his bunk, eyes fixed on the drops of rain slowly making their way down the window of the Quonset hut, he felt a hollowness — a vast emptiness and the beginning of rage — that they could waste someone so young, so beautiful — so good — the best thing, he now realized too late, that had happened to him in the whole rotten war.
