Black Cross

cry for a medical officer that broke the spell on the near bank. McConnell splashed into the shallows, then dived into the rushing water and fought his way across. Stern raced up the bank and scampered across the toggle bridge.

When McConnell broke through the circle of men on the far bank, he saw a young man gasping like a landed fish, but getting no air into his lungs. The commando’s lips were already turning a deathly gray.

Cyanosis, he thought. Not much time.

The French commandos shouted wildly in their own language that someone should pump the water from their comrade’s lungs. The young man’s eyes bulged with terror as he tried vainly to suck air into his chest. McConnell elbowed two commandos aside, saying sharply, “Je suis un medecin! Le Docteur!” This parted the clamoring mass of Frenchmen. He knelt beside Sergeant McShane and palpated the Frenchman’s throat. The larynx had been fractured.

“I need a penknife,” he said. “J’ai besoin d’un couteau!”

“What are you doing?” McShane asked. “The man’s got water in his lungs!”

“No, he doesn’t. He just can’t breathe. Un Couteau!”

“We’ve got to lay him on his stomach!” McShane insisted. “Push the water out. Help me turn him.”

McConnell knocked the sergeant’s arm aside, then grabbed the young Frenchman’s hand and held it to McShane’s face. “Look at his nails, Sergeant! He’s suffocating!”

While McShane stared transfixed at the blue skin beneath the nails, someone thrust a small Swiss-made pocketknife into McConnell’s hand. He flicked open its two blades and chose the smaller for its sharpness. The young Frenchman’s face was turning bluer by the second. Using his left index finger, McConnell probed carefully for his primary landmark — the cricothyroid membrane at the center of the Adam’s apple — then brought the point of the knife blade in contact with the skin.

“Dinna try that!” Sergeant McShane said. “He’ll choke on his own blood! I’ve seen it happen in the field. If his throat’s crushed, we’ve got to get him to a hospital!”

“He’s dying!” McConnell snapped. “Hold him down!” He raised the knife, blade turned horizontally so as to pass cleanly between the cricoid and thyroid cartilages. “Hold him, Sergeant!”

Stunned by the American’s sudden assumption of authority, McShane restrained the Frenchman with his left forearm, but grabbed McConnell’s arm with his right. “Wait, damn you!”

“I’m a doctor!” McConnell shouted, turning on the big Scotsman. Then he shouted in French, “Mets-le deahors! Get this man away!”

A dozen hands jerked the astonished Highlander clear. Three French commandos took his place and pinned their young friend’s head and body to the cold ground. With one clean stroke McConnell punched the knifepoint through skin and membrane.

The Frenchman’s chest heaved.

“Mon Dieu!” gasped a dozen commandos in unison.

“I need something hollow!” McConnell told them. “J’ai . . . shit! J’ai besoin de quelque chose de creux. A reed, a straw, a pen . . . un stilo? Anything, quickly!”

As blood trickled from the small incision, he rotated the knife blade caudally to widen it. Then he slid his right index finger down the side of the blade and into the hole, drew out the blade, and left his finger in place to preserve the integrity of his incision. He was about to shout again when Jonas Stern knelt beside him and slapped a dismantled pen into his hand.

“The toggle-bridge instructor was using it to mark his charts!”

Stern had already snapped off the end of the pen’s barrel, creating a hollow tube. McConnell took the fat end and slowly fed it down the inside of his finger and into the incision, exactly as he had slid his finger down the knife blade. The moment the barrel entered the trachea, the young Frenchman’s chest heaved again, then slowly began to fill with air.

“Regardez!” shouted a soldier.

McConnell ordered two commandos to hold their man’s legs higher than his head while he squatted beside the man’s neck and held the tube in place. In less than a minute the Frenchman’s face lightened a shade. In three minutes he had regained some pink and his pulse was strong.

“How is he, then?”

Sergeant McShane had squatted just behind McConnell.

“His larynx is in bad shape, but he’s stable. He needs a good surgeon now.”

“There’s an ambulance on the way from Fort William. Should be here in a few minutes.”

“Good.”

A French medic appeared and knelt beside the patient. He nodded in silent admiration of McConnell’s work, then began taping the pen barrel to the skin so that it would remain in place during transport. Mark stood up and shook out his hands. Only now did he realize they were quivering.

“Been a while since I’ve done anything like that,” he said. “Nothing but lab work for the last five years.”

Sergeant McShane’s voice carried open respect. “That wasna a bad show, Mr. Wilkes. Bloody good.”

McConnell extended his right hand. “It’s McConnell, Sergeant. Doctor Mark McConnell.”

“I’m pleased to know you, Doctor,” McShane said, firmly shaking it. “I thought you were some kind of chemist, man.”

McConnell smiled. “You were right about not trying a tracheotomy. It’s a dangerous procedure, even for a surgeon in a hospital. I performed a cricothyroidotomy. Almost no danger of nicking an artery that way.”

“Whatever you did, it was the right thing.” The sergeant’s blue eyes held McConnell’s. “Doing the right thing at the right time . . . that’s a talent.”

McConnell shrugged off the compliment. “Where did Stern get off to?”

“You mean Butler?”

“Uh . . . right.”

“Right here,” said Stern, rising from the crowd of Frenchmen.

“Thanks for that pen.”

To McConnell’s surprise, the young Jew leaned forward and offered his hand.

As McConnell shook it, Stern turned to McShane and said, “I think he might do after all, eh, Sergeant?”

McShane nodded once. “Aye. He might at that.”

Walking back to the castle, McConnell realized that he had not enjoyed praise so much in quite some time.

That night, lying on the cots in the cold Nissen hut, Stern and McConnell spoke for the first time about something other than their impending mission.

“I’ve often wished I was a doctor,” Stern said quietly. “Not really for the day to day life, you know, but since I got to Palestine. In North Africa, as well. I’ve seen a lot of men die.”

He was silent for a while. Then he said, “The funny thing is, I remember them all. Not their names especially, but their faces. Their last seconds. It’s struck me a dozen times how alike we all are at the end. They never get it right in the pictures. Most men want their mothers. If they can talk at all. Isn’t that something? I’ll bet they haven’t written their mothers in a year, but at the end it’s the only thing that could ease their fear. Some call out to their wives or children. I’ve stood and watched them die like that, miles from any kind of hospital. No first aid kit. Nothing.”

McConnell lay in the dark and said nothing. Stern was only twenty-five years old, yet he had seen more death than most men would in their entire lives. He slid up onto one elbow.

“Have you ever helped anybody in that position, Stern?”

“What do you mean?”

McConnell could just make out Stern’s silhouette in the darkness, a prone body with arms crossed over its chest. “You know what I mean. Stopped their pain. When I was an intern, I saw a few patients I thought would have been better off dead. But my hands were tied, of course. I just wondered what a man would do if there were no constraints.”

Stern waited a long time to answer. McConnell had closed his eyes and turned on his side when he heard a soft voice say, “Once.”