Page 34 of The Forbidden Love of an Officer (The Marlow Family #7)

Ellen moved from man to man, and each time she knelt down beside another she prayed it would not be Paul.

They were all so bloody and mud-stained she could not tell until she was close.

This was hell on earth. So many men. So many wounded, and for every man here, they were saying there was a dozen left on the field.

Please, God! Please, God! Her mind called a constant prayer that Paul was safe.

‘Would you like water?’ She knelt beside another man.

The lower half of his leg had been torn off by cannon fire.

The rags he lay on and his clothes were covered in dried blood.

The doctor had stopped the bleeding with a tight tourniquet around the man’s thigh, but he would need the upper limb amputated, he may have survived the battle and die from infection in a day or two.

Nausea twisted through the knots in Ellen’s stomach.

She would hold Paul so tightly when he came back and love him even more.

He nodded, a look of terror hovering in his gaze.

The man’s skin was starkly pale beneath the stains of gunpowder, mud and blood, and his eyes were whiter from blood loss.

She smiled, trying to ease his fear, though she was terrified herself.

She filled the ladle in the bucket with water and held it to his lips, letting it trickle into his mouth.

He caught the ladle with both hands and drank more thirstily.

She refilled it and let him drink again.

Then he sighed and lay back, closing his eyes.

As she stood, to offer the next man water, a surgeon waved her over. ‘I need bandages. Have we more bandages?’

The women had been ripping up sheets for hours and she rushed now to fetch some of the strips that were left; there were not many.

Paul’s image was constantly in her mind, as her heart continued praying for his safety.

She handed the bandages to the doctor and watched him wrap them about a wound he had just removed a bullet from. Behind her, another man was brought into the room, shouting out in agony. The doctor looked at her. ‘Carry on here.’

‘ Tie a tourniquet ,’ Paul had said months ago, when she had mourned a single highwayman. She could not have imagined this then.