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18 December, 1944 - Bastogne.

It's gotten colder. I thought it was cold before, but no, no it is much colder now. My shoes hurt my feet, my hands are raw from the cold. My skin is peeling from my nails, and it makes me question how clean my hands really are.

I miss the desert, partly for the heat. I had never been so warm. It used to follow me, made me beg for rain or snow. I miss it now. I miss it dearly, the sun on me making the skin on my face peel.

The snow has made the church worse, with more men filling it from frostbite and trench foot than from blown-off limbs and spilled guts. A partial relief for the other nurses and I.

It is not enough of a relief, not with the lines closed and supplies being dropped over the forest for the Krauts. I want to be angry with them, the planes and their pilots, but I can’t be. So I am angry with the Krauts instead; to be angry with them is better, easier.

It smells like rot and mildew, something that reminds me of home, of the cottage with its thatched roof and the wet windows. Some of the girls have to go outside for fresher air.

Cairo smelt worse; even the cleanest parts of the hospital smelt like festering, sweating, and weeping wounds. The heat boiled men's wounds.

Tommy came by today. How could I have forgotten that?

People's faces have begun to bleed into one another. I have watched the same boy die a hundred times over, but yes, Tommy, he had come by for supplies that we didn't have. More than one medic had; the boys on the frontline are desperate.

He had laughed when I handed him torn up bedsheets, it wasn’t kind laughter. Something exhausted laying under it.

We are all exhausted. I have been exhausted since Cairo. I think I carry it like a flag, the pole down my back making me stand rigid, because if I lean forward I will collapse under it all.

The bedsheet bandages, the bodies piling outside, the boots and helmets, coats and bags outside the church to be rooted through. Some of the men are like vultures, diving in the second new things are thrown outside.

Times like these, where everything feels impossibly slow and all too fast, make me think of my brothers. Of Arthur, if he had cracked under the weight of it all yet; he would be the first, I think, to break. Then James, who is much too smart for our family - he is in London, I know that much. Then William, who Tommy said reminds him of a man from his unit, someone made for war. Bred for it.

None of us are bred for war, and I had told him that much. He had shook his head at me. I think he knew an argument would have come if he pushed it. Tommy is smart that way, smarter than he lets himself on to be, I think.

I dread anyone finding this, seeing how I think, reading my words, knowing that I have begun to doubt this war.

Sometimes, when another boy dies under my hands, I think about leaving.

Walking away, into the forest maybe, and not stopping. I would keep walking, through the line our boys hold, through no man's land, I would walk through the Kraut lines. I think I would not stop until I reached the ocean. I miss the ocean.

I miss when I didn’t have blood under my nails. I miss not having dying words in my head. I miss not lying to these boys when they clutch my hands and beg not to die.

I miss when I was Elizabeth, not mother, mama, ma, sister, wife, daughter.

I am a liar and a thief and they don't know it. I steal the final words of these dying boys, and I swallow them down with a promise to tell their wives they fought bravely, to tell their mothers they went peacefully. They do not go peacefully. They never do.