The Dragon Duke's Wife - Chapter 19
“I don’t like seeing you scared of me. When the time comes, I’ll take care of everything, so just wait without worrying.”
“I-I’m not waiting.”
She blushed deeply and tried to turn away. Khalid chuckled and pulled her into his arms, brushing his lips against her forehead and temple.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not that uncomfortable.”
“It looks uncomfortable. If you’d like, I can… help while you sleep.”
“It’s much more comfortable with you here.”
Ancia’s cheeks reddened further as she lowered her gaze to the pillow. Khalid stretched, still holding her.
“It’s nice to sleep in late for a change.”
“Don’t you need to go out today?”
“It’s raining. Normally, I’d be riding now… I wish you could come with me, but you’re always so deeply asleep in the mornings, I never know when you’ll wake up.”
“It’s because of you…”
Ancia murmured softly, resting her head on Khalid’s shoulder.
They lay there in silence, comfortably nestled together. Ancia could hear the steady beating of Khalid’s heart, and for some reason, the sound was soothing. She pressed her ear to his chest, savoring it.
As she grew accustomed to the silence, the sound of raindrops hitting the window beyond the curtains drifted in.
“I miss the chapel.”
Ancia suddenly spoke up.
“The chapel?”
“Yes. A long time ago… back at the Welpen field hospital… I was in charge of the tent for the soldiers we gave up on.”
“The soldiers you gave up on?”
“Yes.”
Ancia answered Khalid’s repeated question in a quiet voice.
“In wartime, soldiers are classified into three groups based on their injuries. The first group includes those who are lightly injured, patched up, given medicine, and sent back to the front. The second group includes those who suffer serious injuries, like losing a limb or an eye, or deep internal injuries—those who can’t continue fighting and are sent for further treatment after first aid.”
“Right.”
“And the third group, the ones we gave up on, are the soldiers whose injuries are so severe that, though they’re still alive, they can’t survive until they’re evacuated. The medical officers and nurses have given up on treating them.”
Khalid didn’t say anything. Ancia wondered if he didn’t like hearing these stories, but then he tightened his hold on her, so she decided to continue.
“I was just a rookie nurse back then. I had no experience with nursing before I joined the army. I didn’t even know how to distinguish between a coagulant and a fever medicine. In places like Yedermol, where the military hospitals were huge and there were many medical officers, even someone like me could find plenty to do. But at Welpen, we had many wounded and not enough medical personnel, so each one of us was incredibly important. There was no room for a slow beginner like me to step in when someone could be saved. There was no one to give orders, and no time to waste.”
The battlefield was one where the Roden Empire suffered a crushing defeat. The higher-ups had decided to retreat. It was a strategically abandoned front, so the remaining troops were like discarded chess pieces, used only for stalling.
The medical officers and the nurses who volunteered to join the army were also encouraged to retreat. However, there were soldiers so severely wounded that they couldn’t even be evacuated. Some nurses, including the head nurse, volunteered to stay behind, reasoning that the enemy, if they had any honor, wouldn’t kill medical officers and nurses.
She stayed too.
Looking back, she didn’t know what kind of spirit or courage she had back then. Ancia wasn’t a brave person, but in that moment, she could be. The cold-eyed head nurse had glared at her with a terrifying look.
“Are you really prepared to stay here?”
“Yes. Please let me stay.”
“You’re of no use anyway. You can’t even treat one injured patient properly. Do you have the courage to take a saw and cut off someone’s leg?”
“While you’re doing that, I could at least soak some bandages in water.”
In reality, there wasn’t even clean water to soak the bandages.
But Ancia held on. The thought that if she left, these people would die was the only thing in her mind.
In the closest proximity to death, she felt life. Even when she had to live quietly in a relative’s house, or when she lived by her own earnings in a small house, it never truly felt like she was living.
It was the medical tent, just behind the front lines where the sound of gunfire was the closest, that was the only place she had felt truly alive.
“So, the head nurse entrusted me with a tent where the soldiers who were about to die would lie. These were the soldiers who wouldn’t impact anything—neither their survival nor their combat abilities. In other words, soldiers whose deaths didn’t matter.”
Even though they were going to die anyway, she couldn’t bring herself to end their lives. She was asked to make them comfortable, to give them some peace in their final moments. If someone could hold their hand, perhaps the path to death would be a little less painful.
By then, on the battlefield, there hadn’t been that many soldiers who had been abandoned so thoroughly. It wasn’t that there weren’t people who were going to die soon. But they hadn’t been given up on so quickly.
The lack of hands for treatment meant that many people died from missed opportunities for first aid. Since there was no ability to evacuate the severely injured, the medical officers quickly assessed whether someone would live or die and sent the former to Ancia’s tent.
The soldiers jokingly called that tent the ‘chapel.’ Because it was where the dead were prepared for burial. And they always made sure to add that they didn’t believe in God and would never go to church.
