a star-filled sky.
‘Why did you come to Spain?’ Tom asked Dr Norman Bethune from Montreal when he next stood at his bedside.
‘I needed a war,’ Bethune said. ‘To see if I can save lives in the next one.’
‘Which next one would that be?’
‘The one we’re rehearsing for,’ said Bethune who was taking refrigerated blood to the front line instead of waiting for haemorrhaging casualties to reach hospitals. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I wouldn’t want to go three rounds with Braddock but I’m okay, I guess. Whose blood have I got inside me?’ He jerked his head at the pipe protruding from his arm.
‘God knows. Good blood by the look of you. Maybe you owe your life to a priest.’
‘Don’t tell the commissar that,’ Tom said. ‘Are these all your patients?’ He pointed at the broken and bandaged patients lying on an assortment of beds in the stone-floored dining hall of the monastery.
‘A few, those with colour in their cheeks. I gave the first transfusion at the front on 23 December last year. Remember that date: maybe it will be more important than the date the war broke out.’
Tom raised himself on his pillow, then said abruptly, ‘When can I fly again?’
‘When your arm’s mended. You broke it a few days ago. Right?’
‘I got shot down.’
‘And later you must have fallen. And when you fell you turned a simple fracture into a compound fracture and a splinter of bone penetrated an artery and the haemorrhage became a deluge.’
‘I can fly with my left hand.’
‘When your ribs are mended.’
‘Ribs?’
Bethune pointed at his chest. ‘They weren’t practising first-aid when they strapped you up.’
‘Shit,’ said Tom Canfield. ‘No pain though.’
‘Breathe in deeply.’
‘Shit,’ said Tom Canfield.
During the next five days Tom fell in love and learned how to acquire a fortune.
The girl’s name was Josefina. She was 18 and stern in the fashion of nurses, although sometimes the touch of her fingers was shy. She was a student nurse, qualified by war, and she came from a small coastal town astride the provinces of Valencia and Alicante.
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