The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

90: Infinite and Stifling

So many ghosts. There were so many ghosts now. So many haunted faces looking at Charlie from every corner she turned.

She couldn't sleep, couldn't even bear to close her eyes, and though she'd been awake for over thirty-six hours her mind wouldn't shut up.

So Charlie lay in bed staring at the ceiling of the house someone had cleared for her and the other nurses, making pictures out of the patterns in the swirls of paint, and waited to be told to wake up so she could return to that place that was worse than the picture she'd always had in her head of hell. Waited to go and do it all over again.

But the order to wake up to go back to the camp never came. Instead, Charlie heard movement downstairs and followed it, and found Autumn and Henry in the kitchen, drinking coffee.

It was still daytime, probably around 1700 by now, though everything felt like the middle of the night. As Charlie slid into one of the empty seats at the table, Henry slid over a mug of coffee she'd poured when she'd heard footsteps, and Charlie sipped it gratefully.

"They're finding camps all over the place," Henry said gravely. From Autumn's lack of reaction Charlie knew she'd already heard. "The Russians apparently found one ten times worse."

"Ten times worse?" Charlie echoed. Her voice sounded stale. "How could anything be ten times worse than that?"

"Ten times bigger," Henry said, and Charlie didn't even want to know what the increased size would entail, but Henry didn't elaborate.

"The locals are claiming they had no idea," Autumn spoke up in a deadpan. "I was helping with the translations. They claimed we were exaggerating."

"Oh, and they didn't smell it?" Charlie said, bitter. Of course they'd known about it, there was no way they hadn't. And she was sure they'd known about the women's camp by the train station, too. But they'd said nothing and been complicit.

"They couldn't have done anything under the Nazis' rule," Henry said, but Charlie didn't want to hear it. She didn't see any reason to give the Germans who lived in this horrible town the benefit of the doubt.

"Anyway," Autumn went on, "General Taylor has ordered every able-bodied German between the ages of fourteen and eighty in town to start burying the bodies, and the 10th Armoured are supervising clean up, so we're not going back."

The words were a relief Charlie felt sick for feeling. Those men, and the women at the women's camp, had lived there for months, maybe even years, some of them, and she couldn't bear to go back to help? But though she was disgusted at her own relief she felt it all the same, and was relieved even more when Henry told her they would be moving out of Landsberg and into a different German town, Thalham, tomorrow at 1200 hours.

She didn't want to remain in this place, with this smell, anywhere near this horror, for any longer.

Charlie went back up to bed, just to give herself something to do to pass the time, and tried to read, but it didn't work. She couldn't carry many books with her so she'd read her copies over and over again, had even tried to read the French Romeo and Juliet on two separate occasions out of sheer boredom, and there was nothing to occupy her mind now, either. She considered writing a letter home but couldn't stomach the thought of it - there was no way to write without talking about what she'd seen, but there was no way to write about what she'd seen, either - so she climbed back into bed and continued to just lie there until, eventually, she fell asleep.

She woke up at 1100 hours the next day to Henry telling her she had an hour before they were moving out. Not knowing where they were heading next, Charlie showered and used whichever family lived here's soaps and shampoos, lathering up her hair generously and even using what she thought was a fancy conditioner. She felt no guilt about it. In fact, she quite enjoyed it.