Please Forget Me - Chapter 222

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾.

Illumination flares were shot into the night sky at the edge of the plains. As a signal, the distant echoes of artillery and gunfire would begin to roll in, and the nurses in the field hospital at the base would steel their faces, busily preparing operating rooms and hospital beds.

Everyone probably thought the same as I did:

‘How many more lives will teeter on the edge between life and death today?’

Soon after, the first truck carrying wounded soldiers would arrive, and from that moment, a different kind of battle began inside the field hospital—no gunfire, but screams echoing and blood splattering.

“Ah! Help me!”

“Nurse, hold him steady!”

While the fighting raged in the wards, the front lines would quiet down for a moment—only until the last ambulance trucks loaded with the injured rolled in. That’s when the field hospital faced its toughest moments.

With no space left inside, medics laid the wounded in the hospital’s front square. When I went out to sort patients who needed surgery, the young men lying on stretchers, wearing blood-soaked aprons, would avoid my gaze in terror, as if I were the Grim Reaper—not an angel in white.

It stung, but I couldn’t fault their fear. The moment they were sent to surgery, they faced the chance of losing limbs, or worse, death. Even those who survived might live crippled for life.

As I moved through the square checking on the wounded, I stopped before one soldier who often came to get medicine for his chronic skin disease.

He told me seeing me reminded him of his fiance back home. It wasn’t a flirtation—everyone in the unit knew who my fiance was, so no soldier would dare make advances. He was just homesick.

But that man, who once had sad eyes whenever he saw me, now stared blankly into space. I motioned to the medic to come, pointing at him. The soldier, already dead, didn’t tremble or react as if I were the Reaper himself.

Before he was loaded back onto the stretcher and onto the truck, I removed one side of his dog tag. The spot where his heart had still beat was warm.

His fiance would hold that tag knowing that proof of life was gone and it had gone cold.

I felt sorrow as if I were that unknown woman.

Since becoming a military nurse, I have seen countless faces walk out alive only to be carried back dead, but I never grew accustomed to it. Even those who marched to the front with determined eyes returned hollow and lifeless, indistinguishable from the dead—a sight too painful to witness.

‘Which face of war do you consider beautiful?’

As a truck carrying corpses passed by, I silently questioned the military officer saluting its rear.

‘Does he truly mourn the death of his men?’

I suspected it was just an act for show. When reinforcements arrived, he wouldn’t even have time to learn their names or faces before sending them straight to the trenches.

My bitterness was directed at the company commander—my fiance—who urged the soldiers to charge to their deaths with empty words but never visited near the trenches while his men were dying.

‘Wait… my fiance?’

Had I blamed Killian? Was he the vain commander who treated soldiers like expendable commodities?

If so, then maybe the cold-hearted image he showed now was the real him. The warmth he showed as ‘Johann’ from the mountain village might have been the unusual side of him.

Knowing his past, I understand. Despite being a soldier, I had blindly believed Killian had never killed anyone himself, because in the past, he only allowed others to kill for him.

‘He never soiled his own hands—until it was because of me.’

If that’s true, then there’s no doubt Killian loves me, but I began to question the warmth he showed others.