Military medics held a much lower status than officers, lacking dedicated staff to handle their laundry; such mundane chores had to be done themselves.
The only exceptions were those senior medics who were constantly doting on the lieutenant colonel.
Lin Yu carried a stool outside the tent.
She then filled a basin with water, ensuring it completely submerged the clothes within.
Rolling up the sleeves of her long-sleeved shirt, Lin Yu dipped the soap into the water and began to gently rub the garments.
As the two sets of soiled clothes began to lather in the basin, she scrubbed with renewed vigor.
She continued until the clear water in the basin turned entirely murky.
Catching a figure approaching in her peripheral vision, Lin Yu wiped her hands on her clothes.
“Where are you injured?” she asked.
“I’ll go fetch the bandages right away.”
The figure remained silent, simply standing before the basin of laundry.
Upon recognizing the face, Lin Yu’s expression soured considerably.
Appearing before her again and again, how many times had it been now?
Over the past month, the fellow had become a frequent visitor to the medical tent.
He would often arrive, wounded, requesting bandages and treatment.
Despite the absence of artillery fire, he somehow managed to injure himself, leading Lin Yu to suspect he was deliberately harming himself to shirk duty.
“Please treat me.”
The man lifted his disheveled uniform.
Beneath, the bandages were stained with large, still-damp patches of blood, and the gaping wound continued to seep slowly.
It was clear that the bandages and tourniquets from a standard first-aid kit would be insufficient for an injury of this magnitude.
“Don’t you think your current behavior is an enormous waste of precious medical resources…?”
Lin Yu, in a fit of pique, initially considered refusing treatment to teach him a lesson.
However, an injury of this severity clearly couldn’t heal with mere bandaging.
Left unattended, he would undoubtedly succumb to his wounds.
While his frequent visits certainly brought much trouble and annoyance, he was undeniably a casualty in this moment.
He required immediate surgery to extract the bullet and stitch the wound.
“…Come inside with me,” she conceded.
“Find a place to sit.”
Abandoning the half-washed clothes, Lin Yu returned to the tent.
She washed her hands at the table, sterilized her instruments, and then, gathering the necessary tools, walked over to the fellow.
With practiced ease, she poured out some antiseptic, beginning the cleaning and disinfection of the wound.
Unlike the general reaction of other casualties, he uttered no cry of pain when the liquid was poured onto his wound.
Nor did he flinch when the forceps probed deep inside.
Compared to the painful amputations and sutures Lin Yu had performed in the past, he remained remarkably quiet—so quiet, in fact, that she began to wonder if he had lost his sense of pain due to some brain injury.
‘Is there even such a condition in the world?’ she mused.
Lin Yu was no neurologist, and neurology itself was rudimentary in this era.
Her expertise lay solely in simple surgical procedures: extracting bullets and shrapnel, and suturing ruptured blood vessels.
Half a minute later, a deformed bullet head was extracted.
Lin Yu tossed it aside, where it landed on a metal tray with a crisp clatter.
It was significantly larger than the standard Diacla military rifle rounds.
This bullet was, in all likelihood, a Lanfoss 10mm rifle round, which largely ruled out the suspicion of intentional self-harm.
“Honestly, I’m quite curious how you manage to get injured so many times,” Lin Yu remarked, casually striking up a conversation.
“And still come bouncing back to us for treatment every single time.”
Seizing the moment, she skillfully inserted the surgical needle into the flesh of his arm.
Distracting patients with conversation was a common tactic.
However, during their previous encounters, he had always remained as silent as a stone.
“I’ve never seen the same face twice here,” she continued, a hint of exasperation in her voice.
“Except for you, repeatedly returning wounded, practically flaunting your presence before Nangong and me.
“Do you truly think this medical tent is your own home…?”
Since the stray bullet hadn’t damaged any major blood vessels, Lin Yu simply closed the wound with a few stitches.
The suture thread pierced through the flesh, drawing the half-open injury shut.
Finally, she covered the sutured area with a dressing and bound it securely with a sturdy bandage, thus completing the treatment for a common gunshot wound.
“…I’ve bandaged you up,” she announced.
“Avoid strenuous activity during your recovery.
“You may leave now, and next time, I’d prefer not to see you injured again.”
As the young man straightened his uniform, Lin Yu finally noticed his rank insignia: a Private First Class.
He wasn’t much older than her, yet he had already advanced beyond the ranks of a Private Second Class, just a step away from becoming a non-commissioned officer.
‘Perhaps he could even become a junior officer someday?’ she mused.
Still, his future held little relevance to Lin Yu.
There were countless soldiers far stronger and braver than him, and they too would die instantly if shot in the head.
‘Perhaps one day he would lose his “always just injured” knack,’ she thought, ‘and quietly become a body wrapped in a sack…’
What concern was that of hers, anyway?
This time, however, before departing the tent, he cast a deep, lingering gaze upon Lin Yu.
Noticing his unwavering stare, Lin Yu looked back curiously.
“Is there somewhere else that needs treating?” she asked.
“Was that statement of yours,” he began, “a demand for a ‘soldier’ not to get injured?”
He had almost never initiated conversation with Lin Yu.
The total number of times he had spoken matched the number of times they had met, and with the exception of their encounter in the shell crater, every instance had been, “Please treat me.”
His actively posing his first question now surprised Lin Yu slightly.
Another layer of surprise stemmed from the question itself.
“Next time, I’d prefer not to see you injured again”—when scrutinized, that phrase carried two distinct meanings: an admonition to be careful, or a curse wishing for his demise.
For a foot soldier hunkered down in a trench, firing their rifle and enduring bombardments, getting injured was never a matter of personal will.
It depended entirely on the Lanfoss artillery positioned behind the enemy lines.
‘How about a little defiance?’ she thought.
“I was simply reminding you to be more careful next time,” she retorted, “and not to exhaust your luck.”
Lin Yu pointed to the location of his injury on her own arm.
“Just a little higher here is the brachial plexus,” she explained.
“If that gets hit, your entire arm will be crippled.
“With my medical skills, I absolutely wouldn’t be able to reattach that tangled mess of nerves.”
“…”
He offered no reply, undoubtedly stumped by the medical terminology, unsure how to respond.
“So—”
Lin Yu intended to add a few more words, but before she could utter them, she saw him turn his back to her and walk away towards the trenches.
‘What a nerve…’ she muttered.
She grew even more convinced that he suffered from some serious affliction.
He would always just leave silently, never speaking to others nor seeming to listen.
Dismissing the troublesome foot soldier from her thoughts, Lin Yu reseated herself before the basin.
She rolled up her sleeves and resumed scrubbing the clothes.
Reaching in, her hand encountered a soft, smooth object beneath the garments, and her already sour mood instantly plummeted further.
‘How could I have left the soap in there!’
Holding the soap, now a shapeless, waterlogged mess, she was overcome with waves of vexation.
That single bar was meant to last her and Nangong for the next half-month.
Now, she would likely have to swallow her pride and beg the quartermaster next door for another half-bar.
She had paid the price for her carelessness.
‘At least,’ she consoled herself, ‘I didn’t leave any gauze or hemostats inside the patient.’
‘Speaking of which, Nangong should be back soon, shouldn’t she?’ Lin Yu pondered.
‘The Lieutenant Colonel isn’t even there; she only asked those senior ‘yitaitai’ (TL Note: A somewhat pejorative term for a concubine or mistress, here used sarcastically to refer to senior female medics who are perceived to be favored by or intimately associated with superior officers) to pass along a note.’
Lifting the wooden basin, she poured out the dirty water.
The stream flowed along the terrain, curving around the medical tent and away to the back.
The winding path of the foam stirred a faint, baseless thought within her.
‘Would Nangong leave me here and just keep chatting with them?’
Lin Yu wasn’t particularly adept at the topics they discussed and rarely initiated them.
When Nangong chatted with her, it was usually Nangong doing most of the talking, while Lin Yu would simply cover her mouth and chuckle softly.
After wringing out a few of the clothes, Lin Yu returned to fill the wooden basin with more water, preparing for a second rinse.
However, she was interrupted by a voice calling out to her from inside the tent.
“Doctor! Doctor—”
“Coming, coming!”