bradford copes with being shot and then gets sent home

Bradford is never quite sure what is real and what is a dream out of his scattered memories of his very first serious war injury. He knows he was shot twice, although he would swear he only felt one bullet, and he knows Davies was right there and tried to dress the wound in his side, and he knows he was eventually picked up by stretcher bearers and carted back to the trenches, and he's pretty sure he had to share that stretcher with another man who was dead twenty minutes later. (As for how he's almost positive the man was alive when the stretcher bearers got him but dead not long after, he can't say. But he knows it happens.)

He knows he tried desperately to stay awake while he was lying in No Man's Land bleeding and in pain and unable to stand up – and being peppered with shrapnel after a shell exploded nearby – because he was afraid that if he was unconscious when the stretcher bearers came by, they would think he was dead and leave him there to be picked up later, if he was lucky and the Germans stopped shelling and shooting for long enough.

( He knows he was taken to the first aid post and then to a dressing station )

words: 1943
total words: 38,846
note: i am seriously making up all the medical stuff as i go along, altho it's true that sometimes wounded men would be sent back to england, rather than a base hospital in france, to heal. and then as soon as they were able, a lot of them were sent right back to the front.