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Gerty Cori never let it show just how much the war affected her.
Her experience in World War 1 was something that she rarely talked about, even among her comrades. She hated to remember what happened then, even as this new war raged on. She hated to had that reminder with her every single day of this damn war. And why wouldn’t she? Whatever was happening now seemed far too much to echo the things she experienced then.
She was 18 when the First World War started. She was not Gerty Cori when it happened, but Gerty Radnitz. Her boyfriend, Carl Cori, was drafted into the Austrian army. Even though she was in her mid-40s now, and in far safer places than she could ever dream of during the first war, she couldn’t help but remember the fear that she experienced during that.
The fear for not just one’s own life, but the lives of loved ones as well. The sound of bombs exploding nearby as the ground shook around them. The nights where she went to sleep, worrying whether that day would be her last. The things enemy soldiers did around her. Things she neither wanted to remember nor speak of. She knew those feelings of fear and uncertainty in war all too well.
Perhaps that was why she tried to hide it with optimism, cheeriness, liveliness, anything to distract her mind, her comrades’ minds, from the things going around them. Gerty knew that she wasn’t really that hopeful. Hell, she had seen a war before. How was one supposed to be optimistic after that? But she knew that the rest of them needed to have hope. Anything, if only to distract them from the war and the constant overlooking from Churchill. Churchill, she felt, never quite learned how to appreciate the six of them the way he appreciated the main six.
And she had noticed the way Georges Lemaître reacted when the bombs came crashing in, shaking as the impact reverberated through the walls. Never speaking a word in those moments, terrified for his life. He was two years older than her, so he was a soldier in the Belgian army when the war broke out. It was just a thought she had, but Gerty firmly believed that whatever happened in the war they both lived through, whatever happened then, was something that he found difficult to forget. And God, the way people died then! Their deaths weren’t the type that was quick and painless, no. Certainly not peaceful either. Rather, their deaths were slow, painful, almost torturous. Not with bullets, but with something far worse than that. They didn't want to remember that. They never wanted to.
Maybe that was why she felt closer to him than everybody else. They both had experienced the same war first hand. They had seen death beyond anything the others would ever comprehend. Their experiences were something that the other 4 would never have dreamed of, not even in their nightmares.
Why were they always stuck and running from the bullets? They had experienced far, far too much war for two.