Shooter on the Wall

Based on family journals, a nurse serves amid faith, fear, and war.

Shooter on the Wall

Ruth Jones was in her thirties the first time she went to China, old enough to understand exactly what she was leaving behind and young enough to believe she could endure what lay ahead. She arrived not as an adventurer or a witness, but as a nurse, offering trained hands in a place where trained hands were desperately needed.

The hospital stood just outside Nanking, beyond the city itself, in an area that no longer exists under that name. Later, the government would change it, quietly and deliberately, as if renaming the land might soften what had happened there. At the time, it was simply where the wounded came. Chinese soldiers. Japanese soldiers. Civilians. Anyone who reached the gates alive.

Officially, China and Japan were not at war. Not yet. But in that region, fighting never truly stopped. Skirmishes flared without warning. Soldiers moved through villages like storms that never fully passed. While World War I raged elsewhere, violence had already claimed this land as its own.

There were no formal nursing schools in the region. Ruth and three other American nurses trained local women by necessity. They taught by example, guiding hands until they learned steadiness, teaching eyes to recognize fever and infection. It was slow, careful work, but it mattered.

One afternoon, Ruth was assisting in surgery on a Chinese soldier whose foot had been overtaken by gangrene. The doctor amputated while she passed instruments, her focus absolute. By a small mercy, the surgery ended before the world outside the operating room unraveled.

An orderly rushed in, pale and breathless. At first the doctor scolded him for interrupting. Then the words came out clearly enough to stop everyone cold.

There was a shooter on the wall.

They dropped to the floor and pressed themselves against the operating room wall, sitting low because standing meant death. Every few minutes a bullet tore through brick and plaster, sending dust and fragments skittering across the tile. The sound was sharp and final, too close, too real.

They could not move. To try meant risking a stray bullet. And beyond that wall were patients who needed them, men and women who had survived long enough to reach the hospital. Knowing they were there and being unable to reach them was its own quiet torment.

The gunfire lasted for hours.

Later they learned the shooter was a Japanese soldier who had become disoriented, shouting words that made no sense, firing at anything that moved. The doctors said he was delusional. Eventually, someone killed him. When Ruth heard, she felt no relief, only sorrow for a man broken by a conflict that did not even acknowledge itself as war.

That day was not unique. Death came close often.

Ruth lived in a small house off the hospital grounds, but most nights she stayed inside the hospital itself. It was safer there. The hospital treated wounded from both sides, and for the most part, that fragile neutrality was respected.

When looters reached the nearby towns, everything changed. These men belonged to no army. They believed the poor were lying, that something of value must still be hidden. After that, more women arrived at the hospital, carrying injuries that could not always be spoken aloud. Ruth treated what she could and stayed when there was nothing left to offer but presence.

When she was not assisting in surgery or training nurses, she sat with patients and spoke of ordinary things. Harvests. Families. Childhood memories. It helped distract them from fear, and it reminded her why she stayed. These were simple, kind people, and their suffering settled deep in her chest.

Because she was a missionary, Ruth was required to return home after twelve months. She stayed away only three. China pulled at her harder than home ever had.

On one of those returns, she married Dr. Herbert Madison. In time, he joined her on the mission field, working beside her at the hospital. Together they served, sharing both the weight of the work and the quiet grace of not carrying it alone.

Ruth loved China. Not the fighting. Not the politics. Not the fear that crept in after dark. But the people. She prayed every day for God to help her help them, to steady her hands and soften the weight she carried. She knew she could never do enough. No one ever could.

She wrote it all down in a journal she left behind for her family. Not to explain herself. Not to justify the choices she made. Only so they would know where her heart had been, and why she kept going back.

War eats at the land and hollows the soul. So Ruth learned to live one day at a time, to do the work set before her, and to trust that faithfulness, even when small, mattered.

Sometimes, that had to be enough.

Author’s Note

This story is a work of historical fiction inspired by family journals. While based on real events and experiences, some details, dialogue, and circumstances have been imagined where the record was incomplete. The heart of the story remains true to her service, her faith, and her love for the people she served. Names have been changed.