A Rose for the Anzac Boys (10 page)

The colonel held forth between mouthfuls, and filled her glass again. ‘Drink up, Miss Er. I like a girl with a hearty appetite. Ha, ha! You’ll like the salad. Only the French can make a good mayonnaise. Salad cream has nothing on it.’

‘Do you have salad cream back where you come from, Miss Er?’ asked the captain. They were the first words he had addressed to her.

‘Yes, sir.’

Is it because of men like you, she thought, stupid men, ignorant men, men in charge because of who they are, not what they are—is that why so many have to die?

The colonel patted her knee. His hand stayed there, fat and white and hairy. ‘Come, come, Miss Er. You can be a bit more forthcoming now. What do you say, Ferguson? Cheese?’

‘Definitely, sir.’

‘That’s the ticket. And the little lady would like an ice?’

‘Sir…’

‘Tut-tut. All little girls like ices.’ He squeezed her leg, then, thankfully, took his hand away. He gestured at the waiter. ‘An ice for
mademoiselle
.
Bombe chocolat
, eh? And the cheese board. Port or madeira, Ferguson?’ He answered his own question. ‘Madeira, I think. You ever drunk madeira, little girl?’ His moustache twitched even more this time.

‘Sir…’ She clutched her napkin. The room was spinning. ‘I think I’ve had enough. I have to drive this afternoon.’

‘Drive? What?’ He shook his head. ‘Tell you what. Yes, tell you what, rain coming down too hard to drive now. Stay here tonight. Damn good dinner they give you here, pardon my French, Miss Er, ha, ha.
Poulet estragon
. Had squabs here last time with what’s-his-name, salmon too, damn good sauce, hollandaise, pardon my French again, Miss Er.’ He patted her leg again.

He was drunk, she realised. And so was she. She had never drunk more than half a glass of wine before, to toast the King at Christmas or on someone’s birthday.

She had a sudden vision of Corporal Harrison’s friend with his ill-fitting false teeth soaking his hard biscuit in the filthy water of his trench. The hungry men on her platform, thousand after thousand of them, grateful for their cocoa and their bully beef sandwich. Suddenly she couldn’t take any more. The hot room. The smell of too much food. The smell of cigar that wafted from the colonel’s clothes. The heat of his hand on her leg. She pushed back her chair. Instantly the waiter was there to help her.

‘If you’ll excuse me for a moment…’ she began.

The colonel’s hand squeezed, then blessedly let go as she stood up. ‘Certainly. Certainly. Off you pop, little girl. Yes, we’ll stay here tonight. Really get to know each other, eh?’ He gazed around. ‘Where is that madeira?’

She escaped, into the cool of the corridor, out onto the terrace and into the rain.

The rain had lessened to drizzle. The clouds were low, the mist hovering about the trees. The cold shocked the nausea away.

What was she to do now? Impossible to go back in, to that man and his moustache and his bally madeira. Equally impossible to just drive off. The car wasn’t hers. Nor, she realised gratefully, was the responsibility hers either. What could the colonel do? Ring up and report her? She wasn’t even officially a member of the ambulance unit. Probably
he couldn’t even remember her name, and she could trust Captain Nancy not to remind him of it. She could just walk away.

But where to? The hotel was isolated, with no other buildings nearby that she could see. And if she took a room here the colonel would find her. She could refuse to come out, of course. But it would be unpleasant and cause a scene.

She trod slowly along the terrace, then back into the courtyard, and asked for the car in halting French.

She lifted out her case, then hesitated again. No, there was nothing else for it but to take a room. Pretend that she was ill, perhaps, and hope her French was up to convincing the maid to give a suitably dismissive message to the colonel.

She was just about to mount the hotel’s front steps when a vehicle loomed out of the mist. For a moment she thought it was one of the trucks they had passed on the road. And then she realised it was a car, much like the one she had been driving, but with a red cross on the side. Impulsively she stepped into the road and put up her hand.

The car jerked to a halt. ‘You all right, miss?’

Her heart thumped. She had been hoping the driver might be familiar, even another woman. But although he was a stranger, at least this man spoke English.

‘I’m sorry, my car has broken down. I don’t suppose you could give me a lift?’

The man shook his head. ‘Sorry, miss. Orders. We’re on our way to the casualty station. All our lot’s been ordered to report there. Big push on last night, I reckon.’

She knew what that meant. Thousands, tens of thousands, dead, dying, wounded. But Aunt Lallie was at the casualty station, she thought vaguely through her spinning head. If I find Aunt Lallie I’ll be all right. Whatever the colonel was going there to do, she doubted he’d be inspecting the nursing staff. Not if there’d been a push last night and the wards were full of wounded. Not the colonel with his madeira.

‘Oh, the casualty station is perfect. That’s where I was headed before I had to stop.’

‘Hop in then, miss. You’re a nurse?’ he added.

‘Ambulance driver,’ she said. ‘The Duchess’s unit. Relieving anyway. But the regular driver is back now.’

‘Well, they’ll welcome anyone with a pair of hands where we’re going.’

The engine flared again. The car took off, as jerkily as it had stopped. It wouldn’t have jerked like that if I’d been driving, she thought, leaning back against the leather seat and shutting her eyes.

She wondered how long the colonel would wait, her untouched chocolate ice melting at his side.

15 April 1917

Dear Miss Macpherson,

I hope you are well.

I got the parcel you sent. Thank Miss Carryman for the chocolate—I don’t know how she got so much but tell her the boys are grateful. Not much to report here. A general out from Blighty came to give us a pep talk today. They want to send us back up the line. Some of the boys threw clods of dirt at him. You would have laughed if you had seen it. But I reckon we will be going anyway. I’m going to take a good long look at that photo you gave me before we go, just in case there isn’t time to look at it again once we get to the front. Come to think of it, that ram of yours has a bit of a look of the general. Reckon the sheep has more brains, but.

Oh, and Johnno has found his teeth. Or someone’s teeth, because he swears there is an extra tooth he never had before. I’d offered to chew his food up for him, but you know, the so and so wasn’t even grateful.

Well, I am not one for putting pen to paper much, Miss Macpherson. I have never written so much before in my life as I have to you, I reckon, even when Mum made me do that correspondence school. But you can’t know what your letters mean to me. I read bits of them out to the others, and they think you’re just bonza too. I am glad that you are out of it and going back to the canteen. There is only so much a body can take. You know Miss Macpherson I reckon sometimes you get used to looking after others so much you forget about yourself.

I hope this finds you well as it leaves me.

Yours sincerely,

Harry Harrison (Sergeant!)

The casualty clearing station was tents and men, trucks and mud and chaos; a temporary hotchpotch that looked as though it had grown, mushroom-like, from the dirt around it. The sound of guns rumbled in the distance, like thunder that forgot to end. Each truck brought more men, and made more mud and chaos.

Men lay on stretchers on the muddy ground. Men carried stretchers, some wounded, but still able to stagger. Men leaned on each other, the blind supporting the lame. Men passed by in grey coats and muddy uniforms, their badges
startlingly white in a world of drab. The vivid flash of blood was the only colour in the landscape.

‘A new push’ the driver had said. A few words by men like the colonel, a long way from the battle lines, translated into this.

Midge had been standing, staring, for minutes now since the ambulance had left her at the first row of tents. Slowly, the chaos before her eyes resolved into some sort of order.

Ambulances and trucks bringing stretchers, presumably from the battlefield itself; men waiting, like wet sheep in a pen before shearing, but these men were grey, not white, dappled with mud and blood, men with bandages, sitting or standing, those with less serious wounds, she supposed. Waiting, waiting, waiting for help to save their lives, their sight, their limbs. Trucks leaving with the stabilised wounded, so few out of so many, off to hospitals in Paris or England.

The sagging damp tents over there must be the wards and offices, she thought, or perhaps living quarters for the medical staff. There was no way to tell which. She shifted her case from one aching hand to the other and squelched over the boards laid in the mud to the first tent, and stepped inside.

The tent itself was long and grey and not quite waterproof, so what had been steady rain outside was transformed into fewer but larger drips that dangled off the tent’s roof and plopped onto the planks that had been roughly laid to make a floor over the mud.

It wasn’t an office, nor was it a ward or dormitory. It was, she thought afterwards, more like the waiting room of hell.

Two rows of tables. Ordinary tables, like the kitchen table back home. But these were draped with sheets, not a tablecloth, and decorated with blood instead of teapots, and on each table, instead of saddle of mutton or a plate of biscuits, was a living, bleeding man.

Women in stained grey aprons bent over them; men in once white coats worked with bloody hands; here and there a nurse in a still-white cap and veil hurried from table to table.

One glanced up at her, her attention still mostly on the bloody arm she bandaged. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I…I’m looking for Sister Macpherson.’

‘New are you? Well, there’s no time for paperwork now.’ She nodded to a smaller table along the back of the tent. ‘Clean aprons over there.’

‘I’m not a VAD. Or a nurse, either.’

‘Well, what are you then?’ Even as she spoke the woman’s eyes slid over to the next table. Someone is dying while she deals with me, thought Midge.

‘I was an ambulance driver—’

‘Good enough. You can help Mr Fineacre. He’s on the end table.’ And she was gone.

Midge moved in a dream to the back table. What was she doing? She couldn’t stay here. Not untrained. What would Aunt Lallie say?

The legion of wounded outside rose up before her.

How could she go?

Midge put on the apron.

Mr Fineacre was Uncle Thomas’s age, tall and thin and clean-shaven, a white coat over his uniform, slightly bulbous pale blue eyes in a shadowed face. He nodded, and held out a large pair of scissors. ‘Cut.’

The boy on the table stared up at her. His face was white, his eyes even whiter in the bruises around them. For a moment Midge thought Mr Fineacre meant she was to use the scissors to operate, to cut flesh and bone. And then she saw the scissors in his own hands as he began to cut away the top of the boy’s uniform.

‘Start at the side,’ he said shortly. ‘Then we’ll lift the shirt off. I think the stomach wound’s the only injury but we need to check. Can you hear me, lad?’ he asked more gently.

The boy nodded, an infinitesimal movement, as though even that was agony.

‘Where do you hurt?’

‘Not hurt,’ said the boy. Midge stared at the bright blood on the shirt she was cutting. ‘Cold. Just cold.’

‘Ah. Well, we’ll warm you up again.’ The man’s voice was reassuring. He looked over at Midge. ‘Ready?’

Midge nodded. She smiled at the boy automatically, the practised smile she had learned at the canteen, in the ambulances. She remembered Slogger’s words. No matter how bad it is, you have to smile at them. Together she and Mr Fineacre peeled the blood-sodden garment from the boy. He gasped. His eyes rolled upwards. Midge looked down.

Blood boiled upwards, slowly, sluggishly, around a bulge of purple intestine. Mr Fineacre reached over and picked up a wire cup covered in gauze. He held it over the boy’s mouth and nose. He began to drip a solution from a large brown bottle.

Drip…drip…drip…

The chemical smell seeped up through the scent of blood and disinfectant.

The boy’s breathing changed. The gasps relaxed, turned deep and steady.

‘Ready!’ called Mr Fineacre.

Immediately another man stepped over from the next table, his gloved hands blood-covered. A woman in a nursing sister’s cap stepped over with him.

Midge looked enquiringly at Mr Fineacre.

‘He’s the surgeon,’ said Mr Fineacre tersely. ‘Only one we’ve got. Our job is to get the boys prepared for him. Ready for the next one?’

The body on the next table was a man, forties perhaps, skinny. One foot dangled below his trouser leg, held on by tendons and shreds of bone. Amazingly, he was conscious, even through the long minutes it took to cut off his trousers, till finally he too closed his eyes as he breathed in the anaesthetic.

Slowly they fell into a rhythm. Cut and strip together, then Midge pulled any remnants of cloth from the wounds with a pair of tweezers while Mr Fineacre dripped on the chloroform.

Cut, strip, drip…

Cut, strip, drip…

All around them the surgeon cut, stitched; nurses handed instruments, bandaged; VADs fetched and swabbed. As soon as one man was bandaged, an orderly lifted the stretcher under him and took him out, while more orderlies carried in another.

It was unending. Unchanging, body after body, wound after wound, till suddenly you focused again and saw the faces, the individuals not just ‘the wounded’, every one with a sister like me, thought Midge, or parents perhaps at home. Each one with a life that had been shattered, the next moments perhaps deciding whether they lived or died.

Oh, Tim, she thought. Tim, Dougie, Gordon, Harry…Cut, strip, drip…

What was happening outside, Midge wondered. Her wrists ached. Her feet were beyond cold. Only her fingers were warm, cutting and stripping the still-living flesh. Was the ‘sheep pen’ of men growing smaller? Or would they have to keep working until each battlefield was emptied?

Where was Aunt Lallie?

Thirst and hunger came and went. There was no food, no drink for any person in this tent, no time for either. Even a sandwich snatched would cost a man his life.

Cut, strip, drip…The world narrowed to this tent, to this table, to her hands wielding the scissors.

‘I demand to see the surgeon! I demand—’

‘He will be here in a moment, Colonel.’

Midge woke from her daze. It couldn’t be.

It wasn’t. The man on the table in front of her was not
the one she had left at lunch…had it only been today? How long had she been here?

‘I demand…’ The words were muffled as Mr Fineacre held the mask over him. ‘Mwwf, wff.’

Drip, drip, drip…

To Midge’s horror the man tried to sit up. Bone showed white as blood streamed from his shattered shoulder. One arm hung awkwardly, as though it wasn’t sure if it still belonged there or not.

Mr Fineacre waved his hand. Two orderlies ran over. They stood either side of the table and held the colonel down. He was a big man, and they were short and thin. Despite his wound they had to strain.

The colonel’s good hand tore the mask away. ‘I demand—’ he began again. A dribble of blood trickled from his mouth.

Mr Fineacre pressed the mask back on. He dripped on more chloroform, more quickly now.

Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip…

‘He’s not going under,’ whispered Midge.

Mr Fineacre bit his lip. He kept on dripping. None of the others had taken even half as much as this, thought Midge. The colonel kept on struggling.

Suddenly he stopped. The waving arm went limp. The orderlies stepped back.

‘Oh, God.’ Somehow it seemed like a prayer, not swearing. ‘He’s stopped breathing!’ called Mr Fineacre. ‘Someone, help him.’

‘Can’t, old chap.’

It was the surgeon at the next table. A shattered leg lay at his feet. As he moved sideways Midge could see the arteries he was tying in the leg stump, the flaccid body of the man who only this morning had been walking.

‘Help me!’ Mr Fineacre shook Midge’s arm. She jerked the colonel’s one good arm while Mr Fineacre pressed his chest. Suddenly the colonel took a gasping breath.

‘We’ve done it! Next table,’ said Mr Fineacre.

They moved away just as one of the orderlies called, ‘He’s gone again.’

Mr Fineacre grabbed the colonel’s arm again. But it was obvious he was dead.

‘Is he…? Did we…?’

‘I gave him too much anaesthetic.’ Mr Fineacre’s voice was flat.

The world shook. She took hold of the table till the dizziness passed. ‘It’s my fault. I’m not a nurse.’ Was that her voice babbling? ‘Not even a VAD. I didn’t know what to do…’

She felt like running. Hiding. Her ignorance had killed a man.

‘I’m not a doctor either. I’m the chaplain.’

Midge stared at him. Mr Fineacre managed a smile. There was gentleness in it, but no humour. ‘That is the third man I’ve killed this month. But I’ve helped save a lot more. So have you. We do what we have to. Come on.’

She followed him to the next table. To table after table. The darkness thickened outside the tent. Someone lit lamps
and hung them from the dripping roof. They hissed and spat when the drops hit them. Table after table. Cut, pull, drip…

Midge kept wielding the scissors. There was no energy now to do anything but cut. Cut, pull, drip…

Something crawled under her sleeve. Lice, she thought, with a shudder of repugnance. They must have been crawling out of each uniform she touched. But there was nothing she could do about them now.

Cut, pull, drip…

Something changed. For a while she was too tired to realise what it was. And then reality filtered through the weariness. No more orderlies and stretchers. Instead two wounded men would stagger in, carrying a third between them. Sometimes they staggered out again to wait their turn for surgery; at other times they slumped onto the rough wooden floor till a table became free.

Mr Fineacre saw her stare and shrugged. ‘We usually run out of stretchers during a push,’ he said shortly. ‘You can’t send the boys in an ambulance without a stretcher. Can you carry on, my dear?’

‘Yes,’ said Midge.

Cut, pull, drip…

‘Margery!’

Snip, tug, pull…

‘Margery! Margery, look at me!’ The voice was used to obedience.

Midge looked up. ‘Aunt Lallie,’ she whispered.

Aunt Lallie looked just the same. Just the same but different. Blood on her apron, but her hands in their rubber gloves were clean. She must have just washed them.

‘Rest,’ said Aunt Lallie.

‘But I can’t—’

‘Rest.’

There was a tent. This too had the wooden floorboards and the drips that crept down your neck. But it had beds instead of tables: six of them, a few feet apart.

There was water in a bowl, and disinfectant and a wooden bucket for her louse-infested clothes. She washed her hair twice, wringing out the moisture as best she could without a towel, then sponged herself, starting with her top and moving lower, hoping she had got every one of the ‘greybacks’ as she went. She put on clean clothes—day clothes, not a nightdress. Her body screamed for sleep but her mind knew any rest was unlikely to be long, and probably disturbed.

There was cocoa in a tin mug, thin and lukewarm.

The guns cracked and thundered in the distance. Were they nearer now? The dark about the tents was lit by lanterns. The red flares further off were shells. Impossible, she thought. So many wounded here, and they are still fighting. Each second shattered more young men.