A Rose In Flanders Fields (42 page)

Despite the gentleness of his tone, I hated the words he spoke, and looked back at Will’s beautiful, achingly familiar face. The thought of him going into the ground threatened to push aside all reason, and I realised how close I was to hysteria. I forced the image of him in one of those awful plain coffins from my mind; I’d think about it later, would have to, but for now I had to get him back behind our own lines where I could make sure his body was cleaned and cared for.

Archie was eager to get back now, too. I could see him looking worriedly around, peering through the dark. ‘You take his arms, I’ll take his feet. For heaven’s sake keep low.’ He spared me a look before picking up Will’s feet, and his voice was exasperated but full of affection. ‘Uncle Jack was right about you. Just don’t get yourself killed, he’ll never forgive me.’

After my terrified crawl through the shattered landscape alone, I felt almost nonchalant about the journey back, as though I could just stand up, throw Will over my shoulder and march back to the sap-head in full view of anyone who cared to take a pot-shot. But we bent low, inching our way, with me holding Will under the arms and Archie supporting his feet. My back screamed with the effort, each foot we covered felt like a mile, and it was hard not to grunt or exclaim aloud as our muscles strained and our breath shortened. I could feel the stitches at my neck pulling, but they held, and there was only the harsh, fiery pain of the healing wound, no fresh blood.

I went first, and backwards – Archie insisted, in case of enemy sniper fire which would find him before me – and stretched my foot out behind me at every step, knowing a mis-step could send all three of us tumbling into a shell-hole. The terror of mines was something I couldn’t afford to dwell on.

At last we reached the sap-head again, and Archie told me to go down the ladder first. ‘I’ll lower him down to you, you just guide him, aye?’

‘It’ll be even more difficult carrying him through that mud,’ I whispered back. ‘There’s no duckboards there, remember?’

He hesitated, then nodded. ‘OK, once we’re down I’ll go and get a stretcher-bearer, I’ll need help to get him up to the collecting post.’

I climbed down the ladder, wincing at the press of the splinter I’d received on the way up a million years ago, and Archie carefully lowered Will to me, lying flat and holding onto Will’s webbing, grunting with the effort of controlling the slide. I felt Will’s body slither into my arms, and sank to my knees with him, holding his head up so it didn’t fall into the mud. It felt more vital than ever now to keep him clean, as if allowing more dirt to collect on his skin were a form of burial. I wasn’t ready.

I smoothed his hair from his eyes, wiping at the dirt as best I could, and Archie briefly squeezed my shoulder and went in search of some means to carry him away. I was only aware of the water lapping over my knees in a distant sort of way. The stinging cuts from shrapnel and stones hummed quietly in the background and I didn’t even think about how lucky I was to still be alive, beyond the ability to hold Will again. His head rolled back in my arms and I instinctively cupped my hand beneath his cheek and jaw, gently lifting it again, so I could look down into his face until the time came when I would have to surrender his body. As I did so I felt my skin tingle. All over. Every part of me suddenly leapt to life and, with my heart triple-thumping, I pressed my shaking fingers against his neck, just below the angle of his jaw.

I hadn’t imagined it. I opened my mouth to scream for Archie, then remembered how close we were to the German lines. Instead I lifted my fingers from Will’s cold skin, and then replaced them, suddenly terrified it had been my own thundering pulse I had picked up. It wasn’t.

‘Will?’ I whispered. There was no response, but I lowered my face to his parted lips and felt the faintest brush of his breath on my skin. ‘Will!’ A sound behind me in the trench made me turn in sudden terror, but it was only Archie and two stretcher-bearers. ‘He’s alive!’ I said, through lips that suddenly felt numb. What if this was the last breath in him? We had dragged him across that rocky, ruined ground…we might have killed him.

Archie dropped to his knees beside us, heedless of the water, and took Will in his own arms, feeling, as I had done, for the faint, thready pulse. He looked up at me, then around at the stretcher-bearers. ‘Right, quick, you two. Get him down the line and out. Now!’

Between us we got Will onto the stretcher, and then Archie’s arm came around me as we watched the men round the first difficult bend into the main trench. I slumped against him for a second, trying to make sense of the swift turnabout of emotions that rendered me utterly useless, then plunged after them, desperate not to lose sight of Will in case I never saw him again.

Archie and I followed the ambulance in his car, and my eyes were fixed on the hurriedly fastened canvas that flapped in the wind. Neither of us spoke…I wanted to thank him again for helping me, but when I rehearsed the words they sounded insulting and self-indulgent; he had helped Will, not me. He had risked his life to come after me, it was true, but in the end it was Will’s life he had saved.

By the time we reached the Clearing Station, Will was conscious. Sheet-white, and sweating, he breathed in short, shallow bursts, his eyes closed, his hair matted to his head and with one shaking hand he held a wad of dressing against his left side. Word of his return from the dead had flashed around, and the corporal I’d overheard delivering the news arrived, in a state of guilty relief, to tell his story again.

‘He was trying to lift Private Glenn off the wire. He had one hand up, see?’ He raised his left arm in demonstration, ‘and the sniper got Glenn, and then him. He managed to get to his grenade before he fell, and sent Jerry off. We was all sure he’d copped it too.’

The nurse cut away Will’s filthy, mud- and blood-covered jacket and jersey, glanced up at her VAD and snapped an order for fresh bandages and iodine. The VAD hurried away and I looked back at Will’s face; tight-jawed, eyes closed, brows drawn down. The bullet wound was visible only as a small, neat hole, but I had seen enough casualties to be able to guess at the truth behind that seemingly innocent mark. The bullet had hit him midway between hip and ribcage, and travelled across his body, but there was no exit wound, and when the sister gently palpitated his abdomen he groaned. I grabbed his hand, but he didn’t open his eyes.

‘Well, it looks as if your little act of negligence has cost this young man dearly,’ the sister said to the corporal, with some heat. ‘Leaving him out there has done him a good deal of harm.’ She looked at me, at my muddied state, at my clothes, and then at my hand holding Will’s. Her eyebrows went up.

‘My husband,’ I managed, and after the first flash of disapproval, her voice softened. ‘We can do our best for him here, but he’s going to need better care than we can provide. Surgery, obviously, and the sooner the better, but the after-care is going to be vital. Infection’s the biggest danger with abdominals, and he’s been lying out there a long time. We’ll get him as comfortable as we can, and give him something for the pain, then as soon as he’s fit to travel he needs to get out to the hospital.’

With his shirt cut away I could see scratches and scars I’d never even known he had, and once more I was hit by the realisation that our lives were utterly separate, joined only by our past. To pray for a future together felt like too much, all I could bring myself to hope for was that he had any kind of future at all. He opened his eyes at last, and looked down to see our hands still linked, and it seemed he wanted to say something, but the sister was cleaning his wound and laying fresh padding over it, and each gentle brush of her fingers seemed to slam into him like a hammer blow. His fingers ground into mine but I held on, taking comfort in the strength I could feel in his grip. Fighting strength. The sister finished applying the bandage, and prepared a morphine injection which he eyed with frantic hunger. As she slipped the needle beneath his goose-flesh-rippled skin he turned once more to me, and his face relaxed. ‘Thank you,’ he breathed, and then he was away.

‘Who told him you went out after him?’ Archie wanted to know, his voice sharp. ‘No one knows as far as I’m aware, and there could be trouble if anyone finds –’

‘That’s not what he meant, Arch.’ I stumbled over the words, trying not to break down. ‘He was thanking me for letting him go.’

We watched in silence as Will was lifted away, only to be replaced by another soldier, his face swathed in blood-soaked bandages with small, whimpering sounds coming from behind them. A shock of blond hair was all I could see of him, but the sound was very young, and the slight body trembled, drowning in a uniform that hung on a frame shrunken by hard work and poor diet. I felt terrible that my thoughts barely drifted across him before following the stretcher carrying Will; every one of these men deserved someone to hold their hand, to soothe their fears, to murmur comforting words as they fought their own intense battle against encroaching darkness…but I had no strength left, I could only be that person for one man now.

The hospital at Arras was underground. A labyrinth of roughly-hewn tunnels, accommodation for soldiers, signs pointing to exits and different areas, new tunnels joining up with existing ones, quarried hundreds of years before. There was electric light, running water…these things should have struck me with awe, but all I could see was the mud-encrusted soles of Will’s boots as they whisked him away from me and into one of the operating theatres, and all I could think about was whether that brief glimmer of life had been his last.

Archie walked beside me as we made our way back up to the surface. Both of us pushed up against the walls as groups of soldiers clattered past, heading for the exits on their way to the trenches, and surgeons and nurses hurried by on errands on which life nearly always depended. Once again I tried to make myself remember that Will was just another nameless face to them, a young man to be tended and, hopefully saved ready to send back out there again, but all I wanted to do was scream at them that he was more than that, he was more important than all the others. But of course he wasn’t.

Archie was becoming more and more agitated; his replies to my questions were growing shorter, and his face was tense, his eyes dark and haunted-looking. It wasn’t until we emerged into the night and his face immediately looked to the sky that I realised why. It had been creeping into the small hours by the time Archie and I had got Will back to the sap-head, and although it was not yet growing light, it was late April and soon the sky would be brushed with the first light of dawn.

‘Archie?’ I spoke gently, but he jumped, and turned a white, strained face towards me.

‘I know Oli did a terrible thing,’ he said, his voice husky with the effort of control, ‘but he’s just a kid, Evie.’

‘I know.’

‘He doesn’t deserve to die.’

‘No.’

‘For God’s sake, it was his
sister!
If I’d known, and got to Drewe first, I’d likely have done the same thing.’

‘No!’ I grabbed his arm. ‘You wouldn’t, you know you wouldn’t. And if you had, well, you wouldn’t have gone off and left a friend to fight your battles for you.’

‘That’s just it, though. I
am
his friend. And what am I doing? Hanging around this place –’

‘You saved Will’s life,’ I reminded him, trying not to be stung by his words. ‘If it weren’t for you coming out to help me I’d just be lying beside him out there now, not knowing he was even alive, let alone unable to get him back.’

He subsided with a little sigh. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m just…I feel so helpless.’

‘Uncle Jack is doing all he can.’

‘Aye, but what can he do? The fact’s the thing; Oliver killed his superior officer and then deserted. He’s going to die, Evie, and then what’ll become of Kitty?’

Archie walked away a few steps, then spoke over his shoulder without turning. ‘I’m away to get a bit of air. Come and find me if you hear anything about Will.’

I watched him go, wondering if being alone really was the best thing, and decided it probably was. For him, at least. For me it felt as though everything that had been holding me up had suddenly been yanked out from under me; I couldn’t bear the emptiness, I felt stranded and hopeless, and I turned to go back down into the hospital – at least there I might be of some use to someone while I waited for news.

Within a few minutes I had been given a role in one of the long-term wards, and having cleaned myself as best I could, and borrowed yet another uniform, I set to work changing beds and cleaning floors alongside the grateful, overworked VADs. The only uniform available in my size had been a nurse’s one, hurriedly plucked from the sewing basket, and, creased and holey-pocketed though it was, I found myself smiling faintly at the thought that Will would have found it extremely funny to see me dressed as a nurse at all; I’d always hated the idea of women fussing over uniforms, instead of getting on with the work of helping people.

‘I know what I’d rather, if I was in a sticky situation,’ I’d written, exasperated when, during training, I’d received yet another warning for slovenly dress, ‘between someone coming towards me dressed in rags with a first-aid tin, and someone telling me to wait while they fix their cape properly and straighten their cap!’

‘It’s good for discipline,’ he’d said, amused, but of course he’d already become used to army life and could see both sides. To me it still felt like pointless posturing, and I’d sworn he’d never see me in a nurse’s uniform, but seeing the smooth way the hospital was run, and the way the patients relaxed when they saw a neatly-turned-out nurse approaching, looking calm and capable, I allowed there might be some merit in the almost military attention to detail.

It was good to put myself to work; the tension of my emotions was eased by exhaustion. But I’d not been there more than half an hour when I heard something that stopped me in my numbed, mindless tracks, and set my brain racing once again.

Chapter Thirty

‘The morphine’s going to be what does for him in the end,’ the nurse murmured to me. I looked back at the patient she was referring to, sitting up in bed after we’d replaced his bandages. He’d endured another fitting for one of the masks that were growing more lifelike and detailed all the time, and, just as Will’s had last year, his hands were clenching and unclenching on the bed next to him, and I didn’t think it was pain that was causing it; the movement was jerky, unlike the rhythmic, determined focusing on something to take one’s mind off physical discomfort.