Amy (4 page)

‘Good Lord,’ Helen said. She was looking about her with her eyes wide and her mouth half open. ‘I didn’t think I’d ever be staying in a place like this.’

The carts arrived with their numerous chests and boxes and the porters piled them on the marble floor. M. Le Blanc’s eyes widened.

‘You have brought much equipment, I see. We have done what we can before you arrived. We have cleared the lounges and the
dining-room
and the beds will arrive tomorrow.’

‘Good.’ Dr Hanfield smiled. ‘In that case we should be able to open the day after tomorrow.’

‘So soon!’ he said, surprised. ‘You English ladies work very hard. We
already have many patients waiting for you.’

‘We’ll be ready.’

‘Is there anything that we can do for you tonight?’

Dr Hanfield shook her head. ‘I think we all need to go to bed,’ she said. ‘We can do nothing more until the morning.’

‘The bedrooms on the first floor are ready,’ M Le Blanc said in careful English, ‘but some of you will have to share, I think. There are sheets and blankets to make your beds, and there is hot water in the bedrooms and the bathrooms.’

Matron shepherded them towards the staircase. ‘Come along, young ladies. Let’s sort ourselves out and get to bed. I’ve no idea where anything is. We can’t unpack anything tonight, I’m afraid. We have a lot to do in the morning.’

‘Share with me, Amy?’ Helen whispered, and Amy nodded.

‘No tea,’ Helen said.

Amy smiled. ‘It must be lost in one of these packing cases. I think I’d be too tired to drink it.’

They trailed up the marble staircase to the bedrooms. The floors of the corridors were laid with red and blue tiles, and the walls hung with cream silk wallpaper and huge gilt mirrors. Matron opened each door in turn. She reserved the rooms nearest the staircase for the doctors and senior nurses, and then quickly settled the rest of the staff into the other rooms.

Amy and Helen dumped their bags on the carpet, looking round them at the luxury, the deep windows with their rich blue curtains, the thick carpets, a cheval mirror and linen-covered dressing table. There were two neat single beds with the bedding neatly folded at the foot. A water carafe stood on each bedside table.

‘I hope it’s been boiled,’ Helen said. ‘That would be a good start, wouldn’t it, if we all went down with food poisoning.’ She opened a cupboard door. ‘Oh look. There’s a wash basin with hot and cold taps.’

‘I’m sure they would have boiled it,’ Amy said. ‘They seem to be very efficient. I’ll start making the beds. You go and locate the
lavatories
and the bathroom, Helen.’ Helen left the room and Amy took off her hat and coat and put them in the wardrobe. She was weary to her bones, partly with the fatigues of the day, but mostly, she knew, with apprehension. She began to spread out the bottom sheets and put on the pillowcases. At least everything seemed to be dry and aired.

Helen came back. ‘Just down the corridor,’ she said. ‘On the left.’ She gave an enormous yawn. ‘I’m too tired to do more than wash my face tonight. Baths in the morning.’

They finished making the beds and then they undressed and put on their cotton nightdresses and got in. Amy turned off the bedside light.

‘I didn’t think I’d ever be sleeping in a place like this,’ Helen said. ‘Utter luxury.’

‘For the moment, yes.’

‘We’ve never had a chance to talk, have we?’ Helen said cheerfully. ‘Where do you come from? Where is your home?’

Amy didn’t want to have this kind of conversation. She would just have to be careful. ‘Bromley,’ she said.

‘Do your parents live there?’

‘My father does,’ Amy said. ‘My mother died when I was a young child. I hardly remember her.’

‘I’m sorry about that. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

Amy shook her head in the dark. ‘No. Just me.’

‘Any passionate swain waiting for you?’

Amy laughed, a short humourless laugh. A horrible image of Sir William Bulford rose in her mind. ‘No. Nothing like that. Just as well really, the way things are now. It must be dreadful to have someone to worry about. It must be appalling.’

‘I just have two sisters,’ Helen said. ‘Younger than me, and my parents, of course. No brothers, fortunately. My father’s too old to be a soldier but I know he’d like to go. I don’t have a swain either. My mother was always trying to marry me off.’ She giggled. ‘I think she was trying to get rid of me.’

Amy laughed. ‘So you didn’t find anyone who took your fancy?’

‘Goodness no. Everyone my mother found was far too immature, or boring. Anyway, I wasn’t ready to settle down and have children. I wanted to do something first – have an adventure. My father always said I was the boy of the family.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘I suppose this is an adventure, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know if I’d call it that exactly. It’s going to be very hard work.’

‘Have you done anything like this before, Amy?’

Amy hesitated. This was another question she wanted to avoid. She would have to be prepared and phrase her answers accordingly. ‘No,’
she said at last. ‘I have never been an orderly before.’

‘Neither have I. I just stayed at home and helped my mother. Deadly boring. That was until I joined the suffragists. I don’t think my mother is very pleased about that. She was always frightened that I’d end up in prison. Now she’s frightened that I’ll end up as a prisoner of war.’ She yawned loudly. ‘I don’t think I can stay awake any longer. Good night, Amy.’

Amy heard her turn over, and she seemed to be instantly asleep.

Amy lay awake. Outside the windows Paris seemed to be strangely quiet and very dark. The street lights were apparently out, or the gas turned down very low. Utter luxury, Helen had said. Amy could
imagine
what might have been here, the carriages and motor cars coming and going, the flowers, the music, voices and laughter. She could see the guests arriving, the women beautifully dressed, Worth and Fortuny and Patou, greeted by porters and pageboys and an obsequious
receptionist
. They would be shown to their rooms, champagne and fruit waiting, all the trappings of luxurious living. This beautiful hotel should be filled with elegant tourists and travellers, with silks and furs and the haunting scents of French perfumes. It was not meant for what she knew was to come. Death was coming. Death and suffering and sorrow. She shivered, though the night was warm.

The news from the Front was already so bad, the casualties so high. There was a memory, an image that she couldn’t get out of her head. A year ago, a lifetime ago, she and her father had been to a slide lecture in London. The speaker was an old man who had actually fought in the American Civil War, on the Southern side. That lecture came back to her, almost a premonition, a preparation. The old man spoke haltingly, and now and again, even after all those years, struggled to hold back his tears. His descriptions of the carnage had been utterly horrifying. He told how he had watched his best friend die beside him, shot through the head; how he had watched a man die holding his own bowel: how he had nearly died in a prison camp of pneumonia and malnutrition. This was not a battle, he said, this was a new kind of war, a war that lasted for years, that drained the country of its finest young men. Could it really be true that civilized men did this to each other? Could it be true that thousands and thousands had died in agony, had limbs removed without anaesthetic when they ran out of chloroform and morphine, had died of dysentery and pneumonia because there
was no way to treat them? He told of barns discovered, half filled with rotting, stinking amputated limbs, of mass graves, of farms and
homesteads
devastated, women and children starving. She and her father had been shocked and horrified, but it seemed like fiction then, too far away to be real, too horrible to have happened. Yes, the suffering human body had been exposed to her, but in the best conditions, in an English hospital; not the kind of suffering that was happening now, here, in France. The rumours had been appalling, thousands already dead and injured, shocking injuries, tetanus, gas gangrene, dysentery. She lay awake until sheer exhaustion put her to sleep.

The next morning they woke early.

‘Come on,’ Helen said. ‘Let’s get to the bathrooms first. There’s going to be a rush.’

They bathed and dressed and put on their uniforms over their bodices and bloomers.

‘At least we don’t have to wear corsets.’ Helen said. ‘They’re an invention of the devil anyway.’ She picked up her suffragist’s badge. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll let me wear this,’ she said, ‘but I’ve still got it in my head. I won’t be giving up.’

‘After the war,’ Amy said grimly. ‘After the war, perhaps. They wouldn’t be bothered with it now.’

‘Breakfast,’ Helen said. ‘And lots of cups of tea.’

They walked along the silk-lined corridor and down the marble staircase. Matron and Dr Hanfield were standing in the hall.

‘In here, girls,’ Matron said. ‘Get your breakfast quickly and get to work. We have to be ready tomorrow.’

They went into a small room with bare tables and chairs and the comforting smell of bacon.

‘The cooks must have got up at the crack of dawn,’ Amy said.

‘I don’t know why we brought our own cooks,’ Helen said. ‘I was looking forward to a bit of French cooking.’ She grinned. ‘Though I don’t suppose the Tommies would fancy snails and frogs’ legs.’

Amy took porridge and a boiled egg. They reminded her achingly of home.

Matron was waiting for them in the hall. ‘Aprons and long cuffs, girls,’ she said. ‘You can start making the beds as soon as the cleaners have finished the floors.’

‘It’s chaos, isn’t it?’ Helen whispered.

The crates and boxes were open and strewn about. Amy watched the doctors unpacking the surgical instruments, enamel basins and kidney dishes, scalpels, saws, retractors, hypodermic syringes, packs of needles. She found herself gazing at them, almost unable to bear it.

Dr Hanfield looked up and saw her. ‘It’s Amy, isn’t it? Help me with these, dear. We’re setting up the operating theatre in the ladies powder room. There are sinks and water in there already. M. Le Blanc has worked wonders – he’s found us an operating table and an electrician to put up the light.’

Amy carried in the bundles of familiar instruments. Sister Cox, the theatre sister, was already sorting them and putting them away in boxes and drawers.

‘Where shall I put these retractors?’ Amy said. She knew she had made a mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

Sister gave her an odd look. ‘What do you know about retractors?’ she said.

‘Oh – nothing,’ Amy stammered. ‘Dr Hanfield said that’s what they were.’ I’ll have to be careful, she thought. That was a close one, but Sister appeared to be satisfied.

‘Thank you, Amy,’ she said. ‘That’s all you can do in here.’

The words were like a blow. No it isn’t, she thought. I could do everything in here. Men were dying and she could do nothing.

She turned abruptly and hurried out. ‘Help in the wards, Amy,’ Matron said. ‘The beds have come. They all need making up.’

The big luxurious lounges and the dining-room had been stripped and emptied and scrubbed and the beds arranged in rows, a strict four feet apart. Amy wrinkled her nose. The wards smelt strongly of carbolic, astringent and sharp. An efficient smell. So much for French perfume. Helen was already there, spreading sheets and tucking in neat corners.

‘You have to do the corners right,’ she said, ‘or the nurses will shout at you.’

The nurses moved about, crisp in apron and headdress, and crisp in manner. One bed was piled with dressings and bandages,
thermometers
and pairs of scissors. There was a crate of hydrogen peroxide and a box ominously marked in red letters – Morphine.

The morning wore on. They scrubbed and dusted and made beds and put away supplies. A brief lunch of roast beef and potatoes and
cabbage, and then they began again. Slowly the piles of boxes
disappeared
. Slowly the equipment was put away.

Amy stood in the doorway of the biggest ward, looking back. The rows of beds stood silently in the late afternoon light, waiting in
terrible
expectancy. The empty beds had a soul-chilling air of impersonal indifference, as if all feeling, all emotion, had left the world. Who knew who would lie there? Does it matter, they seemed to say? Does anyone care? They will lie here and die, and more will come and lie here and die and this is just the way it is. Men have always killed each other. They always will. It will never end. Does anyone care? Not the heads of state, she thought, who cause it all, not the generals in their fine uniforms, safe behind the lines.

We care, she thought. We care. The beds waited. She was too
horrified
to cry.

The next day they arrived. One after another the ambulances unloaded their dreadful cargo. The whole staff watched them arrive, standing in the foyer. Amy was overcome with pity and dismay.

‘My God,’ Helen whispered bedside her. ‘Oh my God.’

The orderlies and nurses got the men to bed and stripped them of their lice-ridden clothes and washed them. The doctors hurried round the wards; the chest of morphine was opened. Dr Hanfield and the other surgeons operated all the day and far into the night. In the
hospital
, the war had begun.

T
HE
work was relentless. Amy had not really known what to expect, but certainly not this endless flow of wounded men, many of them already dying of their wounds, of infection, gas gangrene, septicaemia, blood loss. They arrived filthy, in tattered uniforms, most of them covered in lice. They brought every wound imaginable; limbs shot away, abdominal wounds, head injuries, eyes missing and facial injuries almost too dreadful to look at. The
operating
theatre was working all day and half the night. She and Helen fell into bed every night, utterly exhausted. Helen cried herself to sleep for the first few nights. ‘Oh, those men,’ she sobbed. ‘Those boys. How can they be so quiet, so patient? They should be raging. I don’t understand what this war is about. It’s about nothing, just men
wanting
power – more and more power.’ Amy could only agree, horrified and sickened.

Every day those men whose wounds had been treated and were fit to travel were taken to the railway station and loaded on to hospital boat trains
en route
for the many hospitals that had been set up in England, set up in schools, church halls and country houses, and largely staffed with women volunteer VADs and orderlies. And every day the orderlies and ambulance drivers collected more shattered men from the trains that carried them from the trenches and brought them back to fill the waiting beds in Paris. On too many nights a
heartrending
cargo of plain coffins was moved hurriedly through the corridors
and loaded on to carts and lorries at the back of the hotel to be
transported
home, invisibly, in the night. Often the dead were not taken back to England but were buried in France. Sometimes there was no way of even knowing who they were. Their funerals took place in the early morning. Usually the coffins were placed on an open hearse, and the people in the streets would cover them with flowers. They were taken to cemeteries outside Paris where the local mayor would say a few words of sorrow and gratitude. The rows of graves and simple crosses grew every day.

Suffering and pain, courage and death were laid before them every day. Two of the young orderlies who had come out with them left almost immediately, their faces stiff and stretched with horror.

‘What’s that smell,’ Helen said one day, her nose wrinkled. ‘It’s horrible. Smells fusty, like mice or something.’

‘It’s gas gangrene in the wounds,’ Amy said. Another batch of men had just arrived and the dressings that had been applied hurriedly in the aid posts at the trenches or at the clearing stations were soaked and stinking. ‘The wounds will have to be excised and irrigated.’

‘What’s gas gangrene?’

‘An infection, a germ in the wound. The germ is one of those that doesn’t need oxygen, and it goes very deep.’ She paused, dismayed, knowing what might happen next to these men.’ If it gets bad enough, they will have to amputate the limb. Otherwise it just spreads.’

‘Oh my God.’ Helen looked as if she were about to burst into tears. Then she looked puzzled. ‘How do you know all that?’

I’ve done it again, Amy thought. I really must be more careful. ‘I heard the doctors talking,’ she said hurriedly. ‘It’s not something you see very often in England – apparently. They’re trying some new method of irrigating the wounds. I don’t know whether that will work, but it’s worth trying, if it saves a limb.’

Some of the wounds were alive with maggots. To her surprise, Amy thought that the maggoty wounds looked cleaner than the others. She mentioned it to one of the nurses. ‘It must be just a coincidence,’ the nurse said stiffly. ‘Maggots are horrible things.’ Still, Amy wondered.

They wrote letters home for the men who could not use their hands or could not see. The letters were simple and brave and were all much the same:

Then there were the letters to wives and sweethearts, sometimes very intimate, sometimes very descriptive. The younger orderlies often had flaming cheeks.

The dreadful letters, those to tell the appalling news to the bereaved families, were written by the doctors. It was one task that Amy was glad that she didn’t have to do. What could you possibly say?

Occasionally they got an English newspaper. There were lists and lists of the dead, or the ‘missing, believed dead, believed wounded, taken prisoner’, appalling, endless lists. Sometimes Amy could hardly bear to look. Often, in the same regiment, there were several dead men of the same name – William Weaver, Henry Weaver, John Weaver. She knew that men from the same area, the same towns and villages, often joined the same regiment. Were they related? Were they perhaps even brothers? Did some distraught mother see that dreaded boy with the telegram visit her home again and again, with the same ghastly news? She could hardly bear to think about it.

Some of the news from home seemed so trivial. ‘Look,’ Helen said one day. ‘It says the Duchess of Devonshire has asked people not to wear mourning in the streets for fear of lowering morale and Selfridges is going to put up an honour board of all their men.’ She gave a wry, bitter smile. ‘That should help a lot.’

‘I suppose they have to find ways,’ Amy said, ‘to bear it.’

The news from the front at the beginning of September was dire. The British Expeditionary Force had retreated at Mons, and the Germans were even closer to Paris. Very close, apparently. M. Le Blanc kept them informed, as much as he could. He came to the hospital every few days to see the doctors, to ask if they needed anything that he could
possible
get for them. His face became more clouded every day, his fear more obvious. The news was as bad as it could be. Paris was in great danger. At any time the people who had bravely stayed in the capital expected to hear the screech of shells bombarding the city, or even worse, the apocalyptic clatter of hoofs as the German cavalry rode through the city streets.

‘Do you think they will get here, Amy?’ Helen was obviously nervous, though she tried to sound jaunty and calm.

‘No,’ Amy said firmly. ‘Of course they won’t.’ We must believe that, she thought. We can’t let fear overcome us. Unfounded fear is more destructive than anything. We must believe that.

They were given a few hours off one afternoon. ‘Let’s go out,’ Helen said. ‘I’ve never seen Paris and I must get out, just for a little while. I’m getting claustrophobic. We need to look at something different.’

Matron was dubious. ‘Don’t go far,’ she said. ‘We don’t know what is happening.’

‘I don’t think the Germans are going to come today,’ Helen said. ‘Surely we would have heard something. There would have been some news, some shelling, or something.’

Matron still looked worried. ‘Well, keep together,’ she said. ‘and if there’s the slightest sign of trouble, come back at once.’

Paris was surprisingly quiet; there was no sign of panic or
confusion
. In the side streets the shops and apartments were nearly all closed and shuttered and the streets almost empty of people. They passed a little church, with the doors open, and it was packed with women and children and old men, praying on their knees, rosaries in their hands. Their prayers spilled out into the street, in desperate chanting. ‘
Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce
.’ The many candles flickered and wavered in the gloom; the plaster saints stood inscrutable in their niches.

Here and there in the streets they saw small groups of people
clustered
about a young man, and they would hold him and kiss him until he turned and walked away, leaving behind their shocked, white,
tearful
faces. Very soon they realized that these were families, saying
goodbye
to their sons and husbands and brothers. Helen clutched Amy’s hand. ‘Oh, Amy!’ By now they knew what was waiting for these men. In every street there were more and more women, bent with grief, wearing their widows’ veils.

The people who were left seemed to be steadfastly going about their usual business, an old cobbler in his shop still mending shoes, a little milliner’s shop, open, but bereft of customers, a dressmaker, sitting alone in her little shop, staring out of her window. There were signs of jobs half done – a strong smell of horse dung in some of the streets where there was no one to clear it away.

There was none of the usual cheerful tables and chairs outside the
cafés, no one sitting in the sunshine with their coffee or wine. M. Le Blanc had told them that they were no longer allowed, that the French had to drink inside now like Englishmen in their pubs. The cafés had to close at eight o’clock, and the restaurants at half past nine and there was to be no music after ten. The Louvre was closed, but the most frightening news of all was that the government had decamped to Bordeaux.

‘They must think the Germans are coming,’ Helen said, ‘or they wouldn’t have gone. Why didn’t they warn everybody? And I suppose everybody has to stay inside in case they start shelling. And why do they have to close at eight o’clock?’

‘M. Le Blanc says there is a curfew,’ Amy said. ‘No one goes out at night. Apparently they have policemen patrolling the streets in case anyone is up to no good.’ There were constant rumours of spies. Shops with German sounding names had been hurriedly abandoned, and their owners fled. Some of them had been wrecked by angry Parisians, the broken windows boarded up.

They walked on. Many of the monuments and statues were completely surrounded by sandbags, the history and beauty of Paris covered and obscured.

‘Look, Amy. There’s the Eiffel Tower.’ They looked up at the great structure that was now the signature of Paris, known all over the world. ‘I wish we could go up to the top, but M. Le Blanc says we can’t. They have searchlights up there at night, and there is a machine-gun post on the top. In case of Zeppelins or aeroplanes, I suppose.’

Aeroplanes, Amy thought; such a wonderful invention, such a leap forward in man’s ingenuity. Her father had been so delighted when he heard of the first powered flight. ‘I knew it would happen,’ he said. ‘I knew someone would do it one day.’ And now aeroplanes were just another weapon of war, just another way to kill. Could such a thought ever have entered the Wright brothers’ minds when they flew for the first time? Could they ever have imagined this? Did every wonderful thing have to be used for destruction?

They walked on. ‘It feels peculiar, doesn’t it?’ Helen said. ‘Creepy.’ Amy nodded. There was an atmosphere of deep apprehension that showed clearly in the strained, white faces, the hurried steps. The words hung in the air – are the Germans coming? Will they be here, in Paris, tomorrow? What will they do to us? The memory of the siege of
Paris in 1870 had returned, with all its terror.

They walked into the wide boulevards. There was a scattering of bright uniforms; the red of the Zoave – the North African soldiers; the Turkos – the Algerian riflemen in their blue jackets, and the splendour of the French Hussars in their light blue tunics. Amy wondered at the bright colours. Surely they would be easier for the German riflemen to see. They would surely stand out against the greens and browns of the land. The British Army had long used khaki – ever since the Boer War.

They reached the great boulevards and stopped in shock at the most dismaying sight of all, the steady streams of people moving south. The streets were filled with slowly moving lines of traffic, refugees from the north in their carts pulled by farm horses or donkeys, taking whatever they could from their abandoned houses and farms, pots and pans, bottles of wine, a flitch of ham, a fat yellow cheese – and children; so many children, gazing about them at the sights of the city. Here and there were carriages or motor cars carrying the more prosperous French from their fine homes in the 16th Arrondissement or
Neuilly-sur
-Seine, all going south or west, away from Paris.

‘Look, Amy.’ Helen plucked at her sleeve and they watched,
astonished
, as a farmer drove his flock of sheep down the Bois de Boulogne. ‘I didn’t realize,’ Helen said, her voice shaking. ‘Shut up in the
hospital
all the time, I didn’t know this was going on. They must really believe that Paris is going to be invaded. They must think it is lost.’

Amy put her hands in her pockets to hide their trembling. The rumours were rife, and worse than rumours. They had all heard about the German atrocities in Belgium. They had burned Louvain and its precious medieval library. There was a dreadful report in the papers that they had shot hundreds of civilian men and women and children at Dinant. Did the country that had given the world Goethe and Beethoven really do such things? There were worse rumours for women. There had been a horrible cartoon in one of the French
newspapers
of a fat German soldier with a woman at his feet, a woman, half stripped, bound and gagged. The caption read ‘The Seduction’. Its meaning was obvious: the fear of rape was yet another horror for women. It brought into her mind another hideous memory, hurriedly suppressed, of Sir William Bulford.

‘No, not Paris,’ she said firmly. ‘The Germans will never get Paris.’

Helen looked doubtful. ‘I hope you’re right.’

‘Lots of people are staying,’ Amy said. ‘We’re staying.’

‘Let’s go back to the hotel,’ Helen said, ‘I think I’ve seen enough. We don’t know how lucky we are in England half the time, do we? Never been invaded since 1066. Thank God we’re an island and we have the sea and the Royal Navy.’

‘This Sceptred Isle.’ Amy said. ‘Thank God indeed.’

They made their way back to the hotel. ‘I wish we hadn’t gone out at all,’ Helen said. ‘I’m more worried now.’

Later in the day Dr Hanfield called a meeting of all the staff. ‘We must make plans,’ she said, ‘for a possible evacuation. I think the American hospital would help us with an ambulance or two and I would have to find whatever transport I could. I want you all to be ready – a small suitcase only. Just essentials.’