Dead Man's Land (11 page)

‘How long have you been standing there?’ Mrs Gregson demanded.

‘Oh, not long. I was just getting some fresh air. Bit stuffy on the wards.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, yes, you’d know all about that, I suppose. Bit rum getting you girls to paint, isn’t it?’

Mrs Gregson rolled her eyes.

He looked at the bag of lime and the two buckets at their feet. ‘But you must mix the lime in at the right proportion, you know. Over-thickening is very common. And you must give it a good old stir.’

‘Must we?’ asked Mrs Gregson.

‘Yes.’ He examined the wall and pointed to the mould. ‘And you’ll have to scrape—’

‘Can you fetch us a stick?’ Mrs Gregson asked, not wanting another lecture. ‘To stir the mix.’

‘Oh. Right-o.’ He began to look around ineffectually.

‘Unless you want to loan us that one.’ She pointed at his swagger stick.

‘I . . . no . . . I’ll be right back. My name’s Metcalf, by the way. James Metcalf.’

As soon as he had gone, Miss Pippery spoke. ‘He’s after something.’

Mrs Gregson agreed. ‘You can’t usually get an officer to fetch sticks quite so easily. Usually takes a few sessions.’

Metcalf returned with a broken broom handle and, as Mrs Gregson poured in the lime, he proceeded to rotate it in the pot with a practised vigour, mixing the contents without spilling or flicking.

‘The thing is, ladies, I am here to see some of the men. Wounded men.’

‘You’ve come to the right place,’ said Mrs Gregson. ‘We’ve got hundreds.’

‘No,’ he corrected solemnly, speaking as if the VADs were particularly dim-witted. ‘These are men, you see, under my command. They were hurt in some shelling. The thing is, I have been asked by some of the officers in my battalion to set about organizing a dance. We’ll be in the area off and on for the foreseeable future, you see. And we thought, while we are out of the line . . . To be honest, I thought I might kill two birds with one stone.’

The women exchanged glances.

‘I mean, while I am here visiting the men, I could ask some of the nurses if they would enjoy the company of officers.’

‘We have plenty of officers here, Lieutenant. Whole ones for a change, do you mean?’ Mrs Gregson asked.

‘I suppose I do, after a fashion. Golly, that sounded cruel.’

‘We’ll think about it,’ said Miss Pippery. Mrs Gregson nodded her agreement. ‘On one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

Miss Pippery flashed a coy smile. ‘You help us paint this wall.’

Mrs Gregson shot her friend an admiring glance. She couldn’t have put it better herself.

‘What? When?’

‘Now.’

He looked down at his once pristine uniform, now lightly floured with lime dust. He brushed at it ineffectually.

Mrs Gregson tutted. ‘Oh, I’m sure we can find you something to cover that. You
can
paint?’

‘I’ve done my share,’ Metcalf said cautiously, wondering how much manual work a gentleman should admit to. ‘And you’ll think about it? The dance? Perhaps ask some of your chums.’

‘We said we would. And Miss Pippery here, Alice, is the very best fox-trotter you have ever seen.’

Metcalf’s face brightened at the thought. ‘Really?’

‘She was taught by Harry Fox himself.’

Miss Pippery’s eyes dropped to the floor, in what could have been mistaken for bashfulness.

‘Good Lord. Really?’

‘At the
Jardin de Danse
on the roof of the New York Theatre.’

As Metcalf began to unbutton his tunic, ready to roll up his sleeves, Mrs Gregson and Miss Pippery were careful not to catch each other’s eyes, for fear of collapsing into giggles.

It was shortly after they had finished the wall and were about to move on to the greenhouse that they heard the sound of a man sobbing.

Watson passed through the curtain from the officers’ ward and into a small passageway that opened up into another high-ceilinged room, but with larger windows and more natural light. A former refectory, perhaps, although a porous one: metal buckets caught drips from the leaking roof, pinging and plopping in an almost musical sequence. The arrangement was much the same as the officers’ ward, with twin rows of bedsteads facing each other. There was only one heater, though, along with an as-yet unlit potbelly stove, and there was a bite to the air.

‘Major Watson! Is tha’ you, sir?’

He turned to his right. It took him a second to recognize the sergeant as the man’s left eye was heavily bandaged and it obscured most of his face. The nose was unmistakable, though.

‘Sergeant Shipobottom?’

‘Aye, sir. It’s Shipobottom. ’Ow do?’

‘Your captain said you’d been injured. But we didn’t have the opportunity to chat further. What on earth are the Leigh Pals doing here?’ He spoke up, as always when dealing with the mill workers, whose hearing had been ruined by the constant clatter of machinery. It made them very adept lip readers, a useful skill in the trenches.

Shipobottom pointed at his dressing. ‘Ah took one in the stomach. And a shell splinter in m’ eye—’

‘No, no, man,’ said Watson with a laugh. ‘I mean here. Belgium. You were in Egypt, last I saw, marked for the Dardanelles.’

‘That’s right, but we were away about a month after thee, sir.’ There was a time when Watson had been unable to understand the thick ‘Lanky’ accent of the Leigh Pals, or ‘the Lobby Gobblers’ as they were sometimes known, but a few months as their temporary MO – where, for a shilling a time and a tot of rum, they had acted as willing subjects for his transfusion experiments – had cured him of that. One curious side effect of the war was that it had thrown together men of different regions and classes who would never have had cause to converse before. This breaching of national (and to some extent, class) boundaries, Watson had come to believe, could only be a welcome development. Even if it made for difficult conversations sometimes.

‘Are you all right, sir? No more of that ague?’

‘I am, thank you.’ Watson had come down with a mild case of malaria, debilitating enough to have him repatriated. ‘Quite recovered. No recurring fevers yet, fingers crossed. So you shipped here straight from Egypt?’

‘Aye. Like you said, we expected Dardanelles, like . . . but they brought us t’ this place. Get us green ones used to trench life, so they say.’

Watson caught a whiff of something on the man’s breath. ‘Have you been drinking, Shipobottom?’

The man gawped at him, his expression as comical as his name, which he claimed was derived from ‘man-who-looks-after-sheep-in-meadow-with-a-stream-at-the-bottom’.

He looked ready to deny it, but then relented. ‘Aye. Just a drop, like. Don’t tell on me, sir.’

‘I won’t. But it’s not a good idea right now. Not in here. No more. Understood?’’

‘Aye.’

‘And how are the men?’

He looked sombre. ‘Bearing up. We lost Captain Leverton, though. A right shame it were.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ It was true. He had been a fine officer, a good few years older than most. Maturity was in short supply in the British Army. ‘How did he . . . ?’

‘He got some gypo disease. Terrible it was in the end. Reckon you could’ve saved him.’

Dysentery, enteric fever and, as he knew, malaria, were rife out there. ‘I’m sure they did everything they could.’

Shipobottom’s unbandaged eye looked doubtful. ‘They’ve given yon de Griffon a field commission to captain. We all thought it must be because his family is bow-legged with brass. Rich, like. And a nestle-cock we reckoned. But no, the lad done well. I reckon he’ll keep the promotion, n’ all.’

‘I’m sure he will. He seemed very concerned about you.’ He knew de Griffon was from a well-to-do family, but he had a common touch that the men liked. What was a nestle-cock, though? Someone used to a little mollycoddling was his best guess. ‘And here in France? You’ve seen much action?’

‘Nah. The guns, like. Always the bloody guns throwin’ shells at us. Worse thing being the trench foot. Some of the boys, they take their boots off and their feet swell like a freshly baked loaf. I told ’em, you have to keep your boots and puttees loose and rub the whale oil on, but it don’t half pong. Dunno how whales put up with the stink. And then this happens to me. Just a scratch under the bandage, so Dr Myles says. I’ll be back with lads soon enough, I suppose.’

‘And the wife? And family?’

He beamed. ‘Peg is champion and the boys an’ all, thankee. I wrote ’em a lazy card and had got three letters back.’

A ‘lazy card’ was a sheet with a set of stock phrases to be crossed out as appropriate. ‘Have been wounded in the arm/leg/face/body.’ ‘Am doing well/better than expected/poorly’, and space for the location of the CCS or hospital. Shipobottom, he suspected, couldn’t manage much more.

As he looked into Shipobottom’s face, a glint in the white of the good eye caught his attention. ‘Sergeant, can I just look at the area around your pupil?’

‘Sir.’

Watson took finger and forefinger and separated the upper and lower lids. Something was odd there. Amid the reticulate pattern of red veins, he could see tiny flecks of blue. Which meant what? Was it some side effect from the metal that had penetrated his body? He made a mental note to check the other eye, once the bandage was off.

‘Is it all right?’

‘Yes, fine.’

‘I was wishin’ for some leave home after all this, you know. I’m right jiggered.’

Watson could hear an unfamiliar trembling in the big man’s voice. Shipobottom, the robust, foul-mouthed (when no officer was around) force of nature was genuinely scared. He didn’t want to go back up the line. The near-miss seemed to have shattered his nerves.

‘But soldiers like this one are too valuable to let go. Right, Sergeant?’

It was Caspar Myles, from over Watson’s shoulder.

Shipobottom pulled himself together. ‘Yes, Dr Myles, thankee. I’m still a bit mazey, though. A terrible yedwarch, an’ all.’

‘Mazey?’ Myles turned to Watson. ‘I only get about one word in three as it is.’

‘Dizzy,’ Watson translated. ‘Light-headed. And a yedwarch is a headache. Did he lose much blood?’

‘From the stomach wound, yes,’ said Myles. ‘He’s had saline.’

Watson was all too aware that saline often brought about a remarkable recovery initially, but could be followed by a spectacular collapse. ‘You could give him some of the citrated blood I collected. It can work wonders.’ He turned back to the patient. ‘As the sergeant saw first-hand in Egypt.’

‘Do I get me shillin’ and a tot this time?’ Shipobottom asked cheekily.

‘I think you know the answer to that, Sergeant.’

Shipobottom nodded with mock contrition. ‘Aye, Doctor.’

Watson turned to Myles. ‘Won’t take me a second to select the right grouping. You simply have to be sure there will be agglutination or haemolysis in the donor blood.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Sergeant, you don’t recall your group, do you?’

‘Aye, I was group one. The tops.’

Watson had tried to tell this group of guinea pigs that group I blood was in no way superior to group IV – it was simply a terminology associated with cross-matching, but they wouldn’t have it. ‘Well, there you have it. He can accept any blood – a universal recipient. You simply infuse the citrated blood like saline.’ Watson had to be careful. It was a disaster to suggest a fellow physician was in any way deficient or not familiar with current practice.

‘So I heard,’ Myles said evenly.

‘If the sergeant feels up to it, you could move him to the transfusion tent. Some privacy, the VADs can do the monitoring rather than take up valuable time here. Also, with the lamps turned down, it would be a perfect environment to remove the eye bandage. No windows.’ It would also be a good place away from big ears and prying eyes for Watson to have a quiet word about Shipobottom’s mental state.

‘Excellent thought.’ Myles cleared his throat. ‘Dr Watson, can I have a word?’

Myles steered him to the centre of the room and lowered his voice. ‘I just want to ask you a question,’ he said furtively.

‘Is there a problem?’ Watson asked, automatically reducing his own speech to a whisper.

‘Staff Nurse Jennings.’

‘Yes?’

‘You were with her yesterday. In the reception tent.’ Watson nodded. ‘What do you think of her?’

Watson considered, not sure how the question was weighted. Perhaps he was considering recommending her for promotion or a mention in dispatches. ‘I think she has the makings of a fine nurse, Doctor. A sister-in-charge at least. Of course, she’s young—’

‘No, I mean.’ A conspiratorial huskiness crept into the voice. ‘What do you think of her? Not as a nurse.’

‘I don’t think of her as anything other than as a nurse.’

Myles winked. ‘Is that right? I thought there might be the age factor, but you never know. Famous writers, eh? Might fancy their chances despite . . .’ He cleared his throat, thinking better of finishing the sentence. ‘So you don’t mind if I have crack at her?’

‘A what?’

‘A crack. A run at the barn door. Been considering it for a while. Then I saw you two being, well, intimate. Hold on a cotton-pickin’ minute. What’s this? But I was imagining things, you say. Just thought I’d check.’

Watson felt himself blinking, too fast and too often. ‘Dr Myles, if Staff Nurse Jennings has any dealings with you in that sense, Sister Spence will have your—’

‘Whoa, now.’ Myles pointed at his own chest. ‘Doctor. Yes? Not army. Not an officer. The rules don’t apply to me.’

Watson wasn’t certain that was true. Or at least, that Sister Spence would make any exceptions where her charges were concerned. ‘But they do to Staff Nurse Jennings.’

‘I’d argue that in a court of law.’

‘And why are you telling me this?’

‘As I say, I just thought you were gearing yourself up for a pass of your own. I wanted to make sure that I’m not . . . what do you say? Queering the pitch? I did see her first, y’see.’

‘Dr Myles—’

‘Caspar.’

‘Dr Myles. There is no pitch to queer. But I promise you if you endanger that girl in any way, either morally or professionally—’

‘Oh, don’t be such a stuffed shirt.’

‘ – I’ll have you run out and returned to your unit. The All-Harvards or whatever they were called.’ Myles didn’t look too concerned at this rather empty threat. ‘I have a suggestion to make.’