Scorpion Sunset (31 page)

‘Wish I could do that instead of cleaning and draining an abscess.' He reluctantly left the warmth of the stove and moved to the door. ‘Thank you, Rebeka.'

‘For what, sir?'

‘My memory table. I will furnish it as soon as I have time.'

Turkish Prisoner of War Camp

October 1916

John rarely went to bed before midnight. That night it was two o'clock in the morning by the pocket watch he'd managed to hang on to despite Turkish ‘searches' for what they termed contraband, which covered any valuables they considered worth stealing.

He closed the door of his bedroom, sank down on his cot, and mulled over the treatment he'd given Bowditch. He'd intended to lance the abscess on his spine before it burst but the abscess had decided otherwise. And now Bowditch was running a high fever which suggested the infection had already entered his bloodstream. Bowditch's condition would have been regarded as serious in a London hospital, here, given the primitive conditions and instruments he was forced to operate with, it was life threatening, but he'd done all he could for the present. Jones and Baker were in charge of the night shift and he'd left them strict instructions to fetch him if there was any change in Bowditch's condition. He could do no more.

He sat on his bed, unlaced his boots, and in an effort to divert himself recalled his conversation with Rebeka about setting out a memory table.

He spent a few enjoyable moments recalling his childhood and student days, and a pleasant affair he'd had with an older and more sexually experienced fellow doctor, Helen, that had ended amicably leaving the deep friendship between them intact. His early military days in India, the balls, parties, mess dinners, flirtations with senior officers' daughters, rides in the countryside. Then – then – came Maud.

It would be churlish of him to say there were no good memories of Maud. Their courtship had been wonderful, marred only by Charles's clandestine affair with Maud's mother Emily. He'd suspected from the outset it would end badly for Charles, although he'd never thought it would end with Emily's untimely death. His wedding to Maud on the day of Emily's funeral had been sombre and not an occasion he wanted to remember. Their honeymoon in Harry's Arab father-in-law's house in Basra could have been wonderful but it had been spoiled by Maud's antagonism towards Harry's Bedouin wife and all things Arab.

From that moment on, he suddenly realised, there were no memories he wanted to cherish or put on his memory table. Only events he'd rather forget, like conducting make-shift surgery on trestles in trenches, extracting bullets and amputating the limbs of smashed young bodies. Drunken days and night when he'd sought oblivion and solace from the knowledge of Maud's adultery in any alcohol he could lay his hands on.

An endless parade of faces of the dead and wounded that he hadn't been able to help out of pain or save from death flashed through his mind's eye. Skeletal men dying of malnutrition and disease in Kut. The blanket-wrapped bodies of the men he'd read the burial service over in the desert, who'd died from wounds, disease, and the Turks insistence on force-marching them in temperatures of 130 degrees at the height of summer.

He re-read Maud's first letter and tried to imagine her living and working in a convent and simply couldn't.

Maud belonged in a party, surrounded by attentive men, and liveried servants with trays of capes and chilled champagne, smiling, talking, laughing …

He looked at the paragraph that had annoyed him most in the first letter he'd received from her.

I gave birth to a boy last December. I've asked Mrs Butler to place him in an American orphanage. I hope she will do so and that he will find adoptive parents who can give him a better life than I am able to. I am writing this so you realise that if you could bring yourself to consider taking me back, I would come unencumbered by further responsibilities.

So like Maud: she'd given birth to a child but instead of taking responsibility for him, she'd abandoned him to an orphanage and the care of mythical adoptive parents who, she believed, would be better placed to look after him than his own mother. That the child was unlikely ever to see the inside of an institution was down to Charles's generosity in acknowledging him as his son and leaving him an inheritance, and Angela Smythe's kindness in taking the child in.

He preferred not to dwell on Maud's infidelity, especially with Charles, but to his surprise he realised the idea of Maud sleeping with Charles didn't hurt him as much as the knowledge of her affairs had when he first discovered she'd been unfaithful to him.

He re-read the final paragraph.

I have suffered, but I know my suffering is nothing compared to yours. I will understand if I do not hear from you, but please, John, try and write, even if it's only a few sentences to tell me that you don't want to see me again.

I send all my love, your own very sorrowful Maud who's only hope is that you allow her a second chance to be the wife she should have been.

‘Sorrowful' in truth or ‘sorrowful' that she had been caught out? If he did reply, what could he say? It was easier to leave Maud's letters unanswered.

He picked out Georgie's last letter.

There's a sister in the Lansing, a real martinet called Sister Margaret. I spend most of my time fighting with her because she disapproves of female doctors. She's unbent slightly since she discovered I was married, but only slightly, and still tries to insist that I should examine men only when they're fully clothed as a naked man ‘is a sight unfit for a woman's eyes'.

When I get free time I spend it with Angela, she absolutely dotes on the baby and I don't mean to hurt you, John, but he looks exactly like Charles. That's how I guessed who his father was.

I can't understand Maud leaving the child but I try not to judge others. Even if you've forgiven her I can't. She should never have treated you the way she did.

You are my cousin, and you always were a better big brother to me than Harry, but then as I was apparently born first, strictly speaking he was never my big brother.

I love you fiercely and protectively, John, look after yourself until we meet again and I can look after you. Whenever I write to you I imagine you sitting in front of me, listening intently, you head slightly to one side, never condescending or impatient …

He picked up his pen, unscrewed his inkwell, and took a clean sheet of paper.

Dear Georgie,

You have no idea how much your letters mean to me. You say they are full of nothing, that's what so marvellous about them. They enable me to picture a sane, normal world (apart from the Turkish POWs) and there are times here when I'm ashamed to say I begin to doubt I'll ever live in the normal world among normal people again.

It's horrid being cooped up with men who long to be active. None of want to be here and there are days when some of us can't even summon up energy for a game of chess.

I'm more fortunate than most because I have the hospital and the sick to keep me occupied. I also have two marvellous nurses who've lost their homes and all their family to the Turks, yet they show so much kindness to all of us every day.

Today one of them gave me a memory table. I'd like to share it with you …

Chapter Twenty-one

Bagtsche Prisoner of War Camp

December 1916

Captain Vincent ducked his head under the doorway of the small cell he used to isolate the camp's fever patients in the hope that separation might contain some of the diseases that were sweeping through the camp. Eight men were lying comatose on the floor. Warren Crabbe was the only one of his patients who'd moved since he'd last checked them. The major was leaning back against the wall, gasping.

‘Still breathless and still have that pain in your right lung?' Vincent asked.

‘I'd be worried if I didn't,' Crabbe joked. ‘It would mean my broken ribs are dissolving.'

‘A cart has arrived. We're loading it now. The Turks have agreed that six sick POWs can be moved to a hospital in another camp.'

Crabbe checked the men nearest him were really unconscious before whispering, ‘Do you think there really is another camp close by with a hospital?'

‘Macefield was hauled out of his cell last night by the guard with a limp. He was returned two hours later, unconscious. The men who shared his cell created a fuss until the guards woke me. There was nothing I could do. He died two hours ago. If they wanted to kill you and the others, Crabbe, they'd have no compunction about doing it right here and now in front of me and anyone else who was around.'

‘They're allowing you to send six men, you say?'

‘Yes.'

‘Give my place to one of the younger men the guards are using every night.'

‘The other five are all younger men who are being raped on a regular basis by the guards. You're going because if someone doesn't operate on those ribs of yours and set them properly, your lungs won't heal and you won't last out the winter.'

‘I'm tougher than I look, and I've done most of my living.'

‘You're an experienced officer who wields considerable authority. I need to send someone who has clout with the men, someone the guards won't try to bully. You know how impressed these dunderheads are by rank. I also told the commandant that your family are Scottish nobility.'

Crabbe made a face. ‘Don't! Please don't make me laugh.' He clutched his chest. ‘The idiots believed you?'

‘They believe everything I say because I take care to keep a straight face when I say it. Over here,' Vincent shouted to two men who carried in a makeshift stretcher improvised from a pair of saplings and two greatcoats.

‘I can walk.' Crabbe pressed the palms of his hands against the wall in an effort to lever himself upright.

‘No you can't. Move him carefully and don't put any pressure on his chest,' Vincent warned.

‘I can walk,' Crabbe repeated stubbornly.

‘Out of this cell, down the full length of the corridor, and out into the courtyard?' Vincent checked.

‘I may need an arm to lean on.'

‘Assemble the stretcher and lift the major on to it,' Vincent ordered.

‘Don't you dare,' Crabbe warned the men.

‘Medic's orders take precedence over senior rank in all matters pertaining to health. Lift him on to the stretcher.'

Vincent escorted the stretcher-bearers and Crabbe into the courtyard. Five men were already in the back of the cart. The stretcher-bearers lifted Crabbe from the greatcoat ‘sling' and laid him in the cart before fastening the tailgate.

The commandant left his office and looked into the open cart. ‘These are the six you have chosen?'

‘They are the most seriously ill. How long will they be travelling?' Vincent had asked the commandant several times as to the exact location of the camp with the hospital, and how long it would take the patients to travel there, but he had yet to receive an acceptable answer.

The commandant waved his hands in the air. ‘One day, maybe two.'

‘It gets cold at night. Put the greatcoats in the cart,' Vincent ordered the stretcher-bearers.

‘But, sir, they're ours …'

‘Do it.' Vincent went to the commandant. ‘There are many more sick POWs who should not be working.'

‘Your men are lazy. The Germans do ten times more work than you and there are not so many of them.'

‘The Germans are housed in clean dry rooms with clean dry bedding and they are given good food. Our men are being kept in appalling, filthy, damp conditions without adequate clothes or bedding, fed scraps that are not fit for animals, and beaten, raped, and mistreated by your guards.'

‘I refuse to believe that a single one of your men has been mistreated by one of my Turkish guards. Every penny your men earn working on the railway line is spent on them as well as some Turkish money my government can ill afford. They have a roof over their heads, don't they?'

‘An inadequate one.'

‘If they work harder they may earn some more money which will buy better food, clothes, and blankets. The solution to your problems is in the hands of your men, Captain Vincent.'

‘And the beatings,' Vincent steeled himself, ‘and the rapes.'

‘If your men obeyed orders there would be no need for my guards to chastise them.' The commandant watched the cart move across the courtyard. He barked the order to open the gates. As soon as the cart was driven through them the sentries closed and locked the massive doors.

‘They will be all right, won't they, sir,' one of the stretcher-bearers asked Vincent. ‘I mean, Major Crabbe and the others will be looked after?'

Vincent wasn't convinced that Crabbe and the others would be cared for, but the last thing he could afford to do was spread alarm or lower morale which was already at rock bottom among the remaining men so he repeated the same words he'd said to Crabbe. ‘If Johnny Turk had wanted to kill Major Crabbe and the others, I think they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble and done it here. All we can hope for is that there really is a hospital staffed by qualified doctors. British would be marvellous.'

‘You think we'll see them again, sir?'

‘I certainly hope so.' He headed back to the isolation cell. ‘I certainly hope so, Pearce, and wouldn't it be bloody marvellous if we were all on a boat heading to Blighty out of Constantinople harbour.'

Abdul's, Basra

November 1916

‘So, you are back, my friend.' Abdul embraced Michael as he entered the coffee shop with Kalla and Daoud.

‘Only for two days, Abdul. Then I will have to go upstream again.'

Abdul fell serious. ‘I am very sorry about Major Reid. It is a grievous loss for you.'