The Foreshadowing

  The worst of it, as ever, was that no one would believe me.

  My every utterance was taken to be worthless, the rantings of a madwoman. Yet I knew the truth for what it was, and it was coming to meet me faster than I thought possible.

  The seagulls wheeling above my head should have told me we were approaching the French coast, but as I gazed at them, they were transformed into ravens. They flapped blackly around the boat, calling to me, mocking me.

  “You should know the future only when it has come; to know it before is grief too soon given. All will come clear in the sunlightof the dawn.”

  The boat drove on through the breaking waves.

  44

  By late afternoon the French coast was in sight. The sunshine of Folkestone had vanished, and a heavy rain beat down on us from a black sky. Our ship had to wait while a troop ship maneuvered in the harbor, and so it took slow turns up and down the coast for an hour or more.

  When Millie had finally returned with a bottle of lemonade, she took one look at me and decided I was unwell. I think I was no more than tired, but she feared something worse, and dragged me into the ship’s galley, where once again she had no trouble in making everyone do as she bid.

  Before long I was sitting with my feet up in an officer’s berth, a glass of ice water in my hand. This was not the quiet, unobtrusive arrival I had planned, but I couldn’t stop Millie, and in any case, I was in something of a mess.

  By the time the boat docked I had recovered, and then there was no more waiting.

  We stepped onto Boulogne Quay, onto French soil. The whole journey had taken no more than twelve hours. As we made our way from the docks to the railway station, I wondered what was happening at home, in Brighton. My parents would have discovered that I had disappeared. It would be a day at least before my letter reached them—I had wanted to give myself that much of a head start in case they came looking for me—and even when they did get it, I didn’t think it would reassure them very much. I knew they would be sick with worry, and yet I felt detached, not just by the distance between us, but by my sense of purpose.

  That evening Millie and I were put into our detachment. There are a dozen of us in all, with a superintendent and a quartermaster above us, and a commandant above them. Our superintendent is called Sister McAndrew. She’s tough, keen on discipline. When I told her I’d forgotten my outdoor uniform, she made me buy one from the stores.

  She gave us each a booklet of rules detailing how we have to behave in France. I tried my best to look interested, though I can’t shift the feeling that none of this really applies to me. My disguise is a means to an end; I’m only here for one thing. Then I remembered that if I’m caught I won’t be able to find Tom, and I started acting like a nurse again.

  I saw Sister McAndrew looking at me hard, but I told myself it was only my imagination. I am Miriam Hibbert now.

  Millie and I have been assigned to No. 13 Stationary Hospital, but we will spend a couple of weeks learning general duties in the rest station at the railway station.

  It has been a baptism of fire.

  43

  They all have it.

  All of them.

  The trench-haunted look. An appalling weariness behind their eyes. Every single man who has passed through the rest station while I have been here, and there have been literally thousands of them, has exuded an awful aura of . . . of what?

  Is it horror? Or fear? Pain or fatigue or shock?

  It is all of these things. They don’t talk about the trenches specifically; you pick up hints and notions and hear stories and rumors, but none of them talk about it directly. Yet there is enough to form a terrible picture of what they have witnessed, what has been done to them, what they have done to other people. That’s what made me realize what it is about them.

  They have lost faith.

  They have lost their faith in what it is to be human. And so the smallest act on our part, not even of kindness, but of mere consideration, makes them so desperately grateful that it makes me want to cry.

  I haven’t seen much of Millie, although we’re in the same detachment. We’ve been so busy that we’ve had no more chance than to nod and smile as we’ve passed once or twice. When I do see her, though, I’m still struck by her irrepressible nature.

  As for me, I see death at every turn. I see these men like ghosts waiting to be born. Sometimes it’s just a feeling I get as I am tending to one of them, a sad realization that I’m wasting my efforts in patching him up, because in another fortnight he’ll be dead anyway. Sometimes I get a vision, horribly real, impossible to ignore. Last time it happened I nearly gave myself away. As I washed a soldier I suddenly saw corpse worms crawling across his face. When I blinked and looked again they were gone. I realized that it had been a premonition of his death in a field somewhere in Flanders.

  I began to shake, but managed to control myself, and no one suspected anything.

  In one way, that’s the worst part of it. I’ve had to control my reactions to my visions, for fear of exposing myself. I’m assaulted by them almost every waking hour, and it makes me sick to admit it, but I’ve got used to it. Not completely, of course, but to a very large degree, I witness these walking ghosts and don’t turn a hair.

  If I do, I may lose the chance of saving Thomas.

  42

  Although we’re VAD nurses in the rest station, and not regulars in one of the base hospitals, we’ve had more to do than mere domestic work.

  Each ambulance train has been specially converted to hold over three hundred men on stretchers, as well as maybe another fifty sitting on cases. At times, when trains have been rolling into the station every hour, we’ve been inundated.

  When men arrive here by ambulance train, they may have been washed and had their wounds cleaned by the nurses on board, if they weren’t too busy. The doctors decide what will happen to them next: home, hospital here or back to the front.

  Of course, most of them hope that their wound is bad enough to get them sent home.

  “Is it a Blighty one, Sister?”

  You hear those words all day, on every side of you. Blighty is a word picked up from the Indian soldiers; it’s derived from their word for British things. The men want a Blighty wound, to get themselves a Blighty ticket, one of the little forms like luggage labels that we tie onto the wounded who are being sent home. On the brown card ticket is a diagonal red cross, as well as all sorts of information. The man’s name, of course. His army number, regiment and the date and name of the hospital ship he’ll be taking home. On the other side is the diagnosis, details of any treatment to be given en route, his age, his religion, his length of service.

  And the sister will be gentle with them, or maybe joke with them, anything than say bluntly that they’re going back to the war.

  “A Blighty one? No!” she’ll say, laughing. “Not that scratch!”

  And when he complains, she’ll maybe add something.

  “Still, you never know, if you hang around here for three or four days, maybe the medical officer will have too many tickets to carry and we might persuade him to get rid of two on you!”

  Two tickets, of course. For they are never issued except on the assumption that when the man is better he will be coming back to France to fight again. He may be injured, but that doesn’t mean he’s left the army.

  In spite of myself and my intention to find Tom and leave France, I find myself being drawn in by the wounded men. It’s not possible to remain impervious to the anguish all around. Already in my short week I’ve seen many cases of shell-shock. In these cases, the diagnosis on the tickets will say one of two things: shell-shock, or neurasthenia. I can’t see the difference in the men themselves, and I believe it’s really down to the view of the medical officer who writes the ticket. In brackets after the diagnosis, there is one of two letters: S or W. S is for sick, as in from dysentery or pneumonia; W is for wounded, when they’ve been hurt in action. For the shell-shock cases, sometimes they
put S and sometimes W, as if they can’t decide if they’re sick or wounded. It may seem a small difference, but it will mean a lot to the men when they get better. For wounded men receive an army pension; sick men do not. It makes me wonder at how easily the doctors seem to make these decisions.

  41

  I haven’t managed to get any news of Tom’s battalion. The postcards he sent were as good as useless. The men are not allowed to say anything about where they are, in case the letters fall into the hands of spies and give away secret army information. But Tom knew he was heading for Flanders before he left, and I don’t have any reason to suppose otherwise. If his battalion is still there, then any wounded would almost certainly come to Boulogne, though there’s a small chance they might be taken by canal to St. Omer, and then Calais.

  I’ve tried to check the regimental badge of every wounded man I can. Sometimes it’s easy enough despite the mud, but sometimes . . . sometimes the uniforms are not just caked in mud, but ripped to ribbons as well. From the barbed wire in no-man’s-land. Then it’s very hard to see anything, maybe hard even to tell which bit of clothing it is you’re removing from your patient.

  I’ve found no badges from the Twentieth Royal Fusiliers. In a way that’s good news, for though it means no news of Tom, it also means that maybe his battalion are in reserve, and not fighting at the moment.

  I say I’ve had no news of Tom, and that’s true. But I’ve seen him.

  Last night I had the dream again, in which I see him being shot. It was just as real as before, but briefer, and chilling in its detail.

  The raven was there, cawing at me, mocking as usual. I saw the gun that will kill Tom. It was so clear I could feel the cold metal of the gun barrel heat up as the bullet spun down it.

  Tom was surrounded by huge rough spikes sticking out of the ground, up into the air. I couldn’t work out what they were, and everything went hazy.

  It’s Saturday morning, and I’m drinking my tea and trying to shake the vision of the dream from my head.

  It’s the first of July. Tom’s nineteenth birthday. It’s actually pretty quiet on the station today, and in the rest station, but all morning, rumors have been running around that something big is happening.

  Down the valley, in the Somme.

  Those who claim to know say the big push has come, and that very soon the wounded will start arriving in numbers hitherto undreamed of.

  So far, though, it’s just distant thunder.

  40

  The last few days have flashed past like the blurred view from a speeding train.

  How quiet it seemed on Saturday morning. It wasn’t long before that peace was shattered and we knew it had merely been the calm before the storm.

  The big push had finally come.

  Although many of the wounded are taken to the base hospitals at Rouen, directly down the line from the Somme valley, just as many of them come up to us via Abbeville or St. Pol.

  Millie and I were on the same shifts, and that day alone we must have processed a thousand men through our rest station. Next day was twice as bad, and there’s been no respite.

  It has been a continual onslaught, and it amazes me that we’ve coped, but we have. All day and night we take men in on their stretchers, direct from the train, clean them up, move them on. We load the trains with supplies for their next journey: clothes, cases of sterilized milk, butter, eggs, biscuits, meat extracts, cigarettes.

  Over and over and over again, until we are not even conscious of our actions anymore. There are men everywhere. Bodies asleep in every conceivable corner of the station. And we keep working until every last one has been seen, and the station is quieter again. Then the next train arrives.

  I’ve barely had a chance to think of Tom. Of course, at first I worried continually, and all the while expected to see him being carried into our suite. I’ve heard of stories like that. One of our nurses saw her own brother being brought in. He had died on the train. It might seem extraordinary, but with the thousands of men coming through here, sooner or later things like that are bound to happen. She was inconsolable, but next day she was back, working again. Her world had changed, but it changed nothing. She still has a job to do.

  After a while, I stopped thinking about Tom, though from force of habit I kept checking regimental badges, and I’ve seen none from the Twentieth.

  Then, yesterday, Tuesday . . .

  It was a horrible day, rain lashing down in angry bursts. The sky was brutally dark, and it was hard to believe it was July. We could hear thunderstorms inland. At least, we thought they were storms, but sometimes we’ve heard the sound of the guns from the front. The big guns.

  I handed a heavy bucket to Millie, and paused briefly to straighten my aching back, when the sister we were with crossed herself.

  She was looking through the window of our surgery onto the platform. A shadow passed by. A dispatch rider stuck his head into the room, as if looking for someone. When she saw him, Sister looked away hurriedly, and bent her head to cleaning the rough wooden table we used to operate on.

  He was gone almost as soon as he’d arrived, and Sister crossed herself again, shuddering.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong? Do you know that man?”

  “No,” she said. “And I don’t want to. Everyone knows who he is.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  She looked at me briefly, then started working again.

  “Hoodoo Jack. That’s what they call him. He’s a bad wind and you should stay away from him.”

  “But why? What’s he done?”

  “It’s not what he’s done, it’s what he says. Used to be a soldier. Then he started to know when his mates were going to get it. He was right once too often. Went crazy. He’s a jinx. That’s why they call him Hoodoo.”

  She crossed herself a third time, and would say no more.

  39

  I knew immediately that I had to talk to Hoodoo Jack, but two days passed before I got the chance. In that time there has been nothing but work. I am so tired. I looked in a mirror last night and hardly recognized myself. My face is sunken, my eyes are dull, my hair is lank, my skin grimy. My hands are sore from all the washing. Washing men, washing clothes, washing myself.

  I saw my first gas cases yesterday. The first since . . . that man . . . in the hospital. Simpson. I tried not to think about him, but it all came back to me. What a different world the Dyke Road hospital seems to me now. Even its makeshift nature was luxury compared with the primitive rooms we work in here. The floors are scrubbed, but they’re still bare. The walls are whitewashed, and we put flowers in jugs, and keep it all as tidy as we can, but there’s no forgetting that the rest station is just four primitive rooms in a French railway station.

  There were three gas cases. Two privates and a corporal from a Scottish regiment. Their skin was blistered and burnt by the gas, and one of the privates couldn’t see. None of them could talk, but they didn’t need to.

  I saw it all from them.

  The dark fumblings in the early dawn.

  “Gas!” someone called down the line.

  I could see their wretched attempts to pull their gas helmets on, and though they managed it in the end, they were too slow. The gas was borne in on a westerly wind, clinging to the ground, seeping into every crevice, unseen. The corporal got it worst because he stopped to help his two young soldiers.

  As he did so, he could hear his sergeant shouting at him.

  “Always put your own mask on first. You won’t be able to help anyone if you’re dead!”

  He heard his sergeant’s words, though his sergeant had been dead two weeks by then. But he couldn’t help it. He had to help the privates, they reminded him so much of his own boys at home. Thank God, at home.

  I didn’t see any more. I couldn’t move. I was useless for five minutes, till Millie hissed at me. I’d never seen her angry before.

  Afterward she told me. Sister McAndrew was staring at
me from the door. I forced myself back to work. I cut the men’s clothing, and prepared them for departure to No. 13 Stationary.

  And they were gone. Another three among the thousands I have seen. But I hope to God that poor corporal sees again.

  The others don’t seem to complain, so I dare not. I know I’m not really a nurse, but no one else knows my secret, not even Millie. I’ve always wanted to be a nurse, but I know now I was naïve. I had no idea what it would be like. I can’t do this.

  I can’t tell anyone, but I long to. To grab someone and scream at them that I’m not a nurse, that I don’t know what I’m doing, that I’m not strong enough to cope with all the horror around me. That I want to go home.

  But I cannot. I think of Tom, and I cannot.

  38

  Later on, after the gas cases, I went out with Millie. The canteen was full of noise and people, and though our legs were crying out for us to sit down and rest, we took a mug of tea out onto the platform.

  “Let’s walk,” Millie said.

  The station is massive, busy and noisy around the center of the platforms and the buildings, so we headed for the far end of the platform. It’s from that direction the trains roll in from the front, and yet, for the time being, everything was quiet.

  Something made me think of Edgar. I was angry with him; he’d said I was useless and weak. Then I felt guilty because I remembered that he’s gone.

  I thought of Tom. It’s almost overwhelming sometimes, and I don’t know which is harder to cope with. The fact that Edgar’s dead, or that Tom’s still alive, but could be killed any day.

  Millie and I had nearly reached the end of the platform. The rails ran off in front of us, away through Boulogne, away into the countryside, through towns and villages, through cuttings and clearings, until somewhere, the track must come to an end maybe just a mile or two behind the front lines. I could smell cordite, though I have never seen a gun fired in my life; I could hear the shouts of battle.