‘Ben, please – stay – bring a mug – there’s enough for two.’
‘I can’t drink tea with you, Sister – not in here.’ He was shocked.
‘Please,’ and we both heard the ragged edge to my voice. I swallowed, ‘Sister’s busy in “Heads” – she won’t be back. Sit down, Ben.’ Suddenly I could not bear to be alone.
He fetched an enamel mug and poured the tea for both of us. I said, ‘Ben, he trusted us – and we did that to him.’
‘It were the only thing to do – he’d had enough, more than enough – you know that, Sister.’ Yes, I knew that, but I felt my face tighten. ‘Sister – do you fancy a cigarette? I’ve got some in me locker – it might help you like…’
‘No, thank you – I don’t smoke.’
‘I didn’t either, afore the war – me old dad leathered me for it when I were a lad so I kept off it after that.’
‘Where do your parents live, Ben?’
He said woodenly, ‘There’s neither of them living now, Sister.’
‘I’m sorry.’ My voice broke.
He went on steadily, ‘It’s not surprising – I were a late babby, see – my old dad were well over fifty when I were born, and he died just after I started as a cleaner on railway. Me mam – me mam died not long afore we went over at Ypres in the summer. She were took ill, and Captain Girvan got me home on leave, but it were too late. I went to funeral, though, I were glad of that. There’s just me two sisters now, they’re a sight older ’an me but we always got on all right. They’re both married to decent blokes and got families of their own – nice youngsters they are – I’m fond of childer.’
‘Then you must marry too, Ben – when the war is over.’
He looked back at me steadily. ‘Aye, happen – but like Ginger said – I’m choosy.’
I could think of no reply and we both sat on in silence. My mind went back to Lennie’s terrified face and I felt my breath begin to quicken again. I had said: ‘When the war is over’, but the war would never be over. I saw myself, years ahead, bent and grey – after a lifetime of deathbeds. I whispered hopelessly, ‘Ben, I don’t think I can go on – I can’t stand any more.’
His shadow loomed over me as he leant forward. ‘Of course you can – you’re a bit upset now, it’s only natural – but you’ll be all right tomorrow, you see.’
I shook my head. ‘No – I can’t take any more, I just want to go away and –’
‘Don’t be so daft, lass – you’re not type as runs away, not while you’re still needed. You’re like your brother – he looked like a thin mardy lad at first, but he’s got a backbone o’ steel, and so have you.’ The blue-grey eyes held mine across the table, until at last I straightened my back, took out my pen and began to indent for a shroud.
The following evening I walked into an almost empty ward. Only the men with fractured femurs remained, suspended gloomily from their Balkan beams. The powers-that-be had finally relented and the Blighty orders had come through.
Over the next few days the letters of thanks arrived from my former patients: Lofty was in Oswestry and Ginger in Newcastle, and Ben Holden wrote from the 2nd Western at Manchester. I also received an awkwardly written, misspelt letter from Lennie’s mother – she said she was glad to hear he had passed away so peacefully.
Chapter Twelve
After Christmas the weather became colder still, and then I went down with a flu-like fever and had to be warded in Sick Sisters. I was just creeping about again when Robbie arrived on a twenty-four-hour pass. I began to cry as soon as he came into the ward to see me, and I scarcely stopped all day – I felt so weak and tired. Sister said if I wrapped up well I could go out with him, and he half carried me out to the car he had hired and drove me down the straight white road to the sea. We sat in the lounge of the best hotel in Paris-Plage and he talked to me while I wept on his shoulder. After tea he drove me back to the hospital and I clung to him hopelessly when the time came to say goodbye. That evening I cried and cried until my eyes were so swollen that I could scarcely see out of them; the next morning I felt bitterly ashamed of myself for spoiling Robbie’s precious leave. I wrote a long letter of apology and self-recrimination, and he replied at once – ‘Don’t be a silly donkey, Big Sis – that’s what brothers are for. Besides, if you hadn’t been ill I wouldn’t have seen so much of you – now keep your pecker up and don’t work so hard.’
When I was passed fit again Matron put me on days in a light surgical ward, where the work was much easier. When I came off duty I slept a lot in our small stuffy hut and Aylmer kept the stove going and fed me with biscuits and cocoa. We did not talk much, but we were comfortable with each other and I began to feel stronger again.
In February I had a letter from Innes, to say she had been transferred to No. 11 General at Camiers – if she walked down to Étaples one day perhaps we could see each other? I spoke to Sister and we eventually agreed on an afternoon. I walked out along the Camiers road to meet Innes: she looked thinner, and her face was very pale, but her smile was the same as ever. We decided to catch the tram to Paris-Plage and stroll beside the sea and then have tea in the Blue Cat.
As the tram trundled along beside the estuary, Innes told me the news of Rouen after I had left: Sister Jennings had gone up to a CCS, so had Captain Bevan – ‘Not the same one,’ Innes added hastily, her face rather pink, and I smiled to myself at the memory of flirtatious Sister Jennings. Then I told her about Hugh and she whispered, ‘I’m so sorry, Girvan – so very sorry.’
We walked by the sea and drank coffee and ate chocolate cakes together, but she never referred to the raid on St Omer, so I did not ask her about it. When we got off the tram at Étaples I said I would walk part of the way up the road to Camiers with her. It was dusk by now and her face was in shadow as she told me, her voice intense, ‘I can only keep going now by planning what I shall do when the war is over – I think of it in part of my brain all the time, whatever I’m doing. My old college have offered me a junior fellowship and I cling to that like a life raft; I’m going to study the work of poets who wrote of green, living things, and who died long ago, peacefully in their beds. And I shall train my mind never, ever to think of the war again. You must turn back now, Girvan – you’ve come more than halfway.’
As I walked back alone in the darkness I thought of what Innes had said. I almost envied her, for I knew I would never be able to have my mind under such control. But then, it was different for Innes – she had never lost a sweetheart, or a brother.
We managed to arrange a second afternoon together, early in March. By then the camp was heavy with rumours that the Germans were planning an attack in the spring. Men who should have gone back to Blighty were sent up the hill to the convalescent camp, miserable and resentful. We in the hospitals clung to our bleak corner of France and waited.
It was a Thursday, the third Thursday in March. I was sitting over an enamel bowl of greasy soup when I realised that the VAD on my right was talking in a quick, urgent voice. I began to listen – the rumour had come that the German attack had been launched. I thought of Robbie and closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again I pushed the bowl away untouched; I felt sick. By that evening we knew that the rumour was true – and that our line had broken before them. Sister and I were hastily erecting extra beds and making them up, even as the bugles sounded for the first convoys.
Day followed frantic day as the ward became foul with the smell of blood and pus and human excrement. There was no time now to be frightened of what lay beneath the filthy blood-soaked bandages, there was only time to work – to work harder and faster than I had ever done before, even in the worst days of the Somme. And all around us was the scent of fear – our armies were being pushed back.
Some men sobbed aloud as they heard of the loss of the places we had fought so hard to gain. Others tried desperately to explain, to excuse. ‘There were so many of them, Sister, and only a few of us – what could we do? We didn’t have a chance,
we didn’t have a chance.’ All those who were fit to travel, and many who were not, were evacuated, while the others went straight to the cemetery and their beds were filled again by grey-faced, unshaven men.
As Étaples village teemed with refugees, and yet more wounded flooded in, in lorries, cattle trucks and anything that could carry them, the litany of losses lengthened: Peronne, Bapaume, Beaumont-Hamel and Albert. The Somme battlefield which we had fought so desperately to gain in 1916 had fallen to the enemy. Paris itself was being shelled, and early in April we heard the dread news that the Germans were entering Amiens.
Men from the convalescent camp, many still wearing their bandages, went limping off back to the front, their faces masks of despair. And we too felt despair as, for the first time, we began to fear that we might lose; that all those terrible four years of fighting, all those lost and broken lives, might have been for nothing. The exhausted sisters fleeing back from the bombed CCSs, with tales of patients barely evacuated as the Germans came over the next field, confirmed our worst fears – we were on the run, and we would be trapped in our narrow strip of land, caught between the advancing enemy and the sea. I worked on, waiting each day, heart in mouth, for those short notes which told me Robbie was still alive and holding the line further north. Somehow, I managed to scribble even briefer replies.
One evening as I came off duty between convoys a scrawled note was delivered to me. It was very short:
Dear Helena,
My YMCA team has been evacuated to Étaples, I can’t get away myself but do come over if you can. I’ve seen your brother. Isn’t it all too exciting?
Yours,
Juno.
I read again the flamboyant: ‘Isn’t it all too exciting?’ – how typical of Juno – and how typical too that she had not said which of my brothers she had seen. I put on my coat and began to fight my way through the melee the camp had become.
When I arrived at the YMCA hut, Juno was behind the counter, slapping endless mugs of tea down in front of huddled, dispirited men. I stood watching them as they queued – men with thin pasty faces and bowed legs, with hollow chests and sloping backs – men who would probably never have been accepted for service earlier in the war, and certainly never sent up to the front line. How could men like this stem the German tide? As I watched them, defeat took hold of my heart.
Juno saw me and signalled; she spoke over her shoulder and another pair of hands took her place at the urn. She began to push her way through the crowd, carrying two mugs of tea. ‘Over here, Helena.’ She tugged the cloth from her belt, gave the smeared table a perfunctory swipe with it and dropped heavily into a chair. ‘Good timing – I was just about due for my fifteen- minute break. How goes the nursing, Helena? God, I never thought, when we signed on for three months at the East London, that you’d still be at it after all this time. Lucky I didn’t lay any bets on the end of this war – it would’ve been money down the drain.’ She lit a cigarette and drew in a lungful of smoke. ‘That’s better – it’s against the rules, of course – but I’d like to see any of that lot stop me. By the way, I saw Muirkirk last week.’
‘Guy – so it was Guy you saw.’
‘Yes – he was going back up the line with the First Battalion. Said he’d had enough of Headquarters – so he’s wangled a transfer. Good luck to him.’
So Guy was back at the front. As I picked up my mug, I realized I was almost glad. Guy had lost his self-respect; now he had the chance to regain it. Juno went on, ‘I saw Pansy in London a couple of months ago – she’s preggers again. Each to their own form of war work, I suppose.’ She threw back her head with her typical braying laughter and I felt my stiff muscles relax as I smiled back. Juno leant forward. ‘I must say, I got pretty fed up before I signed on for this unit – kicking my heels about in London for a couple of months after Mama’s little outfit got deported. You know, I was walking across Piccadilly one day and I noticed three Jocks on leave, arm in arm – then a couple of tarts picked up two of them, one right after the other, and I saw the third Jock left all on his own and looking pretty wistful and I said to myself, Juno, old girl, you’d better take the last one home yourself – at least you’d be doing something for the war effort.’
I looked at her in horror and asked weakly, ‘You didn’t, did you?’
There was a pause as Juno took another long pull at her cigarette, then she winked at me. ‘No – one of the regulars got there first, so I toddled off to the club and started ringing up everybody I knew with any pull at the YMCA.’ She added, ‘I wouldn’t be much good as a tart anyway – I don’t really like that sort of thing.’ I wondered how on earth she knew, but it was better not to ask – being Juno she would probably tell me, at the top of her loud voice in this crowded canteen. She looked me up and down and said kindly, ‘Hellie, you do look a mess – your mother would have a fit if she could see you now.’ Then she grinned again. ‘Funny, we neither of us take after our respective mamas, do we? And he was quite a well-set-up Jock, too!’ And suddenly I began to laugh, and Juno laughed with me as she stubbed out her cigarette and lit up another one. Then she glanced over my shoulder. ‘Somebody’s trying to attract your attention, Hellie – that stocky sergeant-major over there.’ I swung round – it took me a moment to distinguish the man she meant amid the milling khaki throng – then I recognized him. It was Ben Holden. I smiled and he began to push his way through to us; I noticed he still had a trace of a limp.
He stopped beside the table, rather red in the face. ‘I don’t like to intrude, Sister, but I thought…’
‘Sit down, Sergeant,’ Juno interrupted, ‘we’re all democrats in this hut – here, have a cigarette.’
Ben sat stiffly down on the third chair. ‘Thank you, miss.’
I asked, ‘Ben – why are you back in France? Surely your arm’s not right yet, and you’re still limping.’
He shrugged. ‘They’ll do. I walked well enough for Medical Board – and I can fire me rifle.’
And then I understood. ‘They’re not sending you up to the front again – not so soon?’
His blue-grey eyes looked steadily back into mine, and I saw that his cheekbones still showed gaunt in his face as he said, simply, ‘Someone’s got to go.’
I sat desolated – whatever was the point of nursing men back to health, if they were only to be sent, still limping, back up into that maelstrom again? Juno was speaking: ‘They say our men are on the run, Sergeant.’ Ben Holden brought his fist down hard on the greasy table top. ‘I’m not running! And I tell you, I’ll keep the swine back even if I have to strangle them with me bare hands.’
Juno’s eyes shone. ‘That’s the spirit, Sergeant-Major!’ She lowered her voice a fraction. ‘I got hold of a rifle, as soon as I came out this time – I’m keeping it under my mattress. I can shoot as well as any man – if they break through to here I’ll give the blighters something to remember me by.’ She and Ben Holden leant towards each other, bodies tense and eyes locked.
Then he nodded to her and turned slowly to me. ‘Don’t you worry, Sister, we’ll keep you safe – we’ll hold ’em back somehow – you’ll see.’ He stood up abruptly. ‘I’d better collect me draft together. Good evening.’ He ducked his head to us and was gone before I had even had time to wish him luck.
Juno looked after him. ‘That’s the right sort of man – as long as we’ve got chaps like him in our army we can’t lose.’ She ground out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. ‘I’d better be off – so long, Helena.’
As I walked back to the hospital, lorries and ammunition wagons were rumbling after each other along the road in a continuous stream; a loaded train rattled and clanked its way up to the front and I saw the distant flash of the guns against the night sky. My ears were filled with the clamour of war. And yet my sense of defeat had lessened: between them Juno and Ben Holden had heartened me and given me strength – we would hold out, we must. And back in the mess Tilney told me that Amiens had not fallen after all; so that vital
city, at least, was still in our hands.
But the other news from the front got steadily worse, and in London the age of military service was raised to fifty – fifty! German aeroplanes were coming nightly to the coast now, and one evening the lights in the mess went out and we heard heavy crashes nearby. A veiled shape appeared in the doorway and ordered us to scatter – in Matron’s voice. Aylmer seized my hand and we ran back to our hut. I sat on the bed shaking while Aylmer prayed in a low calm voice, and the flashes of the exploding bombs lit up the small window.
Next day we heard that Étaples village had been bombed and the bridge over the Canche destroyed: for a morning no trains ran on the main line through the camp, then the engineers completed their work, and the men and shells began to pass by once more.
Then the Germans attacked again, the Portuguese gave way and the enemy broke through in a second place, further north, near Neuve Chapelle. We looked at each other with fear in our eyes, then hurried to the wards where the wounded were filling the beds and overflowing into the centre aisles. On Thursday 11 April, just as we felt we could cope no longer, Sir Douglas Haig’s Special Order of the Day was pinned up on the mess notice board – addressed to all ranks of the British Army in France and Flanders – addressed to us. I stood and read it through until the last paragraph:
There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.
And even as I read it I knew it was true. We had no choice. We must fight on to the end, whatever that end might be.
A couple of days later the rumour in the mess at lunchtime was that Ypres had been taken; I felt sick with fear until Mac came flying in, her voice high-pitched with excitement. ‘The Americans have arrived – I’ve just seen them, hundreds of them, marching up the road to Camiers. They’ve come, they’ve come!’ And as we looked at her she burst into tears. Tilney jumped up and took her arm and pushed her into a seat, and I heard Aylmer’s low voice beside me: ‘Thanks be to God, thanks be to God.’