Softly Grow the Poppies (16 page)

Some of the farm wives stood by ready to give a hand were it needed, dropping blood-soaked dressings into a bucket, their expressions stoic. They had been brought up to deal with nothing more than a cut with a scythe, a burn perhaps, a child poorly with a fever and even though some of them had loved ones at this mysterious ‘front’ that was forever on everybody’s lips they did not falter. Rose was everywhere at once, taking orders since the doctors knew how reliable she was, giving them to the farm women, even the VADs who didn’t know where anything or any place was, and at the end of the day it was only Dolly’s forceful command and her own total exhaustion that made her lie down in her own bedroom at Beechworth.

‘What about Will?’ she said plaintively and was gently pushed down on the bed, covered with a blanket and told that there was a horde of women, servants from Beechworth and Summer Place, only too willing to look after the dear little chap.

‘But he might fret if I’m not there,’ for it was very evident that Charlie and Alice’s son had attached himself to Rose as he would a mother. The bond between them was a worry to Dolly. What would happen when his parents came home? She fully believed they would, she didn’t know exactly why but in her heart there was a small place that held the sweet girl whom they had all come to love, and a voice in it that whispered to her that she would not be taken like the Summers brothers. Like Alice she somehow felt that she would know if Captain Charlie, a great favourite of them all, was dead and fully expected his face to smile up at her from one of the stretchers that were now in some sort of order according to the gravity of their wounds.

‘Be quiet and do as you’re told for once,’ Dolly ordered and almost before Dolly left the room, Rose was asleep.

‘What have you done to your hand, Nurse?’ the doctor asked tiredly. Although he was beyond exhaustion as he bent over a bed in which a boy moaned in his sleep, he still noticed that the little ambulance driver who had just brought him in had her left hand wrapped up and his medical training kicked in, for it would not do to have a valuable member of the medical team with an injury.

‘Nothing, Doctor. A splinter from the frame of the hut where we sleep. Nurse Paget got it out then bandaged it to protect it from—’

But the doctor had turned away. A splinter! In the midst of the horrific wounds some of these men suffered, a splinter did not seem to matter much in the scheme of things! Alice left the stretcher that she had helped to carry in and headed for the hut where she and the other ambulance drivers slept, hoping for a bit of ‘shut-eye’ but the alarm bell rang out to tell them that the ambulances were needed again.

‘Where to?’ she asked O’Neill who was crossing herself as she ran for her ambulance. The Battle of the Somme still raged as it had done since July and the tented hospitals were overflowing with the wounded. Alice had lost count of how many times she had made this run to the dressing station to pick up the shattered flotsam that was once a group of fighting soldiers. From the hospital she would then run them to the railway station where they would be loaded like so many parcels to be shipped back to England.

‘Somebody said Delville Wood wherever that is. There’s been a big battle there. We’re to pick them up and take them directly to the trains. The hospitals are full, they say, and the wounded are just lying on the ground where they were brought in.’

Alice climbed into her ambulance though the damn splinter in her finger was throbbing so much she could barely hold the steering wheel. Some kind soldier, despite a terrible wound to his left arm, had cranked the engine for her, cheerfully smiling as he waved her away and she wondered for the thousandth time how these men, these suffering men, many of them clerks, tram drivers, coal men, milk men, servants, kept going against the odds which said that two-thirds of them would be dead before the week was out.

She and the stretcher-bearers packed the ambulance with wounded men. She had cigarettes in her pocket and having lit several for the men who were in her charge, for it seemed, despite their plight, a ‘fag’ was a great comfort to the wounded, she then turned in the direction of the railway station, following the line of other ambulances. The train was already at the platform and she reversed her vehicle adroitly so that the rear was facing the train. She knew all the terrible wounds by now, the worst being made by the evil serrated entrenching tools used by the Germans. There were shrapnel wounds which she knew tore off parts of the body and then the ones that were clean, one could almost call it the humane wound of a bullet.

The men were loaded, lying almost on top of one another in the wagons which she knew would be stinking, accepting the conditions in which these poor souls were to lie for there had not been time to clean them and the floors where the patient wounded lay were filthy with vomit, excrement and blood from their last passengers. It seemed no one cared and for a moment she felt a great wave of guilt sweep over her. She thought she had become so indifferent – no, that was not the right word, but it was close and for an instant she wanted to weep. For these brave and suffering men, for the people she loved at home who must suffer agonies at her disappearance, for her beloved husband who could not be found. Dear, sweet Jesus, forgive me.

It took all her strength to climb back into her ambulance and follow the one in front, which was driven by O’Neill. She knew that when she reached her destination she and the others were faced with the task of cleaning their ambulances and the thought demoralised her. Her hand, her whole arm hurt and if she didn’t get some sleep soon she would not be able to get over to the enemy prisoner-of-war camp where she meant to find a way in to see if . . . if . . .

The ambulance behind her nearly ran into her as the vehicle she drove began to swerve from side to side, finally finishing up against the stump of a tree. Ewing, who was now in Alice’s detachment cursed like a trooper, for they had all learned the language with which the men addressed everybody and everything in this bloody war: lice, rats as big as cats, mud and each other.

Opening Alice’s ambulance door she found the driver slumped over the steering wheel. There were shouts and much honking of horns as impatient drivers piled up behind Ewing’s ambulance, from soldiers doing their best to get to the front lines, or from them, all in a hurry but Ewing took no notice. From ahead O’Neill ran from her vehicle to see what the hold-up was, leaving her engine running as it was hard to crank it up again.

‘What’s wrong?’ she gasped. ‘We are causing an awful hold-up here, Ewing. What’s wrong with Barnes?’

‘I don’t know. She’s passed out. You’ll have to get a couple of blokes to run her ambulance out of the way and I’ll take Barnes in my ambulance. Can you get some help?’

Two soldiers on their way to the trenches were only too pleased to help and within minutes they had the semi-conscious young woman into Ewing’s ambulance, then shouldered Alice’s off the road. The soldiers who were on their way to the line cheered; the incident had been a welcome break in their weary, fear-filled lives.

The little convoy was soon on its way and when they arrived two stretcher-bearers, seeing the two ambulance drivers struggling to get another from her ambulance, ran to help.

‘What’s wrong with Barnes?’ Nurse Paget asked abruptly, bustling up in what Dolly would have called a ‘paddy’. She had wounded men pouring into the hospital and an ambulance driver who was fainting was very annoying. Only a few days ago she had taken a splinter from the girl’s finger, which was nothing compared to the terrible wounds of the men under her care.

‘Don’t know, Nurse, but she’ll have to be—’

‘What? She’ll have to be what?’

‘I don’t know but . . .’

The nurse tutted irritably then her mind dwelled on the fact that this girl, Barnes, for she was no more than a girl, was the hardest working of the lot of them, and they all worked until they were nearly dead on their feet.

‘Very well, leave her there for the moment and I’ll see to her as soon as I’ve got a minute. Sit her on that box there and get back to your quarters. See if you can get some sleep.’

Two hours later a wounded man who lay on the ground at the feet of the young woman heard her moaning. No one took any notice for moaning was a common sound round here but she was a funny colour, he thought, who was himself the colour of putty.

‘Nurse . . . Nurse . . .’ He tried to shout but his energy was expended on trying to breathe, never mind shout. When, in a lull, which was very rare, a VAD found her she was beginning to ramble and then, with a gasp that he thought might be her last, she fell off the box and on to another injured man who screamed since she was heavy on the wound he had sustained only an hour ago.

The VAD put her hand on Alice’s forehead and drew it back as though the ambulance driver’s flesh was burning hers. She ran to fetch another VAD and together they lifted the driver they all thought of as Barnes and took her to another room, one where the exhausted nursing staff could rest for a moment. The doctor was called. When the bandage was unwrapped those who were present gasped in dismay, for the driver had what the wounded themselves feared. What was picked up on the battlefields. The battlefields that had once been the French farmers’ pride and joy and which they had carefully spread with manure and under which now lay the rotting dead of two years of war. The tiny splinter when removed had left an open sore that had festered and was pretty close to becoming gangrenous.

‘This woman may lose her hand, or even her arm,’ the doctor said sadly. ‘We all know what this is, don’t we? Sepsis, which could turn gangrenous. Treat her with hypochlorous acid. You know the amount, Nurse. I can do nothing for her here. She must be sent home. Put her on a hospital ship as soon as you can.’ He looked down at the moaning, restless woman stretched out before him. In his mind was the horrific war that was wounding and killing men in their thousands, hundreds of thousands, and he did his job in a kind of numbness, for it was the only way he could manage to keep his sanity, but to see a woman suffering the same fate as the soldiers was almost too much for him. His own wife and children were safe at home, thank God. This brave woman, it was said, spent all her spare time, which wasn’t much, searching for her husband who was missing and must surely be dead.

Shaking his head he turned away, going back to the nightmare world that was his, leaving Alice Summers to the care of the nurses.

‘There’s a woman ter see yer, Miss Rose. A lady, I should say. She ses it’s important. Shall I send ’er in? She’s come in a chauffeur-driven motor car!’ Obviously impressed since motor cars were not often to be seen out of Liverpool, for the petrol to run them was scarce as the war drew on.

Tom Gibson, who would have gone to do his bit at the beginning had his age not been against him, stood in the doorway of the tiny room, once a butler’s pantry, where Miss Rose did the administration work that had fallen on her shoulders though she would much rather be on the wards at Summer Place or with Will and the dogs as they romped about the garden. Taking a walk through the wooded area at the back of the gardens on this lovely autumn day with the boy tumbling about in the fallen leaves, the dogs, four of them now, counting Harry’s retriever, hopefully bringing the toddler a stick to throw, which he did but not very far for he was barely eighteen months old. Ginger and Spice raced round and round and a little rough-haired dog who had shown up at the back door about six months ago did the same. They called the stray Tommy and he seemed particularly attached to the men on the wards as though he sensed they needed him and the nurses had given up chasing him away. No one knew where he came from but he would lie with his nose on his paws, his eyes flickering from bed to bed and when an arm dropped he would sneak over and lick the hand devotedly and the hand would weakly caress his fur. He was bathed regularly which he accepted and everybody loved him, especially Will. He slept beside the boy’s bed and seemed to have the gift of knowing exactly where and when he was needed most.

Rose sighed and looked up at Tom. Tom and Nessie had moved back to Beechworth and their own little cottage beside the vegetable garden when the place had been taken over and Mrs Philips, cook to the Summers family, had her kitchen to herself again with Mary to help her in feeding the wounded men and the staff, the doctors and nurses and everybody connected with the hospital.

‘Did she give a name, Tom?’

‘Mrs Bentley, Miss Rose.’

Bentley! Bentley! Now why did that name ring a bell?

‘You’d best show her in then, Tom.’

The lady who entered Rose’s small domain was in her thirties, small, pretty and very elegant. She doesn’t buy her clothes in Old Swan, Rose thought as she rose to her feet.

‘Good morning, I believe your name is Mrs Bentley. I am Rose Beechworth and this is my home which has been turned into a sort of convalescent home for officers. May I ask . . . oh, please do sit down and may I offer you some refreshments.’

‘Thank you, Miss Beechworth. A cup of tea would be nice though I hate to bother you when you are so busy, but I think I might have some news – good news, I hasten to add, that might interest you. My husband, Major James Bentley, is in the 19th Battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment and he said in his letter that you . . . that your friend, Alice Summers, is married to one of the Summers brothers.’

There was a knock at the door and a tray, carried by Dolly who was eager to know what this lady had to say to Miss Rose, was set on Rose’s desk. Silver, since the motor car at the door was evidently owned by a person of importance. A teapot, sugar basin and milk jug set on a lace tray cloth with the best porcelain cups and saucers. A small silver tea strainer, and a plate on which lemon slices were delicately arranged.

Rose’s heart was beginning to leap about in her chest and she wished Dolly would leave but she was bobbing and smiling in the evident belief that Mrs Bentley was about to say something that Dolly felt she was entitled hear.

‘Thank you, Dolly, that will be all,’ Rose said firmly and as Dolly sidled out, highly offended, she turned to Mrs Bentley, asking her politely whether she took milk and sugar, or lemon but suddenly she could take it no longer.