Softly Grow the Poppies (17 page)

‘Please, Mrs Bentley, what is it? Is it Harry? He is in the same regiment and I cannot bear the—’

‘No, no, my dear.’ Mrs Bentley smiled kindly. ‘As far as I know Harry is . . . well, how can any of us know? It is his brother, Charlie.’

Rose sat down heavily and her heart – how foolish the heart was, leaping and plunging and yet really the organ never moved; she was going mad . . .
was she going mad
? She could hear a blackbird singing and when she turned to the window it hopped across the lawn, then flew over the wall, ready to land on the other side with its raised and fanned tail. A thrush answered in its musical notes, three times as though to outdo the blackbird. One of the dogs was barking in the back, longing to be let out of the stable, and from upstairs came the baby voice of Will demanding to see ‘Wose’. Jossy, aged fifteen and who had replaced the gardeners was in the garden, doing what he hoped would be the last of the lawn mowing while Mrs Bentley’s chauffeur leaned on the bonnet of the motor car watching him. He was an elderly man and, she supposed, like all the men who were too old for the trenches, he had taken over from a younger man.

‘Please, Mrs Bentley, please . . .’ Rose croaked.

‘I have had a letter from Jimmy, my husband.’

‘Oh, dear sweet Lord . . .’

‘He is a prisoner of war in a camp. A camp for officers somewhere in the north-east of France. Six months now . . .’ A spasm of pain crossed her face and Rose wanted to get up and stroke her hand but she didn’t think it would be welcome. ‘He met Charlie.’

Rose’s face lit up like the first evening star on a winter night: ‘Charlie, thank God, oh thank the dear God,’ then it fell again.

Mrs Bentley stood up as though she would put a comforting arm about her but she sat down again and continued. ‘But there is more, my dear. Charlie has been seriously injured – his head. Oh, he is well now but he has lost his past, his memory. Jimmy told me he has informed the authorities so Mrs Summers should hear very soon that her husband is alive but a prisoner of war. When you tell her she will be overjoyed, as I was when . . . I’m sorry . . .’

For Rose’s face had fallen into lines of despair. What an irony, was the thought uppermost in Rose’s mind, going round like a mouse on a wheel. Charlie is alive and has been found and we don’t know where Alice is to tell her. Somewhere in France which was a heaving mass of struggling humanity where it seemed to her no one was in charge. Some of the soldiers who were recovering in this very hospital and who had been in the thick of it had told her. At the beginning of the year the Germans had been at the zenith of their fortune and the Allies almost on their knees. They, with the French, had done their best to defend Verdun, a citadel town surrounded by impregnable forces, a bulwark, a bastion that the French were determined to defend. The dreaded flamethrowers had been used to incinerate them, the massive
Minenwerfers
that could toss huge bombs the size of oil-drums, and 1,200 guns ranged across the narrow front from where the attack came. The casualties were horrendous, the roads almost impassable with troops marching towards the battle and others marching in the other direction. Refugees, ambulances, lost children and mothers frantically searching for them. It had been ‘bloody hell on wheels’ the soldier had told her and though he had lost both his legs he felt himself lucky to be out of it. And, he muttered in disbelief to Rose, who sat by his bed and held his hand, much to Staff Nurse Long’s annoyance, men were still volunteering.

‘They don’t know what the bloody ’ell they’re lettin’ themselves in for, poor sods. They should stay at ’ome with their family. Bugger me if I don’t think them conchies were right after all. Never mind puttin’ them in prison, they should pin a bloody medal on them.’

When Rose had seen Mrs Bentley out she scurried to the kitchen where Dolly and the others were waiting with barely concealed impatience to hear from her who the lady had been and what she had to say.

Rose swept Dolly into her arms and, laying her forehead on Dolly’s shoulder, began to weep.

‘Not . . . not Captain Harry, my lass, tell me it’s not Captain Harry.’

‘No, Dolly, not Captain Harry. They’d hardly send a lady in an expensive motor car to tell me Harry was . . . was . . .’ She couldn’t even bring herself to speak the word. ‘It’s Captain Charlie. He’s alive, Dolly. He’s in a prisoner-of-war camp in France and that lady’s husband, a major, who’s also a prisoner, recognised him. But Charlie has been wounded in the head and he has no memory. Didn’t even know who he was until Major Bentley came across him. The major told him all he knew about himself, Charlie, I mean; he told him about the day at Lime Street station where Lady wouldn’t go on the train and Sparky and everything he knew . . .’

‘Dear sweet God. Oh, Lord above, thanks be to God. Now Miss Alice – Mrs Summers – can come home and see her babby and the little lad can meet—Why, what’s ter do, Miss Rose, are you not glad that . . .’

Dolly reached out and took Rose’s hands between hers, doing her best to peer into Rose’s face, for her young mistress had hung her head in despair.

‘Can you not see, Dolly? We have found Captain Charlie but we have lost Alice. We don’t know where she is over there. You know that friend of Harry’s tried to discover her, and Harry even saw her once but she will not have joined under her own name and from what the soldiers here say, it is total chaos on the battlefields. She might even be . . . be . . .’

‘Nay, I’ll not have it, never.’ Dolly reared up and her face was fierce with her fury. ‘The good God wouldn’t let a lovely, good-hearted girl like our Alice be taken, not when her husband’s just been found. I’ll not have it, d’you hear, so if you won’t do it, I will.’

‘What, Dolly?’ Rose sniffed disconsolately; though she was a strong and determined young woman – what she had done these last months proved that – for once she was at a loss.

‘Telephone that there friend of Captain Harry’s an’ ask him to make some enquiries. He must know folk in high places who can go through records an’ find out where Captain Charlie is. Ask about this ’ere Major Bentley. They must know what camp he’s in and if they can tell you Captain Charlie will be there. You could write to the lad, when they’ve found him an’ tell him all about his life, his wife, his own little lad and it might bring the poor young man to find himself again. Now stop that worritin’ and write that letter.’

S
he lay on the narrow cot that was her bed. It was covered with a thin, lumpy mattress and a worn sheet. Spread over her and the strange hospital nightdress she unaccountably wore, was a flimsy blanket. On top of that someone had laid her long overcoat. In the next cot O’Neill breathed the deep exhausted sleep into which they all tumbled every chance they had, but Alice’s brain was straining to make sense of what had happened to her and how she had come to be lying here in a hospital gown, like the ones the wounded men wore.

Her hand gave a vicious twinge and when she attempted to alleviate the pain by moving it she found it was bound in a dressing. Suddenly she remembered the splinter Staff Nurse had removed and marvelled that it could hurt so much. It had only been a splinter after all. Why was she dressed like a patient, for God’s sake, tucked up in her bed with O’Neill snoring her head off beside her when she knew there had been a huge battle and every ambulance driver had been needed to bring the wounded to the hospital? Was it over, the ‘big push’ everyone had waited for? And why . . . where . . . Dear Lord, was she going mad or . . .

Her mind travelled back over the months since she had landed in this pit of hell. How many men had she witnessed, dragged from the mud, the slime, the putrid shell-holes, the blood-soaked trenches, most of them by their own mates, for these men had formed a bond with one another that only they could understand. No-man’s-land, and that was what it was, a land on which man could not survive without the comradeship of those who floundered in it with them. Rusty barbed wire, machine-gun fire, ‘whizz-bangs’ and the terrible crescendo of the shelling that went on for hours and drove men mad. The soldiers were thrown against these fiendish challenges repeatedly and repeatedly she and the other ambulance drivers carried their mutilated bodies back to the hospitals or the hospital trains, the hospitals completely inadequate though they did their best to put the poor battered bodies back together. Through the summer of 1915 she had carried the wounded, at first so horrified by what she saw she felt she could not carry on, but she had.

At the outset she had known that she could not maintain the engine of the overworked ambulance, for despite her protestations to the sergeant at the Red Cross station in London, she really knew very little about them. She just could not understand the intricacies of the tangle under the bonnet, but she had learned and had managed it. She, who had never washed a cup and saucer in her life, had forced herself to scrub the inside of her ambulance of the muck, the blood and other nasty substances left by the wounded men and her hands were a testament to it. The first time the whistle had shrilled out telling them they were needed she had trembled so violently she could not button her overcoat and was forced to accept the cheerful help of the stretcher-bearer to crank the starting handle of the vehicle. Her terror had surely been visible to all the others until she realised they were all afraid and the knowledge had strengthened her. The smell of the wounded men, the sounds, the screams, the whimpers of pain, the whispers begging ‘Mam’ to fetch them home, the moans, haunted her. They cursed her when she almost dropped her end of the stretcher, jarring their poor tortured bodies. They cursed her in the dialects from the places they had left, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cornwall, Scotland, London Cockney, Liverpool, reducing her to scalding tears but she carried on, turning her eyes from the white of bones glinting through the red of torn flesh, from blood, vomit, faeces, she dealt with them all. She had learned to let the clutch out gently on her overworked vehicle so that it would not jump forward and jostle them. She had carried cigarettes which she lit and placed tenderly between lips bitten and bloody and she survived and lived only for the hours she could snatch to search for Charlie, or his body; for some exhausted soldier who might have known him among the tens of thousands who had fought where he had.

She dozed a little and was startled to find Nurse Heron bending over her.

‘I’ve come to look at your hand, Barnes. It will need re-dressing. Can you sit up?’

‘Of course I can, Nurse,’ she said, struggling and failing to raise herself into a sitting position. She was amazed to find she had not the strength to do as Nurse Heron asked her.

‘Never mind, Barnes, if you’ll lift your arm from under the blanket I think I can manage. I’m sorry to hurt you,’ as Alice winced, ‘but it must be looked at again.’

With much difficulty she unwrapped the bandage and with much difficulty Alice did her best not pull away from her. Her hand and arm, even her shoulder were alive with pain and when the nurse finally had it revealed she frowned.

‘This is not good, Barnes. I think the doctor had better have a look once more. It is . . . well . . . well, let us say it is in a bit of a mess and you are no use to us if you cannot use it. You cannot possibly drive an ambulance.’

With her good hand Alice leaned to grasp the nurse’s arm. ‘Please, Nurse, can you not douse it with Eusol? Wrap it in lint and then a bandage. I could wear a glove to protect it. Please . . . please . . .’ Her voice was weak and hoarse and the nurse, known for her steadfast obligation to duty, became curt.

‘Barnes, you cannot even sit up in bed, let alone drive an ambulance. Now lie still and I’ll send the doctor to you as soon as he has a moment. Do as you’re told, Barnes,’ she continued sternly, for Alice was struggling not only to sit up but to get out of bed. ‘You will wake O’Neill. She has been on duty for fourteen hours and needs her sleep.’

‘There you are, you see. All the ambulance drivers are badly needed and I am an ambulance driver. I can’t loll about here in bed while the other girls do my work. Just wrap it up, for God’s sake and let me—’

‘Barnes, remember to whom you speak. You are not fit for duty and the doctor will confirm it, I’m sure. Now lie back and I’ll send a cup of tea for you.’

‘I don’t want a bloody cup of tea, Staff—’

‘Remember to whom you speak, Barnes,’ Nurse Heron repeated, ‘and do as you are told.’

The doctor arrived just as Alice had decided to get out of bed and sod the lot of them. She was driven to resort to the coarse language the men used in their agony but as she did her best to sit up a masculine hand pushed her back.

‘Staff tells me you are being obstinate, Barnes, and want to get back to the men. Has it occurred to you that you are a danger to men already weak with their wounds? You have picked up something from
them
, probably from the soil, which has poisoned what is a simple splinter wound and having left it to fester is now beginning to poison you. That hand of yours is swollen and red with inflammation and I know you are in great pain. You have been out here for how long?’

‘Almost eighteen months, Doctor,’ Nurse Paget said, looking sternly at Alice.

‘Eighteen months. Then it’s time you had some home leave anyway. And while you are there your hand will be—’

Alice clutched at the doctor’s arm with a feverish desperation. She was starting to feel worse than ever but she would recover from this, she knew she would, and if they sent her home, which it seemed the doctor was threatening to do, she could not continue her search for Charlie.

‘No, please, Doctor, don’t send me home. Nurse will re-dress my hand and in a day or two I’ll be up and about again. I’m strong and—’

‘Barnes, everyone here knows how you spend every free moment searching for your husband. We are all very sympathetic but you are no longer well enough to remain here. I cannot let you be responsible for bringing in the wounded if you are in poor shape which it is obvious you are. You have a high fever and . . . Barnes . . . Dear God, what is your Christian name?’