The Summer Before the War (48 page)

“I'll ignore your lieutenant's insults because I don't have all day; I have a war to run,” said the Brigadier sharply to Colonel Wheaton. “Can the Captain carry out the sentence, or must we risk the lives of twelve men in a firing squad?”

“The boy asks for Mr. Hugh,” said the chaplain. “Is one of you Mr. Hugh?”

Hugh gave Daniel a warning shake and went to Snout. The boy was weeping now, tears running silently down his neck. Hugh knelt and wiped his face with a handkerchief.

“I want my mama,” said Snout. “I want to see my mama and my sister, Abigail, Mr. Hugh.”

“I know, Snout, I know,” said Hugh.

“I just want to go home, Mr. Hugh.”

“You will be going home, Dickie,” said Hugh, taking the boy's bound hands in his own. “I think it will be just a moment and then you'll be walking down the hill to Rye and your mother and father will be waiting at the door for you.”

“Will Wolfie be there, do you think?” asked Snout.

“I know that dog will find you if he can,” said Hugh. “I will be here with you, Dickie. Lieutenant Daniel is here. Captain Wheaton is here too.” Hugh looked up to see Daniel wiping his eyes and Harry looking away to hide his distress.

“That's enough,” said the Brigadier. Even he looked pale, as if either his conscience or his bilious stomach were bothering him. “Perhaps the squad is the more appropriate way. I can see the Captain is overcome.”

“I'll do it,” said Hugh. Death was inevitable and to wait for a firing squad would be an agony. His heart threatened to break in his chest, but he had seen patients die every day. He knew what it was to prolong suffering, and he had learned when to just hold a hand and let a man go. “I'm a medical doctor. It will be painless and quick.”

“For the love of God, no, Hugh,” said Daniel. He stepped between Hugh and Snout and pushed Hugh away with a roughness that sent him sprawling into some bags of potatoes.

“Oh, God, I hate these pals' battalions. Everyone knows each other and no one wants to shoot his neighbor's gardener,” said the Brigadier. “Stand aside, gentlemen. I'll finish this myself.”

As he took his pistol from its holster, Daniel threw himself in front of Snout, and the Brigadier's aide ran to pull him away. They pulled at each other in the fierce, awkward way of real fighting in an enclosed space. Snout was toppled to the ground, still roped to his chair. The Brigadier stood waving his pistol, more in the direction of Daniel than of Snout, and Hugh cried out lest he shoot Daniel, by accident or design. The Wheatons, father and son, seemed mesmerized and unable to move, as if seeing the entirety of the impact this day would have on their future careers. At last Hugh was grateful to see Colonel Wheaton stepping in front of the Brigadier.

When the shell made a direct hit on the roof, Hugh was aware only of a blinding white concussion and a huge sound cut short by unconsciousness.

He didn't want to wake up. It was pleasant under the weight of the covers, and when he moved it hurt; so how much better to drop back into a deeper sleep. He moved again, and the covers seemed to smother him. He had dirt in his mouth and his nose. He coughed and spluttered and gasped for air. The air smelled of grass and wet earth and bonfires. It was harder now to stay asleep and yet so hard to wake up into pain and a buzzing in his ears.

Distant voices called him. Hands scrabbled at his chest. He surfaced, and all he could see were dark skies. Fat raindrops began to splash on his face. He remembered now that a shell had fallen on the cellar, and he tried to call out, but he had no voice. He could only open his mouth and feel the rain on his tongue. There was a lot of pain as someone lifted his shoulders, and then he could only slip away as many hands pulled him from the sucking earth.

The casualty clearing station
was a chaos of stretchers piled in haphazard rows on the ground, in the rain. Patients died before they could be assessed. It had been a large-scale bombardment, almost an offensive, and the casualties covered an entire wheat field. Hugh had woken up in a familiar ambulance to find he was not badly hurt. It was Archie and Bill's ambulance, and Archie had cheerfully cracked jokes about holiday trips to the seaside as he taped up a couple of broken ribs and patched a nasty cut on Hugh's head. He could do nothing about the infernal ringing in Hugh's ears. He had kept his boots in the blast, but somehow lost his trousers, and been laid seminaked on the stretcher. Archie had covered him with a blanket and made ribald comments. Now he sat on a box outside the clearing station and tried to clear his head enough to either offer his help or search the field of stretchers for his cousin and the others.

“Here's a pair of trousers and a cuppa,” said Archie. “We have to go now, guvnor. Taking a load to the train station.”

“Did you see my cousin? Did they pull any others out of my hole?” he asked. He drank the scalding tea and felt the burn of it in his throat.

“Can't say for sure,” said the ambulance driver.

“I never imagined angels would look so ugly, but you were a sight for sore eyes,” said Hugh. “Thank you.”

“Who you calling ugly?” said Archie. “Must've damaged an eyeball, sir.”

Hugh held a hand to his painful ribs and walked as swiftly as he could bear up and down the rows of stretchers and clusters of wounded men sitting on the grassy field. He knew he had only a few minutes to search before someone would stop him, or before he would feel bound to step in and help the wounded. It was selfish to look for his cousin when so many other cousins, brothers, and sons were bleeding and screaming, but he felt the urgency to find Daniel as a drumming in his head. He was driven along the rows by a horror that he must find him or never be able to face going home.

A loose tourniquet on a stranger stopped him at last. A soldier called out for help for his neighbor, and Hugh, seeing the spurt of an artery, ran to tighten the leather belt on the injured man's thigh and secure the dressing on his wound with strips torn from his own handkerchief.

“Thanks, sir, he was a goner,” said the soldier who had called out. When Hugh turned to speak to him, the soldier was already dead, eyes empty and a large bloody stain still spreading from a wound to his lower abdomen. Hugh closed his eyes and placed the man's arms across his chest. He wished there was a cloth to cover his face, but he had to make do with placing the soldier's cap on top of his hands. In place of a prayer he made a decision to help Daniel by doing his duty to all the wounded.

“Where are the operating tents?” he asked a passing orderly. “I'm a surgeon.”

He worked for ten or twelve hours, standing at a makeshift operating table and moving almost mechanically to stanch, stem, and close whatever wounds appeared before him. His ribs hurt so much he sometimes had to stop and wait for a surge of nausea to pass, but he refused morphine in case it dulled his abilities. The orderlies could hardly boil instruments quickly enough to keep up with the flow of patients, and Hugh, looking up from pushing a lower intestine back through a gaping shrapnel hole, saw with a start that the nurse was not the same one from when he started. He had been unaware of them changing shifts and had just continued to hold out his hand for instruments and slap them back into a waiting palm when he was finished.

It was deep into the night when the flow of the injured finally slowed and Hugh, shaking his head to clear his vision, knew that he was no longer thinking straight. The deep ache in his ribs now brought tears to his eyes. His head throbbed, and his fingers felt numb from the hours of prodding and sewing. He spoke to the nurse and left the tent. He washed his face and hands with strong carbolic soap and freezing water. He took a thick ham sandwich and a cup of tea from a woman running a canteen from the back of a grocer's van. He was handed a fresh pair of socks and put them on, almost crying with pleasure at the feel of warm, dry wool against his feet. He requisitioned a blanket, and though he was tired almost to collapse, he set out with a kerosene lantern. He walked with the hunched gait of an old man, shuffling through the serried rows of men laid out in tents and in the field, their white bandages bright in the frosty moonlight. He looked in their dirty, broken faces and thought them all his brothers and cousins. And though he asked God to watch over his cousin Daniel, it was enough to be here among Daniel's fellow soldiers and to have done his best to help them all.

In a field containing hundreds of sleeping, or softly groaning, wounded, Hugh found them by the sound of Harry Wheaton loudly calling for a nurse to bring him a bottle of burgundy and a dozen oysters.

“The service in this establishment is perfectly rotten,” said Wheaton as the nurse hurried away. “My friend will have the lobster.” Wheaton was objecting to the mug of oxtail soup and hunk of bread she had left him. He was propped up on a cot, his arm in a sling and his legs covered by a rubber tarp.

“Harry!” said Hugh. “I've been looking for you all.”

“You've found us, what's left,” said Harry. “Wake up, Bookham, your cousin is here.” Daniel was lying barely conscious on the next cot, his head heavily bandaged. “They told me to keep him awake,” added Harry. “But he's always been incurably lazy, haven't you, Bookham? Always looking for a nap.”

“Daniel, can you hear me?” asked Hugh. He crouched beside Daniel's cot and felt for his pulse. It was weak but steady.

Daniel's eyes flickered, and he licked his lips. “Hugh, is that you?” he asked. “I thought you were dead.”

“How do you feel?” asked Hugh. “Can you move?”

“Listen to me, Hugh,” said Daniel. He raised a hand, and Hugh grasped it. “You must get the boy home. Please promise me you'll get the boy home.”

“He means young Sidley,” said Harry. He nodded across the aisle, and Hugh went to peer at the boy, who was bandaged across the chest and breathing in irregular gasps. “Got a piece of shrapnel in a lung, they said.”

“Snout, can you hear me?” asked Hugh. The boy opened his eyes and looked at Hugh for a long moment. Then he gave a small smile and closed his eyes again. Hugh hurried back to Daniel.

“I heard the doctors talking,” said Harry in a whisper. “Those who can survive the trip get put on a list for the ambulance trains to the coast. Those that are too weak do not.”

“It's a new system,” said Hugh. “It keeps the most people alive and saves the very ill from additional pain that will do them no good.”

“Daniel and young Snout are not on the list,” said Harry. “If you have any authority, you had better do something fast.”

“Where are the others?” asked Hugh. “Your father? Lord North?”

“Dead,” said Harry. He turned his head aside to hide any emotion. “My father is gone, Hugh.”

“I'm so sorry,” said Hugh.

“We are the only survivors,” said Harry. “As I told them—such a shame when the court-martial had just found the boy innocent and we were about to leave.”

“Thank you,” said Hugh. He clasped Harry by the arm.

“Of course your cousin had to go and add that the Brigadier threw himself on the lad as the shell was coming in,” said Harry. “Always the weaver of stories. Now Lord North may become a national hero.”

The doctor in charge of the casualty station was inclined to be helpful.

“You did sterling work for us today, Lieutenant,” he said. “I will add your cousin to the transport list and give you a pass to go with him to the coast.”

“And my cousin's batman?” asked Hugh.

“Sorry,” said the doctor. “One officer added to the list is a courtesy; having other ranks jump the queue begins to look like disregard for the regulations. Believe me, we spend too much of our time already turning down impassioned petitions.”

“I appreciate your help, sir,” said Hugh. He knew better than to argue. He would have done the same if he were in charge and might even have denied Daniel priority. How different it felt, thought Hugh, to apply rules universally and then to apply them to one's own family. He thought of the efficient way he conducted his surgeries, patching as he could and trying not to care too much if the injured died. There were always many more waiting, and he could not afford to waste his time mourning.

As dawn was breaking, Hugh waited with Harry and Daniel for the fleet of ambulances to come for the next round of patients. He was delighted to see Archie and Bill coming up the field and waved them over. “Can you take my patients?” he said.

“Delighted, I'm sure,” said Archie. “No one cares who we take as long as you got the right ticket.” A green label attached to the jacket indicated a patient for transport.

“Take the boy instead of me,” said Daniel. He fumbled for the ticket on his chest. “We'll call it an error and I'll find a place on the next convoy.”

“You need to go now,” said Hugh. “No arguments.”

Bill raised an eyebrow, and Hugh took him aside. “Is he badly off?” said Bill.

“Yes,” said Hugh. “He has a hole in his skull, and that kind of injury just can't be properly cleaned or treated at the field station. If I can get him home, or even to the big hospital on the coast, he has a chance.”

“And the boy?”

“Also not very good,” said Hugh. “The lung may get infected. He needs to be out of the cold and nursed intensively, but they've marked him to stay.”

“Look, the answer is that you take them both and I'll go on the next convoy,” said Harry Wheaton. He tried to undo his ticket with his one good hand.

“Everyone's a hero today,” said Bill. “Upper-class toffs, outdoing themselves to be romantic, Archie.”

“Quite making me teary-eyed,” said Archie. “Good as a play at the music hall.”

“Insolent little man,” said Harry.

“Well, if the arm is not infected,” said Hugh, “I suppose there is no harm in Captain Wheaton's delayed removal?”

“Except it's not his only injury, is it, guvnor?” said Bill. With a flick of the wrist he threw off the tarpaulin from Harry's cot. Harry's left leg was gone at the knee, a bloody stump wrapped in such a thick layer of bandages that it looked like the pollarded branch of a tree.

“Good God, Harry, why didn't you say?” said Hugh. “Amputation is a serious injury.”

“Didn't want your pity,” said Harry. “Plenty of my own to keep me occupied.”

“You need a hospital too, Harry,” said Hugh. “Gangrene is a real possibility if you stay out here.”

“All right, Archie, what do you say we do a sloppy job again and take an extra passenger or two with the labels mixed up?” said Bill. “Not like we haven't done it before.”

“It'll be docked pay this time for sure,” said Archie. “But it only gets them to the train.”

“So maybe we get lost along the way?” said Bill. “Take them all the way to the coast?”

“Not like we haven't done that before neither,” said Archie. “Double-quick then, before the sergeant major catches on.”

At the port, the ambulance mingled with those from the train station and delivered Hugh's little party and four other men directly to the big hospital near the docks. Bill and Archie got a severe dressing-down for producing six patients with only five authorized sets of papers. Their artfully disconsolate faces and shuffling feet could not hide a certain eye-rolling sarcasm from the sergeant major at the loading bay. Had the need for their services not been acute, they might both have been thrown in a dungeon—of which the sergeant major claimed to have use—but he docked them two weeks' pay and sent them off on another run with no time off for dinner.