Unnatural Issue (40 page)

All that water meant that the men, unable to keep their feet dry or even
get
them dry for a little while, once a day, were contracting something everyone called trench foot. At its best, it was disgusting and painful. At its worst, it turned into gangrene, and the foot had to come off.

And the stench . . . there was no way to get away from it. Over everything, the bitter fug of rotting flesh. Layered on that, the different fug of men who had not washed in weeks, and who had been sleeping, eating, fighting in the same clothing for all that time. Layered on that, the smell of sickness—trench foot, trench fever, infection. You were supposed to report to the field hospital when you were wounded, but the reality was that no one could be spared unless they couldn’t shoot anymore, and untended wounds festered quickly. Grace notes of urine and feces from the latrine trenches, rat piss, rotting sandbags, stagnant mud, filthy water, creosol, chloride of lime, cordite, cigarette smoke, woodsmoke, coal smoke, cooking food.

Sometimes Charles thought that the smell alone would drive him mad. The men said they got used to it. He didn’t believe them. No one could get used to this.

If the smell didn’t drive him mad, the lice might, first.

Lice were everywhere. You could strip down (in the freezing rain,) delouse yourself, delouse your clothing, put it back on, and the eggs hidden in the seams would hatch and infest you all over again.

Around him, the men were repairing and draining the trenches— the draining being an exercise in futility, since the water pumped out wasn’t pumped out very far, and it would find its way back into the trench again. Unless there was an attack, that was the daytime routine: fix the trench, fill sandbags, hope that night had brought a supply of duckboards to put a floor in with, and maybe some tin. Keep your head down. Listen for artillery. Read or write letters. Read a book, if you had one. Snatch a few minutes of sleep. And remember to keep your head down.

This was no place for an Earth mage. The pervading aura of
wrongness
was so intense it clogged Charles’ throat, and made it hard to choke down food.

Oh, yes. The food . . .

There were supposed to be field kitchens supplying everyone with hot meals three times a day. Well, that might be happening off the front, but no one was willing to get shot just to bring food to the soldiers in the trenches. There might be one hot meal in the morning, brought before first light. Often there wasn’t that. They weren’t going hungry—but—

At first light, Charles would give the order to “Stand to!” and all along the zigzag trenches, as the men were roused from their little rathole dugouts, they got up onto the fire step to prepare for a morning raid. If there was no raid forthcoming, the little exchange known as the “morning hate” ensued, with both sides letting off tension by firing at each other. Once feelings had been relieved and the gunfire died away, the morning rum was issued. Charles had been appalled by this at first. Now he drank down his ration as quickly as anyone else. It was the only way to dull the constant headache and feel a little warmer.

Then, inspection, which consisted these days of making sure each man had cleaned his rifle and no one’s feet were falling off, followed by breakfast. Which, unless an unofficial “breakfast truce” was in effect, was not always the hot food from the field kitchens, but rather bacon cooked over little trench fires, tea, bully beef, bread, and plum and apple jam. Sometimes there was cheese. They were supposed to get vegetables, dried or fresh, but Charles hadn’t seen any in weeks. They were
supposed
to get a great many things that never materialized. Two things never seemed to be in short supply: rum, and plum and apple jam. The same food turned up for dinner and supper, unless there was a lull and the field kitchens could send real meals. Or unless things were so bad that nothing got through, and they had to fall back on ration-biscuits, concoctions that were literally hard enough to drive nails with. Charles’ orderly generally boiled water and soaked them in it to make him a kind of mush, with plum and apple jam atop it. At least it was hot.

Charles was an officer; he had better conditions than his men. He had a bunker with a floor of duckboards, walls of sandbags, and a tin roof with more sandbags on top of it. He had an orderly to cook his bacon, make his tea, and—resourceful fellow!—round up whatever variations to the menu he could manage. In the early days, he’d been able to set snares and catch rabbits; now all the snares caught were rats.

They were supposed to spend only eight days in the trenches, four in the support trenches behind the front, and twelve days in reserve, followed by eight days of rest. That never happened, not here. This rotation had been the longest they had been stuck out here. Charles and his men had been here for two weeks, and he had been praying daily for word that they would finally fall back to support.

His orderly ran up, in the hunched-over position the prudent man always took when running along a trench, a muddy scrap of paper in his hand. Charles took it, and could have sobbed with relief.

He passed the order down the line: Gather up your kit. Be ready to move out at dark. Being relieved at last, and not to the support trenches, but all the way to the reserve. Reserve! Hot meals, a bath, a delousing—sleep in a bed, clean uniforms, dry feet at last. Visit the hospital tents and get the “little things” attended to . . .

The hours until dark passed with interminable slowness, and then, finally, the relieving troops arrived, crawling up the trenches, loaded down with their own guns, equipment, supplies. The officer relieving Charles looked like an angel . . .

Of course, this was an angel wearing the expression of one assigned to hell.

He cheered up a little at the sight of Charles’ bunker; this had been Charles’ work, and that of his orderly, during the two weeks they had been there. When he had arrived, there had only been a little rathole of a dugout, like everyone else’s.

Four hours later, he and the men were crawling back toward the rear, past the support troops, and then, finally, far enough away that they could stand safely, stand and march like men, back to the reserves, behind the lines.

They reached the relief tents at last. Real tents, waterproof canvas, with stoves in them keeping them warm. There was
fresh
hot food waiting for them, really hot—hot enough to burn your mouth, the first they’d had in two weeks. The men fell on it like starving wolves. He took his time, eating slowly, feeling a fog of fatigue coming over his brain. At the start of his time at the Front, when he and his men got to the support or the relief barracks, the first thing he did was to make straight for whatever passed for a bathing facility—rarely an actual bath, but at least there would be hot water, soap, something to kill the damned lice. Now . . . now he was worn down by six days more at the Front than he had reckoned on, and all he wanted was to lie down someplace warm and relatively soft. Someplace where rats wouldn’t run over him.

But no; he’d clean up first. Exhausted he might be, but he
would
clean up first. Wash the stink off, then sleep without dreaming of wandering aimlessly through a city of the dead. Finally, finally get that stink out of the back of his throat, out of his nose.

He finished his stew, got his directions, and stumbled through the rain to his assigned quarters, where someone had left buckets of steaming water, soap, a sponge, and creosol to kill the lice. He dropped his filthy, stinking uniform, stiff with mud and crawling with lice into one of the empty buckets; it would have to be fumigated. Smelling like a tar factory of creosol, he pulled on gloriously clean pajamas and fell into the bed at last, lulled to sleep by the steady roar of artillery, which sounded, in his dreams, like thunder.

Some of the girls said they dreamed of home, of dancing, of handsome, unwounded men. Susanne dreamed of bandages.

In her dream, she would open a huge crate and find it packed to bursting with beautiful pure white gauze and white cotton bandages, clean and new. In her dream, these bandages were miraculous; she rushed into the ward and began putting new dressings on all the boys, who began to heal as soon as the clean fabric touched them. She woke from that dream with silent tears pouring down her face, sobbing into her pillow.

The little old lady with whom she lodged always met her reddened eyes over the breakfast table and nodded knowingly. Then fed her a bowl of boiled milk, an egg, and that marvelous French delicacy, a croissant. With butter. The nursing sisters got generous rations; food was one thing there was no shortage of here at the field hospital. It wasn’t always the sort of food she would have preferred for her patients, but between them, she and Madame Lebois could turn it into something that actually
was
suitable.

“You had that dream again,” Madame said, handing her the jam. “Did you say goodbye to another last night?”

That was Madame’s polite way of asking if one of her patients had died. She nodded. “I couldn’t do anything,” she said, helplessly. “I—”

“Earth Master you may be, but you cannot mend everything,” Madame said wisely. “Eat your egg.”

When Suzanne had so blithely told Uncle Paul that she would be a nursing sister, she’d had no idea what the job would be, exactly. She assumed it would be mostly waiting on the patients. With ample opportunity to slip in some magic now and again.

She was too determined to be horrified when she learned that she, and not a doctor, would be expected to clean out wounds and irrigate them with Dakin’s solution or alcohol. That she, not the doctor, was expected to put in drains and keep them clear. She, not a doctor, would change the dressings on even the worst wounds.

She’d also discovered it was a good thing she had the uneasy patronage of someone rich, for she had been expected to supply virtually everything for herself. The list that the Red Cross had presented to her was astonishing:

Fortunately, Uncle Paul had taken care of the list, with the help of the estimable Garrick, who was serving as Peter’s orderly. Garrick had also helpfully added other things: a spray bottle for antiseptic solution, two thermometers, and her own syringe kit with extra needles and a sharpening stone. She hadn’t needed to use the ward’s syringe, which kept getting “borrowed.”

It was raining again; she and Madame finished breakfast in silence that had the constant rumble of artillery fire beneath it. She pulled on the boiled-wool cape—selected by Garrick and infinitely superior to the plain woven capes the other nurses had—slung her kit over her shoulder, and stepped out into the muck.

She wondered, often, if the other nurses noticed that she took a little longer beside each patient than they did. But then, “her” doctor, the one who was in charge of her ward, was a fanatic for antiseptic irrigation, and she was the one that had to change the complicated dressings, tubes, and drips. Some of the other nurses thought he was mad, obsessed, or both; she thought he was a genius. His system, even without her help, was saving twice as many wounded as anyone else, and was saving men other doctors thought doomed. With her help? While she did lose the ones who really were too badly torn up to survive, the ones with ruptured spleens, perforated intestines, livers that looked as if Zeus’s eagle had been pecking at them, or multiple amputations, most of the men who came into her ward left it healing.