by Lizzie Page
‘It’s about standards!’ hissed Arthur.
‘Oh, and you always maintain high standards, do you?’ Elsie laughed bitterly. His face changed. It was like she had shot him through the heart.
They both rose, their chairs scraped on the floor and I was scared they were going to fight – I mean, brawl like drunk men in the street on May Day. I thought Arthur would never forgive himself if he hit Elsie – if he hit a woman – but the anger he had towards her then was something dreadful, and she seemed to hate him right back. Helen placed down the spoon and looked up at them, her mouth open.
It was at that moment that Dr Munro raced in, pulling on his shirt over his vest. I was momentarily spellbound by his gingery-white chest hairs. ‘We’re needed!’
Forgetting the argument, we grabbed our helmets and dashed out to the two cars. The frail November sun had all but disappeared and the sky was a smudge of purple. Feeling the rush of adrenaline, I squeezed into the Fiat with Dr Munro and Elsie. As Elsie drove, Dr Munro explained that Dixmude, a village about twenty miles away, was falling. The Germans were advancing fast.
The rain had started up again. The car was running tickety-boo, thanks to me, and we had petrol.
‘It’s driving well, isn’t it?’ I said proudly.
They didn’t reply. I retreated into myself, worrying about what lay ahead. Please don’t let it be another Nazareth. I thought about my father and realised that I hadn’t thought about him, or my mother, or even home for a few days. I felt this showed I was adjusting to my new life.
It took a good while to get there, fifty minutes or so, and by the time we did, the sky was black. It was a particularly starless night.
* * *
Even when we arrived, I didn’t feel ready for whatever lay ahead. My knees knocked together and against Elsie’s thigh. Dr Munro reminded Elsie to back the car in in case a fast escape was necessary. Then he told us to wait, before finally giving us the go-ahead to creep forward to the house at the top of the hill.
Everything was in darkness. The only light was the half-moon. It requires a special kind of faith to run into a pitch-black house when guns may be firing outside. Elsie was right in front of me and she whispered to me to hold on to her. I did so obediently, tugging at the back of her coat like Kenneth might have done. And then we found ourselves in a shadowy side room – perhaps what was once a sitting room – ready to deal with casualties.
At first, none were too bad, thank goodness, then word got around that we were there and more injured men began arriving, apparently from all directions.
Someone brought us in a table so we treated them on that. Dr Munro and Lady D were working in an adjoining room. Arthur and Helen took another.
‘We’re going to run out of medicine at this rate,’ Elsie said.
‘I’ll go back,’ I offered. I thought that was what she meant for me to say.
‘Don’t be mad,’ she whispered.
A cacophony of noise started outside. Guns firing. We stood in the dark as men were brought to us. Some came in on stretchers, some were just dragged by their friends. At one point, Elsie was feeling her way around a man with a bloody leg wound. ‘Light, Mairi!’ she ordered.
I lit a match, creating a fleeting illumination. Just long enough for us to see, hopefully not long enough for any enemies to know that we were there. I gulped loudly. I would not be sick.
Elsie told the friend who had brought this man up, ‘There’s nothing we can do, I’m sorry.’
‘There must be!’ the friend said hotly. ‘His wife is having a baby.’
Elsie repeated ‘I’m sorry,’ and when he didn’t say anything, she added, ‘I really am sorry,’ and the poor friend finally got the hint and dragged the dying man off the table and out of our way. I squeezed the friend’s shoulder as he went by and heard him let out a sob.
Elsie whispered to me, ‘Good thing we checked. I nearly wasted a shot of morphine.’
I wondered how the others were getting on. Perhaps they were having an easier time of it? But then I heard Arthur yell, ‘We’re running out of kit, here!’
Dr Munro shouted back, ‘Just do what you can, Arthur!’, which even I knew meant nothing.
The rattle of guns and the crashing of shells went on outside. Flashes of unhelpful light. Rainwater noisily pouring down drains. Some men we could deal with on the spot. We filled them up with painkillers or applied clumsy splints. The man who had lost his thumb, the fella whose bottom had been grazed by a bullet. Some, particularly the ones who’d got it in the chest or the abdomen, needed surgery. And fast. Elsie and Dr Munro violently pumped one man back to life. For now.
One afternoon back in Ghent, side by side over a tin bucket, peeling turnips, Dr Munro had explained the procedure of ‘triage’ to me. It came, he said, from the French word ‘to sort’ and it heralded a revolutionary new way of nursing. The patients with the most life-threatening injuries should be delivered to the hospital first. This seemed logical, even to a nincompoop like me, so I couldn’t get my head around what they might possibly have done instead of this in the past. Dr Munro had sighed, thrown away a particularly rotten-looking turnip and explained, ‘When I was a young man, it would have been the most senior men who were dealt with first, regardless of urgency.’
It was decided that Elsie and I would take some of the most injured men back to Furnes at once. Dr Munro and Lady D would bring the next transport later. Arthur and Helen would continue as they were and wait for the return of the car.
Lots of people were involved with carrying the allotted four casualties to the car. Pour souls. It was a bumpy, dangerous descent from the house to the vehicle. As we raced them into the car, we were fired on – sniper! – and one of our helpers – the friend of the dead father-to-be – took two bullets to the stomach. We ducked down, in panicky chaos, then Elsie decided, ‘Put him in with the others, now.’
‘There’s no room!’ someone else said. The ambulance could only carry four.
‘He’ll go on the floor,’ she barked. ‘Hurry.’
Elsie insisted on driving. I was relieved, for I hadn’t driven in a night this wet or black yet. She needed me to navigate. ‘We’ll be fine, darling.’
‘I know.’
The roads were saturated. Rain slammed down, bounced off the surface. The wipers couldn’t keep up and we had to continually hand-wipe the windscreen. It was the wrong side of midnight. Elsie drove with her typical contempt for caution. I imagined this was what flying might feel like as we hurtled through the dark. Elsie’s foot was jammed on the accelerator. She could drive anything they put her in but she knew the Fiat like the back of her hand.
The racket the men were making took me back to visiting a cattle market with my father. I swallowed the thought away. I could smell blood. I tried not to think of the horsemeat I had carried earlier that day. I felt sick. Dead men in Nazareth. Cherries on a hat. Blood spots.
‘Talk to me,’ Elsie said. ‘Tell me something nice.’
I told Elsie about the best beach in England, Saunton Sands. Uilleam and I would take her there when all this was over. We would build castles out of sand and watch the tide fill up the moats.
There was a howl from the back of the car. I thought of the jellyfish that Uilleam and I used to splat with our spades before burying them in mass unmarked graves.
I screamed. Something dark and terrible was in the road. Elsie braked and we flew forward hard. The men in the back cried out in pain. I jumped down from the car to investigate. I was terrified and as I ran forward, I realised I wasn’t wearing my helmet. It could be a German roadblock; I might have walked straight into a trap. My last thought would be: such a foolish mistake.
It was a dead horse. Long-tailed rats were running over its eyes, exploring its face (sometimes, even I wondered what God was thinking when he created rats). It was in our way. A massive obscenity of a roadblock. First, I tried to shift the beast. I thought that if two or three of the five men in the back had been fit enough t
o assist, we might have been able to do it, but those fellows were in no state to move their own legs, never mind lift a dead weight like this.
Only a minute in the open and I was drenched to the bone.
I prayed for strength. Elsie sidled down from the driving seat and joined me in trying too. They say you get superhuman strength in an emergency but this beast did not budge. We measured the space between it and the side of the road with our hands. This space was ten hands wide; how long was our car?
‘Let me try,’ I said. There was not an inch to spare but we could give it a go.
Elsie said if we were going to try, she wanted to be the one to do it.
If we went too close to the edge, we would tip up into the ditch. The ambulance would be lost – and as for its passengers…
Elsie, full of gumption, cranked up the engine.
Once again, I told her to stop. How about we take out the men, carry them to the other side of the horse, drive through and then pick them up? That way, if we collapsed into the ditch then they, at least, would be free.
‘But if we collapse, they’ll just be stuck on this perishing road until goodness knows when,’ Elsie pointed out through gritted teeth. I was wasting time.
There was no alternative but to edge forwards. I held my breath, as though that would give the car the extra lightness it needed. Slowly, Elsie made our vehicle creep around the fallen horse. Our ambulance had never seemed so fragile. The human condition had never seemed so frail. I guess we both had on our minds the poor German boy killed by our delays.
Inch by inch, we proceeded. Shivering, I prayed – but only to myself, because I didn’t want to set Elsie off on an anti-God tirade.
Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
* * *
I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust’—
‘Elsie, we’re too close!’
Inch by inch, we got past without toppling.
We were off again, in the driving lane. It took me a few moments to realise that the groaning in the back had quietened down. While the sounds of their suffering had been horrible, the silence was even worse.
After we had been driving for another twenty minutes or so, I saw another black shadow ahead. I screamed at Elsie to stop, although she saw it at the same time as me. This time it was what we had originally feared, a gaping crater in the road. If we hadn’t spied it, it would have swallowed our ambulance up whole. I remembered how curiously I had looked at that first hole in the road I had seen on arriving in Belgium: what an alien sight it was. Now there was nothing so distressingly familiar as these scabs in the land, like a wound in Mother Earth’s skin. Again, we had to do the measurements, the calculation and then drive the car in a similar side shuffle on the road to get past without falling.
This was how I imagined God treated the Egyptians who kept the Jews in slavery. Were there going to be flying frogs next? A plague? What had the Belgians done to deserve this? What had we all done?
I wasn’t sure how much further Furnes was, but I kept telling Elsie, ‘Nearly there!’ and ‘You can do it!’ We were both nearly broken with exhaustion. Every part of me was chilled. My feet felt like ice. Elsie had driven for miles in this darkness: this was after a day’s work in the kitchens, then those long hours of looking after men in the dark house on the hill.
To get into the Furnes hospital, you had to take a sharp left turn at the old school gates. Elsie attempted it three times, knocked off the wing mirror, failed again, then threw her hands in the air, admitting defeat for the first time since I’d known her.
‘You do it, Mairi! I can’t.’
We swapped seats. The steering wheel was clammy to the touch. I got us through the gates on first attempt, and once we were in, we both shouted for assistance.
As soon as we opened the back door of the ambulance, it was overwhelmingly obvious: we had taken too long. Of our five precious cargo, three had expired, including the Good Samaritan who had helped carry the others down.
Please God, let me understand your reasons for this. I know you are wise and I know there will be some explanation…
There was no time for tears. We dragged out the stretchers and ran the surviving two men inside. Twenty minutes later, we were driving back to the village for the next load and I was praying that the petrol would see us out the night.
7
‘We need to make a radical change, Munro.’
A few days later, we were at breakfast in the old school kitchen. I liked plain porridge, had always eaten it, but I knew Arthur and Helen were growing desperate for some ‘goddamn flavouring’. ‘If only there was cinnamon, or honey,’ they whispered. There were sometimes fried potatoes for breakfast too but mostly these were saved for meals later in the day. Occasionally, I’d catch myself thinking fondly of the breakfast I had eaten in the Harwich hotel. The adequately poached eggs. I would not allow myself to think of the wonderful breakfasts Cook had made us at home. I would not dwell on golden smoked kippers.
The two survivors from the fallen village were being expertly cared for by the Belgian doctors and nurses. ‘They should make it,’ one of the nurses told me, nodding fiercely. ‘They’re grateful to you ladies.’
The nurse knew one of the men who hadn’t survived – Belgium was a small world back then, and it felt like everyone knew everyone. He was a local man who had worked at the bank in Furnes. ‘Always had time for us,’ she said. ‘Patient with the old people.’ This nurse was a volunteer and young – as young as I was – she was struggling not to cry.
‘Munro? I said we need to make a change.’
At Elsie’s words, Dr Munro placed down his English paper (which was full of talk about the king’s engagements and next to nothing about what poor Belgium suffered!) and blew on his pipe. Something in his stern demeanour said that he had been waiting for this. I thought he might say he ‘wasn’t angry but was disappointed’, but he didn’t.
Elsie continued. ‘A radical change.’
At this, Dr Munro snapped: ‘Just get on with driving and nursing, instead of looking for complications.’
‘I’m looking for a solution!’
Elsie had never looked more handsome than she did that morning. She stood, fierce as a bull, ready to charge at Dr Munro, who was the matador… no, he was the red rag.
‘If you have time for navel-gazing then something is wrong.’
‘Shock is killing them. Not wounds. Three mothers lost their sons yesterday. Unnecessarily.’
‘Unavoidably—’
‘Half the time when we drive the poor souls from the battlefield to the hospital, they die in our ambulances or near enough.’
‘I know that, Elsie,’ he said.
‘It’s not good enough.’
‘What is the alternative?’
I was thinking the same, What is the alternative, Elsie? It’s all very well to criticise – ‘it’s all too easy to be negative,’ as my father would say – ‘but what is the answer?’
But Elsie was a step ahead of us, as usual.
‘If they will not survive the journey to the hospital… then the hospital must go to them.’
‘Oh no. Absolutely not.’
Arthur joined in. ‘Elsie, enough acting the hero. You put us all to shame.’
Elsie ignored him. She spoke only to Dr Munro.
‘We have to get closer to the battlefield. Otherwise, much of what we do when they are in hospital is in vain.’
Arthur seemed to take this as a personal attack. His spoon clattered into his flavourless porridge. ‘This is so typical of Elsie,’ he addressed the rest of us, ‘she sees a rule and wants to stamp over it.’
‘Oh, but—’ Helen said.
‘Elsie doesn’t know the meaning of the word “team”!’ Arthur barked in his wife’s direction. Helen blinked at him, taking it all in, no doubt ready to regurgitate it in her ‘romance’.
‘It’s too much
of a risk,’ Arthur went on. ‘We’ll be shelled to kingdom come.’
I was surprised when Helen then spoke up for Elsie. ‘She has got a point. You’ve said similar things yourself, Arthur.’
Elsie continued, with a grateful glance at Helen. ‘Everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve done tells me it has to be that way. We have to get nearer to the boys.’
She grabbed a bowl of porridge to demonstrate her theory in much the same incomprehensible way as Munro did with his coin armies. ‘If the fighting is here, what use is a hospital over there?’
She pulled at the tablecloth as though determined to tip everything over. However, Dr Munro anticipated her, slamming down his fists so that nothing could move.
‘What is this tomfoolery? Change for the sake of change is ridiculous.’
‘It’s not for the sake of change!’ Elsie roared back. ‘It’s for the sake of the boys!’
I could see she was struggling not to swear.
Dr Munro lowered his voice. ‘Elsie, you are a thrill-seeker and this makes you dangerous.’
She laughed. ‘It’s not me who does their evening exercises in their smalls.’
Munro’s face was red with fury now. ‘And who will pay for this ridiculous caper?’
‘We will save on petrol… All this toing and froing is expensive.’ She was smirking slightly. ‘Some would say “profligate”!’
‘The British Army won’t fund it. The Red Cross won’t… they’re desperate as it is.’
‘We can raise money. How difficult can it be?’
‘No. We began as a group. A group is how we stay. No egos, remember?’ He looked at me. ‘Don’t even think about it, Mairi. I have a responsibility to your parents—’
‘I know,’ I began. I felt terrible. I liked Dr Munro enormously. I would be eternally grateful we weren’t engaged, but he was a marvellous leader. He, more than anyone else – more even than Elsie – explained things properly to me. I knew his heart ached for the lost men: he only wanted the best for everyone. We all did.