Dusk

by Edwards, Eve

  ‘So sorry, matron. I missed the omnibus, then tripped over the kerb and scraped my knee …’

  ‘Miss Juniper –’

  ‘Then I got tangled up with this lady’s umbrella – have you seen how the weather has taken a turn for the worse? – and that caused quite a furore, I can tell you …’

  ‘Molly.’ The single word was said with solemn emphasis. ‘What have I said to you before?’

  Molly squeezed her hands together. ‘Not to go on so. To apologize without elaboration because there is no excuse for lateness.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Bedpans.’

  ‘Yes, matron.’ Sister Hardwick turned away. ‘But it’s always worth a try,’ muttered Molly under her breath, giving Helen a sly smile. Helen wanted to laugh but dared not. ‘Morning, Helen.’

  ‘How’s the knee?’ Helen asked with an arch of a brow.

  Molly stuck out her tongue and skipped away, her limp mysteriously vanishing as she called out cheery greetings to the men. She was a favourite with them, her passage down the ward acting like a beam of sunshine breaking into their dull lives.

  Washing someone was a strangely intimate experience. Helen had trained herself to keep to her task, not thinking too much about being so close to flesh when polite society claimed to be shocked if girls so much as hinted at any knowledge of the private parts of the male body. Usually her patients were elderly, in their fifties, worn down by a hard life of manual labour, and it was easy to regard them dispassionately; but the coalman turned out to be young, in his twenties, and Helen could tell he found receiving the bed bath as embarrassing as she did giving it. When it came to what Matron briskly called his ‘operative parts’, he stilled her hand and took the sponge from her.

  ‘I think I can reach that meself, miss,’ he said gruffly, going every shade of red. Even the skin under the rough dark hairs on his chest was flushed.

  Helen relinquished the task with relief. As ever, she was grateful that the men did not take up the obvious chance to make crude remarks about the care the nurses gave them; the uniform protected the young women and put them on a pedestal that, by common consent, none of the patients wanted to rock.

  Helping him into a newly-laundered gown, she then called Molly over to double-team the sheet change. Tricky with the patient lying in the bed, but there was a knack to it as there was to most things in nursing. Roll him on his side, free the sheet, reverse the manoeuvre and remove the linen, repeat the process to make the bed. Helen had a sharp thrill of satisfaction when she saw her coalman sitting propped on the pillows, clean and comfortable. At least there was some good she could do.

  She took her tea break with Molly after the demonstration of the correct dressing for an ulcer – clear the dead matter, dress to put some pressure on the wound, but not too much. Neither Helen nor Molly suffered from squeamishness so they had watched the procedure with close attention. The coalman had been admitted because his neglected ulcer had nearly gone gangrenous. He had to endure a scolding from matron on the subject, but fortunately it looked as though that horrible fate had been avoided.

  ‘Handsome man, that fellow, particularly now his leg won’t rot off,’ Molly observed, nodding to their patient from the nurses’ station. ‘Shame he’s already married.’

  ‘Molly, you are completely shameless!’ Helen poked her in the ribs. ‘I can’t see you settling down with a coalman.’ Her friend was from a well-to-do family in Sevenoaks; no one from the lower classes would be allowed to court her if her brothers had any say in the matter, but it was a life too confining for their outrageous youngest sister.

  ‘Who said anything about settling down?’ Molly grinned, showing the gap between her two front teeth. She tugged a stray piece of her dark blonde hair moodily. ‘But I have my own rules about trespass. Can’t break them. More’s the pity.’

  Helen nibbled on a biscuit, deciding no comment would be appropriate.

  ‘How was last night?’ Molly asked. She loved hearing tales from the theatre, assuming it to be much gayer and brighter than it was in reality.

  The mouthful Helen had just taken went down slowly and painfully as she gulped. ‘The usual.’

  ‘Oh.’ Molly looked disappointed, then brightened up as a new thought struck her. ‘Do you ever meet any eligible men with Flora? I mean, I know you don’t want them – you live like a nun – but if you don’t and I’m free …’

  ‘No, no new men.’ Helen washed up her cup. At least none that she wanted to share. Helen was surprised by a flash of jealous protectiveness for her new discovery; she wanted to keep him to herself for the moment.

  6

  THE SOMME, FORWARD MEDICAL STATION, 1 JULY 1916, 8.30 A.M.

  The growl of the approaching motor ambulances woke her. Helen lay for a moment, confused. She must have fallen asleep still fretting about Sebastian. Her dreams were always more vivid when she was exhausted, strange fragments of old and new, a rag rug of her thoughts. The shouts in the old farmyard outside warned that this was a new influx of casualties; it would be all hands on deck even for those like her who were off duty. She tumbled out of bed and dressed, shoving her feet into the rubber boots she wore in surgery, unconsciously acknowledging that she would be wading in blood.

  Breakfast? She hadn’t eaten since the previous night. Not that she was hungry, but she knew when she needed to keep up her strength. She grabbed a handful of biscuits from the tin she kept on the rickety table next to her Chinese box. The worn pattern of a smiling lady in a big hat and frilly white dress on the lid looked out of place in the nun-like quarters, a survivor from the pre-war world. Did she have everything? Cramming a biscuit in her mouth, she pinned her scarf in place and left the room at a run.

  This was going to be bad: the courtyard was already full of stretchers, the orderlies overwhelmed as the ambulance men quickly unloaded their vehicles. Coming on behind them were the horse-drawn wagons, filled to capacity with the wounded, many propped up against the sides as there was no space to lie down. Helen ran for the operating theatre.

  ‘Nurse Sandford, excellent. I was just going to send for you.’ Sister Richards gestured to the closed theatre doors. ‘I’ve assigned you to Dr Barnett. He is waiting for you to proceed with an abdomen.’

  Her least favourite doctor and her least favourite injury, if one were allowed to rank wounds. ‘Yes, Sister.’

  Scrubbing her hands before entering, Helen shouldered her way into the room, hands held up like antennae, making sure not to touch anything.

  ‘Miss Sandford!’ snapped Dr Barnett, a fierce grey-haired man with the character of a hornet. ‘I haven’t all day!’ His hands were already bloodied. There was something operatic about his stance, like a tenor about to sing his sorrow over murdering his lover.

  She passed the other two surgeons already deep in their first operations. ‘Doctor.’

  ‘He’s out but, if he comes round, administer the chloroform. Not too much. I don’t want to lose him to a clumsy hand.’

  With that reminder, she pulled up her face mask to keep her own nose and mouth far from the scent and dampened the cotton pad. Her fingers shook. Let me get this right. Her room-mate, Nurse Henderson, a pale, bespectacled girl with the quiet, neat demeanour that reminded Helen of a librarian, was assisting with the removal of shrapnel from the stomach. The smell, as with any abdominal wound, was horrendous.

  ‘He’ll lose a bit of gut but, if I can stop the bleeding, he might pull through.’ Barnett glared at the injury as if it had personally insulted him.

  Helen took the man’s pulse – beating strongly, thank God. The patient looked so vulnerable, his dark hair fl
opping back from unnaturally pale skin. Barely a bristle on his chin, plenty of mud and blood though. Despite the lines around his eyes, he could not be more than eighteen. He could have been at a dance with his sweetheart or beginning an apprenticeship if the war had not swept him up.

  ‘That’s all I’ve time to do.’ The surgeon let Nurse Henderson cut the thread to the last stitch. ‘Next.’

  A leg lost to a mine. A chest wound. Bullet in the back – this caused Dr Barnett to tut. ‘Either cowardice or stupidity from our lines.’ An arm that had to be amputated. Groin injury. The terrible list went on and on. After two hours, they had made no impression on the numbers stacked in the waiting room and overflowing out in the yard. At eleven, they paused for a drink and to allow a deeper clean of the tables and floor. Orderlies carried away the tub of spare human parts for burial. Helen gulped, trying not to think of the hands that had caressed, legs that had run swiftly, now no more than unidentifiable carrion.

  Barnett slumped against the wall, head in his hands. ‘Lord, oh Lord,’ he groaned and Helen began to feel warmer towards the man. He was human after all. She coped by going numb; unable to think through all the tragic things she had seen on the table, instead she locked on the task that needed to be done. She leaned over the next patient, another young soldier with a dressing bound to his throat. Whitworth, 1st Somerset Light Infantry. Sebastian’s regiment.

  Her numbed serenity fractured, panic seeping through the cracks. That meant Sebastian was at the front too. She had been hoping that he would be on rotation behind the lines.

  The casualty feebly gripped her wrist. The gurgle from his massacred throat and frantic movements indicated that he was desperate for water. Recalled to her duty, she returned the pressure.

  ‘Can’t give you anything now, soldier, but soon,’ she whispered. ‘Very soon.’

  THE SOMME, 1 JULY 1916, 9 A.M.

  Hell could not be as bad as this. For an hour now Sebastian had been stuck with his men behind a low rampart of earth thrown up by a shell, tantalizingly close to their objective of the machine-gun emplacement. The air was thick with missiles, dust, smoke – it was impossible to guess where the death blow would come from. It was doubly dangerous to stay still as the German artillery might find their range and blow them to kingdom come or a bullet cut them down. For the moment, the shells were falling to the rear, pummelling the ground they had already crossed, but the British shells were now landing too far forward, assuming the attack was running like clockwork and the men were already in control of the first line of trenches. That left the troops boxed in on no man’s land by deadly fire. The screams and cries for help for the wounded had to be ignored, but it broke Sebastian’s heart to abandon them.

  After pretty continuous use, Sebastian’s rifle barrel was scorching in his left hand so he had taken to wrapping his palm in the webbing that was used to sling it across his chest. Cook had improvised with a handful of grass and leaves. The sun had come out from the clouds, bringing with it a plague of flies and a stench of decay of biblical proportions.

  Rolling on his back, Sebastian took a gulp of rum from his flask. The sharp hit of the alcohol drove out the taste of dust and smoke from his mouth. He had to break this stalemate. Death to stay here, court martial and execution if he retreated, almost certain death to advance. Not that he had any thought of falling back into that rain of shellfire. The Germans were doing a fine job of making any British soldier think twice about retreat.

  ‘Grenades at the ready.’ He pulled his own supply from his belt.

  Cook held up a German-made stick bomb which he must have scavenged off a body en route. Amazing – Sebastian had not even seen him do it. ‘’Ow about this, sir?’ The long handle made it perfect for lobbing over longer distances.

  ‘Got any more of them?’

  Bentley pulled out another three from some secret stash.

  ‘Can anyone throw it that far?’ Sebastian gestured to the machine-gun emplacement, protected by a redoubt like some tiny medieval castle. We’re spinning back in time; soon be going for each other with stone axes.

  ‘Surrey Young Farmers’ hay bale throwing champion,’ muttered Norton, stringing more words together than Sebastian had ever heard him use.

  Cook snorted. ‘Should’ve guessed.’

  Bentley passed him the first of the stick bombs.

  ‘We’ll provide you with covering fire.’ Sebastian was surprised at how cool he sounded. ‘On the count of three. One, two, three!’

  Cook, Bentley and Sebastian targeted the redoubt as Norton sprang from the ground to lob the stick bomb. It fell short, exploding against the mud wall, splattering them with earth. The machine gun opened up again with a bark of scornful fire. The other men in Sebastian’s squad returned the compliment, bullets coughing against the mud walls, hoping to find a peephole or weakness.

  ‘Just getting my eye in,’ muttered Norton.

  Cook laughed, managing somehow to find black humour in their position. ‘Take your time, mate. Not like we ’aven’t got all day.’

  ‘Again,’ Sebastian ordered. ‘Three, two, one!’

  This time the explosive sailed sweetly over the lip of the redoubt and burst with a muffled crack. Taking advantage of the pause in firing from the Germans, Norton chucked the final two on the same trajectory.

  ‘Forward!’ shouted Sebastian, tossing his rifle on his back, revolver in hand. They crossed the final yards and scrambled up the sides of the redoubt and dropped down the deeper incline on the other side, boots slipping on the sandbags. Sebastian fully expected to have to engage in hand-to-hand fighting to win the position, but Norton’s bombs had done the job for them. The gun crew were dead. He could not even tell how many of them there had been as the redoubt resembled a slaughterhouse, body parts scattered across the collapsed embankment. The unmistakable tang of fresh blood – acrid, sweet – mixed with earth. The gun itself had been blown off its mounting, but had survived better than those who had used it.

  ‘Bentley, Cook, defend the entrance.’ The rest of his squad were pouring over the edge; there appeared to be about twenty men left, some of his losses made up with stragglers from other units. Not too bad, considering. ‘Norton, good throwing. Disable the gun.’ Sebastian wiped the sweat from his forehead. July had once been a time of holidays, long, lazy days spent in the country. He was spending it in the country all right, but in a landscape more suited to Dante’s vision of hell. Stupid thought. Keep to the very real danger you are in, idiot.

  ‘Do we hold and wait for relief, or advance?’ asked Bentley.

  That was the question, wasn’t it? If the tide turned, they could get bottled up here at this forward position of the German lines. They were supposed to push on if they could. ‘We will take the next trench and hope to meet up with the others.’ If Captain Williams was still alive, he might have taken the positions to their left. Others from the 1st Somerset Light Infantry had been on their right. They surely were not the only ones to get this far as the counter-attack from the Germans had been desperate, the act of a few survivors, not overwhelming force. The majority must have fallen back to the next line of defence, giving up this exposed part of their trench network. So perhaps the much-maligned British artillery had done some good overnight, weakened them at least?

  ‘We go forward.’ Sebastian turned away as Cook scavenged an epaulette off the remains of a German uniform. Trophy hunting was second nature to the men and it was pointless to protest. They fully expected their own bodies to be so desecrated were they to take their turn being the victim. It seemed only a mildly ugly fact amid so many more shocking sights. Yet Sebastian couldn’t shake the image of the pale Saxon, back of h
ead caved in by the explosion, sprawled on the ground like a starfish, mouth a circle of surprise, eyes sightless. The boy had been alive two minutes ago. Sebastian wanted to honour the dead, cover him with a blanket, but there was no time, no covering to spare.

  ‘Right you are, sir.’ Cook peered round the corner leading into the trench network. ‘All clear.’

  Sebastian would have given his firstborn for decent intelligence of what lay round the bend. ‘Norton, Havers, Smith, guard our rear; Cook, Bentley, the rest of you, with me.’ Sebastian led the way down the duckboards, boots thudding on the wood echoing like the thunder of a Tube train coming into a station. So far, their luck had held, but for how long?

  METROPOLITAN LINE, LONDON, 15 MARCH 1915, 6 P.M.

  Sebastian hefted his portfolio from his right to his left hand as he stood in the queue for a ticket to the Underground. His weekend visit home to Taunton had gone as well as could be expected: his mother had liked his studies of hands and heads; his father had resisted making his usual jokes about the endowments of the various life models; his younger brother, Steven, had actually admired Sebastian’s new geometric approach, influenced by an exhibition he had recently attended of Vorticist painting. Steven, a bright-eyed fourteen-year-old, was curiously eager for anything that was ‘all the go’ in the capital, finding life as a schoolboy in Eton stifling. Poor boy: still three more years to endure. He had looked decidedly glum when he had got off at the Windsor and Eton branch line.

  Reaching the booking clerk’s window, Sebastian handed over three pennies and received a ticket in return, slid across the brass tray with a chirpy ‘Thank you, sir’ from the clerk. How many times a day did the man say that, Sebastian wondered? What kind of life was that? Men turning into machines.