by Charles Todd
I had told Simon, who had chuckled with amusement. He liked her, and he abided by her rules with solemn courtesy. Which only made her admire him even more.
There were so many memories of these four years in her house, but Mary and I had only a moment before she was summoned to see to a patient.
“Before I go, Bess. Was it you who sent us that officer from Barbados?”
I steeled myself for bad news as I said, “Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“We don’t quite know what to do about him. Perhaps you should have a word with the ward Sister?”
And then she was gone to take charge in whatever emergency had arisen.
I’d been on my way to the canteen for soup and a cup of tea, but I turned back the way I’d come and quickly found the ward where Captain Travis was being cared for.
To my surprise, he wasn’t in the officers’ ward where recovering patients would heal or wait to be sent on to England for further care.
I said to the ward Sister, “I’ve been asked to look in on Captain Travis.”
I was prepared for her to say that he’d left with the morning convoy for Calais. But Mary had spoken as if he was still in Base Hospital Seven.
The Sister looked down at her charts. “I’m afraid he’s not here, Sister.”
“Has he had more surgery? Is he in the Surgical Ward?”
“You must ask Matron, Sister. If you’ll excuse me, I have a patient I must see to.”
With a nod she hurried down the long aisle between beds, leaving me standing there.
I went instead to the Surgical Ward, but Captain Travis wasn’t there. I looked into wards where other ranks and the influenza cases and the men in quarantine were kept. Childhood diseases like measles followed an army too.
I was about to give up and go to Matron as I had been told to do when I remembered that this hospital had a special ward for head wounds, shell shock, and other injuries that precluded putting men into wards with other cases.
Feeling a surging fear, I stopped a passing VAD, one of the nurses supplied by a different group from mine, volunteers who had varying amounts of training, to ask where to find it. She pointed the way.
I opened the door. The ward Sister was at the other end, trying with the aid of an orderly to calm a very distraught man. He was screaming, fighting the orderly and the Sister.
I’d seen such cases. His head was swathed with bandages, only his eyes, nose, and mouth visible so that he could see and breathe and eat. The back of his head bulged where there was extra padding, indicating where his wound was.
Ignoring them, I started down the aisle. Most of the patients looked at me with a vacant stare, and I knew they were drugged to keep them quiet. The shell shock cases lay staring at the ceiling, wary of meeting anyone’s gaze. Other patients were strapped down to keep them from getting out of bed.
And one of these was Captain Travis.
He was a shadow of the man I’d had tea with in the hospital canteen in early autumn, when he’d told me about Barbados and we’d laughed over camels.
He had been shaved, but there were dark circles around his eyes, and they looked at the ceiling with a patience born of bleak despair. It hurt me to see it.
I went to his bedside.
“Captain Travis?”
He didn’t answer, and I wondered if he too had been sedated.
“It’s Sister Crawford, Captain.”
Something changed in his eyes, and after a moment he turned toward me.
“Come to gloat?” he asked, his voice husky with disuse. “I’ve stopped screaming. But they still refuse to untie these straps.”
I swallowed what I was about to say and instead asked, “I didn’t know. Talk to me, Captain. What’s happened?” For it was very clear something had. “Are you in pain?” I wondered if his wound had become septic. But if it had, why was he here, and not in a regular ward? Besides, I couldn’t smell the telltale signs of rampant infection.
“They use my wound as an excuse. But it’s healing cleanly. I can see that in the faces of the doctors who come to inspect it. I was beginning to lose my mind. What was left of it. I don’t do well with laudanum. I never have. It drives me to madness. And they’re sure that I’m there already.”
“But what’s wrong? Are they treating you for shell shock?”
“I don’t know. They whisper in conferences. I can’t hear what they’re saying. And no one tells me. I think they’re afraid to. I’ve got a handful of medals, you see. And I don’t think they want to put down shell shock as a diagnosis.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They blame it on the early head wound. They seem to think I shouldn’t have been sent back to the Front so soon.” The screaming had stopped at the far end of the ward. Captain Travis’s glance strayed in that direction, then came back to me. “If I stay here long enough, I’ll be as mad as the rest of them,” he said bitterly.
I realized then what was wrong. While the wound in his back was healing, he must have fretted about being away from the fighting, and in the throes of fever, let it be known to anyone who would listen that he had to return to his men and stop a killer who had already sent him twice to hospital.
And no one believed him. If they had, he wouldn’t have been strapped down or sedated.
Dear God.
“Do you still have headaches?”
“I’m not sure. The laudanum left me ill and confused. I’ve always had problems with it, even when I broke my arm as a boy. God knows what I’ve been saying. One of the Sisters reported that I was waiting for a camel to take me back to the Front.”
I remembered our conversation back in the autumn. But anyone else would be disturbed by the reference.
We had purposely kept our voices low, and he was watching the ward Sister at the end of the room.
I said quickly, in the event we were interrupted, “Is it because you still believe that James Travis shot you? Is that why they sedate you, and keep you strapped down?”
“It’s likely. But I say nothing about that anymore. I tell them it was the head wound that made me delusional. That I hadn’t seen Lieutenant Travis since we met briefly in Paris in the Gare du Nord. I tell them that he’s a cousin, and I’ve been worried about him, hoping he was all right. That I was thinking about him when I was shot.”
“And how do they answer you?”
He looked away, resignation in his face. It was thinner than I remembered it. “Apparently I was difficult when I arrived—well, to be truthful, I’d soon had enough of people telling me to be quiet and let the staff get on with it. I was impatient, angry. Twice now I’ve been shot by this one idiot, and I felt I had a right to be angry.” Turning back to me, he said, “Then someone remembered how angry I was the first time I’d been shot. And they decided that it was something more than headaches and a new wound so soon after the first. And here I am.”
He seemed to be telling me the truth. But he could also be using me, thinking I’d understand him and get him out of this ward and into another. For he was very persuasive.
“They’re coming,” he whispered. “You’d best go.”
I turned to see that the ward Sister was walking our way with intent in her face.
I didn’t answer him. I waited, and when the Sister was near enough, I greeted her cheerfully.
“Good day, Sister. I’ve stopped in to see how my patient is doing.”
She gave me a suspicious look.
“I’m rather surprised to find him in this ward. What do the doctors say?” I moved away from Captain Travis’s bedside and went to meet her, hoping she would give me a brief account of his condition. “How is the wound in his back?”
Instead she said, “You shouldn’t be here, Sister. He’s been quiet for several hours. We’d like to keep it that way.”
I pressed. “But what is his diagnosis?”
“You’ll have to speak to Matron, I’m afraid. But the general feeling is that he’s suffered a brain injury.”
> Startled by that, I replied, “I saw the head wound when he was first brought in. The bullet hadn’t reached the brain, it had only creased the skull.”
Her mouth tightened. I’d questioned the doctors, and that wasn’t done. Seeing that I was going to get nowhere with her, I said, “I’m leaving shortly. I’ll say good-bye to the patient, if you don’t mind.”
And without waiting for an answer, I turned back to Captain Travis. In a voice that carried, I said, “Try to get well, Captain. You’re in good hands. I’ll look in the next time I’m here.”
But what the ward Sister and the orderly coming up behind her couldn’t see as I turned my back on them to speak to the Captain was what I was doing. I found his fingers under the sheet and gripped them. I saw the flare of surprise in his face, and then it closed down again. But his fingers turned under the sheet and gripped mine with a fierce strength.
He had found a lifeline, and he knew it.
A dangerous thing to do, if he had suffered an injury that we’d missed. But I couldn’t leave him there, lost in a hopelessness that had no end but another ward just like this, in France or in England.
But I would look in again. To be sure.
I left then, and went to speak to Matron again.
She listened to me, then said, “You didn’t see the Captain when he was brought in. You didn’t hear him in his delirium, shouting at an imaginary cousin, calling him a killer, a traitor. You didn’t watch him struggle against his straps, telling us he was healed and ought to be returned to duty. Whatever was driving this poor man, it was in his head, Sister, and we had to remove him from the ward he’d been taken to. He fought us, ill as he was, and we had to sedate him for his own sake, with that back wound. I believe you’d done the same when he was in the ambulance that brought him here. The driver had warned us that he was wild even then. You know as well as I do that a back wound doesn’t behave like that. What’s more, he aggravated his wound and we feared infection would set in.” She shook her head. “Your concern does you honor, Sister, but given the facts as we have seen them, I think we have made the right decision for Captain Travis.”
I could see that I was about to do more harm than good if I argued. But I said, “I think something happened during that earlier retreat that shook him rather badly. I hope you’ll also take that into account.”
“Are you telling me you believe that he’s suffering from shell shock?”
Oh great heavens!
But I kept my wits about me with an effort. Frowning, as if considering the matter, I said, “I don’t really know the answer to that, Matron. I saw the head wound when it was brought into the forward aid station. And I’m not convinced that it was severe enough to cause this aberrant behavior. In fact, he was returned to duty the next day.”
“And that might well be the source of the problem, Sister. That he was released too soon. If we’d kept him longer, we might have seen these symptoms develop and dealt with them. He might have responded to treatment, early on. Still, I shall make a note on the Captain’s chart, indicating your concern. Thank you, Sister Crawford, for your assistance in this matter.”
Another Sister was tapping at her door, and I used that as my excuse for a hasty retreat. “I’ve kept you long enough. And my ambulance will be waiting. I must thank you for the supplies, on behalf of Dr. Weatherby. He will be grateful.”
She nodded in dismissal and I got myself out of there without betraying the turmoil in my own mind.
Just as I closed the door behind the reporting Sister, I could hear the ambulance driver calling for me. I caught up my bag and hurried out to meet him. The hospital was far from shorthanded, I had no excuse to stay—and I might already have complicated matters.
I used fatigue as my excuse for sitting with my head back and my eyes closed. I hoped the ambulance driver would understand—he’d seen me on my feet all the way here, dealing with my three emergencies.
But what was going through my mind was what I had seen—and what I had done.
If Captain Travis was suffering from a brain injury, he was better off where he was, where he couldn’t do himself or someone else a harm.
If I was honest with myself, I couldn’t deny the frightening possibility that he had given the face of someone he’d met by chance to the man he believed had shot him twice. Even though it was far more likely that if it wasn’t the Germans, he’d been shot accidentally in the chaos of battle. The question now was, would he go on insisting that he was right, go on looking for a man who might not even exist? And try to kill a stranger who was unlucky enough to resemble James Travis?
And yet I failed to convince myself that Captain Travis had invented a killer, that he believed himself to be invincible and needed to blame someone else when he discovered he was as vulnerable as any of his men.
What if, for the sake of argument, he was telling the absolute truth, that someone—even, as wild as it sounded, his cousin James Travis—had wanted to kill him? But the question then was why? If they had found themselves face-to-face in the midst of battle—which wasn’t terribly far-fetched as the Germans retreated and the British Army was bringing every man it could muster to prevent a last stand—why had James Travis been so determined to see the Captain dead that he would try twice to kill him?
Stranger things had happened in war. Perhaps only James Travis knew the answer to that.
The unthinkable part of this whole dilemma was the chance that Captain Travis was telling the truth, no matter how unbelievable it might appear to be. And to abandon him in a world of madness would be unspeakably cruel.
I hadn’t intended to raise the specter of shell shock, and I hoped Matron had brought it up only in an effort to find a realistic explanation for the Captain’s condition. After all, I’d been present each time he’d been brought in to the aid station, and so I had firsthand knowledge of his case. Shell shock was believed by many to be arrant cowardice, not a medical matter at all. And if this diagnosis was confirmed, in Captain Travis’s record for all to see, he would be shunned for the rest of his life.
It would be a very different nightmare from the one he was presently in.
There was really no one I could talk to about all this. Not here in France.
There was Mary. Could I turn to her? She’d told me to look in on Captain Travis in the first place. But why? A courtesy because he’d been my patient and I would want to know how he was faring? The fate of the men we’d tended mattered to us. Or because she thought I might be the best person to judge his condition?
It was too late to do anything about that now. But as soon as I reached the aid station, I quickly wrote a note to her, asking her as a favor to keep an eye on Captain Travis for me, and let me know how he did. Then I handed it to the patient driver waiting to go back to the base hospital.
As I watched the ambulance disappear down the rough track, I knew there was nothing more I could do now. I could only hope that the memory of the despair in Captain Travis’s eyes wouldn’t haunt me as I went on with my work here.
Chapter 5
The next morning early we left the ruined farmyard and moved forward. The medical corps had cleared another space for us, this time in the ruins of a blacksmith’s shop on the outskirts of town.
Dr. Weatherby went to the nearest officer he could find and refused to set up his aid station there.
“There will be lockjaw present in the paddock behind the building. I refuse to operate in such conditions.”
According to the account I heard, the Major was a city dweller and had thought only of the space we would have there and that the ambulances would be safe from artillery fire.
That meant a second move, this time to the far side of town in a brickyard.
Dr. Weatherby was still not pleased, but there was nothing we could do. He asked for the town hall, the hôtel de ville, which we could see was in fairly good condition, although the windows were broken.
We were told that this had been German headquarters for six
months and it hadn’t been cleared of traps.
Removing what we could of the shelled rubble surrounding us, we had the aid station set up in time for the first stretchers appearing down the road that led to the brickyard. Twelve hours later, we moved into the city hall, just as a patient brought more news, telling us there were rumors that Kaiser Wilhelm was abdicating. That the government had collapsed in Berlin.
We found it impossible to believe. The Kaiser was the grandson of Queen Victoria. But he had no love for the English, it was said, even though his mother was the Queen’s eldest daughter. War with England had been an acceptable risk, in his view, when his troops invaded Belgium in 1914, on their way to the north of France. He had become the face of Germany in all the British recruiting posters, which showed him as a cruel, bloody invader. I simply couldn’t imagine him walking away at this stage of the war.
And I couldn’t help but wonder what the Colonel Sahib thought about this news—if it was true. He knew far more about such matters than I did, given his service to the Army since war was first declared.
Our next visitor was an unexpected surprise.
Sergeant Lassiter, who always seemed to find his way to me wherever I was posted, came by in the evening. Whatever grapevine the Australian forces had, he knew far more about what was going on than half the men serving in France, and if he couldn’t find an answer to my questions, he found someone who did.
It was good to see him. Tall, rangy, and irrepressible, he was about to sweep me off my feet and swirl me around in midair, and just in the nick of time he happened to see Sister Medford in the shadows of the doorway. We’d both come out for air, but I was standing on the steps leading up to the door.
“Sister,” he said plaintively, pulling off his hat—I thought for a terrified moment he was going to bow, right there in the middle of the village square—“this hand is bothering me again. Where you took out that bit of shrapnel. I fear it’s festering.”
He held it out, dangling from his wrist, as if it were about to fall off. A grimace of pain twisted his features.
A more pathetic act I’d never seen, and I had to hold in my smile.