The days became a blur of blood and bone-weary fatigue. The trains went backwards, forwards, racing to the railhead at Vecquement-sur-Somme, loading up with broken bodies and slowly trundling west to Rouen with their freight of suffering and death.
Sometimes, Rose looked up at the sky and saw how blue it was, how beautiful. Just as it should be in July, she thought, when these conscripted shop assistants, clerks and office boys ought to have been walking in the parks and showing off to girls, taking Sunday trips to Margate or Southend, but instead were being murdered and mutilated on the Somme.
‘What were our generals thinking of?’ As they cleared up at the end of yet another gruelling journey, Maria’s tone was light and conversational, but her eyes were hard as tempered steel. ‘When the wretched Germans saw our men come out and walk towards their blasted guns, I don’t suppose they could believe their luck.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Judith, yawning.
‘Surely you’ve heard what the men are saying? That first day, they were supposed to take possession of German trenches full of German dead. But they walked into a hail of fire. It was like a shooting gallery, I heard one man say. The Germans sat in their machine gun nests, and cut our soldiers down.’
It remained a shooting gallery. The optimism of that first summer morning died with all the murdered men. But still the allied troops were sent to try to take a wood, a trench, a village, and still they were cut down.
‘When we’ve unloaded, shall we go and get something to eat?’ Maria asked Rose, as the train came trundling into Rouen with its dreadful cargo, one evening in the middle of July.
Tonight, thought Rose, Maria looked like a butcher’s boy, in an apron striped and smeared with blood, in boots slick and encrusted with the blood that dripped on to the floor as young men died.
As she washed her hands and face, dyeing the water orange-red, Rose thought she would always smell the blood, would always have that sweet, metallic tang inside her nostrils. She rolled down her sleeves and shook her head. ‘I’m not really hungry,’ she replied.
‘Rose, nobody’s hungry, but we have to eat, or we’ll collapse. Judith, you come too. We’re only going to the Red Cross café in the square, just to have some toast or something, otherwise we’ll die.’
As they ate their toast and drank their tepid, bitter coffee, Sister Glossop came into the café. When Rose had met her first, she’d been a spruce, determined woman who looked like a busy, speckled hen.
Now she was bedraggled and looked ill. She was a veteran of the Boer War, an army nurse who Rose could see had always managed to take control of things, and put wounds and sickness in their place.
But she couldn’t cope with wholesale murder. ‘We have to leave again in half an hour,’ she murmured, as she sat down heavily. ‘My dear Miss Courtenay, when did you last sleep? You look terrible.’
Rose didn’t have the nerve to tell the sister she looked dreadful, too.
The train sped back to Vecquement, pulling into a siding where electric lights were trained on wires, and where the wounded waited, sitting, lying or wandering aimlessly about.
The stretcher bearers carried in the worst ones, laying them down on bunks still stained and bloodied from the men who’d bled in them before. Rose picked up her shears and started work.
Leaning over one unconscious man whose legs were mangled and would probably be amputated as the train sped west, she had a sudden sense of déjà-vu.
Looking at the shoulder flashes on his bloodstained jacket, she saw he was from the Royal Dorsets, that he was broad-shouldered and well-made, and that his hair was dark.
She suddenly felt nauseous, and the world began to swim. She held on to the bunk to keep her balance. But of course it wasn’t Alex. This man was the officer who’d been with Michael Easton, when they’d met for tea that day in Rouen.
Lieutenant Lennox? No, Lieutenant Lomax, Freddie Lomax. She felt his pulse and grimaced. He wasn’t going to live. He’d lost far too much blood, and his face already had the grey-green otherworldly look that meant only a miracle could save him.
As she cut away his shirt and saw the bullet wounds that made a ghastly pattern on his chest, his dark eyes flickered open.
‘Freddie?’ she said gently. ‘You’re very badly wounded, but we’ll do our best for you.’
Freddie Lomax looked at her, but couldn’t seem to focus. As she began to clean him up, he closed his eyes and died.
She left him, moved on down the train, surrounded by the dreadful sights of broken, tortured men, some of them boys years younger than herself, whose suffering could not be eased because there was no time to give them pain-relieving morphine.
As their wounds were probed and cleaned, they tried not to cry out. They didn’t want to be a nuisance even as they died.
As Judith passed her, carrying a kidney bowl and knuckling her eyes, Rose was glad she didn’t have a heart, that it was safely buried with Alex in the army cemetery at St Etienne.
The machine that these days pumped her blood around her body did a splendid job, and now she was a mere automaton. She wasn’t even hungry. She found she could keep going for hours, for days, on coffee and dry toast.
It was only when she had to deal with someone who’d been burned, who’d been blown up or set on fire, when she had to look into a young man’s ruined face, that she wanted to sit down and cry.
They got back in the early hours to find some letters waiting. So, after all the casualties had been carried off the train and taken to the hospital ships tied up along the river, Maria made some coffee, and the nurses sat down in the kitchen.
‘These must be from some of the boys we’ve nursed.’ Maria fanned her letters out. ‘It’s always nice to hear from them.’
‘But have you heard from Phoebe?’ Rose enquired.
‘No.’ Maria shrugged. ‘So what have you got – anything exciting?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Rose smiled wearily. ‘I’m too tired to read them anyway.’
Chapter Fifteen
‘You left them in the kitchen,’ said Maria, as she handed Rose her letters later that same morning. ‘Go on, open them.’
So Rose scanned the first.
‘He had a septic finger,’ Celia said. ‘Just a little cut. But he must have got some dirt in it, because his whole hand swelled up horribly. He couldn’t hold a rifle, so he missed the great attack. We are so relieved! You will be, too. Apparently, Michael is the sole survivor of the 3rd Battalion. The rest of them are dead.
‘Daisy is very well. Her hair is curling into ringlets and she has two new teeth. She is a sweet, contented child and a great favourite with Mrs Hobson. I hope to have her picture taken soon, and I shall send you a print. I’ve not heard from her mother. But if she is a low, loose-living woman, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised.
‘My knitting circle goes from strength to strength. We’ve made a splendid effort this July – four thousand pairs of socks and fifteen hundred balaclavas are on their way to France.’
Rose went to help the others make up bunks. ‘Daisy’s very well,’ she told Maria, who she knew was saving up her leave and hoped to go to England soon. ‘If we could get some leave together, we could go and see her, maybe.’
‘You mean go to Dorset?’ frowned Maria. ‘I’m not sure I’d be welcome.’
‘Yes, you would,’ insisted Rose. She suddenly had a brainwave. ‘We could stay at Henry Denham’s house. He asked me to go and see him, and I’m sure he’d put us up.’
Rose pushed her other letters into her pocket. She’d seen there was another from her father, in which he’d be asking why she hadn’t given the gallant Michael her consent to be his wife. She was getting sick and tired of being badgered.
The bunks were almost done, the trays were laid. Glancing at her watch, she decided she could snatch ten minutes. She’d write to Sir Gerard now, and tell him she wasn’t going to marry Michael Easton. Then she’d write to Michael, saying she hoped they’d always be good
friends, but she couldn’t be his wife.
As she walked back to her own couchette, she opened the third letter. This was written on cheap blue Forces paper, much stamped and franked and creased. Misdirected, it had followed her around, and finally caught up with her in Rouen.
It would be from a soldier she had nursed, thanking her for what she’d done, telling her he was fit again and ready to go back.
Hearing this invariably depressed her, for it seemed a futile waste of time to mend a man only to send him back to be blown up again or killed.
She took out the single sheet inside.
‘My dearest Rose,’ she read. ‘Since I’m not yet able to hold a pen myself, a sister is kindly writing this for me.’ She scanned the rest in mounting disbelief.
‘Maria!’ Rose ran down the empty train. Laughing and crying all at once, she blundered into empty bunks and scraped her knees and shins, but didn’t notice, didn’t care.
She finally found Maria in the sluice, washing a stack of kidney bowls. ‘Maria, look!’ she cried. ‘Maria, it’s a miracle! He’s alive!’
‘Miss Courtenay?’ Before Maria could ask Rose what was going on and why she was hysterical, Sister Glossop bustled in. ‘A little more decorum, if you please.’
‘Oh, Sister Glossop!’ Thrusting the letter at Maria, Rose beamed at the sister, knuckling her tears away and gulping like a goldfish out of water. She made an effort to calm down. ‘May I have some leave?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Sister Glossop frowned, and shadows like raw liver deepened underneath her eyes. ‘Miss Courtenay, there’s a battle going on. I’m sure you must have noticed?’
‘Just twelve hours, Sister Glossop, please!’ Rose was jigging up and down, a sprat upon a griddle. ‘I’ll do extra shifts, I’ll work a twenty-four hour day, I’ll cover sickness, everything. But please let me have a pass tonight!’
Sister Glossop looked at Rose. ‘I’ve never heard you laugh before, Miss Courtenay. I didn’t think you could. But no, you can’t have leave.’
‘I’ll cover Rose’s shifts.’ Maria looked earnestly at Sister Glossop. ‘I know she’ll do mine for me.’
Sister Glossop frowned. ‘This is a family matter, I assume?’
‘Rose’s cousin,’ said Maria glibly.
‘Really?’ Sister Glossop raised one eyebrow. ‘Oh – very well, Miss Courtenay. You’ll have to work tonight, but if you’ll make the time up later, you may have tomorrow off.’ The sister smiled grimly. ‘That’s provided Dr Wood agrees.’
Maria grinned at Rose. They knew it was unlikely young Dr Wood, the officer nominally in charge, would dare to challenge Sister Glossop.
Rose went by train to Egreville, a small town near the Belgian border. Then she hitched a lift to Valoucourt, a tiny village. Asking for directions in her halting schoolgirl French, she walked for miles down muddy tracks until she came to Forges les Eaux.
Left empty by the family that owned it because it was so close to the front line, the manor house had been taken over by the British Army. As its roof and turrets loomed between the summer trees, she slowed her pace. She was trying to remember what Michael had said about the night patrol. She wished she’d questioned him more closely.
There had been two other men with Alex, she did remember that. All three had presumably been carrying grenades. If they’d been hit, they’d probably have gone up like Roman candles.
He had said he couldn’t hold a pen. She shuddered as she realised his strong brown hands would now be stiff red claws, that couldn’t manage anything as subtle as a pen. As for his face – she didn’t want to think about his face.
She had heard there was a special hospital in London that was making marvellous lifelike masks, based on army photographs, for men with damaged faces. Perhaps they could help Alex. Maybe in due course he would be able to face the world again.
Rose squared her shoulders. Whatever Alex looked like now, whatever awful damage the flames had done to him, to Rose he’d always be the slim, brown boy who had bewitched her with his lovely smile and great dark eyes.
What if those eyes were blind?
It didn’t matter. She would love him still. She would leave the VAD, and take him home to Dorset. She’d find a house and get a job. She would look after him.
She walked up to the gatehouse.
‘Good morning, Sister,’ said the orderly on duty. He took in Rose’s filthy boots and grass-stained, mud-streaked skirt. ‘You must have walked a tidy way.’
‘I’m sure the exercise has done me good.’ Rose smiled at him. ‘I’ve come to visit Captain Denham.’
‘I understand he was quite badly hurt?’ As Rose followed a blue-skirted nurse along a polished corridor, she raked her fingers through her messy hair.
She knew she looked a sight. They’d made her leave her muddy boots outside, and the nurse had stared astonished at her dirty dress.
‘Quite badly, yes.’ The nurse turned back to smile. ‘But he’s getting stronger every day. Now he can remember things that happened before the raid, he’s looking brighter.’ She opened the door into a sunny ward. ‘Here we are, Miss Courtenay. Please come in.’
Rose took a deep breath, then followed the nurse into the ward. She hoped she’d see him first. She knew what fire could do to human flesh, but she still felt the need to be prepared, then she wouldn’t look shocked or horrified. She wouldn’t upset him.
‘Where is he?’ she whispered.
‘Over in the corner, by the window.’
Rose looked, and saw the man she’d always known. He was a little thinner in the face, but apart from that he hadn’t changed. Dressed in the usual loose, hospital blues, he was sitting reading, and hadn’t noticed anyone come in.
Relief and gratitude to somebody or something made her feel light-headed, and she was afraid she might pass out. But she drew a deep, relaxing breath, then walked up to him on stealthy, stockinged feet.
‘Alex?’ she said softly, crouching down beside his chair.
‘Rose?’ At first he looked as if he’d seen a ghost, but then the smile he gave her made her want to sing.
‘At first, I couldn’t believe it.’ Rose wanted desperately to touch him, make sure he was real and would not disappear. ‘I thought it was some horrible, cruel joke.’
‘I’m sorry, Rose.’ Alex looked so stricken she longed to kiss the frown away, to make him smile again. But she couldn’t even touch him, not with all the nurses and other patients staring, and with doctors hovering about.
‘What happened?’ she asked, gently.
‘I’d gone out with two other chaps. One of us got hit and set on fire. I wrapped David in my jacket, which had all my papers in the pockets. Then I must have got blown up myself. When they found me I was crawling round a crater, miles away from our position. God know how I got there. I suppose I was trying to get home.’
‘Then you and the other soldier got mixed up.’ Rose shook her head at him. ‘Why don’t you men wear chains around your necks, with your names and numbers on metal disks? Those silly little cardboard things are useless. More than half the men I see have lost them, and no wonder when you tie them round your necks with bits of string.’
‘So we should have necklaces and lockets?’
‘Maybe,’ Rose replied. ‘Who exactly found you, then?’
‘Some chaps who’d been out mending wire.’
‘You said you couldn’t hold a pen.’
‘I can’t.’ He looked down at his hands, and Rose saw the burns were at a stage when any movement would be painful. But they were going to heal. Of course he’d have some scars, the skin would always pucker and those angry weals would never fade, but in a couple of months he would be able to use his hands again.
‘Where else were you hurt?’ asked Rose.
‘Something must have hit me on the head. I remember waking up in this place, but everything before it was a blank. I didn’t have any papers and I didn’t know my name.
‘They tried to trace my regiment
, of course. But thousands of poor chaps are missing, and a lot of them must look like me.’ Alex shrugged. ‘People have even come out here from England, hoping I might be their son.’
‘What happened next?’
‘A week or two ago, one of the sisters came in humming a tune they used to play at dances, in the summer before the war. Suddenly I saw a woman in a long pink dress, and it was you.
‘I grabbed the sister’s arm and made her hum the tune again, over and over. She humoured me, but God – she looked so frightened! She must have thought I’d really lost my mind. Then, everything started coming back to me.’
‘Captain Denham, it’s a lovely day.’ The nurse in blue smiled down at them. ‘If Miss Courtenay helps you to the terrace, I’ll bring you both some coffee.’ She held out Rose’s boots, which had been cleaned.
So Rose took Alex through the double doors. They sat down on a lichen-clad stone bench, and turned their faces to the sun.
Still she couldn’t touch him. She didn’t dare, for she was afraid that if she did she’d feel Maria shaking her and saying she’d overslept.
Then she looked at Alex, at the little creases at the corners of his eyes, at a thin white scar that snaked along his forehead, then disappeared into his raven hair. This mundane appraisal could not be the stuff of dreams.
‘When I heard from Henry,’ she began, ‘when he sent my letters back and told me you’d been killed, I thought I’d die of grief.’
‘Poor Rose.’ Alex carefully brushed a strand of hair back from her face. ‘Poor darling, I can see you haven’t slept.’
‘When I first got Henry’s letter, I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again.’
‘I couldn’t wait to see you.’ Alex stroked the coil of hair with one stiff, awkward hand. ‘Actually, I wondered if you’d come. I thought you might have found somebody else.’
‘Alex, don’t be absurd.’ Rose took his hands in hers and worked the fingers, smoothing and massaging them. ‘When you didn’t write,’ she whispered, ‘and I didn’t know about the raid, I wondered if you’d changed your mind. I thought perhaps you had gone back to Chloe, and–’
The Silver Locket (Choc Lit) Page 18