Lorimers at War

by Anne Melville

  ‘They like it.’ Frisca pirouetted as she spoke. Her dimpled smile was infectious. It was impossible to feel gloomy in Frisca’s presence – and equally impossible to be strict. Everyone knew that the seven-year-old, angelically blonde, was spoiled, but no one could bring himself to be the brute who would dim the radiance in those wide blue eyes. Kate watched with amusement as Margaret did her best to be severe.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure they like it, but they should be getting on with their work instead of watching you. Off you go.’

  Frisca’s pretty face clouded. ‘Everywhere I go today people tell me to go somewhere else. All the rooms are different and everyone’s busy and I can’t do anything I want to.’

  ‘You should be in the schoolroom, surely,’ suggested Kate.

  ‘Miss Brampton’s saying goodbye to her cousin. He’s going to be a soldier like Robert, and she’s been crying all morning. She gave me some sweets to keep out of the way for half an hour.’

  ‘By the time you get back to the house, the half-hour will be up. Run along.’

  Pouting, the little girl made her way off the stage and out of the theatre, dawdling at first but unable to restrain herself from skipping happily before she was out of sight. Kate continued to smile.

  ‘I’ve never seen such a child for dancing,’ she said. ‘One of these days I’m sure she’s going to become as famous as her mother – but as a prima ballerina, not a prima donna. Now then, tell me what you’re going to do with all this.’

  There were so many details to be discussed and so many decisions to be made that Kate was filled with admiration for her aunt’s appreciation of each problem and the firmness with which she made up her mind. They discussed catering, and accommodation for nurses. They considered how the actors’ dressing rooms could best be used, and whether there was a need for an operating theatre.

  On this last point the two women held different views.

  ‘We can hardly hope to equip Blaize as a complete hospital,’ Margaret pointed out. ‘I see it only as a place for recuperation and convalescence. Surely it would be a mistake to attempt anything more ambitious. We’ve set ourselves a limited objective: to free other beds and services for the men in most urgent need by accepting those who need only time and care for their recovery.’

  ‘I know that was what Uncle Piers suggested,’ Kate agreed. ‘But when I came off duty this morning the corridors of the hospital were lined with beds. These were the men who had been moved out of the acute wards, and these are the cases who will be sent to a place like Blaize if the present rate of casualties continues. They’ve had their main operations, certainly. But there’s gas gangrene in almost every wound. At a guess, I would think that one in ten may need further surgery. I agree that those cases ought not to be sent here. But I suspect very strongly that in fact they will arrive.’

  Margaret’s face paled, and Kate guessed that she was thinking about Robert. She continued to talk quickly, forcing her aunt to concentrate on the matter in hand. more notes were taken, more measurements made. It was a relief, back at the house, to see the calmness with which Lord Glanville accepted the day’s new sheets of requirements. He had made himself responsible for obtaining everything Margaret wanted, whether it was equipment such as beds and blankets or labour for the necessary tasks of conversion. His authority, and his many friends in the world of affairs, cut through the red tape of War Office inefficiency and smoothed away difficulties which would have been daunting to a mere doctor. Kate watched and admired.

  For eight weeks she lived a double life. Her work in London would once have been considered full time, but she travelled regularly to the country to undertake what was in effect a second week’s work. At first it was only administrative: but even before Blaize could be considered ready to receive its first patients, the ambulances began to arrive, and Kate took turns with Margaret in assisting the hard-pressed admissions doctor. There were times when she could have wept with tiredness, times when she would have paid any price for a full night’s sleep. But the survivors of the Battle of Ypres lay in such stoical silence as they waited their turn for attention that Kate found it impossible to turn away as long as there was still work to be done. She had never been a frivolous young woman, but these first months of her working life matured her with remarkable speed. She never ceased to be appalled by the injuries she saw, but with every day that passed she was able to deal with them more competently.

  When Christmas came she allowed herself a single day of rest. By now Margaret had closed her London home and it was tacitly accepted that Blaize would be the family centre for as long as the war lasted.

  Already, though, the family was scattering. Brinsley was still in France and Robert too had left for the front. Even to Kate it seemed that his period of training had been very short, and she could see the same anxiety in Margaret’s unhappy eyes. But he had assured his mother that his role would be to lay the tracks of light railways for the movement of supplies, and this would be done behind the line. Kate could feel no such consolation when she thought about Brinsley.

  So it was a small and not very merry group of people who assembled in the library at Blaize to celebrate Christmas – the Christmas which had once been expected to mark a return to peace. Nor were Kate’s spirits raised by a piece of news which came from Beatrice. A date had been fixed – two weeks ahead – on which the second women’s unit would leave England. But it was not going to France.

  Kate knew that there had been great difficulties in getting women doctors admitted to the war zones. The British War Office had remained adamant in its refusal to accept the offer of skilled workers and modern equipment, while the French had proved unable to use the first unit to good advantage. All the same, it was a specific desire to help British soldiers on the Western Front which had prompted Kate to volunteer. It was with dismay that she learned that her unit would be going to Serbia.

  Six months earlier she would not even have known where Serbia was. Even now she found it difficult to care greatly about the fervent nationalists whose hatred of Austria had started the war. She sat in silence for a little while, wondering whether to withdraw her application. No one could say that the work she was doing in England was not a valuable contribution to the war effort.

  Lord Glanville noticed her silence and guessed at its cause, although Kate was ashamed to admit that her own form of nationalism was making her reluctant to care for anyone but her own fellow-countrymen. It had always been a joke in the family that the Glanville library contained every book, on however unexpected a subject, that anyone could need. Now its owner not only produced a map, but proved himself to be the unlikely owner of a Serbo-Croat dictionary, brought back to England by an ancestor whose Grand Tour had once taken in Diocletian’s palace. Kate accepted the gift without enthusiasm and continued to consider her future.

  But there was no real choice. It would be disgraceful to withdraw from her commitment so late in the day, leaving Beatrice less than a fortnight to find a substitute. And certainly if she did withdraw, she would never be offered a place in any other unit and so would lose her only chance of working in a front-line hospital. It was not so long since she had been convinced that it was there, in the places where men were actually being wounded, that she could be most useful, and that conviction had not changed. Perhaps after a little while she would be allowed to transfer to a different theatre of war. But soldiers could not choose where they would serve. Why should she expect different treatment for herself?

  Kate allowed herself one long sigh of disappointment and resignation. Then, as the others looked at her in curious sympathy, she forced herself to smile. After only a few seconds the smile ceased to be a pretence as the warmth of her feelings for her family made themselves felt. When she had so little time left in England, she must fill every moment with happiness. Who could tell, after all, when she would be able to spend Christmas at Blaize again?

  1915

  1

  On the Western Front the enemy was
the German; in the Dardanelles it was the Turk; in Serbia it was the louse. Its killing power took Kate by surprise, and the battle against this unexpected adversary began almost from the first moment of her arrival in Serbia.

  The journey across a continent disrupted by war had been long and uncomfortable. Kate and her fellow-doctor applied themselves to the Serbo-Croat dictionary and by the end of the journey had at least mastered the difficulties of the Cyrillic alphabet. But this achievement proved to be of only limited use. Now they could read and pronounce words in the unfamiliar letters, but they had yet to learn what the words meant.

  Communication was the first problem to confront them when at last the party of doctors and nurses stepped off the train at Kragujevatz. They had been invited to come here and they were expected – a reception committee was waiting for them at the station. But their first impression, gained from an interpreter whose English was almost as incomprehensible as the Serbo-Croat of his companions, was that the British team were not wanted in the town. Women in the medical world were so often under-valued that it was easy to see slights even perhaps where none was intended; but to Kate, tired after the journey and still disappointed that she had not been sent to France, the impression that they were being turned away came as a last straw. To keep her temper under control she supervised the unloading of the expedition’s stores while the senior doctor, Dr Muriel Forbes, established that she and the Serbs could converse, after a fashion, in German.

  ‘The reason why they’re suggesting we should establish ourselves away from the town is that the arsenal is here in Kragujevatz and there are regular bombing raids by Taube aircraft,’ Dr Forbes reported when the situation had been explained to her. ‘It doesn’t mean that they don’t need or want us. Far from it! Twenty-one of their own doctors have died in the past five weeks.’

  ‘From the bombs?’ asked Kate incredulously.

  ‘No. From typhus. There’s an epidemic raging. They’ve had four thousand civilian deaths in this town alone and nobody knows how many are dying in the villages. As well as the regular military hospital here, there’s an emergency building filled with men wounded in the campaign. That’s where they’d expected us to work, but the typhus is spreading through there as well.’

  ‘If we split into two teams, could they give us orderlies?’ Kate asked.

  Muriel’s smile showed that she had been thinking along the same lines. ‘Yes. I asked that question, and the answer was that with the greatest of ease and pleasure we could be provided with as many Austrian prisoners of war as we needed.’

  ‘Is that safe? I mean, would they have to be under military guard all the time?’

  ‘I gather that they’re only Austrians in the sense that they were conscripted into the Austrian Army because they lived in land under Austrian occupation. They’re Serbs by race – Bosnians – and delighted to have been captured – in fact, it sounds as though most of them deserted. They’d work as volunteers.’

  ‘Then we ought to establish a separate hospital for the typhus victims,’ said Kate. ‘Under tents, if possible, and a little way out of town.’

  The two women were so closely in agreement that there was not even any need to discuss where each of them should go. Muriel, the elder, was a surgeon and volunteered at once to care for the wounded soldiers who could not be housed in the main military hospital.

  Three days later Kate’s tented hospital received its first patients. Those of the British team who stayed with her had been allocated their own spheres of responsibility – for nursing, the kitchen, the dispensary and the stores – and had set to work at once to train the Serbo-Austrian orderlies allotted to them. Kate herself had grasped the greatest nettle of all, that of sanitation and disinfestation. She was only twenty-four years old and all her training had been done in teaching hospitals run with an almost military discipline along lines laid down many years earlier – establishments whose methods of organization could not even be queried by a junior doctor, much less completely re-thought. But her recent work at Blaize had provided useful experience of organizing a hospital almost from scratch, and from her father she had inherited the ability to be definite, taking responsibility and giving firm orders even when she lacked the experience to be sure that the effects would be as she hoped. From her mother, too, she had from childhood absorbed the principles of community hygiene. Lydia’s battle in Jamaica had been against the mosquitoes which carried malaria and yellow fever and against the the insanitary habits which made dysentery endemic. With the same singlemindedness Kate declared war on the lice which carried typhus and on the polluted water which spread the equally dangerous typhoid fever.

  To save the wounded soldiers in the town from further infection, Muriel would direct typhus patients to the tented hospital at once. Even though she expected this, Kate was not prepared for what she saw as she stepped out of the staff tent at six in the morning. A row of carts stretched from the perimeter of the camp back along the road until it disappeared behind the brow of a hill. There were ox wagons and donkey carts and occasionally a smaller vehicle – hardly more than a platform on two wheels, pulled between the shafts by the mother of the child who lay on it. Old men carried babies in their arms; exhausted women slept on the verge. There was no noise, no jostling for position; the line of sufferers waited patiently until someone was ready to help them.

  Kate was already dressed in the costume which she had designed for everyone concerned in the reception of new patients. It was not beautiful, and only time would tell whether it was effective. She had rubbed her body all over with paraffin and was now wearing a one-piece garment tightly strapped round her neck, ankles and wrists. One of her first actions when she realized the dangers had been to cut off most of her thick tawny hair so that the short crop which remained could be easily contained inside a rubber cap. Long boots and rubber gloves completed the outfit.

  Careless of the impression she must make, she called for stretcher bearers and hurried to the head of the queue. A tall man with only one arm jumped down from the front of the first ox wagon and led her round to the back. He pulled the canvas aside to reveal more than a dozen children. All were between the ages of three and ten and all were either asleep or unconscious. Their hair was dirty and their clothes ragged, but that was of no importance. What made Kate stare in dismay was the state of the little girl nearest to the light. Her leg rested on a pad of folded sacks but there was no flesh on the bone of the foot and the gangrene was spreading above the knee. Several weeks must have passed since she survived the first onslaught of the typhus and it was clear that in all that time she had received no medical attention.

  The one-armed man was saying something, presumably in Serbo-Croat. Kate shook her head to indicate that she did not understand and he made a second attempt in a language equally unfamiliar to her. She put up a finger to silence him as she made a quick count of the children. Three were in need of immediate surgery, five were in the semi-comatose stage of typhus which suggested that they were approaching the point of crisis, two others – awake now and moaning for water – showed the brown blotches on their skins which were the earlier signs of infection, and three were already dead. Only one little girl appeared to be free of typhus and her state was the most serious of all, for it was clear that she was suffering from diphtheria and that an immediate tracheotomy was essential.

  Kate pointed out this child and two of the gangrene cases to be the first to go to the special admission tents, where they would undergo a routine of cleansing and disinfecting before being admitted to the ward tents. As she turned away, realizing that all the reception arrangements must be multiplied, she had to fight down a sense of panic. In the weeks of waiting she had done her best to fill the gaps in her experience, but even then she had been part of a team and had never been required to attempt the most dangerous operations. She had had some surgical experience as a medical student, but she was not a qualified surgeon. Beatrice, allowing her to join the unit, had expected her to act only as
Muriel’s assisstant in this field. But to put a child who was already almost dead from diphtheria back on to a jolting wagon in order that she could be entrusted to Muriel’s safer hands would be a risk too great to take. From now on, Kate realized, everything she did would be a question of life or death for someone. This was the moment in which the sentimental disappointment she had felt in being unable to work with British soldiers fell away from her mind and never returned. The need for a doctor here was as great as it could be anywhere else in the world. Within a short time she would have a little girl’s life in her hands, and it was a life just as important as that of a soldier in Flanders. To be a doctor, nationality must never be of any importance.

  The one-armed man made a third attempt to communicate with her and this time he spoke in French. Kate had learned the language only from books, but she had a natural talent for languages and could both understand what he said and answer him. Recognizing the anxiety in his voice, she paused for a moment to answer although there was so much to do.

  ‘Can they be saved?’ he asked.

  ‘Three are already dead. We will do our best for the others. But the gangrene is very serious. Why were they neglected for so long?

  ‘They are not my children,’ said the tall man. ‘They are orphans. All of them: no mother, no father. I am a Russian. My name is Sergei Fedorovich Gorbatov. A woman gave me shelter on her farm. When she died, there was no one left alive on the farm except her son there.’ He pointed to a three-year-old whom Kate had already marked out as the most likely survivor of the wagonload. ‘I heard of your hospital and set out to bring him here. All these others I have found on the road as I came, or they have been brought out of their houses by neighbours. Their fathers killed in the army, their mothers dead of disease. Who will look after them?’