For a long time Margaret stared blankly at the wall in front of her. Lydia had been her friend for fifty years. They were playmates as children in Bristol, and as medical students in London had lived and worked together for the hardest and happiest years of their lives. It was as a direct result of Margaret’s match-making that her brother had married Lydia and taken her off to Jamaica. And now her dear friend was dead. It was to be expected at her age, she supposed, that she must lose one by one everyone whom she had loved when she was young, until now only Ralph himself remained, but this particular bereavement made her feel that her youth itself had disappeared. There would be no one now with whom she could exchange memories of bicycle rides and theatres and examinations and all the struggles that had been necessary before the two of them were accepted in a profession dominated by men. Lydia, dear ugly Lydia, had always been so merry, laughing away the tiredness of nights on duty and the drudgery of each new subject which had to be studied.
How merry had Lydia been in the last years of her life, Margaret wondered. She had never complained at the need for her two elder children to spend so much time away from home for the sake of their education, but it must have come as a bitter blow when the war prevented their return just as hopes of a reunion were highest. Brinsley and Kate were such handsome children, sturdy both in body and in the independence of their character. Grant could hardly have provided a satisfactory compensation for their absence. If Ralph’s letter were to be believed it was Grant – crippled and clinging – who had been responsible for the final strain on his mother’s heart.
Margaret was not a woman who succumbed easily to grief, but the months of war had taken their toll of her nerves. It added an extra dimension to her sadness that a chapter of the past should so finally close at a time when the present was grey and uncertain and when it was not possible to look into the future at all without terror. If a woman surrounded by love on a peaceful tropical island could die, what hope was there for a young man on a battlefield designed for killing? The sense of desolation which overcame her embraced everyone she loved and clouded the future, as well as the past. She mourned for Lydia. And at the same time she feared for Robert.
7
The gales of late December had whipped the Channel into a fury almost as spiteful as that of the Western Front, and the troop trains in both France and England were slow as well as over-crowded. By the time Robert arrived at Paddington Station on his first home leave he was exhausted by forty hours of travel. The train which was already pulling away from the barrier was the last of the day, his only hope of sleeping in a comfortable bed at Blaize and waking up to Christmas Day amongst his family. He forced himself to make one last effort and began to sprint as though the widening gap between himself and the end of the train were exposed to machine gun fire. Still running, he fumbled with the handle of the last carriage and fell rather than stepped inside.
As his panting subsided and he looked around, he saw that the only other occupant of the compartment was a fair-haired young woman wearing the uniform of a VAD. She looked startled, even a little apprehensive. Robert glanced at the window and saw the diamond-shaped label which reserved the compartment for Ladies Only.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll move at the next stop.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Her voice was shy and attractively soft. She hesitated as though she were either wondering whether it would be proper for her to continue the conversation or else was doubtful about the particular question she wanted to ask. In the end, however, she was unable to restrain it. ‘Where have you come from?’
Robert was reluctant to answer. He had promised himself that for the next ten days he would forget the canal and the bridge, pretend that Loos had never existed and that he would never return to Hédauville. In any case he had been warned by friends who had been on leave before him that civilians were not genuinely interested in the details of battles. They made polite enquiries but rapely listened to the answers. Perhaps they lacked the imagination necessary to envisage the horror of life in the trenches; or perhaps, imagining it too well, they were embarrassed to discuss it amidst the comforts of England with someone who was enduring it on their behalf.
‘What sector of the front, I mean?’ She hesitated again. ‘My brother was killed –’
Now Robert saw what she wanted – the description of some landscape which would furnish her attempts to reconstruct the scene; and, most of all, some kind of reassurance that the death had been necessary, a means of understanding why it had happened.
It was not a reassurance which he could give. There was nothing deliberate about his evasion of her question. It was more than three weeks since he had last enjoyed an undisturbed night and he had not slept at all for the past forty-eight hours. As though the catching of the train represented the last positive effort of which he was capable, he gave one deep sigh and felt himself toppling sideways. From what seemed to be a deep sleep he was conscious of the girl shaking him by the shoulders. She was worried, perhaps, about his sudden collapse, because her finger was pressing his wrist to feel the pulse. He managed to grunt as an indication that he was still alive and the focus of her anxiety changed.
‘What station do you want? Where are you going?’
‘Blaize,’ he murmured, and fell weightlessly through the darkness into sleep again.
He awoke in a mid-morning light to find Frisca sitting beside his bed, staring intently at him. He had just time to consider that this must be the first occasion on which his young cousin had ever managed to keep still for more than two seconds at a time when she flung her arms round his neck.
‘Steady, steady!’ he protested, laughing. ‘I’m still asleep.’
‘No, you’re not.’ She hugged him again. ‘You’re scratchy, though.’
‘Let that be a lesson to you. You should never come into a gentleman’s bedroom until he’s had time to shave.’
‘Aunt Margaret said I could sit here. She said no one was to wake you until you were ready, but she wanted to know when you did wake.’
‘Off you go and tell her, then.’
Frisca must have had difficulty in finding his mother, for he had time to bathe before he heard her footsteps hurrying along the corridor. He opened the door so that she could run straight into his arms and for a moment they stood close together without speaking. They would both have been embarrassed, though, to say what they were feeling. Margaret’s voice was light and smiling as she sat down on his bedroom chair.
‘You’re just in time to help with the carving of all the turkeys.’
‘What an exhausting business it is, coming on leave,’ Robert laughed. ‘But I can hardly believe that I’m here at all, so a little strenuous carving may help to persuade me that it isn’t a dream.’
‘If it hadn’t been for Nurse Blakeney, you wouldn’t have been here at all – you’d still have been asleep on the train when it arrived at Bristol.’
‘Is she one of your nurses? I must thank her.’
He found the opportunity to do so later in the day, when he met Alexa leading a group of a dozen VADs and convalescents out of the house towards the Theatre Ward.
‘Come carol-singing with us, Robert,’ she called.
He had been on his way to find Frisca in the stables so that she could show him the puppy she had been given for Christmas, too young yet to leave its mother. But they had fixed no definite time. He joined the group without admitting that the attraction lay in one member of it, the fair-haired girl who turned when Alexa called. She smiled at him, first in a nervous, tentative manner, and then again with pleasure as she saw that he intended to come. It was easy for him to catch up with her as the party walked down the gently winding path which had been built to connect the original tithe barn with the house at a gradient more suitable for wheelchairs than the old woodland walk.
‘I’m jolly grateful to you,’ he said. ‘Not many people on that train would have known which station I needed for Blaize. I hope you didn’t have too
much trouble getting me off it.’
‘The station master helped,’ she said, smiling again. ‘And he knew who you were. It was a relief to discover that you lived here and were on leave. I was afraid at first that you’d been told to make your own way to the hospital for convalescence after some kind of injury or illness, and that perhaps you were having a relapse which I ought to be able to recognize.’
‘No. Just uncomplicated tiredness. We’d been having a fairly noisy show. You asked me a question in the train, Nurse Blakeney. I don’t remember whether I had time to answer it before I flopped.’
She shook her head. ‘No. But I shouldn’t have asked. Of course you don’t want to think about that when you’re on leave.’
‘It’s all right. I don’t expect I’ll know much about your brother’s sector. But I’d be happy to answer any questions that I can, if it would stop you worrying.’
‘It’s not worry, exactly,’ she said. ‘I mean, he’s dead now. There’s nothing to be done. But we were always very close. It seems terrible that he should go into a world that I don’t know anything about and simply disappear for ever.’
He could see her eyes filling with tears and was tempted to take her hand and comfort her, but the occasion was too public.
‘This isn’t the moment,’ he said, referring to her question. ‘What are your working hours tomorrow?’
‘I start at seven in the morning and come off duty at eight in the evening. But we usually have two hours off sometime in the afternoon.’
He fixed a rendezvous and then, anxious not to draw attention to himself and the girl, increased his walking pace to catch up with Alexa. Only then did he wonder whether his promise was a wise one. To describe the mud and stench of the trenches, to list all the stupid, useless ways in which her brother might have been killed, could be of no possible benefit to Nurse Blakeney. The truth was that he wanted after all to talk about it for his own sake, to build some kind of bridge, if only of words, between the year he had spent in Flanders and these few days in Blaize. His mother, surrounded by the casualties of the fighting, must have some idea of its fierceness, but in no circumstances could he tell her – when she was already so anxious about his safety – how much worse the conditions were than anything she could imagine.
The patients in the hospital had been given their Christmas meal at noon, but it was not until the evening that the family, fully occupied throughout the day with their efforts to make the festival a joyful one, sat down to Christmas dinner. Alexa and Margaret had dressed for the occasion and Piers brought up some of his best wine; while Frisca, over-excited, was allowed to stay up late for once. For a little while they all relaxed as though the evening and the kind of normal domestic life it represented would last for ever. But sadness was not far away even from the peaceful candlelit table on which glass and silver gleamed and glittered with a brilliance undimmed by war. When Piers rose to propose the toast of Absent Friends, Robert noticed at once that a name was missing from the list. He made no comment at that moment; but later, as they moved towards the library which was now used as a drawing room, he held his mother back for a moment.
‘Aunt Lydia?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t want to spoil your return home with bad news,’ Margaret said. ‘She died in November, although the news only reached us here ten days ago.’
‘I’m very sorry.’ Robert had had little opportunity to become acquainted with his aunt, but he knew her to have been his mother’s best friend. ‘Do Kate and Brinsley know?’
‘Ralph asked me to write to them. He can never feel sure that the addresses he has aren’t out of date. Brinsley probably will have heard from me by now. Hardly the most welcome kind of letter to receive at Christmas time. But then, I suppose no one can expect to have a very merry Christmas in the trenches.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Robert realized that it was his duty to cheer his mother up. He sat down on the floor in front of the log fire and allowed Frisca, sleepy now, to snuggle up to him. ‘Last Christmas was quite a jolly affair. I remember it very well.’
‘Tell us,’ said Frisca.
‘Well, I hadn’t been at the front long enough to know what was normal and what wasn’t, but the first thing that seemed odd on Christmas Day was the birds.’
‘Birds?’ Margaret laughed in surprise. ‘You never told me in your letters.’
‘I hadn’t seen a bird since I arrived in France. They had more sense than to hang about the front line. But on Christmas Day, there they were, perching on the barbed wire. That was what first made us realize that the firing had stopped. And the rain had stopped as well. A crisp frosty dawn, and sparrows sitting still.’
‘Did you feed them?’ asked Frisca.
‘Yes, we did. We scattered crumbs all over the place And while they were pecking away we saw four Germans walking across No Man’s Land. They were jolly nervous, I can tell you that. One of our officers went out to talk to them and within an hour there were fifty of us out there, swapping cigarettes and looking at family photographs. Mind you, for every ten men above ground there was probably one tunnelling away below, laying mines to blow up our trenches. But we didn’t think of that at the time.’
‘I remember the newspapers said that soldiers had been singing across to each other from the two sets of trenches,’ Margaret said.
‘That’s right. Auld Lang Syne and Good King Wenceslas and Stille Nacht. But that was only part of it. I remember there was a field of cabbages between the two lines. Someone had sown them and was never able to get back for the harvest. By Christmas they were all slimy, even though the ground was frozen. We started half a dozen hares in that field, and coursed them.’
‘You mean you and the Huns together?’ asked Frisca.
‘They didn’t seem like Huns that day. Just ordinary chaps who didn’t want to fight any more than we did.’ Unusually serious, he looked at his mother. ‘It was an important day for me,’ he said. ‘I’d been frightened when I first arrived at the front. And then to stop myself being frightened I’d had to concentrate on killing and hating. But suddenly, just for one day, I was able to feel like a decent human being again.’
‘Did you catch any of the hares?’ Frisca asked.
‘Yes. We got two of them for the pot, and Fritz bagged one as well. The cook didn’t quite rise to the Blaize standard of jugged hare, but it was an improvement on bully beef, I can tell you that. I can imagine Brinsley’s Christmas well enough. But not Kate’s. Where is she now?’
‘The last we heard for certain was that she was somewhere in Serbia. I don’t expect the name Kragujevatz means any more to you than it did to me at first.’ Margaret stood up and looked along the lowest of the library shelves until she found a large leather-bound atlas, so heavy that Robert hurried to take the weight. He laid it on the desk and she searched the index for the Balkans. ‘The national frontier lines in this are probably a century or two out of date; but then, no frontier can be guaranteed for more than a week nowadays.’ She frowned over the small print before stubbing her finger down. ‘Here we are, south of Belgrade. But it’s three months since I last heard from her, and even that letter was written in July. I’ve no idea whether any normal postal service gets through. Beatrice was in charge of keeping the hospital supplied, at least until the invasion, so I sent my letter to her and asked her to include it with any stores that she was able to send out. I haven’t really much hope of it reaching her, though.’
‘What invasion?’ asked Robert. The war to him was a matter of a few yards of muddy ground gained or lost. Although he knew about the Dardanelles, nothing but the Western Front was real. Serbia, small and remote, had been responsible for the start of the war, but seemed to have no further importance.
‘The Germans and Austrians and Bulgarians launched a joint attack on Serbia two months ago,’ Margaret told him. ‘Kragujevatz is behind the enemy lines now.’
‘And Kate?’
Robert had noticed as the evening passed how his mother’s
face had lost its expression of strained tiredness as she was able to relax in an evening off duty, knowing that her son was safe. Now the lines round her eyes tightened again in anxiety.
‘My only news comes from Beatrice and even she isn’t sure what’s happened. Some of the nurses stayed behind in the hospital to care for the Serbian soldiers who were too badly wounded to move. They’re in Austrian hands now, though since they’re civilians Beatrice is hoping that they’ll be repatriated. The others decided to move as many of the men as they could, hoping to establish another hospital further south. Kate was the only doctor in the unit who was still alive in October, and she took charge of that group. But nobody knows what has happened to the convoy which retreated, or where it is. And the most terrible stories are coming out of Serbia, Robert. It’s not just the sick who are trying to get away. The whole Serbian Army is in retreat. And all the civilians are escaping as well, if they can. Those who stay are starving and those who take to the road are dying of exhaustion. I haven’t dared to tell Ralph any of this, when he’s already distraught over Lydia’s death. But I’m very frightened for Kate.’
8
Time had changed its nature: there was a difference in kind between living and surviving. No longer did each day present itself to Kate to be lived through, moment following moment – not necessarily to be enjoyed, but at least to be taken for granted. Instead, as the retreat continued, she had to fight for every second of the future, and each pace forward was a triumph of determination.
More than two months had passed since the Germans and Austrians invaded Serbia from the north. Kate had evacuated the patients from the military hospital in Kragujevatz only a few days before the building was destroyed by bombs and the town was occupied. Ever since then they had been retreating southwards as the enemy advanced, and they were not alone. The whole country was on the move, trying desperately to escape before the enemy caught up. With so many of her charges sick, Kate could not hope to cover the ground fast, but as the end of the year approached they had crossed the Serbian frontier into Albania.
Lorimers at War Page 9