Lorimers at War

by Anne Melville

  Had Sergei been intending to travel with the Serbs, Kate might have decided what to do on personal grounds. But he had made it clear how impossible that was, so there was no weight of friendship to put in the balance against the prospect of seeing her family again. For the whole of one morning she paced up and down beside the grey winter waters of the Adriatic. She longed to go home, but more and more clearly she realized that her duty lay in a different direction. No real choice existed. She must stay with her patients.

  Two days later she watched the last of the sick and wounded men being carried up the gangplank of the ship which would take them from Durazzo to Salonika – if it was able to thread its way successfully through the minefields. Sergei had been standing beside her, checking off the name of each man who went past. As the last of them disappeared down the companion way, he handed her the list.

  ‘Goodbye then, my brave, foolish Katya,’ he said.

  A feeling of desolation robbed Kate of speech. She stared at him in silence for a moment. Then Sergei put his one arm round her shoulders and kissed her, Russian style, three times. Still without speaking, Kate watched as he strode away.

  Darkness fell as the ship moved away from the port. She stood for a long time on the deck, watching the dark silhouettes of the mountains gradually merging with the blackness of the sky and wondering whether she had indeed been foolish. Her spirits were low. This was New Year’s Eve and there was no one with whom she could drink a toast to a happy new year. Her surviving nurses had accepted with relief the offer of a passage home, so that of the original team which had come from Britain Kate was the only one who would be staying with her patients. At the time when she made the decision she had been sure that she was right; but this was a lonelier moment. She was sailing towards 1916 with no friends or close companions at hand and no hopes that the year could bring anything more than new tragedies.

  Major Dragovitch, her colleague from the hospital, appeared at the top of the companionway. The ship was blacked out for fear of submarines, so she did not recognize him until he was close.

  ‘We dance the kolo now for the new year,’ he said, bowing and offering his arm. The small gesture cheered Kate at once. It was an accident of administration which had cast her lot with the Serbian Army rather than with the British or French. But by refusing the chance to return to England she had demonstrated to the Serbs that she regarded herself as one of them, and now they were making a gesture in return, accepting her as a well-tried companion. She let the major lead the way below into a large cabin which had been set aside for the use of officers. There she took her place in the circle of dancers, moving her feet rhythmically to the sound of a flute and a violin.

  After each dance she was offered drinks – for all the officers, it seemed, had made good use of their two days in the port. It was a party after all, and as for the second time in her life she became a little drunk, she pushed the sadness from her mind.

  As midnight approached, the music stopped while every glass was refilled. There was a moment’s pause until a blast of the ship’s siren marked the time. The single melancholy note, dispersed by the wind into a mournful diminuendo, was enough to introduce a new mood. A second earlier they had all been determinedly cheerful, Now the same thought entered the mind of each of them – that they might never see Serbia again. They had been holding their glasses ready, but the toast which emerged was not what had been expected. They drank to their homeland and the day of their return to it.

  Kate’s homeland was not theirs – indeed, she hardly knew where it was. Was it Jamaica, in which she had been a child? Or England, where she had lived as a student? She had left Hope Valley behind her without putting down roots anywhere else. The Lorimer mansion perched above the Avon at Bristol: Margaret’s friendly house in Queen Anne’s Gate, closed now for the duration of the war: Blaize, rich and peaceful before the war and now crowded and businesslike – all these had welcomed her, but none was her home. Not from choice, she had become a wanderer.

  It was not important. People mattered more than places. She was amongst friends, and that must be enough. And suddenly her companions were cheerful again, with the abrupt change of mood which she had learned to expect from the Serbs. Their gaiety, unfounded but determined, was infectious. To the sound of shouted good wishes for the new year, and the smashing of glasses after the toast had been drunk, Kate sailed into 1916.

  1916

  1

  On the last day of June 1916, Robert Scott began to write a letter to Margaret. He was not the only man to be writing to his mother at this moment and to judge by the tense quietness of his companions and the uneasy chewing of fountain pens, he was not alone in finding the letter difficult to phrase. For some days now they had all guessed that a big new offensive was imminent. No one was anxious to put his suspicions into words in case they should be confirmed, but Robert had drawn his own conclusions from the number of Decauville railway tracks which he and his section had laid in the past three weeks and the weight of ammunition which had been hauled along them. The tramp of men moving forward along newly surfaced roads had told its own story. So too had the piles of wooden crosses waiting ready in the villages behind the lines and only partly concealed by coverings of torn tarpaulin.

  That afternoon the orders which they had all been expecting had come at last. After almost two years of war, officers and men alike knew the odds against them. Robert calculated that his cousin, Brinsley Lorimer, who was in the front line and would be one of the first to go over the top, had less than one chance in four of surviving the next day and only one chance in three of emerging from it unhurt. Robert’s own odds were less daunting, for the sappers would not take part in the first wave of the attack. It would be their task to move rapidly forward after the first line of German trenches had been taken, to repair the damage done to them by the British guns during the attack and to build a road capable of carrying guns and supplies across the shell-pocked surface of what at the moment was No-Man’s-Land. But they would be working under fire.

  So this letter home could not be composed without thought. If it should turn out to be the last letter his mother ever received from him, she would keep it for the rest of her life. It was an occasion for writing something memorable, some statement of a personal philosophy which would serve as his memorial: or something especially loving, an expression of thanks for all the happy years of his youth.

  What was so appalling was that he simply couldn’t do it. Strong and healthy and twenty-one years old, Robert was incapable of stretching his imagination to envisage the possibility that within twenty-four hours he might be dead. And if his mother were to receive a solemn letter from him, different from his usual matter-of-fact style, she would be frightened, possibly without reason. With a sigh he bent his head nearer to the lamp and began to write.

  ‘Dearest Mother, Guess who I saw two days ago. Brinsley, no less – for the first time since I waved him goodbye on Waterloo Station. I was sent up to the front line to take a good look at the terrain and check my maps, and I noticed a lot of chaps wearing his regimental flash, so I asked whether Captain Lorimer was around and finished up by having a meal in his dug-out. Not much difference in the menu from my own mess. Same old powdered soup, same old tins of meat and peas and potatoes. But someone had brought some quite decent wine back from his last rest period, so we made a party of it. Thanks to a near miss from a howitzer a couple of days ago, Brinsley is down to his last gramophone record so we all had to listen to “If You Were The Only Girl In The World” about twenty times during the evening. He seems to have had a jolly good time on his last leave, and taken in all the shows.

  ‘I could hardly believe it at first, but Brinsley does actually seem to be enjoying the war. As though it were some kind of game, just a bit more exciting than cricket. A lot of fellows put on that sort of act, of course, but in Brinsley’s case it seems to be genuine. I won’t pretend that I share the feeling – or even understand it. But his men practically wors
hip him for it. Some of them helped me to find my way back afterwards and we chatted for ten minutes while we waited for a break in the barrage. He’s had so many narrow squeaks – and has come through them all without a scratch – that they reckon he has the devil’s own luck, and they’ll follow him anywhere because they feel safest when they’re close to him.

  ‘There’s going to be a big push tomorrow. I can say that because by the time this reaches you, you’ll know all about it. Brinsley’s looking forward to it. And perhaps I am in a way as well, but a different way. We can’t go on like this for ever, thousands of men sitting in holes and shooting at each other, but obviously things have got to be worse for a while before they can be better. So let’s hope that this one is going to be the decider, and that we’ll be in Berlin before Christmas.

  ‘I send my love to all the family at Blaize. But most of all, of course, dearest Mother, to you. Your loving son, Robert.’

  He read the letter through carefully to check that the last sentence was not too sloppy and that the rest contained no information – details of his position or the name of Brinsley’s regiment – that would infringe the censorship regulations. Then, although it was still early, he lay down to rest. He did not expect to sleep.

  At half past four the next morning he went to rouse the two men he had chosen to act as his runners. They had not slept either and seemed almost grateful for the opportunity to move. Together they made their way in silence along the communication trench. Then there were thirty yards of open ground to be covered before they could reach the shelter of their observation post.

  The front line curved at this point in front of a small hill which had once been heavily wooded. By now only the stumps remained, with a few bare spikes to indicate the original height of the trunks. Once shellfire had destroyed the trees, the debris had quickly been appropriated for firewood, so the observation post was a dug-out. Robert had always been good with his hands and eighteen months of war service had provided good practice for his ingenuity. He had made and installed three large periscopes and had also made sure that the post was concealed from air observation by camouflage.

  It was not possible to see the German trenches from the British line, nor even from Robert’s position on the hill, for the ground of No-Man’s-Land rose to a ridge which divided the two armies. The ground was a mess of craters and hummocks bounded by formidable lines of tangled barbed wire and peopled now only by the decomposing bodies of men who had taken part in earlier attacks. In a few hours Brinsley and his fellow-officers would be leading their men up the slope towards the German machine guns. Although he would not be amongst them, Robert found himself shivering with fear on their behalf. It seemed impossible that they could break through – and even if the main attack succeeded, how many of those in the first wave could expect to arrive at the further side?

  In the hour of waiting there seemed no alternative to such thoughts as these. Over and over again Robert looked down at his map, checking it with the actual contours of the land, making preliminary choices of the best line for laying a supply route. The final decision could only be made after the attack had succeeded, if it did succeed, and when it was possible to assess which section of the area had been least devastated by shellfire.

  Gradually the sky lightened, cloudless and clear, bearing all the promise of a perfect summer day. Robert found himself suddenly thinking of his cousin Frisca. Probably it was because he was trying to visualize summer in England, to conjure up a mental picture of girls in white frocks playing croquet on smooth green lawns or eating strawberries in the shade of cedar trees. Blaize in peacetime seemed to sum up everything he was fighting for, but Blaize had changed as unexpectedly as his own life, although less dangerously. He did not want at this moment to visualize his mother sitting in her office and signing death certificates or drug requisitions, nor to think of Alexa endeavouring with all the skill of a professional actress to conceal the heartache she felt at the sight of her beloved theatre converted into a hospital ward. Nine-year-old Frisca, alone amongst his family, had not changed at all. She was still dancing through life, her golden curls bobbing, her bright blue eyes flashing with gaiety. He remembered how he had awoken from an exhausted sleep on the first morning of his last leave to find his cousin sitting at his bedside, and how the expression on her young face had changed from almost maternal solicitude to delight that he was ready to be talked to at last. With a rush of emotion that was almost a physical desire he wished that he could hug little Frisca now and tell her that there was nothing to worry about.

  He thought of Jennifer as well, whom he had wanted to kiss at the end of that leave. Her shyness had restrained him on the last occasion when they had been alone together, and their final goodbye had been said with his mother watching. Although there was nothing to suggest that she disapproved of their deepening friendship, her presence had proved inhibiting to them both. But Jennifer had written to him regularly during the past six months, and he had replied to each letter. The correspondence was important to him. To his mother he wrote only in reassurance. He told her about his rest periods, his billets, the pleasures of buying an occasional meal or cup of good coffee. His letters to Jennifer were quite different. As though it were necessary to tell the truth to somebody, he described to her with complete honesty his moments of fear and nausea, disgust and shame. Perhaps he hoped that the moment would come when she would tell him that she could not bear to hear any more, so that he would have reason to hope that she was beginning to care for him; but until that time he poured out his feelings about the war without reserve.

  She, like himself, might be awake at this moment, approaching the end of night duty in a ward full of men who in their time had awaited the dawn with as much apprehension as Robert felt now. He tried to force himself into her mind, so that his own mind should be distracted. Robert suspected that Jennifer was not a particularly good nurse. She had none of the controlled compassion which enabled his mother to recognize a need and alleviate it as far as she could with all the sympathy and skill she possessed but without allowing any kind of emotional involvement to distort her judgement. Jennifer was too young and too highly-strung to remain detached. She suffered with her suffering patients, deliberately indulging her own feelings, whether of anger with those who had inflicted the injuries she tended, of anguish with those who endured them, or of desolation with the bereaved. She had confessed to Robert that she chose to work as a nurse deliberately to ensure that she should not be happy when so many people were frightened or unhappy. It was an attitude wholly to her credit; yet in these moments of waiting it proved not to be the memory of Jennifer which brought most comfort to Robert, but that of Frisca. He felt almost that Jennifer had a need to suffer and did not want to be spared anything; whereas it seemed important that Frisca should be protected, that nothing should ever happen to sadden those sparkling blue eyes. Dear little Frisca, he thought affectionately. And then suddenly it was not possible to think about England any longer.

  The barrage which began at six o’clock was more intense than any he had heard before. As though a conductor had signalled with the sharp double tap of his baton, a symphony of gunfire began with a single ear-splitting chord. With a rolling reverberation it developed through all its different movements: of surprise, range-finding, concentration, obliteration, deterrent – all leading up to what must be the finale: the creeping curtain barrage of attack. There could be no crescendo, because the fortissimo was sustained from first to last; and after the first few moments it was impossible even to distinguish the notes of the different instruments: the smacking percussion of field guns, the rasping of the medium artillery, the drumming boom of the biggest guns and the high-pitched scream of shells. The orchestra became a double one as the reports of guns firing behind him were echoed in sinister fugue by the explosions of the shells out of sight in front. These in turn were joined by another band of instruments altogether when the distinctive notes of the German howitzers began to punctuate the s
core, their crashing chords coming nearer and nearer as they probed behind the lines for the British guns.

  Beneath Robert’s feet the ground was shuddering. His ears were battered not only by sound but by the vibrating pressure of the air. His whole body became tense, as though by drawing in on himself, holding every nerve-end under tight control, he could give himself immunity from death’s flying splinters. An hour passed, and more, but still there was no pause in the relentless battering on his ear drums. The noise hung over him like a cloud, a huge umbrella, filling the atmosphere almost visibly, with no chink or break in its intensity. Nothing but noise existed: nothing but noise was real. Robert felt himself beginning to tremble, his self-control stretching towards snapping point. Only the presence of his two equally dazed companions prevented him from crying.

  In the firing trench at the foot of the hill the rising sun glinted on a row of bayonets. Robert reminded himself that, unlike the men who held them, he was not just about to walk towards a line of machine guns. A sudden conviction that he would never see Brinsley again made him angry with himself. He had said goodbye to his cousin too casually, wishing him good luck with nothing more than a smiling nod of the head. Just as he ought to have told his mother how much he loved and admired her, so he ought to have touched Brinsley on the arm, shaking him by the hand, even embraced him. How ridiculous it was that it should be so difficult to demonstrate affection even where affection so genuinely existed. Well, it was too late for regrets. He could think only of himself, and by now the tension had become unbearable. How much longer would the barrage continue? When would the attack begin?