Lorimers at War

by Anne Melville

  ‘Get a grip on yourself, Jennifer. I’ve spent two years caring for the victims of the battlefield. Do you think I supposed that people were throwing grenades and gas shells at them during some peaceful country walk? You could give me credit for a little imagination. I didn’t need to be told. Oh, I’m sorry, dear.’ She stood up again and put her arm round the girl’s shoulders. ‘It’s as much of a shock to me as it is to you. But I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do. If there are any choices at all, we must leave them to Robert.’

  ‘Then he’ll go,’ said Jennifer flatly.

  ‘Yes.’ Margaret kissed her daughter-in-law. ‘Give him as happy a time as you can until then, my dear. Don’t let him see you crying.’

  In obeying that instruction Jennifer proved more successful than Margaret might have expected. But when the day of parting came at last and she returned alone from London, it seemed that the effort had exhausted her. Twice during March she fainted in the ward, and Margaret began to receive complaints – cautiously worded, in view of the family relationship – about Nurse Scott’s tendency to weep and dream. Before long it became necessary to have an official interview.

  ‘I can think of an explanation for what’s been happening,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m hoping you’re going to tell me that I’ve guessed right.’

  She was rewarded for the gentleness of her approach by seeing the shy flush which had won Robert’s heart. Jennifer nodded.

  ‘You’re expecting a baby?’

  ‘Yes. In November.’

  All problems of discipline forgotten, the two women hugged each other. Then Margaret, her eyes shining, prepared to exercise her authority as a prospective grandmother as well as the administrator of the hospital.

  ‘This feeling of weakness may not last for more than a month or two,’ she said. ‘But all the same, I’m going to suggest that you go home to Norfolk. There’s too much heavy lifting in your work here. It’s not good for you or for the baby. I know how much your father has longed to have you back with him, and this is the time when you’d be justified in indulging him. Country air and country food and plenty of rest. It’s the best recipe. Do you agree?’

  ‘Yes, Mother. Thank you very much.’

  Margaret was touched by the girl’s first use of the word which Robert had from the beginning urged her to adopt. In the first weeks of the marriage the dual relationship had apparently made it impossible for Jennifer to decide whether she was talking to her commandant or her mother-in-law. From now on, Margaret was sure, their relationship would be a much easier one. Her happiness at the news was such that for a little while she was able to stop worrying about Robert. She did not even feel any great uneasiness at first when Piers came into her office a day or two later and enquired whether she had an address for Kate.

  ‘Yes. A new one has just arrived. It’s somewhere in the south of Russia.’ She handed her address book across the desk. ‘I’m not sure how much one can count on letters reaching her, though. She obviously never received my message about Brinsley’s death. You look worried, Piers. Has something happened?’

  ‘Yes,’ Piers told her. ‘It may not be important, but she’s a long way from Moscow and Petrograd and news may take quite a time to travel. By the time she hears from there, it could be too late for her to get out of the country. And in my opinion she ought to leave. There’s some very disquieting news coming through from Russia. Very disquieting indeed.’

  2

  Every day Kate allowed herself two minutes of rage against Russian inefficiency. It acted as a safety valve, making it easier – a little easier – for her to cultivate during the rest of the day a Russian quality of resignation.

  There was nothing wrong with the postal arrangements. What was left of the Serbian Division was now under Russian command, and if the youngest and most useless of the Russian officers sent a message to his family in Moscow or Petrograd requesting the dispatch of a new pair of gloves or some favourite item of food, the parcel would arrive in the minimum time needed for the courier to make the double journey by train. But none of Kate’s letters to the Minister of War or any of the committees which had recently been set up to deal with supplies or transport or hospitals was even acknowledged.

  No one, it appeared, was willing to authorize the release and dispatch of the crates of medical stores which were waiting uselessly in some warehouse or other. In vain did Kate argue that the consignment was private property, sent from London specifically to re-equip the volunteer hospital which the suffragist movement had reestablished after the Serbian retreat, this time on the Romanian Front. Somewhere in the tortuous bureaucratic process through which even the simplest transaction had to travel, some stamp or signature must be lacking. Before she learned better, Kate would have expected that in an autocracy decisions could be made simply and speedily. But in practice she found that no one in any sphere was willing to take responsibility for anything – not even the Autocrat himself.

  At first it had been possible to make excuses. Almost before she had recovered from the hardships of the Serbian retreat, Kate – along with the new staff of English and Scottish nurses who had joined her in Medjidia – had found herself retreating again, this time across the Dobrudja plain. It was reasonable that her supplies should be stored securely until the hospital had been re-established in a position which could be considered temporarily safe from capture. But by January 1917 the situation was stable and still the supplies did not come.

  It was not only the hospital which was under-equipped. The soldiers – Serbs and Russians alike – were short of ammunition. There were not enough rifles for each man to have his own; someone leaving the front line for a day’s rest had to hand his weapon over to his relief, together with a ration of cartridges which would be quite inadequate in any full-scale battle. For the time being everything was relatively quiet along the frozen front, but there was talk of a spring offensive. Kate knew little enough about the strategy and mechanics of war, but it was plain to her that if an attack by either side began before the Russians had supplied their men – including the Serbs – with rifles and machine guns, cannons and ammunition, there would be a massacre. And if there were a massacre – or even nothing more than the normal run of casualties after a battle – Kate and her staff, lacking even the most basic drugs and bandages, would be unable to cope with it. Throughout January she waited with mounting frustration.

  But the beginning of February brought a possible explanation of the delay. She had asked one of the Russian officers to take the matter up for her while he was on leave. It came as no surprise when he returned empty-handed, for she had already realized that more perseverance would be required than he was likely to display; but it was of some value that he could tell her what the obstacle was. Beatrice – far away in London and aware of the chaos which had surrounded the hospital unit in the second retreat – had consigned the stores to Dr Kate Lorimer by name, presumably as a precaution against misuse. ‘You will have to go personally to Petrograd to sign the papers and accept delivery,’ the officer told her.

  ‘And will that be enough?’

  ‘Who knows? Have you friends? In such matters, it is always as well to have friends.’

  Kate knew no one in Petrograd and for a day or two longer she hesitated. But her life since leaving England had matured her far beyond her years. She was not yet twenty-six years old, but responsibility and the habit of command had given her the authority of an older woman. The knowledge afforded her little pleasure: she would have liked to be young for a while longer. But it meant that she did not lack confidence. And there would be no language problem. Her lessons in Russian from Sergei had enabled her to converse with the Russian officers right from the start, and constant practice had by now made her fluent. It did not take her long to decide that she must make the journey.

  She was still in the process of arranging for her duties to be covered during an absence which might extend itself beyond her expectation when a bundle of letters arrived from home.
She had written to England with a new address, and here were the answers, more promptly than she could have dared to hope. Had she judged only by their dates, in fact, the speed would have seemed nothing less than a miracle. But she knew that Russia – unlike the rest of Europe – had never adopted the Gregorian calendar and was by now thirteen days behind everywhere else. It was a small matter, but one which she found typical of the backwardness of the country.

  Guessing that it would be the dullest, she opened her cousin Beatrice’s letter first. As she had expected, it was devoted to the business of the hospital unit. With typical efficiency Beatrice enclosed a copy of the stores inventory in case the first notification had been lost during the Dobrudja retreat. The supplies had reached Petrograd in the late autumn, just before the port was closed by ice. The ship had already returned to England to confirm the delivery.

  Kate sighed as she read the businesslike communication, but it told her nothing that she did not already know. By contrast, Alexa’s letter was gossipy and casually organized, hopping from one subject to another. Just as the typed list reflected Beatrice’s character, so it was in keeping with Alexa’s interests that she should enthuse about the musical life of Russia – the excellence of the bass singers, the grace of the ballet dancers, the taste and discrimination of the aristocratic audiences who were as likely to throw jewels as flowers at the feet of their favourite artists. Kate could not help laughing to herself, so different was the Russia in which she was living now from the Russia which had feted Alexa during her opera season in St Petersburg, eight long years ago.

  ‘And if you find yourself in Petrograd, as I believe they call it now,’ Alexa continued, ‘you must on no account fail to visit my very dear friend Prince Aminov. Prince Paul Aminov, I should perhaps say, because you will have discovered by now that even younger sons in Russia take their father’s title, so there are probably half a dozen Prince Aminovs scattered around the family estates. Paul is a great patron of the opera. In one of his palaces, at Tsarskoe Selo, he has a private theatre. It was when I sang there for him that I became determined to have my own little opera house one day. He’ll be interested to hear from you that I did at least manage a season or two before this terrible war interrupted all our lives. He had a younger brother – I forget his name, but he played the piano so well that in England he could have been a professional concert soloist. In Russia, of course, it would be unthinkable for a nobleman to stoop to earning his living in such a way. Paul is officially an admiral, and his brother was something in the army – but I doubt whether he saw much more of his regiment than Paul did of his fleet. I’m writing to Paul by this same post to tell him that my niece is a guest of his country. So I can promise you a welcome if you should ever go north. They have a palace in the city itself, of course.’

  Of course, agreed Kate, and for a second time she laughed aloud. No doubt it was true enough in peacetime that admirals could amuse themselves with their private theatres and their favourite singers; but in war even the least military-minded officer must recognize where his duty lay. Whether he was competent to discharge it was a quite different matter. However, Alexa’s promise of an introduction strengthened her confidence in the success of the journey she planned. The requirement of her personal signature made the visit necessary: the name of a powerful family increased the hope that it might be successful. The warning that she might need friends had not surprised her and, although her claim on the Aminovs was so tenuous, it still might be enough. The Russian officers with whom she messed were all members of the nobility, and she had had time to learn that they were as generous as they were unpredictable when favours were asked.

  She was still thinking about her journey when she opened Margaret’s letter, but within a few seconds all thought of medical stores had vanished from her mind. She stared at the words with incredulous horror.

  Brinsley was dead. Brinsley had been dead for more than six months. Margaret, it seemed, had made two attempts already to break the news, but realized from the cheerful note in Kate’s last letter that they must have gone astray. She gave some details of the battle, of the letter which his commanding officer had written praising his gallantry, of his posthumous DSO. Kate found it impossible to believe any of this. There had been a moment, as she said goodbye to her brother on the platform of Waterloo Station, when she had been frightened lest she should never see him again, but beneath the fear had lain a belief that someone so young and full of life could not possibly die. Brinsley – his mouth curling with mischief – had claimed to be lucky, and Kate had believed him.

  Still shocked, she allowed her eyes to run over the rest of the letter without taking much of it in. Robert had been wounded but was recovering well. Her father, though, was showing signs of breakdown as a result of Brinsley’s death. Duke Mattison was writing alarming reports of his increasing irrationality, and there were hints that he was drinking too much. Margaret asked Kate to consider seriously whether her duty now might not lie at home in Jamaica. If she decided to return, Beatrice could find another doctor to replace her.

  Kate set the letter aside and began to pace up and down. Almost as though she were sleepwalking she made her way to one of the hospital wards. The night sister looked up in surprise, since it was not the doctor’s hour for a round, but Kate did not explain her presence. There was an immediate cry for water from the men at one end of the ward; whenever anyone new came in they renewed their pathetic requests for a drink. Neither doctor nor nurses could ever persuade soldiers whose stomachs had been shot away that a sip of water could kill them as certainly as a glass of poison.

  What was it all for, Kate asked herself as she looked at the faces of the injured men. One of her early grievances had been that the Russian command had proved readier to risk the lives of their Serbian allies in battle than those of their own army. As a result, few of the Serbian Division survived: most of the patients now in the hospital were Russian. Sixteen-year-old boys, grey-haired fathers of families, uncomprehending peasants who had probably never travelled more than ten versts from their villages before the recruiting officer arrived. What were they fighting for? What were they dying for? For these men, at this moment, it was possible to say that they were fighting to defend their own country; but that had not been the case at the beginning of the war. And what had a complicated network of treaties and guarantees and invasions ever had to do with Brinsley, except to make him their victim? How much longer could it go on? How long would women see their sons and husbands taken from them without protest? How long would the men themselves continue to obey officers who might have to order them to advance against machine guns whilst armed with nothing more than pitchforks? Kate knew that such a thing was happening already and would happen even more frequently in future. Some of the patients in her hospital had arrived with wounds to their feet or fingers which Kate knew to be self-inflicted. If despair had already reached that pitch, the time must be near when the men would simply turn and run away.

  The thought increased her sadness. It should have been possible to think of Brinsley’s death as glorious. No doubt he had acted heroically in the moment of battle. But was it worthwhile? He had not survived to ask the question, so Kate put it to herself instead. The answer came easily. No, it was not worthwhile. There was nothing that any politician or general had ever told her which would justify the death of one young man like Brinsley, much less millions. Kate suspected that the war continued only because no one knew how to stop it.

  The only clear fact was that she was doing some good where she was. Armies would continue to kill each other whether she was in Europe or Jamaica, but every single doctor at the front line saved lives every day simply by being on the spot. It didn’t matter whether the lives saved were Serbian or Russian or even Austrian or German. Her responsibility as a doctor was wider than her responsibility as a daughter. She loved her father deeply, but in the middle of a war she could not devote herself to the care of a single man. As a doctor herself, Margaret would sure
ly understand.

  All that night Kate wept for her dead brother, but grief served only to stiffen her resolve to stay and do her job properly. That meant that she must have the right equipment. The very next day, grim with determination, she set out on the long journey to the city which had once been Alexa’s glittering St Petersburg – the Russian Paris, the Venice of the North – and was now, simply, Petrograd.

  3

  The Astoria Hotel was full. Or, at least, not necessarily full, but reserved for accredited members of military missions. Kate was startled and depressed by the rebuff. Tiring and uncomfortable, the journey had been unexpectedly protracted, for the train had twice been halted for several hours by a lack of coal, and on a third occasion had been forced to wait for the removal of an engine which blocked the line after its boiler burst in the extreme cold. She had been looking forward to a comfortable bed and perhaps even a bath.

  Disappointed, she paused in the lobby to consider what she would do. All foreigners visiting Petrograd were accustomed to stay at the Astoria as a matter of course. It was the only hotel in the city with international standards of service and language comprehension. Because Kate spoke Russian she could search for the kind of accommodation which ordinary Russians used, but after so many crowded days of travelling she felt desperate for rest and welcome. Even more to the point, she was not adequately dressed to endure the biting wind which came straight off the frozen Gulf of Finland. The south of Russia had been cold enough, but here the temperature was so low that without a scarf across her mouth and nose it was painful even to breathe. She returned to the droshky which had brought her from the station and gave the driver the address of the Aminov town house.

  There she used her own language to ask whether Prince Aminov was at home. Even if they did not completely understand, the servants could be expected to get the gist of the request and it seemed a good idea to make it clear from the start that she was a foreign visitor. The prince himself would certainly speak English, although French would be his first tongue. Russian was the language of the peasants.