by Charles Todd
She grinned. “I think they were showing off for you tonight. But we encourage them to sing. And the other patients sometimes join in, if they’ve had any musical training. Most of the time, though, they just listen.” She finished brushing her hair. “Heaven knows we need distractions to take their minds off their wounds. Sister Melvin reads to them, one of the orderlies plays cards with some of them, and there’s a room here where they can learn a new trade, one that doesn’t need both arms or legs.”
“What sort of trades?”
“Sedentary ones. Shoemaker, tobacconist, and the like. The problem comes with finding people who will hire these men. They see themselves as useless. I go to bed at night tired from the emotional effort of cheering them up.”
The next morning my schedule was posted along with that of the rest of the staff.
In the afternoon, I found Captain Williams sitting in the conservatory, looking out at the first snowfall. It wasn’t destined to last, but it was quite pretty coming down.
“A penny for your thoughts,” I said lightly.
“They aren’t worth a farthing. I was remembering. In the valley, the few times we’ve seen snow it turned black almost as soon as it touched the ground. And in France it was a misery.”
It was an opening, and I took it.
“Do you have a family waiting for you at home?” I asked.
“A sister. She isn’t much for writing. She’s busy with young children. At least, they were young when I left the valley. I won’t recognize them now. The eldest must be eight or nine.”
If she hadn’t written since his wounding, he had no idea how he would be received when he returned.
“No brothers?”
“One. Tom. He went missing at Passchendaele.”
He didn’t mention his sister-in-law, and I wondered if she’d written since that Christmas letter.
He changed the subject, making it clear he didn’t want to talk about them. Instead, he went back to studying the snowfall and said, “Will you do something for me?”
“Yes, if I can.”
“Could you see to it that all of us are released at the same time? It will be best for morale.”
“I’ll speak to Matron. I see that Private Jones isn’t here any longer. Has he already been released?”
“Private Jones managed to kill himself.” His voice was harsh, as if he disapproved. But I realized he was trying to conceal his own shock and grief.
“I didn’t know,” I said, appalled. “I’m so sorry. It must have been very difficult for the rest of you.” Why hadn’t Sister Baker told me?
“There was a letter from the girl he was to marry. She broke off their engagement. There was some mention of her parents needing her to care for them, but Jones took it to mean she couldn’t face his wounds. He went up to the third floor and managed to get a window open. And threw himself out. The fall didn’t kill him straightaway. He died of his injuries two days later.” His voice was bitter. “It’s for the best, I keep telling myself that.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again, remembering the man I’d known in France.
“I wrote to his family. I think they were relieved, in a way. And I asked about Sarah. She’d married someone else. Two days after her letter to him.”
“That’s awful!” I replied.
“That’s why I want to be there, to ease their homecoming. If I can.”
I wondered if his concern for his men, as he considered them, was a way of avoiding thinking about his own return to the life he’d left behind.
He was talking now about Private Morris, who had lost his right arm. It was difficult to find a trade he could learn, and his depression was deepening.
“I feel guilty that my old position in the mine office is waiting for me. I don’t know how some of them will manage. Morris is married, with children. He’s desperate.”
“Surely the owners of the mines ought to be able to find work for these men.”
He laughed sourly. “These men will be extra mouths to feed. It will take a toll on their families.” He looked away again. The snow was finally stopping, a few flakes still floating lazily down from the gray sky. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t know what you can do,” I said quietly.
“That’s what haunts me.”
Was this the teacher he’d wanted to be speaking? Or the officer? Most likely both. Whole villages had enlisted together all over Britain, fought—and died—together. Wiping out a company meant wiping out most of the young men in a single village, or even a street in the larger towns. The published lists of the dead, missing, and wounded often read like a memorial service.
And of course we had lost men from the Colonel Sahib’s regiment. In India and other postings, and during the war. I’d known so many of them, danced with them at balls, played tennis with them, been table partners at dinners. I’d tended more than a few of them myself, when they were brought to my aid station or the base hospitals. My mother had visited many recent widows in her role as the Colonel’s Lady, because she had been a part of their lives in happier times. We were a family, and so I understood what the Captain was feeling.
“I don’t know if Matron can do anything about that,” I told him, “but you might let her know that you are worried.”
“What can she do? We’re speaking of the valleys. Her views hold no weight there.”
Three days later, Private Evans managed to throw himself down the stairs, all fourteen steps, in the wheeled chair that was his only means of getting about. There was an orderly assigned to push it, but Private Evans had left his pipe in his room, and while the orderly was fetching it, he managed with one foot and one hand to make it as far as the head of the stairs, and fall.
I heard the racket as the chair bounced and ricocheted off the walls, and raced for the steps. I came through the door nearest the stairs just as the chair brushed past me as it slid toward the outer door. Private Evans rolled down the last step and lay still. I got to him first, with Matron at my heels. He was bleeding from his mouth and ears and nose, but what struck me first was the odd angle of his head. As Matron knelt beside me on the hard marble floor, she gently lifted my fingers from his pulse and placed her own there.
“He’s dead,” she said quietly. “I think his neck is broken.”
All I could think of was that look of determination in the poor man’s eyes in France, when we’d all but pulled him back from the dead after he’d taken an overdose of morphine. It had taken him weeks to find a way to try a second time. And he’d made sure he’d succeed.
The orderly, his face drained of color, was thudding down the stairs, the Private’s pipe still gripped in his hand.
“My God,” he said over and over again, then came to a halt six steps away from the body.
Others had hurried to the scene, among them Captain Williams. When he saw that it was one of his own men, he stopped, such an expression of sadness in his eyes that I turned away.
He maneuvered his crutches around the chair, one of its wheels still spinning slowly, and looked at Matron. She shook her head.
“How did this happen?” he demanded harshly. “What was he doing so near the stairs? Why wasn’t anyone with him?”
A lift had been installed in the house in 1910 when the owner had had a stroke and was confined to a wheeled chair.
I thought at first the Captain was going to try to kneel by the body. Instead, he saw the orderly and started toward him. I sprang to my feet and stepped between the two men as the orderly retreated.
“Damn you!” he said through clenched teeth.
“Honest to God, Captain, we was by the lift, and he remembered his pipe—”
Captain Williams cut him short. “Didn’t you think, you idiot, that it might be a trick?”
“No, sir, he sometimes forgot it—”
The frustration of having lost a leg, of being on crutches and unable to reach the frightened orderly made the Captain swing one of his crutches hard against the newel post, and Ma
tron said sharply, “That will do, Captain,” in a voice that stopped him in his tracks. She turned to several of the other orderlies who had come running. “Willis, Strong, will you carry Private Evans to surgery, please.”
They came forward, lifting the body gently, and started for the surgery wing. It was then that I had a moment to notice the others who had come to the hall, three of them from the Private’s own company. Their expressions were as grim as the Captain’s, and they started after the orderlies, with Captain Williams by right moving ahead of them.
Matron started to object, then thought better of it. Turning to the other onlookers, she said briskly, “A tragedy for all of us. I think it best that we carry on with our duties now. But I will confer with the chaplain, and there will be a service for Private Evans later today. That will be the appropriate time to express our sense of loss and sympathy.”
As people began to move away, still showing signs of their shock, she turned to the hapless orderly, standing as if rooted to the step.
“Please come to my office, Manners. We will speak there, not here in public.”
To me, she added, “See to the other Welsh patients, if you please, Sister. They will need our every care.”
It was her way of telling me to keep a watch over them. I went down the passage to the surgical wing, and reached there as Willis and Strong were coming away.
“Where are the others?” I asked.
“They wanted a minute of privacy, Sister. I thought it best,” Willis said.
“Yes, thank you.” I walked into the room. The orderlies had laid out the body of Private Evans on the table, and covered all but his face with a sheet. One of them had also cleaned the blood from his face and brushed back his hair.
As I stepped forward, the Welshmen turned as one to stare at me, as if I had come from the moon.
I said, “Matron asked me to give you time alone with Private Evans. I wonder if you could tell me more about him. I have only known him as a patient. I would like to know the man.”
It was clear that Captain Williams resented my presence here, and my request.
Then Private Lloyd said, “I worked alongside him in the pit. He was a good man with a pick. Sure and easy. A good soldier as well.” His Welsh accent was musical, with a lilt to it. That made his words more poignant.
Private Williams said, “He has a mother and a sister in the valley. Who’s to tell them about this?” There was anger in his voice. “Who will look after them now?”
Private Morris said, “He didn’t like the dark. Much of the year we never see the sun. We’re down in the pits before it comes up, and we walk home after it’s set.”
“What will they do with the body?” Corporal Jones asked. “Will they send him home to be buried?”
Although I had seen markers near the woods to the west of the house, and some stones, I didn’t know what the policy was here. For all I knew, the stones were in a private cemetery belonging to the family who had once lived here.
“I will ask Matron,” I said quietly.
“They won’t let us go back with him, will they?” Private Jones asked, but Private Lloyd didn’t wait for my answer.
“I don’t want to go back.” His voice was low and savage. “Not like this. He had the right of it, didn’t he? To end it before his family ever saw what was left of him?”
Captain Williams spoke for the first time. “I’ll have none of that.”
Private Lloyd shuffled his feet, as if embarrassed to have put into words what all of them must have been thinking.
“I can’t look at him any longer,” one of the others said, and turned his crutches toward the door, moving as fast as he could. When he got there, he slammed it with his fist and walked out. The others slowly followed, all except for Captain Williams.
“He was a good man,” he said quietly. “He shouldn’t have died like this, not after the trenches. Bloody damned Hun!”
I wasn’t meant to hear that. I had gone to the door to catch the others up. Captain Williams brushed past me and went out into the passage. I went back and gently lifted the sheet over Private Evans’s face. I hadn’t known him well, but he’d been polite, done whatever was asked of him, and never wrote letters to anyone, not that I was aware of. Soft-spoken, not very well educated, but a reader of books.
It was the only epitaph I could offer, then I said simply, “Poor man.”
The chaplain was just coming into the room as I reached the door. “Was it suicide? That’s being whispered about. Or an accident?”
“I didn’t see what happened,” I replied. “But I should think it was an accident. He couldn’t manage the chair very well.”
“That’s true,” the chaplain agreed. “Thank you, Sister.” And he moved on to the body. I saw him lift the sheet.
“I think he might have been Chapel,” I said.
The chaplain looked over his shoulder and smiled sadly. “It doesn’t matter. In death we are all God’s children, never mind the door through which we enter His presence.”
I left him there and hurried after Private Evans’s comrades. Catching them up I said, “Will you come to Matron’s private sitting room? She isn’t there, but I can ask that tea be brought. It’s quieter. You’ll have a little privacy.”
Corporal Jones cast a glance at his Captain. “Thank you, Sister. If you don’t mind.”
They followed me to what had once been a morning room, still quite pretty with floral wallpaper. The white morning glories against a blue background was appropriate, I thought, for men who were mourning a comrade. There was a small desk and several comfortable chairs as well as more around the tea table set by the windows. I left them there and went to ask for tea to be brought in.
I didn’t stay with them after I’d poured their tea. I knew they resented my presence but were too polite to say so, and the quiet room was what they all desperately needed.
As I closed the door behind me, I heard Captain Williams say to his men, “We have got through worse together. We’ll get through this.”
It wasn’t until two days later, after the service for Private Evans, that I found Captain Williams waiting for me in the library.
The chaplain and one of the other Sisters had accompanied the Private’s body to Wales and the valley where he had been born and brought up. The family had wanted him to come home, and I thought they would probably mourn the man they remembered marching off to war, not the man in the coffin. The chaplain had taken it upon himself to read the letters from the dead man’s mother and sister, to give him some insight into what they knew and what they felt.
“They never mentioned his wounds in their letters,” he told me afterward. “I don’t know if they were being kind. Or blind. It might have helped him if they’d at least acknowledged the fact that he was an amputee.”
And I’d agreed with him.
The Captain looked up as I came into the room to find a book one of the patients was asking for. I smiled at him, but he didn’t return it.
“Any word from the chaplain?”
“No. I expect he’ll wait until he’s returned to tell us how it went. Evans won’t be the last of us to die by his own hand,” the Captain went on slowly. “Tea and kind words won’t wipe away the sight of his body lying there. I don’t think any of us have got it out of our minds. Those of us who are left haven’t found his courage yet—or Private Jones’s—but we will.”
We were alone in the library, but I crossed the room so that my words wouldn’t carry to patients on the other side of the thin partitions that had turned this home into a clinic.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, Captain. These men look up to you, and they desperately need your support and your encouragement. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and try to help them find the courage to go on, not to die. Be the leader they believe you are. If you haven’t forgotten how.”
And I walked out of the library before he could answer me. Only after I’d closed the door did I remember I’d gone there for a b
ook. I stood there, hearing my words in my ears, feeling I’d overstepped my bounds and said far more than I should to a man who was all too aware that he was little better off than the dead man, except that he had lost a leg, and not an arm as well. I turned, intending to go back and apologize to Captain Williams. But when I took a deep breath and opened the door, his chair was empty. He’d left the room by the other door.
It’s hard to apologize long after the damage is done, and Captain Williams avoided me after our encounter, making it all the harder to say anything to him when we were in the presence of others.
I waited for Matron to send for me to tell me I’d forgot myself and upset a patient, but she never mentioned anything about it. I assumed the Captain had kept the matter to himself. I had done the same.
But I heard from several Sisters that he had tried to help his men deal with their grief. How he’d dealt with his own was another matter, and I spoke to Matron about it.
Her response had been kind—but I thought she’d misjudged the Captain.
“I see no signs of unusual distress, Sister. Perhaps you’ve worried yourself into believing it’s there. Still, I’m grateful that you’ve come to me.”
Before I left her office, I broached the subject of the release of the Welsh patients.
“Do you think it might be possible to release all of them on the same day? I think it might be for the best.”
She looked at her chart. “I don’t see why not. Yes, a very good idea. Meanwhile, I’ll make certain that they’re all ready to go at the same time. I’m worried about Private Owen. That arm isn’t doing as well as it should be. And the doctors aren’t eager to clean it again.”
We talked about several other patients, ones from Surrey and Northumberland and Shropshire, before I was dismissed.
Soon enough we said good-bye to the Welsh wounded and wished them well. They smiled and thanked us for our care, and set off down the drive with those smiles firmly in place. The rest of the staff went back indoors out of the cold wind, but I stayed where I was, watching the coach as far as the bend in the drive. As it negotiated that, the windows came into view again, and I saw that the smiles had vanished and the men staring back at the house looked pale and uncertain.