An Unwilling Accomplice

by Charles Todd

  I had had only the sketchiest breakfast and half a sandwich for lunch. By midnight, I was achingly tired and very hungry—hungry enough now to feel a little light-headed. The incessant shelling didn’t help, but I held on grimly until I was relieved, a little after two in the morning, by two new Sisters brought up by the ambulances that were taking our wounded back.

  I fell on my cot too exhausted to think. Then far too soon an orderly was calling to me, and I had to find the strength to get up again.

  But he had also just brought me a tin of hot soup and a chunk of bread that had also come up with the ambulances, and with the food a large mug of hot tea.

  It was bliss. I broke up some of my bread into the soup—my mother would have been horrified—and enjoyed every mouthful. The rest I ate with my tea, wishing it were a sweet bun from the bakery in the village at home, those we had in such plenty before the war and the rationing.

  And that for some reason reminded me of the message still in my pocket.

  It was a little bloodstained now, spatters from when I’d staunched the bleeding in a badly mangled thigh.

  Sergeant Lassiter hadn’t used a name.

  She’s closer to the Ypres Road.

  And then he’d given me the number of the aid station.

  She might as well be on the moon, for I was on the Somme.

  The Germans were fighting ferociously. And it seemed they had shells to spare, the way they pounded at the British and French lines, looking for—praying for?—a break somewhere that would enable them to push farther south, as they had done in 1914, when they had caught the French off guard. They’d nearly had Paris then, and it had been at risk more than once since. In June, they might have had Paris again, if it hadn’t been for the American Army and the gallant Marines.

  We went about our duties without respite, trying to ignore rumors of peace, seeing the evidence of our own eyes in the stretchers brought to us. And the dread Spanish influenza was still with us, killing cruelly, taking an enormous toll.

  Pulling back at one point, we came upon a small encampment of refugees caught by the shift in the fighting. Men and women who had tried desperately to hold on to their own bit of land, farms that had been in the same families for centuries. Most had fled long ago, south of the Seine, well away from the fighting.

  These people had heard the rumors of peace, they too had believed them—or wanted to—and somehow they had made their way forward in the hope of reclaiming what was theirs as soon as the guns fell silent.

  One woman was heavily pregnant and pale with the onset of labor. Three children clung to her, while her husband begged us to do something. There were seven other families, and one of the men had begun to cough in a way that worried me. The onset of influenza? Or tuberculosis? He hung well back, keeping out of the light we were using to set up the aid station again.

  I hadn’t delivered a baby since the days of my training. But I brought the woman in to lie down on one of the cots, fishing in my kit for some of the biscuits my mother had sent back with me. I’d been hoarding them, slowly savoring a touch of home, but now I gave them to the children, who stared at them as if they had never seen such things before, then gobbled them down hungrily as the father led them away. I realized all of them were hungry and tired and footsore, and I thought they must surely regret their impetuous decision to come north again.

  The baby was slow to come. Ordinarily a second or third child came quickly, sometimes before its time. I remembered one woman from Hampstead Heath who complained that her first child had taken two days to make an appearance, while she nearly had the second one in the omnibus that had brought her to the hospital.

  And then the problem was clear. This was going to be a breech birth, where the baby’s head, usually the first part to appear, is in the wrong position and the legs or buttocks try to make their way through the birth canal.

  I felt a frisson of fear. We weren’t set up for a Cesarean. The chances were the mother would die, leaving three—possibly four, if the baby survived—children alone with the father to care for them. And there was no time, no ambulance available to take her back to a hospital equipped to help her. It had been nearly four years since I’d watched Dr. Morton gently and firmly reposition a baby for a normal delivery.

  The woman, sweating and in great pain, looked up at me piteously. She had seen my face, she was afraid she was going to die.

  I smiled at her, then said, in halting French, uncertain of the words, “The child is twisted, Madame. It will take a little work to right him. It will be painful, but it must be done.” And it must be done at once before the child was in a position where a Cesarean was the only choice.

  I set to work, praying that I wouldn’t rupture the walls of the womb or twist the umbilical cord around the baby’s neck, gently but firmly turning him while the mother cried out in pain. But I had nothing to give her. Nothing at all.

  And then I had the baby’s head, facedown, in the correct place, and I shouted, “Now, Madame, push, I beg of you!”

  She did, and suddenly, as if it was what the child had intended all along, the head came smoothly into my waiting hands, and shortly after that it slid out of the mother’s body with ease. “A girl, Madame!”

  I realized that she was a very small infant. There had been little food for the mother, and she had probably given most of what she had to her children. Just as well, I thought, making it easier for me to shift the baby. But she cried lustily as I wrapped her warmly after tying off and clipping the cord, and I laid her in her mother’s arms. The woman was crying with joy, now, the pain forgotten as I finished what had to be done. The father came forward timidly, to see the child, and I left them to it, going to clean myself up.

  Later, when she had rested a little, I told the mother that she must return south. “If you don’t, you’ll lose this baby and perhaps your own life if infection sets in and there is not enough milk. Promise me.”

  I think they were frightened enough to listen, for afterward I heard an altercation with the other members of the little group. And then I saw the father, three children, and the exhausted mother carrying the baby moving away, back down the long road they’d managed to come up. He’d found a barrow for her—or taken it away from the others—and I watched them until they had disappeared into the night.

  Sister Baker called to me, and I went to do my share of treating the wounded, but I was tired and sick at heart.

  The long line of Crawford men who had fought for King and Country, and the long line of Crawford women who had stood by them through so many wars, kept me going through the hours ahead, although I couldn’t remember if my great-great-grandmother had ever delivered a baby in the midst of a battle. When I fell onto my cot, I slept, mercifully without dreams.

  Our aid station was merged with another two days later, and I went back with the ambulances, for we had two cases of bleeding that needed someone in attendance.

  There, I was sent again to the influenza hospital.

  A line of ambulances came in a few days later, and I heard a familiar voice long before I could see the speaker.

  It was Diana. She had come with the ambulances and was seeing to the disposition of her patients, while Matron did what she could to accommodate wounded who were also suffering from influenza.

  It was chaos for half an hour as we arranged and rearranged our wards, and it wasn’t until a little after eight that I could look for her. By that time the convoy of ambulances had already set out again for the Ypres Road. I’d missed my opportunity. Disappointed, I stepped over to the canteen for a cup of tea and a sandwich or bowl of soup.

  To my surprise, Diana came in ten minutes later. Somehow she managed to look fresh and cool, well in command, despite the tumult of the convoy’s arrival.

  She spotted me, and hurried across the room to greet me.

  “Darling Bess!” she exclaimed, giving me a hug. “I thought you might be back in London on leave.”

  “I was in the north, but th
e situation has changed, and I was reassigned here.”

  She shuddered. “This epidemic has taken such a toll. I’m transporting wounded men back to England tomorrow, and we don’t know whether the clinics they’re going to are fully staffed. So many are down with this flu. It changes daily—sometimes hourly. But I don’t need to tell you that.” Then she smiled ruefully. “We’re passing through Dover. But they are trying to move the wounded to the trains as quickly as possible now, to keep them as far from any contagion as they can. I doubt I’ll be allowed to go up to the castle.”

  And no time to spend with her fiancé. I knew how much she looked forward to those snatched moments together, for their leaves so seldom coincided. They were to be married as soon as the war ended.

  She went to find tea and two sandwiches, then came back to where I was sitting. Attacking her food, she said, “I’m famished. Tell me your news while I eat.”

  I could hardly describe what had happened with Sergeant Wilkins. Nothing about those days on the road with Simon, hunting for the least link to him. Or how uncertain I’d been about my future in the Service.

  I rattled on, mentioning Mrs. Hennessey and talking about a letter I’d had from Mary, anything I could think of.

  “And the wonderful Simon?”

  I laughed. Diana had always flirted with him outrageously. “Busy as ever. He and my father. I think they’re trying to win the war single-handedly.”

  “Of course they are. They ran the regiment between them. What’s a little war?”

  Shifting the subject as she finished her sandwiches, I said, “There’s another reason I’m happy to see you. Simon thought you might be able to tell us something about one of your old school chums. Barbara Neville.”

  Her eyebrows flew up. “Don’t tell me she has her sights set on our Simon?”

  He wasn’t our Simon, but I knew what she meant, and I bit my tongue.

  “She had a dreadful reputation as a flirt, you know. Her father despaired of her after she came out because she even turned down the Viscount who’d asked for her hand. Well, he was much older, of course. And do you remember Freddy Allerton? He proposed again and again, but she would have none of it. There was even a young officer, Lieutenant something or other. Those are just the ones I’ve heard whispers about. When her father died so suddenly, right on the heels of her brother being killed in France, she shut up the house in London and went back to Windward. At first she was in deep mourning, of course, but she’s a great heiress now, and still unmarried. No one quite understands why she hasn’t returned to London.”

  I pictured the haughty, brisk woman I’d encountered in Upper Dysoe. It was hard to imagine her doing what was expected of her.

  “But then Barbara isn’t like the rest of us,” Diana went on thoughtfully. “She was very independent even at school. I remember a dreadful row with the French Mistress. Anyone else would have been sent down at once. But Barbara was summoned to the Head, and there was a conference with her father. Nothing else happened. All of us expected to see Mademoiselle Lavoisier dismissed on the spot. But Barbara apologized very prettily, and there was an end to it.” She considered, her head to one side. “She couldn’t have known, of course, that her father would die so young. He was barely into his fifties.”

  “Was she waiting for love? Is that why she turned down so many suitors?”

  “More likely she was waiting for someone she could manage,” Diana said, laughing.

  Like the wounded Major she’d taken in. “Can you recall the name of that Lieutenant?” I asked. He could well have reached the rank of Major by now, with the massive losses on the Western Front.

  “I don’t know that I ever knew it.” Frowning, she examined her memory. “It was something French, I think. Or sounded French, possibly. She seemed to like him better than her other suitors, or else she was just trying to annoy her father. Helena Kingsley made some remark about it. That it was just as well the French Mistress hadn’t been dismissed, or Barbara would have nothing to say to the man.”

  We went on to speak of men we knew in common, some well, others wounded or dead.

  “I think the greatest cost of this war is in lost friends,” she added sadly. “All the young men I danced and dallied with, played tennis with or went to the theater with are gone. I try to imagine London, once the war is over, and I just can’t. It will be dreadfully empty without anyone we know. Worse still to watch them hobble in on crutches or sit listlessly in wheeled chairs in some sunny room of a clinic, and remember how they used to be.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she brushed them away angrily. “I can’t stay, Bess, I’ve to meet my transport to Calais.”

  I knew what she felt, what she was trying to cope with. I myself had gone into nursing to save men, only to stand by helplessly while so many died. I managed not to think about it when I was busy in the wards or at a forward aid station, where there was no time to dwell on past or future. But at night it was harder to forget, and sometimes I worked until I knew I would collapse and sleep without dreams, the only antidote to lying awake and remembering the faces of men I’d come to know.

  We talked briefly about her wedding plans, which seemed to cheer her up no end, and laughed over the problems of anyone making a cake that would be presentable, what with shortages of almost everything.

  “Instead of gifts,” she said, “perhaps we should ask everyone to bring his or her own dinner.”

  Finishing the last of her tea, she collected her dishes, and we took them back on our way out.

  “That will hold me until I reach England, I hope. Any messages for anyone? Anything for your parents or Simon?”

  “Tell Mrs. Hennessey that I’m well and busy as ever, and my parents that I send my love.”

  “And Simon?”

  “Tell him if you manage to recall the name of that Lieutenant. It’s important. And I shan’t have to worry about censors reading it.”

  With that she was gone. And then the lorry carrying her to Calais stopped and she leaned out her window to shout to me.

  I could barely make out the words. But I waved to her, and blew a kiss.

  It had sounded like Evering.

  I couldn’t recall coming across anyone by that name, but then sometimes I didn’t know the identity of the patient just brought to us.

  I did wish she had begged the lorry driver to reverse a little way, so that I could be clear about the name, but I was sure she would also pass it along to Simon.

  After all, it was far more important for her to tell Simon than to tell me. And I had to be content with that as the rear lamp of the lorry vanished around a bend in the road.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I FOUND MYSELF thinking about the Major from time to time.

  Who was he? Sitting there on a bench in the gardens of that lovely Tudor house, he seemed to be a part of the household. Yet Mrs. Neville had ordered him in such a familiar way to take the reluctant goat back where it belonged. Almost as if she were speaking to one of the footmen. That fleeting resemblance to Sergeant Wilkins had grown dimmer with time, and I still couldn’t say with any certainty whether I should have spoken to Scotland Yard.

  The problem was, the Army didn’t look kindly on men being cared for in places they hadn’t inspected or given official blessing to. If nothing else, it was the perfect opportunity to malinger, far from the watchful eye of doctors and nurses and orderlies. Indeed, there wasn’t a doctor in any of the Dysoes, and I smiled to think what the Medical Corps would make of Maddie.

  And yet Maddie had been as good as many of the tired, harassed doctors I’d dealt with in France. He understood the limitations of his failing eyesight, and he took no unnecessary risks.

  I wondered how Mr. Warren had progressed, if he’d survived the probing, if he still had full use of that arm and shoulder, and if he had returned to his mill.

  But as with so many patients, I seldom saw the final outcome of a case.

  As I fed or bathed recovering patients, I did find myself a
sking them if they knew of a Major Evering. Everyone shook his head. The name wasn’t one they knew.

  The letter from Simon that arrived before dawn one morning, carried by a messenger on a motorcycle, reached me as I was looking forward to my bed after a long night with patients who were about to turn the corner in their suffering, either to die or to survive. Often sitting beside them, holding their hands, and speaking to them as a friend was enough to make that infinitely delicate difference between life and death, unpredictable by any medical science.

  I opened it in my little room, leaning to read it by the light of a lamp whose wick was in dire need of trimming. But who had time or energy for such things?

  Bess,

  I spoke to Diana. She arrived safely in Dover, thence to London, where she telephoned me in a spare moment to give me the name we were after. I’ve gone through the rolls, and I’ve found twenty-three men by the name of Everard. Two are in the Royal Navy, and I’ve stricken them from my list. Another in the Flying Corps was killed over Passchendaele. This death has been confirmed. Another is a prisoner of the Germans, present whereabouts unknown. Information also confirmed. That leaves us with nineteen men. Seven of them are in the ranks, giving us twelve.

  A Major Everard was reported missing at Passchendaele, a Captain Everard is serving in Egypt, and there’s another Captain Everard on the Somme. Brothers, according to the records. Diana could have been mistaken about the name.

  Everard. I’d thought Diana had said Evering. But it didn’t matter. She’d have given Simon the right name.