by Charles Todd
“Caswell, I believe. The house is The Willows.”
“Next time I write I’ll ask Papa about the murders. Three people, you say?”
“So we were told.”
“I shouldn’t care to live in a house where murder had been done.” She shivered. “I can understand your friend’s reluctance to proceed.”
I had lied to her, although a part of what I’d told her was true. Enough to support the lie. As we disembarked, I found myself hoping she’d forget my request before she wrote next to her father.
After that I was too busy to dwell on Molly or the Caswell family or anything else. People were beginning to think that an end to the war was possible. After so many years of fighting, of wounded and dying and dead, no one seemed to trust the rumors. And certainly the fighting as far as I could tell was still as heavy, and we were seeing as many wounded as ever. I couldn’t help but think that if there was to be peace anytime soon, how cruel it was for men to go on suffering and dying unnecessarily. It was depressing, and I couldn’t shake that sense of waste as I tended my patients.
I wasn’t prepared to encounter the Reverend Gates again. Late one evening as dusk was falling I saw him at a distance, speaking to the wounded still lying on stretchers at our forward aid station, and I wondered why he had been sent back to France, given his troubled state of mind. Had he felt he had to be here, drawn by the need to serve, to prove himself, or had the Army deemed him fit, looking only at the outward man? His sling at least was gone.
When I saw him again half an hour later, I noticed his face was haggard, his eyes tormented. But his voice was steady as he offered comfort to the men, as if it belonged to someone else, not the exhausted man going from patient to patient.
And then I lost track of him, distracted by the severity of the wounds I was seeing—shrapnel—and then by a familiar voice coming out of the darkness.
It was Sergeant Larimore nursing a sliver of shrapnel in his hand. It had festered, and it was hurting. He must have seen me working with several of the walking wounded, for the first inkling I had of his presence was the soft but distinctive cry of a kookaburra bird. I turned toward the sound, and with a grin he came to take his place in the line before me, to wait his turn.
I was always happy to see this cheeky Australian. He had helped me once when I needed help desperately, and I was fond of him. Dangerous to care about anyone in wartime, but still . . .
When I’d finished with the patient before him and turned his way, Sergeant Larimore smiled. “No one told me you were at this aid station. I’d have come along two days ago.”
“You should have come anyway. Look at that hand. It must be twice its normal size. And swelling like that is dangerous. Here, let me see.” As I took his large hand in mine, I could just pick out the black speck that was the shard of a shell, and all around it the flesh was puffy and red. It was a very good thing, I thought, that he was a big man, or this wound could have passed through the palm and the back of the hand as well. He could even have lost the use of it, if nerves were damaged, muscles torn.
I found tweezers and brought out the bit of shell, showing it to him. He hadn’t made a sound as I worked, but now he whistled. “All because of that tiny mite? I shall have to give up all hope of a VC.”
“A Victoria Cross is only given for gallantry above and beyond the call of duty. Not for a wound, however swollen,” I told him as I cleaned out the infection and shook septic powder over it.
“I was mentioned in dispatches a fortnight ago,” he said buoyantly, that irrepressible glint in his eyes.
“Oh, yes? As the biggest troublemaker this side of Adelaide?” I asked, bandaging his hand.
He laughed. “You’re a lass after my own heart, Sister.”
I was sorely tempted to ask him to help me find Lieutenant Wade—if he even existed. Sergeant Larimore had come to my aid before when I needed to find information quickly. The battlefield had its own way of passing news, as people’s paths crossed behind the lines. That could have been how the Subedar had been found out and killed. I didn’t want Sergeant Larimore to meet the same fate on my account.
He looked down at me. “What’s the matter, lass? Is there anything I can do? Shoot a few dozen Hun for you? Win the war single-handed so you can have a good night’s sleep?”
I had to smile. “Yes, win the war. It’s lasted far too long.”
I left him there while I went to empty the basin full of bloody water, and that’s when I came face-to-face with Reverend Gates.
He saw me first, and before I could even greet him, he said, his voice shrill and carrying, causing heads to turn, “Are you pursuing me?”
I’d already taken note of how worn down he was, and I realized now that he was living on nerves alone.
“I’ve been at this station for some time,” I answered him. “How are you, Chaplain Gates?”
“Well enough, no thanks to you. The people who wished to look at The Willows backed out. Did you talk to them? Did you tell them anything?” As he finished, his gaze traveled beyond me, and I was aware that someone had come to stand just behind me. But I didn’t turn.
“No, why should I? I didn’t even know their names. How could I?”
“But you did,” he said vehemently. “Mr. and Mrs. Davies.”
I remembered then. He’d mistaken us for someone else when he saw Simon and me coming down the drive from the house. It had completely flown my mind.
“I have no reason to prevent you or anyone else from selling your own property. I only came to Petersfield because I was never told precisely what happened there.”
“No, you wouldn’t have been. It was hushed up, wasn’t it, to shield the regiment? I tell you, I don’t believe that Lieutenant died in the Khyber Pass. I think he’s still in the Army, protected by your father.”
I stood very still. That was far too close to the truth, that Lieutenant Wade was still with the Army. Only not with our regiment.
“I can’t imagine why you should think so,” I answered finally, testing the waters. “Surely the killer was someone closer to Petersfield.”
“His body was never brought in, was it? For all the world to see.”
“You don’t simply ride into that part of the Frontier and retrieve a body,” I said sharply. “You’d take your life in your hands, and very likely end as dead as he was. One man isn’t worth the lives of an entire company.”
“If it was so bloody dangerous,” Gates replied, “then why did he go there? He would have been committing suicide, wouldn’t he? And he wasn’t stupid enough to do that. No, it was covered up, the whole business. An excuse you thought everyone back in England would find easy to believe.”
Behind me Sergeant Larimore spoke, his voice stark, cold. “Reverend or not, you don’t speak that way to Sister Crawford. Not in my presence.”
Gates went pale. “You can see how the Army protects its own,” he said in a low, tense voice. “I’ve proved my point, have I not?”
And he was gone, hurrying toward the ambulances collecting to take the most severely wounded to the base hospital. He didn’t look back.
Sergeant Larimore watched him go. “Are you all right, Bess?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Just—put out with his intransigence.”
“And who is he, when he’s at home?”
“He thinks the regiment covered a murder long ago. Or he’s afraid, if the man everyone thinks was the killer really and truly isn’t, then he’ll have to look closer to home.”
“Aye, he appears to be a man in torment. Where is this house he’s so bent on selling?”
“Just outside Petersfield, in Hampshire. His uncle inherited the house after the family there was killed.”
“Convenient, I’d say. Send me word if he gives you any more trouble. I’ve never knocked down a chaplain before. But that one would tempt me sorely.”
Some
one was calling to me, and I turned to see Sister Milton beckoning me.
“I must go. Not to worry, Sergeant. I’ll be all right.”
“So you will,” he said without smiling. “I’ll pass the word.”
And with that he was gone. In the distance, when I could no longer see his tall, rangy figure, the call of the kookaburra came drifting back to me in a brief silence along the lines at the Front, one of those unexpected lulls that spell regrouping and respite.
Word reached me a few days later that the chaplain who had only recently passed through our aid station had collapsed and been sent back to England for care.
Had my presence here at the station precipitated his collapse? Seeing me here when he was already on the verge of breaking down?
On the whole, I thought not. He should never have been returned to duty. But I knew how it was. The doctors asked questions and evaluated the answers. If Gates had been afraid to admit just how ill he was, for fear of being forced to seek treatment, he could have collected himself well enough to lie to them. And the doctors, pressed to get as many walking wounded back to France as possible, might have turned a blind eye to shaking hands or strain around the mouth. Perhaps they had even thought he might be better off returning to France. So many wounded—so many Captain Barclays—had lied about their condition in the hope of being sent back to their men, where they felt desperately needed.
Captain Barclay, with a severe knee wound, had hounded the doctors, assuring them he was fit long before he truly was. When they relented and sent him to France at my father’s request, he’d learned that will wasn’t enough, however determined a man was to show he was fully healed.
Whatever had happened, I was just as glad not to have to keep an eye out for the chaplain. Breakdowns like his could turn violent. Most particularly, my father’s regiment was serving here in France, and whispers made the rounds far too quickly. . . .
We spent part of the next three hours working with wounded German prisoners.
They were not as cocky as they had been two years ago, when the war seemed to be going their way. Tired, dispirited, short on reinforcements, they fought with the same fierce tenacity, but I could see in their dark-ringed eyes how much it had cost.
One, a young private who couldn’t have been more than seventeen, slept nearly around the clock. The Lieutenant in charge of the prisoners looked in on him once or twice, but let him rest.
I happened by as the Lieutenant said to another Sister, “I’ve a brother about that age. Eager to fight, threatening to enlist, worrying my poor mother to the point of exhaustion. I just hope this damned war is over before he is eighteen.”
“When is his birthday?” Sister Milton asked.
“November. Twenty-six November.”
She shook her head. “I doubt we’ll see it ended by Christmas. Whatever the Yanks are saying.”
“Pray God you’re wrong,” the Lieutenant replied and went to look in on the more seriously wounded men. When the last of those was stable enough to be sent back for processing as prisoners, they were put into ambulances and lorries, with those able to walk bringing up the rear and often getting ahead of the vehicles lumbering through ruts and sliding toward holes. I found myself thinking they were well out of it, and would live to see the end of the war.
And what about our own men? More than one friend from before the war had been taken prisoner.
The shelling began again, and we were hard-pressed to keep up with the influx of wounded.
The attack that followed the shelling pushed the Germans back behind their own lines, and I was working with our only doctor, trying to stop bleeding in a leg wound.
An orderly came up on the run, breathless and covered in blood. “Sir? There’s a Lieutenant down in one of the German trenches. We’re not sure how long we can hold that sector, sir. He needs to be taken out as soon as may be.”
“I’m needed here, can’t you see that?” Dr. Reid snapped, his eyes on the leg he was trying to save. And then, satisfied that the bleeding was slowing down, he looked up. “Sister?” he said to me. “Are you game to go find a rat down a hole?”
“In the German trench, sir?” I asked, surprised. We’d never sent a Sister into the German lines. I thought briefly about Simon, who had been behind those very lines.
“Indeed.”
“What should I take?” I asked the orderly.
“It’s his arm and shoulder. Pinned under one of the bulwarks that hold up the trench walls. He was going down to be sure we’d routed all of them.” He hesitated. “We might have to take that arm off. Morphine for the pain, something to brace that shoulder, sticks for wrapping the arm . . .”
He was still making the list as I led him to where we kept what stores we had. We made a quick survey, chose only what was necessary, and set out.
I’d been caught close to the lines before when the sectors lost ground. I’d almost been overrun by German forces a time or two. The orderly had insisted that I remove my cap and cover my hair with the cleanest helmet he could find. I had visions of lice in my hair and down my back as he pulled an officer’s abandoned greatcoat over my uniform.
“It’s for the best,” he said as we hurried on. He was carrying the bundle in one hand and helping me over the rough, uneven ground toward the nearest trench on our side of the wire.
It was the most appalling sight. Mud, thick with unspeakable, mercifully unidentifiable bits and pieces. I thought I saw a boot with part of a foot still inside, and the body of a dead rat in a puddle of what smelled suspiciously like fresh urine. The walls were haphazardly shored up, sloping toward the top, and above my head was the barbed wire strung all along the top several feet out. What appeared to be caves dug out of the earth with flaps of burlap over them held the effects of officers in two I glimpsed, and in a third, a man bent over a field telephone, giving coordinates. I realized that he’d had to do it as quickly as possible or our own guns would be shelling our own men.
The smell was overwhelming on this warm afternoon. I’d smelled it before on the filthy bodies of wounded men and the orderlies who brought them in. A miasma of everything from stale cigarette smoke to the sweat of fear to urine and unwashed clothes, to something that I couldn’t quite identify, the sweetness of rotting things.
We came to a ladder, flat against the dirty wall.
“Can you manage that, do you think, Sister? I’ll look the other way.”
And before I could think about it too long, I climbed up on the firing step and scrambled up the ladder.
The barbed wire was flattened, had been for the attack, and I saw a landscape that was as bleak and destroyed as anything I’d ever set eyes on. One or two tree stumps were the only things to give it any sense of reality, and I glimpsed what might have been the foundation of a farm building where a shell had blasted the earth away. There were dead men in the shell craters and littering the ground, and my guide said, “Best not to look, Sister. There’s been no time to collect them.”
I walked on, not able to imagine what was sticking to my boots as I went, and some seventy yards away, we came to the first of the German trenches, a shallow one where a machine gun had been set up. The men manning it were dead. I’d heard that very few machine gunners or their crews from either side wound up as prisoners. I could believe it now.
We reached a second line of trenches, and my orderly, casting about, found a reasonably sturdy ladder leading down. The rolls of barbed wire on this side of No Man’s Land had already been pushed to the far side of the trench line, to protect against any surprise attack. But the Germans were quiet.
I was astonished by what I saw when I reached the end of the ladder and could look around.
It was so different from the British trenches that I could hardly take it in. It was as if ants had built a human-size world here, with trenches, latrines, rooms for men and officers, rough stairs down to ev
en lower levels. A veritable city.
And the dead were here too, but not the mud, not the dead rats or bits of men. There were boards to walk on, doors into the cubbies, and down below were dormitories, mess rooms, planning rooms—I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. And below that, according to my guide, was the bunker, which protected the German soldiers from the shelling. Our men, standing in their open trenches, had nowhere to go. And it explained to me why so often an attack after heavy shelling could be met with such fierce resistance on the part of the Germans.
All this while the orderly was leading me down another set of stairs. I saw almost at once that one of the supporting beams had come down, bringing a part of the upper portion of the trench down with it, and under all the debris, hardly visible, was an English officer.
I knelt in the wood splinters and dust and torn earth and called out. “I’ve come to help,” I said just as someone on the far side of the debris field switched on a torch, followed by two more.
I could see him then, grateful that he wasn’t someone I knew. His face was lined with pain and streaked with sweat, which had plastered his fair hair against his forehead.
“If you take my arm, I’ll shoot myself,” he said raggedly. “I mean it.”
He moved his other hand, and I saw his service revolver, drawn and ready to use.
“I can hardly judge how bad it is, Lieutenant,” I said briskly. “Not from here. So we’ll have no threats at this stage.”
“Just so we understand each other,” he said through clenched teeth.
A disembodied voice, with the thick accent of the north of England, came from the other side of the debris. “He won’t let us give him morphine. He thinks it’s a trick.”
“Yes, well, he may soon regret that,” I replied, and began moving some of the smaller bits of wood in front of me.
“Careful, Sister,” someone shouted from the other side. “It’s like skittles, touch one and the lot goes down.”
I worked more slowly, but it was necessary to get close enough to deal with the wound. The orderly beside me said, “Here, let me,” and moved into my place, working with care.