Long and the Short

by Saddler, Allen

  ‘Yes. Well, good luck, soldier. You’ll be all right.’

  He walked to the station. The platform was crowded with soldiers, airmen, sailors and women in the same uniforms, as well as civilians, looking shifty, almost as if they were on the run. There was a train soon. He bought a Daily Mirror to see what Jane was up to. He didn’t read the news. Everybody knew that the news was censored; that you only got told the good bits about the war; how our servicemen were ten times braver than anyone else’s. It was all propaganda, and everyone knew it. When the train came in he got a corner seat. The carriage was soon packed; a dozen people crammed into a space with seating arrangements for six. Everybody who got on seemed to have bulky bags, some on their backs, some tied up like blue bolsters, some bulging suitcases, some brown paper parcels. In no time at all the carriage looked like a luggage compartment, with human beings squeezed in between the kit bags, holdalls and cases. As the train started some of the luggage fell off the racks and was hurriedly shoved back up again, and some was left on the floor. Jimmy regretted his window seat. He didn’t see how he was going to get out unless everybody got out before him. The train shunted into action and was soon passing long sheds painted with the camouflage colours, black, green and khaki in a dreadful and drab uniformity. There was the occasional chimney, with smoke issuing, and the glimpse of cows wandering in the background looking lost. It seemed as though this had once been farmland, which had been invaded by factories, with not much sense of order or development. It was like the war. They made it up as they went along. There was no plan, no order, no hope. The government, it seemed, just reacted to circumstances, never taking the lead. It was Hitler who was bold. Hitler was adventurous; he planned and put his plans into action. Britain just drifted along, wondering what Hitler would do next.

  When the train got to Chester it seemed as though everybody wanted to get out at once. Jimmy, trapped against the furthest wall, wasn’t too bothered. He was a day late, and he had been rehearsing his story of missing a connection, but, then, it wasn’t as though he was going to an interview for a job. He was going for a job he didn’t want. One that had been forced upon him and was likely to be dangerous and low paid at that. He didn’t see it in any way as a patriotic duty. Somehow or another the politicians had got everyone into it. Messing about, always shouting and showing off. It wasn’t them that would have to leave their jobs and prospects for an uncertain future.

  He got on to the platform and gave his voucher to the ticket collector. Standing beside the collector was a soldier with a red face that sort of bloomed out from under a red cap.

  ‘Private Fossett,’ said the soldier, clipping out the words like a Speak Your Weight machine.

  ‘Fossett,’ said Jimmy. ‘I’ve been called up.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the soldier briskly. ‘You should have been here yesterday. Come with me. Walk smartly. No dawdling.’ And he marched off as though he was giving a demonstration of how to walk smartly, which struck Jimmy as being faintly comic.

  The soldier reached an army truck. ‘Get up there,’ he said. The back of the truck was empty. He called to the driver, ‘Right away, Johnny. Man on board.’

  The truck set off.

  Jimmy saw the station receding. He was in a town. A bit quaint, like High Holborn, with old buildings, a few pubs. It wasn’t a busy place. There weren’t many people about. Maybe it was half-day closing. The truck moved smoothly through the streets and then a suburb, with neat houses and front gardens, and then, quite suddenly, there were fields and hills, woods and bridges on both sides of the road. This was a shock. You could go for twenty miles in London without seeing open country. At the same time he felt lost, out of his natural environment. There undoubtedly was a town called Chester, but there wasn’t much of it. You could put the whole place down in one of the London parks without touching the sides.

  The truck sped along for about a quarter of an hour. All that could be seen now was fields and hedges, small rivers, sheep and haystacks, which Jimmy couldn’t remember ever seeing before. Then the truck turned off the road and went slowly down a winding driveway. Looking ahead Jimmy could see masses of small huts, all oblong in shape, with little chimneys. There seemed to be miles of these huts, forking out in all directions. The truck passed through an avenue of them until there was a clearing, with a square of tarmac, where a flag was flying.

  The soldier in the front jumped out. ‘Come on. This is it. Let’s be having you.’

  2

  SISTER Rosa Tcherny quite liked night duty. The hospital had a kind of all-embracing hush. The clatter of the daytime had been stilled for tiptoe walking and quiet conversation. There was still the whiff of carbolic and early-evening cheeriness, which tailed off around seven o’clock. She was left on her own most of the time, touring the beds, doing dressings, dispensing medication, removing soiled garments, emptying pots and bottles, taking temperatures and pulses. Now and again the Deputy Matron would call in and fuss around the beds, trying to find something out of place. The patients, all soldiers, snored and farted in their sleep. Occasionally Rosa found one awake, looking at her with soulful eyes as though he was lost and alone in an alien world. They were mainly young soldiers who had been briefly to France in the invasion, which was supposed to be the big push, and got in the way of a mortar shell or a machine-gun bullet. Some of them had been seriously wounded. There was the loss of limbs and sight to be coped with, huge shrapnel wounds to be cleaned, burns to be dressed.

  This night when the Matron came round there was obviously something up. She was never seen this late at night. By day she was a regal figure. Her progress from ward to ward was like a royal visit, almost as though a red carpet was being laid before her, and her retinue, who followed behind, were carrying her trailing finery.

  ‘I want you to go to the station,’ she said. ‘There’s a bus outside. There’s a whole train full of casualties. They’ll need help to get back here.’

  The Matron, whose outline resembled a cottage loaf, was still spruce in her starched collar and elaborately sprouting headgear, although she looked a trifle anxious. ‘I want you to remember’, she continued, ‘that it is our job to heal and help without any distinction. We do not have discretion. Everybody must be treated alike.’ She made this speech as though she had thought it out carefully and rehearsed it.

  Rosa was puzzled. What did she mean? The Matron added that the sister on the next ward would supervise Rosa’s ward while she was away.

  Rosa had only recently finished her training. She had progressed from the bedpans to a position of authority, now being in charge of a ward. She had left London after the birth of her child. She had slept one night with Charlie, who had been called up and who aroused her pity as a boy who was totally ill equipped for military service or for life in general; unless Rosa obliged he was likely to die a virgin. He had chickened out of buying a condom and subsequently had chickened out of the army, having gone AWOL. He had been picked up and found himself registered as mentally deficient. Rosa wasn’t sure whether Charlie was barmy or just acting barmy. Anyway it had served him well, as he was still alive somewhere in England and his army allowance arrived regularly, although they weren’t married. The child, Benjamin, was with her parents, for Rosa, after the birth, experienced a strong antipathy towards the infant. It had been a trying time, because the neighbours condemned her as a prostitute. You would have thought that she had committed a hideous crime for which she should have been locked up. People turned their backs on her in shops, whispered to each other, gathering in groups like a lynch mob working itself up into action. At the time Rosa was working for a firm of wholesale booksellers that had been bombed out of its premises in the City of London. Maurice, the managing director, had set up again in some old stables in the Wandsworth Road. Rosa soon hated the Wandsworth Road. It was a street filled with derelict shops, leaky warehouses, battered dustbins, gutter rubbish, dingy houses, clanking trams and creaking lorries. When it rained water spurted from hundreds of
faulty drainpipes and gutters and formed pool-sized puddles in the road. Maurice himself had never been a bundle of fun but had now entered a severe depression, mourning the loss of thousands of books, a stock built up over years which had gone up in sullen smoke. The stables had been used for dray horses and still smelt of stale beer, and Rosa had been glad to leave when the baby was due. Her father and mother seemed to accept the idea of the baby as just another weight they had to carry. They had left Austria during the rise of Fascism and never expected that anything good would happen to them again. The Jews always got it in the neck. When Rosa left Green’s she never went back.

  She enrolled in a training hospital in Manchester, a former workhouse, Victorian and extensive, with new wings built in the grounds. It had been hard working and learning at the same time; straight off night duty to morning lectures, swallowing her temper when chastised by sharp-tongued sisters, finding herself at the bottom rung of the hospital hierarchy. Now that all the humiliation and dog-tiredness were behind her she had begun to see that it might have all been worth while.

  The bus drew up at Victoria Station. There were policemen waiting to escort the nurses to the train, standing in a siding at the end of a platform. There were ambulances and stretchers on the platform and all the auxiliary services from St John Ambulance to the Women’s Voluntary Service with the inevitable trolley with a tea urn. Rosa opened the door of the first carriage and stepped back, rolling the window down. There was an overwhelming smell of something putrid, of field dressings long past their usefulness, of caked earth and vomit and excrement. She took a deep breath and plunged in.

  The carriage was full of men. There were men lying in the corridor, moaning and whimpering. There were men holding their legs, which were twice the normal size, with crooked shoulders, bloodied hands, deathly pale faces and cracked parched lips, all with fear in their eyes. She thought that the best thing was to get them out on to the platform, then she could at least move around and see if she could deal with some urgent cases. Some of the men got to their feet and staggered, as though they were drunk, dragging their feet over the men on the floor. They looked dazed and frightened.

  ‘Schwester.’ The voice came from a man in the far corner of the carriage, propped up against the window. ‘Getränk.’

  Rosa looked at the man. His face was skeletal, his hair was cropped close to his skull with just a little tuft on top, like a coconut. She took his hand, which was limp, with a very fluttery pulse.

  She looked at his uniform. It wasn’t khaki. It was grey. These soldiers were not English. They were German. That was what the Matron had been telling her. That she was being called to exercise her skills on enemy soldiers. Did the Matron know that she was a Jew? Was that the reason she had issued the warning? That the lifelong enemy of Rosa’s family were knocking, asking for help and sympathy?

  By the time all the wounded were on stretchers and the walking wounded sitting on platform seats the scene looked as though there had been a catastrophic train accident. The WVS had soon realized that this wasn’t a party of Tommies from the front. These were Germans, and one tea lady had walked off already in protest.

  ‘I’m not helping them bastards,’ she said.

  Rosa kept her head down, concentrating on the job, wiping mouths free of white foam, easing off field dressings. A team of doctors had arrived with syringes of morphine which they injected into anyone who was moaning with pain, then patted them on the back and told them to get on to the hospital bus. Military Police had been called, presumably for guard duties. None of these soldiers was capable of causing any trouble. They hadn’t a fight left in them, but they were, after all, prisoners of war and were entitled to protection.

  There was a wooden barrier at the end of the platform, and two policemen stopping people from getting too close. But this did not stop curious bystanders from peering at the scene. Suddenly there was a shout.

  ‘Here. Come and look at this. Bloody Jerries. All bloody Jerries!’

  Soon a small knot of people gathered beside the barrier, and the policemen tried to push them back. The group became the focus for a collective fury.

  ‘Bloody Germans. Shoot ’em!’

  ‘Bastards!’

  The policemen were outnumbered and soon overwhelmed by the furious mob, who ran down the platform, shouting. When they got to some of the injured soldiers, lying on the ground or seated on benches, they struck out, kicking and punching.

  ‘String ’em up. Kill the bastards.’

  Rosa ran up to the front of the platform. ‘For God’s sake! These men are casualties. They won’t be bothering you any more.’

  One of the men, wild-eyed and out of control of his anger, rounded on her, his face contorted in fury. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself – looking after these scum.’

  Rosa pointed out the logic of the situation, and it served to calm the mob. ‘I hope our soldiers captured in Germany are getting better treatment than this.’

  Gradually the platform was cleared. Some of the prisoners were in ambulances and others on the bus. It was two o’clock in the morning when the convoy left for the hospital. The Germans raised a rough cheer as they set off.

  When Rosa got back to her ward she was surprised to find that it was empty. All the beds had been stripped and new linen had been laid.

  The German soldiers were gradually eased into the clean sheets, and two doctors were going systematically along the beds, assessing the needs of their patients. A tall German wearing an officer’s uniform accompanied the doctors. His arm was in a bloodied sling and his uniform was covered in mud, but somehow he retained some dignity in his bearing. He could speak English and was acting as an interpreter. He also injected some pride into his fellow prisoners. It was clear that while he may not have been liked that he was respected.

  The doctor got to a man who was lying on his stomach. There was a big hole in his back where you could see cracked bones, sticking out like chopped firewood. He was given morphine so that Rosa could swab out the wound, which had suppurated and coagulated in red and yellow blotches. Even after the pain-killing injection he shrieked when she touched him.

  ‘Stop,’ said the officer gently.

  He introduced himself as ‘Oberleutnant Miessen’. ‘I spent my early years in an English school,’ he told her.

  Rosa was coldly efficient with her foreign patients.

  ‘Sank you,’ they said in a way that sounded obsequious and sarcastic at the same time. Miessen was invaluable. The other prisoners seemed to accept his authority but not without a degree of sullen resentment. He moved around the ward, relishing his position, growing in stature by the minute. Rosa was forced to rely on him, although she found his presence and even his politeness repellent.

  Along with the prisoners came the prison guards. The army thought that the injured Germans were still capable of attempting an escape, maybe an unarmed uprising, a surprise revolt. To discourage such plans it had detailed a soldier to each ward. The soldiers, on duty for eight hours and covering the whole of the twenty-four, were not posted with a machine-gun, not even a Sten, but only with the bayonets from their field rifles, Lee Enfields, with the blades in their scabbards.

  The Germans regarded their guards with some amusement, for they were invariably young, with no natural feeling of authority and clearly worried and a bit scared at their close proximity to the enemy. And yet these young soldiers took their task seriously, accompanying the nurse from bed to bed, occasionally wheeling round to see whether they were being attacked from the rear. When the nurse’s tasks were completed they would sit at the ward desk, chatting quietly to the nurse, soon pouring out their hopes and fears, their whole life to date in the space of a single shift. Even with a room full of men it was possible to effect some human contact between two people stuck in a bizarre farce in the middle of the night in the high summer of 1944. Joining Rosa for the shift was Jimmy Fossett, newly and forcibly recruited, who, on his first day as a soldier, had been in more trou
ble that anyone would have thought possible.

  In the first place he had arrived a day late, and that fact alone was sufficient to put him on a charge. He was informed that at the time he should have boarded the train to get to Chester he was officially on parade, even though he was still in his civilian clothes and had sworn allegiance to no one. So while he was at the Quartermaster’s Stores drawing his kit, a charge form was being filled in which would take effect as soon as he had donned his army uniform and drawn on his clumsy boots. As soon as he was dressed he was taken to the Commanding Officer, who questioned him about his lateness.

  ‘I didn’t think it would matter,’ he said. ‘I got here, didn’t I?’

  The sergeant who had marched him in seemed to think that the Commanding Officer might take offence at this remark. ‘Stand to attention!’ he barked.

  ‘You’ve joined the army,’ said the Commanding Officer mildly, a hefty man with bushy eyebrows and grey hair parted in the middle. ‘You have to obey orders here. I don’t propose to take any action this time, but I will warn you as to your future conduct.’

  ‘About turn!’ shouted the sergeant, as though Jimmy were half a mile away.

  Then there was a bewildering set of instructions, all shouted at him in double-quick time, and a lecture from the army doctor, a captain, with long sideburns and a sallow complexion who looked as if he had permanent indigestion and was haunted by something in his past.

  ‘You’ve heard a lot of nonsense about the army boot. Let me tell you that the army boot is technically an advanced piece of footwear, scientifically constructed to support your feet and your whole body in the correct posture.’

  He said this in a defiant, challenging way as though he was expecting an argument. Then he went on to warn about a ‘certain type of woman’ who was all around apparently, waiting to pounce on young soldiers and infect them with a deadly disease. ‘If you can’t bottle it up, use a prophylactic.’ The whole squad of recently joined privates looked at him like he had suddenly slipped in a foreign word, while the doctor looked at them as if the sight of them offended him. ‘A French letter,’ he spat out as though he was feedings pigs with a particularly slimy piece of offal. Among the group of around fifty recruits there was one who knew exactly what the dyspeptic medical man was talking about. Jimmy saw those dark eyes, outside Crewe railway station, and wondered if she had planted any poison in his system.