by Robert Ryan
A fatalistic shrug. ‘Then I have my service revolver in my coat pocket.’
‘Major!’
He gave a smile he hoped was reassuring. ‘I am not serious. I am absolutely confident that I am in no danger. Check my pockets. There is no revolver.’
She looked relieved.
‘Why are you here, Staff Nurse?’
‘I was asked by Mrs Gregson to find you. With this.’
She handed him a grey papyrus Regia envelope. His name was written, in a lovely copperplate, on the front. ‘Where is she?’
‘Gone back to Bailleul.’
‘The foolish woman,’ he snapped. ‘I needed her here. And Miss Pippery? Has she fled the coop also?’
‘No. She is with Sister Spence. I fear her nerves are shot.’
‘Good, good. I mean that she is here, not about her nerves. I shall need to question her later.’ He stuffed the letter into his trouser pocket, still wondering how Mrs Gregson could be so selfish. ‘Well, Staff Nurse, I was going to carry out this procedure for my own personal satisfaction, but, fortuitously, it appears you can be my witness.’
He began to lay out the necessary paraphernalia for his transfusion of blood.
‘I’m not entirely certain—’
He spun around. ‘Staff Nurse, I will do this either with or without you. You can always leave. I only ask that you tell none of the others what is occurring just yet. But if you are staying for my venesection, I need you to make a two-inch incision above my median basilic vein to expose it.’
He was slightly perplexed by the forcefulness of his tone. It had echoes of a decisiveness that was usually quite alien to him. He supposed because he had to accept that there was no leader to follow now. He was no longer the shadow, the sidekick, the note-taker, the foil. No more rhetorical ‘What would Sherlock do?’ questions for Watson. It was a time for standing on his own two feet. And enjoying it, he added.
‘You would trust a nurse with surgery?’ She was genuinely perplexed. A doctor allowing a subordinate to wield the knife was unheard of.
‘I would trust you.’
She gave a solemn nod and straightened her headdress. ‘If you are to be my patient, please sit on the bed here. Do we need to warm the blood, as it has been on ice?’
The question seemed naïve, but he remembered this was all new to her. ‘No. It makes negligible impact on core temperature.’
‘And how much will you require?’
‘Five hundred cc should be enough.’
‘A local analgesic might be in order.’
‘There’s eugenol. In the cupboard there. And, more pertinently, a bottle of brandy at the rear.’
After she had painted his arm with the solution and poured him a tumbler of the alcohol, she prepared a tray with sutures, scalpels, syringes, iodoform and tubing. He admired the precision and neatness of her display.
‘How long have you been with the service, Staff Nurse Jennings?’
‘Almost six years. Well before war was declared. My elder brother died in St Kitts and we came back to England. There was money from the sale and my father set up in business. It was all a terrible shock after the Caribbean. There, at least, there was some freedom from convention. You have no idea how proscribed the life of a young woman from a well-to-do family in Didcot is, Major. All laid out, from cradle to grave. To be frank, being a Territorial meant at least a few weeks’ a year escape from Mother and Father and their endless introductions to suitable young men. It was a very mild rebellion. I never had it in me to become a suffragette like your Mrs Gregson. I was too cowardly, I think.’
‘Mrs Gregson told you she was a suffragette?’
She smiled a smile that suggested shared secrets. ‘She didn’t have to.’
‘No. I think it’s written through her like a stick of rock,’ he laughed.
‘I think she and I got off to a bad start.’
‘We’ve had our rocky moments. She doesn’t always choose the smooth path.’
Jennings seemed to want to say something else, but apparently thought better of it and turned her attention to the job in hand.
‘And was there a suitable young man?’ he asked.
She stopped unscrewing the top of the Lysol bottle, as if considering how to answer.
‘Since you ask, yes. There was. Is. But he released me from any understanding until after the war.’
‘That’s very considerate of him. Many young men have insisted on a formal engagement before leaving. Or a wedding.’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘If there is one thing Mother won’t stand for, it’s a quick wedding. She’s been planning it for more than two decades now. I think we’re ready for you, Major.’
‘And what about Dr Myles?’
‘What about him?’
‘He seems rather struck on you.’
‘Really? I hadn’t noticed.’ She began to move the items on her tray around at random.
‘Forgive me for asking, but it has been preying on my mind. Has he made any suggestions that might compromise you professionally?’ Watson asked.
She fluttered her eyelids at him in a deliberately exaggerated way. ‘What kind of suggestions, Major Watson?’
‘You know exactly what I mean. Improper suggestions.’
His nostrils filled with the smell of cloves from the eugenol. He took a mouthful of the brandy and gave a small cough as it attacked his throat. Not the finest.
‘Keep still now. Arm over this bowl. There’ll be blood.’
‘I’m counting on it.’
She hovered over the skin. He could see the tip of the scalpel shaking. ‘Don’t be tentative.’ He flinched as the blade entered the skin and the first deep red globules formed.
‘Improper by my standards or Sister Spence’s, Major?’ she asked, more to distract him than anything else.
‘Either. Ouch. I think that incision is long enough. You need to go deeper now.’
She worked for a few moments in silence, her forehead lined in concentration, the tip of her tongue showing between her teeth. ‘All right, Major, that’s exposed. I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not sure Dr Myles is any of your concern. Not away from medical matters. Remember, I joined the Territorials to get away from suffocating parents. The world has moved on, you know.’
He suddenly felt like an over-protective grandfather. ‘You’re right. My apologies. But my background has made me insufferably inquisitive. And I wouldn’t want anything . . .’ He cleared his throat again. ‘Right, back to the business at hand. You need to insert a traction ligature, to close the vein when we are done.’
Her hands were steady now and she did as she was told. ‘I’m ready to put in the first syringe. Are you entirely certain you wish to proceed?’
‘It is the only way to convince some people that my blood didn’t kill Shipobottom.’
‘Nobody could really think that, surely.’
‘Possibly in preference to the alternative.’
‘Which is?’ she asked.
Watson hesitated to answer. It didn’t do to spread suspicions as if scattering seeds on a ploughed field. But he was trusting her with this procedure, which meant, subconsciously, he believed her to be untainted by these incidents. ‘That there is a murderer in our midst. Someone who is not only making sure that the victim suffers, but takes care to mark the victim, as if keeping a tally. A person who thinks the war is simply not killing our young men fast enough.’
‘My goodness. A German spy?’ she asked.
‘My first thought. But, no. Where is the advantage for a spy? Unless Shipobottom was a source of important intelligence? I suspect he could tell the enemy where the regimental rum ration was stored and how much each barrel contained to the nearest tot. But anything more than that . . . no, whoever did this is someone from our own side. And murdering for reasons we can’t, as yet, even guess at.’
‘Golly,’ was all she could manage this time.
‘So let us eliminate the citrated blood as a contributo
ry factor, eh?’
The eugenol was a poor analgesic, as he had expected, and his arm was rippling with pain, but he clenched his jaw. She inserted the cannula into the glistening cylinder of the vein and slowly pressed the plunger. The walls bulged alarmingly as the blood flowed in.
‘That’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Dr Myles did invite me out to accompany him. To a dance. But I am afraid I had to disappoint him. Sister Spence has an attack of the vapours at the very mention of the word. So he has asked me to dinner in town. In Armentières, no less. He claims the normal rules of fraternization do not apply, as he is not an officer in any army.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘Second syringe now. Are you comfortable, Major?’
Comfortable wasn’t the word he would have chosen. He looked up into her young face, as yet unlined, her blue eyes clear and shining. Mary had not been much older when he first laid eyes on her. It was easy to see why the soldiers fell in love with these young girls. After the rough horrors of the trenches, the debasements and the deaths, the bellowing and cursing and petty squabbles, the gas and the constant, debilitating shelling, these pristine visions of womanhood really must seem like angels, come down to walk among men and minister to their every earthly need. He shook his head. It was possible those clove fumes were addling his brain. ‘A little more brandy when you are between infusions.’
‘Certainly. And I told Dr Myles I would not even contemplate a dinner this evening without a chaperone.’
‘Well said, Staff Nurse. And whom did you nominate as your protector?’
‘You, Major Watson.’
Twenty minutes later, as they were resterilizing the equipment, Watson felt the first prickles of fever on his forehead.
THIRTY-ONE
Bloch remembered little about how he had reached his own lines and been evacuated away from the front. He had avoided being shot by his own side, he recalled that much. A collapse into an officer’s arms. Alcohol forced between his lips. Then a café in a shattered street, hardly a wall standing, the floor tiles covered with straw to soak up the blood. Then an ambulance transfer to the building where he was now, something approaching a normal hospital. It was close to a railway; he had heard the clank and huffing of the trains through the night. It was said the wounded were always moved back to Germany after dark. That the sight of the maimed might be bad for civilian morale at home.
The men in Bloch’s immediate vicinity seemed lightly wounded, although the infantryman next to him was a Pfeifer – a whistler – who had received a throat wound. It was most likely the type of wound that would take him home. He hoped so. He wouldn’t last five minutes in a trench dugout making an irritating noise like that. Someone would finish the job the Tommies had started.
Bloch shuffled up in bed and took in more of his surroundings. The rectangular room was subdivided by wooden screens, either to shield the badly wounded from the lightly injured, or officers from other ranks. The enormous floor-to-ceiling windows were crisscrossed with blast tape. There were dark coloured squares and oblong panels on the heavy wallpaper, the phantom remains of portraits and landscapes that had once graced the spaces. Two enormous chandeliers, mostly intact, were still in place. He supposed they were too difficult to remove for safe storage. It was, he would imagine, a former dining room. From hosting sumptuous dinners to collecting the deformed and the damaged, it was quite a fall from grace for such an elegant space.
He ran his hands over his face, wincing as he touched unfamiliar protuberances beneath the bandages that masked the centre of his face. His tongue found the gaps in his previously perfect teeth. They were enormous, like canyons. His left hand had the little finger splinted and strapped to its neighbour. At least he could hear now, although occasionally there were high-pitched whistles, of the kind that Pfeifer was making, but seemingly generated from within his cranium.
A Frontschwester, one of the front-line nurses, strode past and he shouted for her. She looked down at the porcelain container in her hand and indicated, with a wrinkle of her pretty nose, she needed to dispose of something within it first.
He watched her go, a tall, broad-shouldered girl with, beneath her cap, corn-coloured curls. The Feldpuffordnung – the widely circulated, semi-official guide to setting up a field brothel – suggested that there was no need for any such facility if there was a hospital staffed with Red Cross nurses nearby. This, part of him thought, was a terrible slander. On the other hand, he had heard all the dugout tales of comely Frontschwestern using unconventional means to nurse a man back to health or raise morale.
The thought caused an unfamiliar movement against his leg and he shifted uneasily when the nurse returned, as if she could see through the blankets that covered him. She examined the piece of card pinned above his bed and asked: ‘How can I help, Unteroffizier Bloch?’
A thick Swabian accent, also strangely erotic. He was beginning to see how such stories about nurses’ behaviour could arise.
‘Is something funny?’
‘No, forgive me. I was just thinking . . . you remind me of my girlfriend back home. Hilde.’
‘That’s odd,’ she said solemnly.
‘What is?’
‘You must be, oh, the hundredth man today to tell me that.’ She smiled and the tops of her cheeks bulged, like tiny, rosy apples. ‘I apparently look like every Olga and Heidi and Karin and Erna—’
‘I’m sorry. I bet you do remind us soldiers of all those girls.’
‘Only because I am a woman. Any German woman would remind you boys of home. I can’t blame you. This war . . .’ the sentence tailed off. ‘And you soldiers aren’t too fussy.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘My name is Nurse,’ she said, although not in an entirely unfriendly way. ‘Now what was it you wanted?’
‘Where am I now, exactly?’
‘A château to the north of Menin. Now Field Hospital Number 19. Is that all?’
‘A mirror.’
She shook her head, as if he had asked for the moon. ‘Why on earth would you want that?’
He touched his face. ‘To see what they’ve done to me.’
‘You can’t see anything because of the dressings. And there is bruising. Swelling, too. Wait a few days. You don’t look too bad.’
‘I’d say it was an improvement.’ Hauptmann Lux, turned out as if for the Kaiser’s birthday parade in dress uniform with medals, stepped from behind her. He had a canvas bag slung over his shoulder that he placed at the foot of the bed. ‘Staff Nurse? Do you mind?’
She gave a small curtsy and left. Lux stared at him for a few moments before speaking.
‘Well, Bloch, I’ve seen worse.’ He took off his gloves, leaned in and parted the sharpshooter’s lips, as if inspecting a horse. ‘I’ll have the section dentist sent over. That is one area in which we have the advantage of the enemy. They don’t bring dentists to the front. Mind you, have you seen their teeth? Probably a waste of time.’
Bloch found it hard to share in the joke. A few less dentists, a few more snipers wouldn’t go amiss, he thought.
‘Now, do you feel strong enough to report?’
Bloch thought he meant for duty, but he then realized that Lux wanted a verbal account of his action. ‘Of course, sir.’ He took a sip of water and gave a concise but detailed recap of his adventures from the moment he went out into no man’s land with the Patrouillentrupp until his return almost twenty-four hours later. Lux listened in silence for the most part, interrupting only when Churchill appeared and cursing when Bloch described the bombardment that firstly ruined his aim and then brought down the church tower.
‘Remarkable. I owe you an apology, Bloch.’
‘Sir?’
‘I did not know about the artillery barrage in that sector. Nobody did. Or I would not have sent you out. That is the trouble with this army. The right hand does not know what the left is doing and neither of them have a clue what the air force is up to. You know tho
se idiots bombed one of the British casualty stations the other day? I think they thought the red crosses on the roof were target markers.’ He shook his head in despair. Such folly led to tit-for-tat raids; before they knew where they were, the Red Cross symbol would be meaningless. ‘But you did well. And the sergeant you eradicated for his uniform? That counts as half a kill. Twenty-nine and a half points. No Iron Cross, I am afraid, but perhaps some leave once you feel well enough? How does forty-eight hours sound?’
Not long enough, Bloch thought. With military rail traffic given priority it could take that to get back to Düsseldorf. ‘That’s very generous, sir.’
Perhaps he could arrange for Hilde to meet him half-way? That might be possible. He would write as soon as this stuffed shirt had gone.
‘Don’t mention it. And I have something else for you.’ He reached down into the canvas bag and brought out an object swaddled in soft cloth. He handed it over. Bloch unwrapped it. It was a telescopic sight, although the distal end was enormous, almost the size of a saucer.
‘What is it?’
‘The new Voigtländer illuminated night sight,’ Lux said with pride, as if he himself had crafted it. ‘We have permission to undertake field trials. With and without atropine as a mydriatic.’
Atropine eye drops – extracted from deadly nightshade – were used to dilate a sniper’s pupils, increasing the amount of light to reach the retinae. The disadvantage was that the user became very susceptible to glare and losing his night vision altogether. It also caused blurred vision and heart palpitations if you weren’t careful. Bloch was not an admirer.
He peered through the eyepiece and moved the sights so that the cross hairs rested squarely in the middle of his superior’s face. ‘Heavy,’ he said.
‘It’s worth it, believe you me.’
‘I’ll need a new rifle, sir.’
‘Of course. And ammunition. No more homemade efforts, Bloch. The new Spitzgeschoss mit Stahlkern round is armour piercing. A fresh Mauser Gewehr rifle, those bullets and the scope and I’m sure that Iron Cross will be yours any day now.’