by Charles Todd
A more pathetic act I’d never seen, and I had to hold in my smile.
“Yes, of course. Sergeant Lassiter, isn’t it? Step inside and I’ll have a look where the light is better.”
He nodded to Sister Medford and followed me inside. He was far too attractive for his own good, and when I looked back, she was watching him with interest.
The central hall had several doors on either side, and one was the room where we examined incoming wounded. It was quiet at the moment, and I opened the door.
“In here, Sergeant,” I said briskly, and closed the door after him.
He grinned broadly in the light of the lamp, his face tanned by the cold wind, his teeth very white by contrast. I thought of the Cheshire Cat.
“Bess,” he said, keeping his voice low so that it didn’t carry beyond the door, in case Sister Medford was nosy. “How are you, lass?”
“Well enough. And you look as if you’re fit too.” I backed against the examining table, suddenly aware that he had more on his mind than an old wound. “I’m happy to see it.”
“The war’s nearly over,” he said. “And when it’s finished, they’ll be shipping us back to Sydney as soon as they can manage without us.” He hadn’t been home for four long, bloody, weary years. I knew how much this meant to him.
“Your family will be glad to see you,” I offered.
There was silence for a moment.
“Bess.” His voice was different now, the friendliness changed to something more personal. “Bess, I’d like to take you with me. As my wife.”
I’d been afraid he’d come to say good-bye. I hadn’t expected this. And yet I knew—I think I’d always known how he must feel.
I dearly loved Sergeant Lassiter. He had been friend and comrade and confidant, a trusted right arm when I needed it. But I wasn’t in love with him. At least I didn’t think I was. There had been no time to consider the future and how it might turn out for me.
He was earnest; this proposal had clearly been on his mind for a very long time. It was there in his face. I had never seen him so serious and determined.
What could I say, how could I answer? I struggled to find the right words.
I smiled, with affection. “I haven’t yet drawn a breath to think about peace. There are still too many men dying. Too many in harm’s way. I am honored, truly I am. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart. But I’m not ready . . .”
My voice trailed off.
He looked at me for a long moment. “Is it Simon Brandon?” he asked. “I’d rather know.”
Shocked, I stumbled over my next words. “Simon? Good heavens—I-I don’t think it’s even possible—he’s like a brother—a part of my family—”
He smiled. “Then there’s hope, lass.”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned to go, only to remember the ruse that he’d used to see me privately.
With a rueful grin, he said, “You’d best put something on this hand.”
I found a roll of bandaging and bound his hand quite efficiently, in spite of his closeness and his stare as I worked.
“There,” I said, giving him back his hand. “It will do.”
“A treat,” he said, nodding in agreement. Then he touched my shoulder lightly. “I won’t go home without you, lass. Not if I can help it.”
And with that he was gone, leaving the door standing wide.
I closed the door, using the excuse of putting away the bandaging and the scissors to bring myself under control.
I should have known, I told myself. I should have been more careful. But it had been hard to keep someone as jolly as the Sergeant at arm’s length. There had been times when I wasn’t sure whether he was simply flirting with me—something the Australians were good at, ask any nursing Sister in France!—or was serious. There had never been time to consider what such a friendly alliance might mean to the Sergeant.
I liked him immensely. I always had. But how could I think about the future when so much remained to be done here?
More flustered than I cared to admit, I went briskly back to my ward and made the rounds. It had the effect of righting my sense of balance.
When the ambulances arrived late in the day, I saw that one of the drivers was the man I’d asked to carry my letter to Mary.
There was no chance to speak to him. As I was helping to load the serious cases into his ambulance, shelling began again just north of us, and one couldn’t hear anything. I was about to turn away, to help with the next ambulance in line, when he touched my arm and handed me an envelope.
I was sure it must be from Mary, with news.
But as I was about to stuff it in my pocket to read later, I recognized my own handwriting.
I caught up with the driver just as he was climbing behind the wheel. Putting my mouth close to his ear, I asked, “What happened? Weren’t you able to deliver this message?”
He shook his head and mouthed, “She’d gone.”
“Gone? Where?”
He leaned closer. “They sent her to England with a convoy. Critically ill men, they needed an extra Sister.”
It happened—I had done more than one unscheduled run myself.
“When?”
“Before I got there with my lot of patients.”
My heart sank. I’d hoped she would be my eyes and ears, that she would look out for Captain Travis. Now I had no idea what was happening to him.
I nodded my thanks, and we got on with the loading. I could tell the British guns were shifting their aim a little and was worried they might be retreating rather than going forward. We needed these wounded well on their way. I’d even convinced Dr. Weatherby to send two more we had been worried about, just in case.
As we watched them out of sight, Dr. Weatherby called to us. More wounded were coming in. When at last, at the end of a very long day I reached the room I shared with the other Sisters, I took out my letter, opened it, and reread it.
Then I burned it. No need for anyone else to find it and wonder at my concern for Captain Travis.
With a sigh, I got myself ready for bed, falling asleep from sheer exhaustion.
The next morning we were moved again. The guns had fired all night, both German and British. We were roused from our cots at three in the morning to deal with the influx of wounded, friend and enemy alike. Some of the Germans were in a bad way, having been without care for days. One was hardly more than a boy, his arm infected and in need of surgery to clean the wound and remove the last bits of shrapnel. Another man’s knee was already gangrenous, and so on and on. We worked until daybreak, a gray and chill morning. We had hardly sent the last patient on his way when the order came to leave.
I just had time for a cup of tea and a very dry sandwich. My kit was ready by the time the Army could spare a lorry to transport us forward.
The desolation was complete. The villages, mostly rubble, hadn’t been cleared of the traps or the dead. It was a horrendous sight in the dull light of dawn. I saw several officers and men I knew, either from before the war or from treating them.
One of them, directing a company of men helping to clear the road, looked up, saw me, and shouted, “The next waltz.”
Lawrence Mallory. I laughed and waved. I’d danced with him at a ball in late July 1914, just before war was declared. He’d asked for the next waltz too, but I’d already promised it to someone else.
He looked tired but fairly fit, although there was a filthy bandage around his lower arm. I would mention seeing him in my next letter home. My mother would let Captain Mallory’s family know that he was alive and well.
The other Sisters were teasing me about him when our lorry went around a bend in the road and came to a lurching halt.
I could hear the driver cursing from his place behind the wheel, but I couldn’t see what it was that had barred the road.
And then Dr. Weatherby got down and went to find out.
He came back almost at once.
“There’s a column of German
prisoners stopping to rest. Most of them must have been asleep on their feet. Haggard faces. A number have wounds. Bring what you need.”
We gathered supplies and the driver was there to help us down from the back of our lorry.
Sister Medford stayed where she was, sitting on a crate of supplies. Her brother had died as a prisoner of the Germans. I said nothing to her, just turned to follow Dr. Weatherby.
We had come to a tiny square in a tiny village. What was left of the church was to my right, and to the left, what must have been the hôtel de ville, a more solid structure, what remained of it.
Seated in the rubble or lying on the cold ground, the Germans were not the fierce monsters of the recruiting posters. They were hungry as well as exhausted, and looked up at us with dead eyes, as if defeat had extinguished the last spark of life. We went among them, assessing their wounds. I followed Dr. Weatherby, who gave orders as he moved from man to man. They needed something warm to drink, most of them, but our own supply of tea was very low, and there were not enough cups or even teapots large enough to serve so many.
We cleaned cuts and more serious wounds as best we could, put on fresh bandages, and even found blankets for several men who were running fevers and shaking with chills.
They didn’t speak to us, although their eyes followed us as they waited their turn, but offered no threat. The men guarding them stood at ease, some of them smoking. I saw one offer a cigarette to a stretcher case, and the man accepted it gratefully.
It occurred to me as I worked that these were simply tired, worried men a long way from home, and I found I couldn’t hate them, even though so many of my friends had died at the hands of their comrades.
I had treated Germans before, men who still had hopes of victory. These knew only defeat.
By the time we’d finished, the road was cleared ahead and we moved on. My last glimpse of the prisoners was of a Sergeant ordering them to fall in for the next leg of their journey away from the fighting.
This time we found shelter from a cold rain in what had been a convent. The refectory was still fairly sturdy, although the rest of the buildings and outbuildings had been shelled beyond recovery or burned to the ground. Our voices echoed as we stepped inside the stone building with its wooden roof, but that changed as men walked or were carried inside, absorbing the sounds.
Sister Medford, suffering from a chest cold after the rains, was going back with the next convoy of ambulances, and I asked her to find out how Captain Travis was progressing.
It was quite late that night when a lone ambulance brought her back to us. I had nearly given up waiting for her to return, afraid Matron might keep her until she was better.
She climbed down from her seat beside the driver, her eyes red-rimmed with fatigue, and I hurried out to speak to her.
Coughing, she smiled at me in the light of my torch.
“How kind of you to wait up for me,” she said. “I’ve brought supplies. Do you think the orderlies can unload them and see that they’re stowed properly? I declare, I don’t think I can take another step tonight.”
I asked the sentry to see to it, and took her to the far corner of the refectory, where we had a small fire burning in the huge vat that the nuns had used to prepare porridge and soup for the convent. I set the kettle over it and began to make a pot of tea to warm her as she brought me up to date on the news.
“There’s to be an Armistice, Bess. Word has gone around that all firing will cease on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of November, at exactly eleven o’clock in the morning. It’s peace, finally.”
That was only three days away. And yet the guns were firing with the same ferocity that had marked our nights for weeks.
“That’s very good news,” I said and smiled at her over the tea leaves I was spooning into the pot.
She said, “I can’t believe it’s really true.” And she went on telling me all she had learned from the Sisters at the base hospital.
I listened as we drank our tea, and when I had collected both our cups and was preparing to wash them for tomorrow, I said, “Were you able to learn anything about Captain Travis?”
For a moment I thought she’d forgot to ask anyone about his condition. I was prepared to hear that he was despondent, or that he had been moved from the ward where the head cases were treated.
“I asked, Bess, just as you’d instructed me to. At first I couldn’t find anyone who knew, which is always a bad sign. Or perhaps they didn’t wish to tell me.” Her face was drawn in the light from the single lamp we kept burning in the cooking area. “I finally screwed up my courage and spoke to Matron. Bess, I’m so sorry to have to tell you—”
My throat dry, I said it for her. “He’s dead. By his own hand.”
“No, no. They’ve sent him back to England. There was space in the next convoy after your friend Mary left. He’s been assigned to a clinic in Wiltshire for the mentally disturbed.”
I stared at her. “Are you certain?”
“Sadly, yes. I asked Matron why, and at first I didn’t think she would answer me. But she remembered that you had been concerned about this patient. Bess, the staff had heard him when he was feverish, shouting at a man he believed had shot him, calling him by name. He’d beg to be cleared for duty, so that he could find the man and have him taken up for court martial. Even when his fever subsided, he still swore this man had tried twice to kill him. The doctors decided it was his head wound, that it had been more serious than anyone realized. After talking to you, Matron was concerned enough that she asked one of the officers coming through on an inspection tour to find out if this man James Travis was a troublemaker, if he had a history of violence. And the Major did just that.”
She hesitated.
“Well?” I said. “Where is he serving now?”
“That’s just the trouble,” she answered. “He was killed last year. At Passchendaele. The Major found someone who knew him, you see. Someone who had served with him earlier in the war. The man Captain Travis is so certain shot him couldn’t have done it. He was already dead.”
Chapter 6
I stared at her. Too stunned to say anything.
“Bess?” she said after a moment. “I’m so sorry. You weren’t in love with this Captain Travis, were you?”
I collected myself. “No, I wasn’t. I felt he’d been misdiagnosed. That’s all. I was worried. Don’t you remember him?”
She nodded. “He came in first with a head wound, and then later on with a wound in his back. Fair, quite attractive. And very angry. We had to strap him down. I recall something about one of his officers running amok. He was determined to stop the man. That would be the Lieutenant who was already dead. I don’t know that I would have called him mad then, but now you do have to wonder.”
“Thank you for going to so much trouble. I’m grateful,” I answered, turning away to hang up the cloth I’d used to dry the cups. I was still trying to deal with the fact that James Travis was dead.
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you happier news. Are you all right?”
“Just saddened that it turned out this way. But I’d rather know than wonder what had happened to him. Go to bed. You’re out on your feet. It won’t help your cold.”
“We’ve had too many sad cases,” she agreed, coughing again. “Well, in a few days it will all be over. I’m not quite sure I believe it’s true. But I’ll be grateful if it is. I’ll be glad when the killing and maiming stop for good. The answer to all our prayers.”
“It is,” I agreed and walked with her to our quarters. “Good night. Sleep well.”
She thanked me, and I went on to the cubicle that was mine. I shut the door and went to sit on my cot in the dark.
I hadn’t foreseen this ending to Captain Travis’s story.
Perhaps he was deranged. Or the head wound had so confused him that he couldn’t remember what had really happened. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to believe it.
I felt that in some way I’d b
een responsible for what had followed. For I had inadvertently given him a name to put to the face that haunted him. I hadn’t meant to, I hadn’t realized that he would find it so believable, or defend it with such ferocity. It would have been far better for the Captain if he hadn’t been so sure, if he hadn’t told everyone he could identify the man. A man who had been dead for a year. That had seemed to be the final proof that the Captain was delusional at best, or had a severe brain injury at worst. He might not have been sent to that hospital in Wiltshire if he’d never mentioned James Travis to anyone.
I remembered something I’d been told out in India when I was there as a child. That if you saved a person’s life, you became responsible for that person. That in saving him, you took charge of his future.
I wondered what they would say about destroying someone’s life, what responsibility one then bore for what happened afterward.
On that unhappy note, I lit my lamp and prepared for bed. Only, I found it hard to sleep, and listened instead to the incessant bombardment not so very far from us.
I was not at my best the next morning, and we had nine very difficult cases in a row. Two of the men died on the table, in spite of all Dr. Weatherby could do, and I heard him curse the war when the second man died. He had lost both legs, and part of an arm. His heart hadn’t been able to stand the shock of blood loss.
I couldn’t openly offer a doctor comfort. It wasn’t done. But I said, keeping my voice calmer than I felt, “He would have thanked you for trying. And afterward wished you hadn’t.”
Dr. Weatherby’s reply was brusque. “I’ll always keep trying.” He squared his shoulders, waited a few seconds until his voice was steady, and called, “Next.”
There was no respite, and we worked on for hours. Someone brought us tea, and we gulped it down, feeling the warmth and grateful for it. It was only afterward that I realized that a teaspoon or two of whisky had been added to our cups.
When we’d dealt with the last casualty, it was almost dark, the early sunsets of November. I found a place to sit down, and someone handed me a dish of sandwiches and a cup of soup. I didn’t ask how we had come by it, but it was delicious, some sort of root vegetable, and bits of meat, chicken, I thought.