Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies

by Jackie French

  Angus laid his hand on her arm. ‘Sophie, you can’t trust him.’

  ‘But I do. And I’m the one with the pistol. Dolphie, I’m sorry. Sorry for many things. But you understand why my friend and I need to hurry, why we have the best chance now. I am not injured and have a car and an officer and a letter from a French general. You understand?’ She still could not be sure that the wounded boy and the tied-up officer knew what Dolphie’s mission was.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dolphie, still not mentioning the gas. He reached out to the dog, ruffled his ears.

  Sophie felt tears prickle. Did Dolphie have dogs, back on his estates? Of course he did.

  ‘Do I have your word that you won’t reach for your pistol till our car is out of sight?’

  ‘I will need to hold my pistol to keep the Korporal in line.’

  ‘I have your word you won’t use it to stop us?’

  Dolphie clicked his heels together. ‘You do.’ Then, as she turned to the car, ‘Sophie.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The reason you are here, you think you may achieve it?’

  Ah, she thought. So his men did not know what Dolphie had been trying to do. At least she had not killed a man attempting mercy. A small crumb to succour her in the nights ahead.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You think it may help bring peace? Shorten the war?’

  She considered, then shook her head. ‘No. Saving lives today might make the war longer. But this is what I think I should do.’

  His smile was grim, but still a smile. ‘I don’t think you are lying now.’

  ‘No. Goodbye, Dolphie. Good luck. Give my love to Hannelore. I am sorry. I cannot tell you how sorry I am, and for how much. I hope … I hope we meet again, when this is all over. I hope you still want to meet me.’

  Dolphie bowed. It looked strange, with his muddy, bloody uniform. ‘I will want to see you. Will always want to see you. And Hannelore will wish to see you too.’ He glanced at Angus and back at Sophie. ‘And I wish you happiness. Always.’

  Her heart wrenched again. But he was an enemy and the Korporal was alive and must be guarded till they left. And Angus needed her. And …

  And this was war. Not love. ‘Take care, Dolphie. Try to find an aid post, even an English one.’

  Dolphie reached down and picked up one of the rifles. She felt a faint prickle between her shoulder blades as she seated herself in the front passenger seat. Charlie leaped unsteadily onto her lap, then gazed at the roast chicken impaled on the steering wheel. She tossed it to him absently, heard him crunch it. Angus already had the motor cranked. He grabbed the crank, tossed it onto the back seat, then dived into the driver’s seat. The car lurched into first gear. ‘I reckon we have ten seconds before he changes his mind.’

  The car moved like a startled horse. Angus swerved back and forth so the shots would miss them.

  But they never came.

  They were going to make it. Warn hundreds, at least, to take cover. Recompense, maybe, for the life she had just taken. Did lives saved really compensate for murder you had done?

  They drove into the sunrise, more yellow now than pink, Charlie snuffling as he slept on her lap, dreaming perhaps of more chicken. She had never seen a sunrise like it. A battlefield sunrise, she thought, made of the smoke of guns and bodies shattered till they were suspended in the air. Did every wind carry small drops of death now? Death that she had added to.

  ‘There’s a road ahead.’ Angus swerved the car across the rutted paddocks towards it, or rather towards the people who lined it, sitting, not walking. Not talking either. A hundred of them, two hundred perhaps.

  Angus sounded the horn. A few moved, just enough to get the car onto the road. But still most of them sat unmoving.

  Sophie found the voice she had lost hours, miles, a lifetime ago. ‘Why are they here? Why are they sitting like this?’

  ‘They probably have nowhere to go. Villages are bombed every night. Soldiers behind. Soldiers ahead. So they sit.’

  Black mud, white faces. Adult eyes that glanced up in fear at the sound of their engine, then looked back down. Children who sheltered their faces in their mothers’ aprons, their fathers’ coats, and didn’t even look their way.

  Charlie still hadn’t managed to eat the cheese or bread, now packed in Sophie’s case. How far would bread and cheese stretch among so many? Perhaps if they brought the food out, people would be injured fighting for it.

  Perhaps if they stopped, not only the food would be taken.

  ‘Keep going,’ she said stiffly, then realised she didn’t have to. This was not new to him.

  ‘Welcome to Flanders,’ he said. ‘The real Flanders.’ There had been no border posts. Not in wartime.

  ‘I knew it was bad.’ Was that her voice? ‘Knew all this. It’s not the same as seeing it.’

  ‘Or living it. Do you think any of the men who give the orders — the real orders, back in London or Berlin — do you think they have ever faced this? That they could keep going if they did?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sophie flatly.

  Angus gave a skeleton’s grin. ‘I think you’re right.’

  They were past the refugees now. They drove along curiously empty roads, a dead land on either side, two trucks ahead and a barricade across the road. Angus slowed down, then handed two Belgian soldiers his pass. Charlie peered at them curiously, his nose pressed to the glass. The soldiers saluted, stared at Charlie, and waved them on.

  Sophie glanced back at them. ‘I wonder what they think I’m doing here. And Charlie.’

  ‘A nurse. A VAD.’

  ‘Well, I was, sort of.’

  ‘I think I recognise where we are now.’ The shadows were back in his voice. ‘Ypres hasn’t changed much in two years. Nothing but mud and water then. No more now. We’ll come to buildings soon.’ He hesitated. ‘Can you hear something?’

  ‘I don’t know. Like birds? Seagulls?’

  ‘Seagulls here? Vultures, maybe. You’d need a thousand seagulls to make a sound like that.’

  This was flat land. Endless land. But they were cresting a small rise, of sorts. On the top Angus stopped the car. They stared at the scene before them.

  It was another world.

  The sound that they had been listening to was screaming.

  No buildings. No trenches either. Barbed wire in giant tangles. Mud. Mud that stretched down this hill and up the other. Mud that moved. Men with eyeless faces; more men, motionless, who looked like mud. Mud that might be men. Men who heaved and gasped. Men who mostly lay and screamed.

  The gas.

  She was too late.

  Charlie whined, his paws against the window.

  One hour late? Four? Had the date ‘13’ meant the night of the 12th, so the gas would take effect on the morning of the 13th, not that the attack would take place on the 13th, as she had thought? It didn’t matter. Nor did ‘what ifs’.

  ‘Sophie, don’t look.’

  She thought Angus reached for her, but she had slid out of the car before he could hold her back. ‘I have to look. Don’t let Charlie out.’

  She ran to one of the men. His screaming stopped as he tried to look up. The movement made him shriek again. She could see the yellow blisters under the brown mud. He lurched away from her on his knees then began to vomit, yellow muck tinged with red. She tried to hold him, touch him, but he wrenched away from her as though any touch burned, and retched again.

  She could still hear the sheep screaming too.

  She looked up as Angus joined her. Up on the hill Charlie peered from the car, too scared to venture further. ‘It’s happened already,’ she whispered. Had Hannelore learned of this from Dolphie, or he from her?

  The weapon that would end the war — unless both sides had it.

  She was too late. Dolphie would have been too late. And now the Allies would use this weapon too.

  If horror could have ended the war, it would have done so years ago. This only added another level to its hell.
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br />   The man at her feet clawed at his throat. She had seen doctors open the throat to let air past scars and burning; they used rubber tubes too. No tubes here. No knowledge of how to do it if she had them.

  A motor rumbled behind her. She looked around. It was a truck, a baker’s van perhaps, a clumsy red cross on one side. The doors opened. Two women in grey overalls got out, their heads wrapped in white veils with red crosses on them, tied up like scarves. Not army nurses, not even Red Cross or VADs, possibly not officially qualified at all. But here.

  A woman opened the van doors, drew out a stretcher. ‘You here to help?’ she called.

  ‘I … I hoped to …’

  ‘Your car won’t be much use in this mud. Watch where you walk. It’s some new stuff — gas at first then it drips to the ground. Those oily patches will burn you alive. One of the girls slid and landed in some last night. She’s still screaming.’ The voice was matter-of-fact.

  Sophie stared around. ‘Will they send more of it?’ It could be nearly on them now.

  ‘If they do, we’ll know it. This stuff comes in shells. If you hear a shell coming, get back in that car and drive. Fast. Careful where you put your hands too.’

  She and the other woman trod across the mud, using a strip of leather so their hands didn’t touch what might be remnants of the gas on the men’s skin, the stretcher between them. They put it down and rolled one of the screaming men onto it. His shrieks grew wilder as his back touched the hessian. Sophie watched as one woman held the man while the other strapped him down.

  She kneeled down in the mud — the muddy mud, not the oily mud — frantically thinking how they might help the man in front of her. He was young, younger than Angus, brown hair — no, mud hair. His eyes looked stuck together. Could she and Angus carry him to the car without a stretcher? How far away was the aid post? An hour’s drive? A day?

  ‘Choking,’ the young man whispered.

  ‘Sophie, I need to get you away from here.’

  ‘No. We came to help.’

  ‘Very well.’ She wanted to cry at the trust, the acceptance in his voice.

  ‘All we can do is get them to an aid post,’ he said as another van drew up behind them.

  ‘Knew we hadn’t got them all last night,’ said a third woman’s voice. ‘Damn the darkness. Just what the poor blighters need. Exposure too. Stinkers, I think there’s a live one over there … What the blazes? It’s Soapy! Soapy Higgs, what in all the world are you doing here?’

  ‘Dodders! I —’ Another not-coincidence. For surely the call had gone all down the line to every aid post for every available ambulance to come here.

  She couldn’t tell Dodders why she was there. Couldn’t tell anyone until the Allies began to use the gas too. For Dolphie’s sake, for Hannelore’s, for her own and Angus’s, she could not betray what was now a military secret.

  In a few days, a few weeks, Germans would be suffering like this too.

  Instead she said, ‘When did this happen?’ Behind her she was vaguely conscious that Angus was taking the other end of a stretcher with Dodders’s companion, carrying a screaming man to their van.

  ‘They say it came in last night. We were far down the line — only got here an hour or so ago. Never seen stuff like it. Nothing like the other gas. Got to get ’em before they choke. These chaps may look bad now, but they’ll get worse. The doctors don’t know why yet — maybe their lungs dissolve, maybe the blisters just stop ’em breathing. We just don’t know.’ Dodders was pulling out another stretcher as she spoke. ‘It’s bad, Soapy. Look, can you take the other end?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Need everyone we can get. Four of us down with septicaemia this month alone.’

  Dodders seemed too focused on the job to query Sophie further. How much sleep had she had in the past few days? Any? How long could she keep going?

  As long as she has to, thought Sophie.

  Already the first two women had carried the man to their truck and were heading back for another. Another man rose from the mud, his fingers tearing at his eyes, his breath rasping, and stumbled towards them with desperate hope. Angus ran to help him, hauling him on his shoulders without a stretcher. Sophie hoped desperately that any residue of the gas would not soak through his uniform, onto his skin.

  An hour, perhaps, passed before the van was full. Another van arrived, then a truck, a French bullock cart, the stoic, thin-ribbed animals no longer even nervous at the smell of blood, the screams. Sophie glanced at their car, but there was no sign of Charlie. He must be sleeping — or hiding from the strangeness — on the seat.

  The sun rose. Angus touched her arm lightly. His face was white, his uniform stained with soot and blood and mud, but at least he seemed unhurt. ‘I think that’s the last of them. Sophie, we’ve done all we can. I’ll get you back to Paris.’

  Sophie looked at the bodies in the truck; at the dead bodies in the mud that someone, some time, might deal with; at Dodders’s white, determined face. She shook her head, then headed to the car and grabbed her bag from the back seat. Charlie slipped down, whimpering. He pressed against her legs. ‘I’m staying.’ She glanced at Charlie’s black furry head. ‘Charlie and I are staying.’

  Angus gazed around at the wisps of green cloud that still hovered in the trenches, the shattered trees, the tangles of barbed wire. ‘Sophie, you can’t.’

  ‘I can. I am. This happened because I wasn’t fast enough.’ I killed a man to get here, she thought. Killed him for nothing. Two more men died because of my arrogance, thinking I could change a war. They might have been cruel men, but perhaps war had stripped their humanity. Perhaps, if they’d survived, they might have regained it, led good, uneventful lives. I wounded another man, left Dolphie helpless and betrayed among the enemy. And Angus … ‘I need to help. Now.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you here.’

  ‘If you don’t, you’ll be a deserter. Don’t do that to either of us. Please, darling Angus, please, don’t let them think you have deserted. Tell Monsieur le Général “Merci” from me, that I will indeed have lunch with him when the war is over. Tell him what I am doing now, and why I must be here, not there. I’ll be as safe as anyone can be here, with Dodders and Charlie.’

  Angus glanced down at Charlie, who was yawning, carefully not looking at bodies, or at Dodders securing the last of the stretchers in the van. ‘Charlie will defect to the first person who offers him a biscuit.’

  ‘Charlie is a survivor. So am I. So are you. I’ll write as soon as I can, let you know where I am.’ She reached up on tiptoe and kissed his lips. ‘Thank you,’ she added. ‘We did our best. Now, go.’

  ‘I love you. And I’m coming back for you.’

  ‘Yes, of course you are, but you must get back now.’

  She knew he wouldn’t leave while she still watched him. Oh, dear God, she prayed, I can face almost anything, but not Angus shot as a deserter for me. Please keep him safe. Please. She shoved her bag into the front of Dodders’s van, then opened the door for Charlie to jump in there too.

  Was this new weapon the end of the war, the end of all war, or the beginning of much worse? It didn’t matter now.

  Behind her she heard the crank of the car’s starter lever again. By the time Dodders was at the driver’s seat of her van, Angus had gone.

  Chapter 59

  Please pass on my love to Sophie. If I survive this, I will tell her who I am, and why. I think, I hope, that she is one of the few who may understand, as you do, my dear friend. I love you both.

  Miss Lily to the Dowager Duchess of Wooten, 1917

  The house had once been fine: three storeys, broad stairs, a pair of stone lions either side. Now one lion had lost a paw and the other was a crumbled ruin no one had thought to take away. The top floor was blackened, the windows like empty eyes, but when Sophie climbed the stairway, Charlie panting at her heels, she found the roof still functioned and the building was sound. The third-floor windows could be boarded up.

 
One army, several armies, had camped in the rooms below. At first perhaps there had been furniture, beds, officers and their servants. Now the furniture was gone and the floors pimpled with dried excrement. Whoever had been there in the last few months had been too weary, wounded, sick, scared or mad to even go outside — perhaps all at the same time.

  Hills rose around the horizon, each eerily the same: a dead tree on one hill, three on another, black against pale blue sky. But around the house a French village that still functioned, or part of a village, at least: a café next door serving beer and soup and sawdust bread, the bakery that baked the bread, half a dozen houses. The residents either had refused to leave, even when the rest of the village was shelled, or had come back.

  Buying houses was easy in wartime. Possibly not quite legal: there was no notary to witness the deal. It was even possible that Monsieur who took her money was not the owner, although the flat-faced woman in the café seemed to know him and the baker too.

  Perhaps they were all part of a family of scoundrels, squatters who had moved in and would move out again, taking the café and bakery profits and Sophie’s money with them.

  But the money wasn’t much, not to her or her father. It cost more to have beds, tables, chamber pots brought by train and then by cart. The sullen locals were willing to scrub, whitewash and cook in return for pitifully few francs. As the days went by and the house assumed its function as a shelter for humans once again, Sophie grew to understand that the sullenness was shock, similar to hers.

  By the end of a fortnight they had begun to exchange smiles.

  Her allowance did not stretch to wages. She borrowed Madame-of-the-café’s bicycle and cycled through three villages, leaving Charlie sleeping in a basket by Madame’s fire, hoping she had judged the noise correctly and that she was cycling away from battle, not towards it — and sent a telegram to her father.

  Have bought house for hospital for gas patients France stop urgently need unlimited allowance stop please stop things are bad here stop