“What happened to him?” she asked softly, not sure if Major Ewing would mind her asking questions.
“I’m not sure. I’ll have a better idea once I get a good look under these dressings.”
“Did the medics give you any notes?”
“Not that I can read. He’s German.”
Dan made a strange sort of choking noise. “You’re operating on a kraut? When American soldiers are waiting for their turn on the table?”
“I don’t give a fuck what country he fights for—pardon my French, Miss Sutton, Captain Kaye. All I see is a man, a boy, really, who needs our care as much as anyone else.”
“He looks young,” Ruby said.
“They all do. I doubt he’s more than eighteen years old. Now, let’s see what we can do about this leg. Just give me a moment to dig in and I’ll let you know what I find.”
He removed the dressings, layer by layer, dropping them onto a metal tray that Gladys held out. A foul smell rose from the wound, like blue cheese but far stronger, and for a terrible moment Ruby was afraid she might be sick.
“Breathe in through your mouth and out through your nose,” Gladys advised. “That should help.”
The wound, once revealed, was every bit as awful as Ruby had feared. It was deep and wide, and amid the torn flesh and oozing blood she could see flashes of white. The bones of his leg, she realized, one of them sticking out of the wound at a disconcerting angle.
Major Ewing was talking softly with the other surgeon, and as they talked they prodded gently at the wound with metal instruments that looked like large pairs of tweezers.
“Can you see inside the wound well enough?” Major Ewing asked.
“Yes, thank you,” Ruby replied. All too well, she thought.
“I’m guessing a shell fragment was the culprit here, given the size and irregular shape of the injury to this man’s leg. See, here, how the fibula is shattered? And the tibia, too, although that break is cleaner. What a goddamn mess.”
“What is that smell?” Ruby asked. “Is that normal?”
“It’s a sign of infection. Have you ever smelled meat when it goes off? This is what human beings smell like when their flesh is rotting. And that is a problem, a very serious one. On top of that, his foot is ischemic—see how the skin has gone gray and cold? Not a good sign. And then . . . oh, boy. Here’s another complication. Evidently the wound was left to fester rather longer than we thought. Just look at this. These fellows don’t hatch overnight.”
He held up the surgical instrument he’d been using to probe the wound. Caught between its tips, wriggling feebly, was a small, gray-white something.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Dan muttered. “Is that a maggot?”
“Yes. Not uncommon in wounds that have been left untreated for a few days. I could spend hours on this leg, and even then I doubt I’d be able to save it. Better, I think, to take it off.”
Ruby stole a look at Dan. He was pale under his tan, and drops of sweat were sliding down his forehead. She looked back at Major Ewing. “So you’re going to amputate his leg?”
“Yes. You don’t have to stay, but if you feel up to watching the procedure, I think you’ll find it interesting. I should be able to keep the knee, which will make all the difference for this man later on. Much easier to fit prosthetics.”
“Ah,” Ruby said. The lights shining on the table were so very hot, and the smell was inescapable, no matter how carefully she breathed in through her mouth and out through her nose. How did the nurses and doctors stand it?
She heard a low groan, followed by a heavy thud as a body hit the ground. Turning, she saw that Dan had passed out.
“Major Ewing . . . ?”
“I know. Marked him for a fainter the minute he walked in. He’ll be fine there for a minute or two. Now—tell me about your time in England. I lived in London before the war, you know. Worked at a hospital in the East End. Some of the stuff I saw there would turn your hair white . . .”
By concentrating on her conversation with Major Ewing, and by studiously looking over his shoulder and not letting her gaze drop to the operating table, Ruby was able to stay on her feet—just. It was a near thing, especially when the mangled mess of the boy’s leg was bundled away, leaving an empty space where a healthy limb had once been, but she summoned up every ounce of willpower she possessed and did not embarrass herself by collapsing as Dan had done.
“Right. I think we’re nearly done,” Major Ewing finally announced. “We’ll leave the wound open for a few days, since it’s easier to monitor for infection that way. I’m off to the canteen for some lunch. Would you care to join me? Miss Sutton? Mr. Gossage?”
Frank shook his head; he, too, was looking pretty green around the gills. “Thanks for the invitation, but I’m going to lie down for a bit.”
“Miss Sutton?”
“I’d be delighted to join you. Although I don’t think I’ll be eating anything.”
As soon as they were out of the operating tent, and away from the terrible odors and heat, Ruby began to feel better, though not well enough to dig into a full meal as Major Ewing was doing.
He reminded her a little of Bennett, though his hair was receding at the temples and streaked through with silver. Like Bennett he was far too thin, and looked as if he hadn’t slept properly in years. The lines of weariness engraved around his mouth and eyes had nothing to do with how old he was, she suspected. Here was a man who had probably aged a decade since the beginning of June.
“Do you mind if I take notes while we talk? I’ll check everything with you before including it in any of my pieces.”
“Go right ahead,” he said, trying and failing to stifle a yawn.
“Are you as tired as I think you are?”
“More,” he said, and smiled a little. “Our first two weeks in France we had something like three thousand men come through this hospital. About nine out of ten needed surgery. It got to the point where I couldn’t sleep. I’d just drink another cup of coffee and keep going.”
“Where was the hospital when you first landed?”
“Boutteville. About six miles in from Utah beach. An awful place. Rained all through the last part of June, and then, about five minutes after each storm, the dust clouds would roll in. Coated everything. And then there were those damned orchards. No one around to tend them, so there were rotting apples everywhere. And the flies—my God, the flies. Not a surprise, since this entire region is carpeted with the bodies of men and livestock.” He looked down at his plate and pushed it away. “I’ll never forget all those flies.”
“How has it been since you moved here?”
“Better, on the whole. Although last week and the week before, when they were closing up the Falaise pocket, were rough. I’m just hoping this lull lasts for a while. We all are.”
“How long have you been a doctor?”
“I finished medical school fifteen years ago. Worked in Boston for a while, doing general and thoracic surgery at one of the big hospitals there. Then I got it in my head that I wanted to see more of the world, so I came to London for a few years. It’s a long story, but I ended up at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. Have you heard of it?”
“I have, and it’s a fine hospital. Their staff should all have received medals for the work they did during the Blitz. I only wonder . . . why did you go there? I can think of half a dozen other hospitals in London with far more modern facilities and equipment.”
“There are, but I wanted to work with their head of general surgery. I’d been reading his papers in medical journals and wanted to learn from him.”
“And did you? Learn from him, I mean.”
“Oh, yes. He’s one of the finest men I’ve ever known. He was a combat surgeon on the Western Front during the last war, and although he didn’t talk about it often, he did say that medicine had advanced a great deal since those days—in part because of what he and other surgeons had learned during the war.”
“What was his name
?”
“Robert Fraser. I’ve been thinking of him a lot since we got here. Thinking of what he must have seen and done and endured. And every day I count myself fortunate that doctors like him paved the way for doctors like me.”
Dispatches from London
by Miss Ruby Sutton
August 24, 1944
. . . The wounded soldiers I’ve met at the 128th Evac Hospital are men, some by virtue of age, but most by virtue of what they have seen and done in the months and years since they left civilian life behind. Some are so young they have down on their cheeks and they blush when I speak with them. But they are all men now, their boyhood stripped away, and they will fight and die as men in this foreign land . . .
AT BREAKFAST THE next day, the hospital was abuzz with news from Paris: at dawn that morning, Free French and Allied troops had entered the city, and had encountered next to no resistance. Liberation day had come at last.
Ruby was thrilled for the people of Paris, and more than a little excited at the prospect of reporting from the freed capital, but she and Frank still had no way of getting to the city.
“I don’t know what to do,” she complained to Gladys. “I can’t ask Colonel Wiley for a jeep, and short of walking out to the main road and trying to hitch a—”
“I’ll give you a ride.” Dan had come over to stand behind her as she was talking. She was so annoyed at him that at first she didn’t realize what he was offering.
“You do want a ride, don’t you?” he pressed.
“I do, of course I do. Thanks so much.”
“Well, you helped me out when I first came to London, and then, the other day, you could have scored some points off me. But you didn’t. So that’s why I’m offering.”
“By ‘the other day,’ do you mean when you fainted in the OR?” Gladys asked.
“Yes. That. Thanks for saying it straight up. Makes me feel so much better.”
“When do you want to leave?” Ruby asked. “Frank and I can be ready in a few minutes.”
“My jeep and driver are arriving sometime this evening. Sorry it isn’t sooner.”
“We’ll be ready. And thanks again, Dan. I owe you one.”
As soon as he was out of earshot, Gladys began to laugh. “Well, he certainly redeemed himself just now. Although I do think he’s a bit of an ass all the same.”
“He can be,” Ruby agreed. “But he can be the biggest jackass in the world and I won’t complain. Just as long as he gets me to Paris.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Although they didn’t leave until well past ten o’clock, Ruby was hopeful they might arrive in Paris by midnight; even taking a southerly route through Chartres, which kept them well clear of recent fighting, it should only have taken two hours at most to cover the seventy-odd miles between Senonches and the outskirts of Paris.
But she’d forgotten about the condition of the roads, which were so perilously potholed that it was suicidal to drive more than thirty miles an hour, and she also hadn’t reckoned on their driver getting lost within minutes of their leaving the hospital.
At one o’clock, still twenty miles south of the city—or so she estimated, for the map in the Michelin guide that Mr. Dunleavy had given her was difficult to read in poor light—the driver announced he was too tired to drive any farther, and pulled abruptly to the side of the road. Dan alternated between pleas and threats, but it was no good.
“I haven’t slept in three days, sir, and if we go any farther we’ll end up in the ditch, or worse. Give me until dawn, and then we’ll be on our way again.”
The driver—his name was Tony, Ruby had learned, and he came from Jersey City—stretched out on the ground beside the jeep and fell asleep instantly, as did Dan, for all his complaining. Frank had nodded off ages ago, and hadn’t woken when they’d pulled over, so Ruby decided to leave him be. She felt exposed sitting in the open jeep, so she sat on the ground and leaned against one of the back tires. It was a warm night, luckily, and she’d slept in worse places. At least no one was aiming bombs at her tonight.
She would look at the stars for a few minutes, she told herself, and hope that Bennett, wherever he was, might be doing the same. One day, when she saw him next, she would ask him.
She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and opened them to the thin, pale light of early dawn. Tony was stomping around, trying to wake himself up, and Dan and Frank were yawning and stretching wearily.
“How long, do you think, until we get to Paris?” she asked Tony.
“We passed a sign not long before we stopped last night. Said thirty kilometers to Paris. What’s that—about twenty miles?”
“Sounds about right,” Dan agreed.
They passed through the Porte d’Orléans at seven o’clock on the morning of August 26. The streets were quiet and eerily peaceful, despite the irregular noise of shellfire in the distance, and still littered with wilting flowers and abandoned tricolor rosettes and flags. Every so often they had to edge past the remains of barricades, most no more than piles of rubble, broken timber, and scavenged gates and railings.
“If only I’d scared up a driver a day earlier,” Dan fretted, another variation on the same theme that had been consuming him since their departure from the 128th. “Everyone else will have filed their stories already, and I’m left out in the cold. Mitchell will have my guts for garters.”
“You were never going to break the story,” she told him for perhaps the twentieth time. “Remember that you work for a weekly. No matter how fast you file it, whatever you write will be a week behind the dailies. So why don’t you stop worrying and start taking notes? There’s plenty of material for stories here.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, come on. I shouldn’t have to tell you this. Just start with what you see and go from there.”
He fished around for suggestions for the rest of their journey, but she steadfastly refused to offer any ideas. And she had plenty of ideas for stories, beginning with her firsthand observations of Parisians and their city.
Outwardly, the city seemed to be in better shape than London. An air of shabby neglect clung to the buildings they passed, though the grandeur she’d hoped to see, especially once they reached the central neighborhoods, was still present. The city’s boulevards continued wide and straight, its buildings remained pictures of refined elegance, and its cathedrals and churches endured in all their ancient glory.
The suffering of France was written, instead, on the drawn and haggard faces of her people, not one of whom failed to stop and wave and call out blessings to Ruby and her friends as they continued north through the city.
“I’m going to the Hôtel Scribe,” Dan announced as they approached the Seine. “Most of the press pack is staying there.”
“Then we’ll try to get rooms, too.”
“They’ve all been booked up by the big papers and wire services. But you can probably find something nearby.”
The Scribe was a fitting name for a place crammed from cellar to attic with journalists tapping away on typewriters, fighting over its too-few telephones, and arguing with the censors who’d set up shop and were tasked with inspecting every outgoing story. Anyone who wasn’t busy writing, chasing down leads, or harassing press officers had congregated in the bar that adjoined the lobby, and the loudest of them all was Ernest Hemingway.
He and his acolytes had taken over most of the tables, and though it was not quite nine in the morning, they were working their way through what looked like a bottle of brandy. The great man himself was impossible to miss, his large frame clothed in sweat-stained khaki, his voice drowning out everyone else’s as he described, likely not for the first time, how he had personally liberated the Hôtel Ritz the day before.
After a long wait to see the concierge, she discovered that Dan had been correct: the hotel was fully booked.
“May I suggest that Madame try one of the establishments on the rue Daunou? They are rather modest, I’m afraid, but they may have r
ooms available. And you are of course most welcome to make use of our facilities for your work.”
The first two hotels she and Frank tried were full, but they found a pair of rooms at the third, which unfortunately had no lift and only one bath per floor.
“You go first, Ruby,” Frank kindly offered. “I know you’ve been wanting a proper bath for days now.”
“That’s really nice of you. I promise not to use up all the hot water.”
AS RUBY WAITED for her hair to dry, she worked her notes into a short piece on entering Paris at dawn. Frank had knocked on her door earlier to announce he was taking a nap, and not wanting to bother him, she decided to head back to the Hôtel Scribe and brave the lineup for the censors. Once she received approval for the piece, she could send it back to PW via air courier, so that even if Frank’s photos were delayed they might marry her piece with something from one of the agencies.
The Scribe’s lobby was, if possible, even more crowded than it had been earlier in the day, and as she stood in line for the censors she was pushed and jostled so many times she felt ready to scream at the next rough-mannered man who barged past her.
Just then, a careless elbow knocked her off balance and sent her reeling into a passerby. Her story, which she’d typed out so carefully, was immediately lost beneath a stampede of passing feet.
Rather than continue on his way, the man she’d bumped into crouched down and helped her gather up the scattered pages. He was older than most of the other journalists, in his midfifties at least, with auburn hair that had faded to white at his temples.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Thanks for your help,” she said. “Ruby Sutton. With Picture Weekly.”
He shook her outstretched hand. “Sam Howard. With the Liverpool Herald.”
“John Ellis’s paper. I met him—oh, it was back at the end of 1940, I think. November, perhaps? I went up to Liverpool to write about the Durning Road disaster, and he was kind enough to help.”
Goodnight from London Page 27