Poppy in the Field

by Mary Hooper

  ‘He should be able to walk with sticks,’ said Poppy, ‘but his feet don’t look very pretty. You must prepare yourselves.’

  The two women exchanged glances, smiling bravely at each other.

  ‘Oh, just his toes,’ said his mother, her voice shaky with relief. ‘You don’t have to look at them if you don’t want to. It’s not like his ears or his jaw have been shot away to nothing.’

  ‘That’s more or less what one of the doctors said: that it’s better to lose a toe than a nose.’

  ‘I suppose so . . .’ Violet said.

  ‘Of course it is!’ Mrs Burroughs agreed.

  ‘He thought you’d be horrified, Violet,’ Poppy went on. ‘He said he wouldn’t be able to take you dancing any more.’

  ‘Oh! How could he think I’m that shallow?’ the girl said, her eyes filling with tears again. ‘My darling Tibs, with all that going on and no one to comfort him.’

  ‘And what about his other injuries?’ Mrs Burroughs asked.

  ‘He had a very nasty gunshot wound to his upper arm, but we’ve been irrigating that with an antiseptic solution so it shouldn’t go gangrenous, and that seems to be working.’

  The little group was silent for a while, each dealing with their own thoughts, and then Violet asked what she ought to do about the letter.

  Poppy thought about it for a moment. ‘I think it’s probably best to forget all about it – pretend you’ve never received it,’ she said then. ‘So many hundreds of letters must go astray and this could easily be one of them.’

  ‘You know for sure that what Tibs said isn’t true?’ Mrs Burroughs asked.

  ‘He told me as much when we were writing it – he needed to dictate the letter to me, you see,’ Poppy said. ‘And I know he’s been utterly miserable since he sent it.’

  ‘There!’ said Mrs Burroughs with some satisfaction.

  Violet got to her feet. ‘I just want to see him now. Will you let him know we’re here?’

  ‘Give me five minutes and then come up to Ward 5,’ Poppy said.

  Going back into the ward, she spoke to Sister to get her permission, put screens around Tibs’s bed and told him he had visitors.

  ‘I’ve just had the Prince of Wales,’ he said. ‘Who’s next, then?’

  ‘Someone even better.’

  ‘Is it the King?’

  ‘No, it’s your ma – and Violet,’ Poppy said.

  His face lit up, and then it fell. ‘But they can’t . . . I told Violet that . . .’

  ‘Tibs, they’ve been terribly worried. They’ve come all the way from England to see you.’

  ‘How did Violet know where I was?’

  ‘Didn’t you think that your fiancée might be in touch with your ma?’

  ‘What will I say about the . . . ?’

  ‘You don’t have to say anything, because Violet never got your letter.’ Poppy crossed her fingers behind her back. ‘She never got it, so she doesn’t know a thing about your imaginary French girl.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘And I’ve told them about your toes and they haven’t run away screaming. Besides, Violet is . . .’

  But no, Poppy thought. She must let Violet tell him that herself.

  Peeping through the screen, she saw Mrs Burroughs and Violet with Sister, and then Sister was leading them across the ward. Poppy gave Tibs a thumbs-up and, as the two visitors appeared, silently slipped out from between the screens.

  ‘Everything all right there?’ Sister Gradley enquired.

  Poppy nodded, smiled, but couldn’t speak for the lump in her throat.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘P our les blessés!’ A French woman with a crate on her bicycle stopped Poppy as she was going into the hospital. ‘Excusez-moi.’ The woman pointed at the wooden crate, which was full of rosy-pink apples. ‘Pour les . . . wounded.’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ Poppy said, helping the woman lift it down. ‘The boys will enjoy these very much.’

  The woman looked at her enquiringly.

  ‘Les blessés will . . .’ Poppy hesitated. Amour seemed too strong a word, but she didn’t know any other. ‘Les blessés amour des pommes,’ she said, knowing that if it wasn’t quite right, the woman would understand what she meant. She squeezed the woman’s hand. ‘Merci beaucoup.’

  ‘Merci,’ the woman repeated, smiling and nodding.

  This was the third time Poppy had been given something for the boys in her ward. Quite often someone, usually a person who lived locally, would be standing on the steps of the hospital with a home-made cake, a slab of chocolate or some knitted garment, waiting to give them to a nurse or orderly. The ward the gifts ended up in depended on who came along first.

  People gave according to their means – a couple of flagons of home-brewed cider often turned up and never went amiss. Poppy had heard of one lucky Boulogne hospital which received a hamper sent from Fortnum and Mason in London every week, a grateful family’s thank you for saving their son’s life and returning him to Blighty. Ward 5 had never managed to secure a hamper, but they’d recently been given six chickens by a Belgian farmer who’d been forced to leave his land and didn’t want his little flock to be appropriated by German troops. The chickens had been put in the backyard of the Casino Hospital and were pecking around happily, laying well and providing fresh eggs for the patients. As yet, there were no calls for them to be killed and eaten, but if they stopped producing eggs it might become a different story.

  Lugging the crate upstairs, Poppy said good morning to Sister and the others, and took the apples into the little kitchen to wash them.

  The Casino Hospital was going through a slightly quieter period, with one of the other hospitals in the same group taking all new casualties and the Casino concentrating on those it had already admitted. There was a backlog of men in the wards now: some blind, some paralysed, some with bad facial injuries, and some with severe psychological problems – men who’d been sent almost mad by the war. These sorts of injuries were proving extremely difficult to deal with, and a number of patients was waiting to have decisions made about their future.

  Taking care of the boys currently in the beds took precedence, of course, but Matron-in-Charge had also requested a spring clean and spruce-up of the entire Casino Hospital. It needed it, for this – and all the other base hospitals along the coast – had been opened in haste, thinking that the war would be over within a year.

  When Poppy went along the beds later, giving out apples, the doctors and surgeons were on their usual daily round. Poppy waited by Tibs’s bed, wanting to hear what they were going to say about him, for she knew that although his right foot was healing well, the left one from which the toe had fallen (thinking of it then, she still felt a little queasy) was causing them concern. Generally, Tibs had made good progress since the visit from his mother and Violet and, following another operation to tidy up what was left of his toes, it was hoped that the feeling in his feet would soon be restored. This would mean he could return to England in time to marry Violet before the baby was born.

  ‘Any changes, Private Burroughs?’ the doctor asked. ‘No new pains in your feet?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed’ came the reply.

  ‘And how’s his shoulder wound, Sister?’

  ‘Healing very well with the new method, as are the wounds of the other patients using it,’ Sister answered, because most of the military hospitals were now using the Carrel–Dakin system of cleansing and irrigation.

  ‘Let’s look at this left foot again then, Private Burroughs,’ said the leading doctor, and Tibs’s foot was lifted into the air to be examined. The doctor drew a pin from the lapel of his white coat and pushed it a little way into the ball of his foot.

  ‘Ow!’ said Tibs.

  ‘Really?’ said the doctor, rather surprised. ‘You felt that, did you?’ He lifted the foot again and pressed the point of the pin into a different part. ‘If you’ll forgive my doing this a couple more times . . .’

  ‘
Ow! That blo–’ Tibs looked at Sister and amended what he’d been about to say. ‘That blimmin’ well hurt!’

  ‘Really? Excellent news!’ one of the other doctors said. ‘It’s catching up with your right foot at last.’

  ‘It might be excellent for you,’ said Tibs indignantly.

  ‘My good fellow, if the sensation hadn’t come back soon, you might have ended up having the whole foot off,’ said another doctor.

  A broad smile slowly spread across Tibs’s face. ‘But now it’s all right, is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Indeed it seems to be. Three cheers for your left foot and keep up the good work!’ said the first doctor.

  Those boys in the nearby beds who’d overheard cheered enthusiastically.

  That afternoon, Sister informed everyone that an injured German prisoner was going to be admitted to Ward 5. This caused a bit of a stir and much muttering.

  ‘We need to play this down as much as possible,’ she later advised her team of nurses and VADs. ‘You know what some of the boys are like . . .’

  Poppy nodded. Since the start of the war, tales about bloodthirsty Germans had spread from regiment to regiment, troop to troop, and pal to pal. Poppy had heard enough gruesome tales of beheadings, the robbing of dead bodies, the stealing of children and other horrors to fill a book. She tried to keep an open mind, however, quite certain that German soldiers heard similar tall tales of atrocities inflicted by Allied troops.

  Some of the boys of Ward 5, fresh from the fighting, didn’t have quite such open minds, however. By teatime that afternoon, several had got together and produced a poster bearing the slogan THE ONLY GOOD GERMAN IS A DEAD ONE, which they proposed to put on the noticeboard.

  Sister, quite furious, tore it in half. ‘Really, I thought better of you,’ she said, rounding on Privates Tasker and Bingley, the two ringleaders.

  ‘Well, everyone knows that Germans are like wild men,’ Private Bingley said. ‘They’re uncivilised. They eat dogs!’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Sister said. ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you hear!’

  ‘But what’s Fritz doing here anyway?’ Private Tasker, who’d lost a leg and two brothers in the war, asked indignantly. ‘He’s taking up bed space that should belong to one of our boys.’

  Sister tutted. ‘He most certainly is not. I won’t have such talk.’

  ‘But where’s he come from?’ Tasker asked.

  ‘I believe all the rest of his patrol was killed in a mining explosion,’ Sister said. ‘He was listed as missing. A couple of days after the explosion, he was found by one of our men in a dugout, more dead than alive, and taken prisoner. The German ward in the usual hospital for prisoners of war is full, so we’ve got him here.’

  ‘Where’s he going when he’s better then?’ Private Tasker asked grudgingly.

  ‘The Ritz?’ suggested Private Bingley.

  Sister looked at them severely. ‘If he gets back on his feet, and if he can stand the journey, he’ll be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in England.’

  ‘A Blighty ticket before me!’ Bingley said. ‘Not fair.’

  ‘Now,’ Sister said, ‘that’s quite enough. This boy is some mother’s son. Let’s show him that we’re civilised.’

  Not all the boys of Ward 5 wanted to be civilised, however. They muttered and complained behind Sister’s back, saying that the nurses weren’t going to be safe with a German about and he’d have to be guarded day and night or chained to his bed.

  ‘He’s probably a spy,’ Private Tasker said. ‘He’ll come in pretending his legs are broken and get out of bed at night to creep around and look in our lockers.’

  ‘I want my bed moved as far away from him as possible,’ Private Bingley said. ‘I don’t want to be garrotted while I sleep.’

  Even Poppy began to wonder if the new prisoner of war might turn out to be trouble, like her friend Jameson’s German officer in Netley, who’d given Jameson a gold ring and then asked her to pass on confidential information.

  As soon as Dieter Brandt was wheeled in, however, pale and still after the amputation of an arm and looking about fourteen, everything changed. He’d been in the bottom of a trench for two days and then had to wait at the back of the queue to be operated on, because Allied officers and Tommies were always dealt with first.

  The waiting around meant that Dieter had lost a considerable amount of blood. In addition to the missing arm, he had several big shards of shrapnel in his chest, one of which had penetrated a lung. This caused him to struggle and wheeze with every breath as he tried to draw air into his body.

  He slept for almost two days, waking now and again to take water or milk in a feeder cup. Poppy usually gave him this, for Sister thought that because she was closest to him in age compared to the other VADs, he might be less nervous of her. When he did open his eyes properly, though, he obviously didn’t know where he was and shied away from Poppy, regarding her with so much alarm that Sister said he’d probably been told the English would try to poison him if he was captured.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Poppy said to him soothingly. ‘Kamerad . . . friend,’ she said, for one of the orderlies had told her a few words of German.

  Sister came over. ‘Are you in pain, Dieter? Is there anything you want?’

  He shuddered, looking terrified.

  ‘You’re quite all right here. Safe. It’s good . . . gut,’ Sister said. ‘You’ll come to no harm.’

  After two days, propped by pillows and struggling to breathe, Dieter sat up and looked around him. His skin was as pale and thin as tissue paper and his eyes were a pale, watery blue. He shuddered and flinched at every noise in the ward – every dropped bowl or sudden shout – and those of the boys who’d glimpsed him through the screens reported to the others that he was scared of his own shadow and no more than a kid.

  Private Bingley was heard to say scornfully, ‘Look at the state of him. No wonder they’re losing!’

  Private Tasker, who had a son of Dieter’s age, snapped back, ‘You can shut up. They never should have taken him in the army in the first place.’

  Two or three days passed and Dieter, though still hardly able to breathe, became a little bolder. He asked for one of the screens to be moved so that he could see out into the ward, and the other patients, curious to see a German up close, came and looked at him. One of them said, ‘Guten Morgen’ and taught the others how to say it, too, so that every so often a head would pop around the screen and wish Dieter good morning, no matter if it was actually the evening, and this made him smile.

  Several of the boys – the Welsh ones who were in choirs at home – sang ‘Silent Night’ to him, for although it wasn’t anywhere near Christmas, the orderly said that it was a German carol and he’d like it. Tibs gave Dieter his apple, which he’d been saving, Private Tasker gave him a square of chocolate, while one of the others mimed writing a letter and offered him a British field postcard to send home. This caused an eager reaction from Dieter, and Poppy was sent to find the orderly who could speak German, so that between them they could write and tell his mother that he wasn’t missing, but captured and at present receiving treatment in a hospital.

  ‘When can Dieter have the operation to remove the shrapnel in his lung?’ Poppy asked Sister, who began shaking her head before the question was half out.

  ‘I’m afraid he won’t be having one.’

  ‘Why? Because he’s German?’

  ‘No, no!’ Sister said. ‘Because the shrapnel’s in an impossible place, piercing his lung. The doctors saw from the last X-ray that there are ulcers forming around it already.’

  ‘Then he won’t live?’

  ‘No, Pearson. I’m afraid not,’ Sister said. ‘Try not to get too attached to him.’

  In fact, Poppy had seen that, day by day, he was growing weaker. His skin was taking on a blueish tinge and it was becoming more and more difficult for him to draw breath. When the boys acted the fool to make him laugh, it doubled him over with pain, and at la
st Sister had to put a stop to it.

  Dieter became feverish, his temperature rising alarmingly, and Poppy was told to sponge him with tepid water in order to cool him down. He stopped eating and grew more frail, and even the offer of a soft-boiled egg for breakfast didn’t tempt him. His pillows were removed, he signalled for the screens to be put back around him, and he lay inside them as flat and lifeless as he’d been when he was first brought in.

  Every day when Poppy went into the ward, she thought he might be dead and would prepare herself accordingly. She didn’t take her half-day off because she was quite sure that he’d die while she was absent, and she often spent off-duty hours reading or writing letters by his bedside. She asked the night VAD to come and wake her if Dieter suddenly got worse.

  He struggled on, too weak to even turn his head, suffering so much that Poppy prayed he would die quickly. Now that the screens were back in place, those men who were ‘up patients’ tiptoed past his bed and took care to speak quietly when they were nearby. When the doctors did their rounds they always looked in on him, but came out shaking their heads.

  If it had been a Tommy who’d been so ill, Poppy knew that Sister would have tried to arrange for his mother to come over and see him before the end, but of course nothing could be done for a German boy. She worried about the field postcard they’d sent to his mother. The poor woman would have heard from his commanding officer that he was missing believed dead, then received the card saying he was safe in hospital. Soon she’d have to hear all over again that he really was dead, and might even think the whole thing was a cruel joke on the part of wicked English nurses.

  One day, when Poppy was in the kitchen boiling up water for the boys’ afternoon cup of tea, Dieter quietly died. Poppy had very much wanted to be there when he passed, had hoped for some last words that might be written down and one day sent on to his people, but it seemed that he’d simply found the effort of breathing too great and decided not to do it any longer.

  Dieter’s coffin could hardly go out of the ward with a Union Jack covering it, and no one remembered seeing a German flag in the hospital, so in the end Sister draped the wooden casket in a plain white sheet. As it was carried out by two orderlies, the boys in the ward once again sang ‘Silent Night’.