A Plague on Both Your Houses

by Ian Porter

  Head wound. Attention needed quickly.

  He scribbled on a hospital admission card ‘dangerously wounded’ and ‘head’. An ambulance was soon whisking Freddie away over shelled, pot-holed, dirt roads to a mobile centre for urgent surgical care. A doctor there took one look at Freddie’s wounds and sighed. It wasn’t his triage colleague’s fault. How could any doctor make a proper diagnosis in such terrible conditions?

  It would be a waste of the surgeon’s precious time to treat him, so he was about to send the superficially injured, but temporarily ‘unfit’ man to general hospital 3 up the road, when he happened to look at his patient’s face. He was not a man. Not even a lad. This was a boy. He stood and stared at the face. And then decided on a course of action.

  Those badly injured but fit enough to travel were being shipped back to England. The doctor gave the boy an injection to bring him back to consciousness. While he waited for his patient to come round, he washed and dressed the head wound, then completed a postoperative recovery form that would have this soldier returning to Britain. He knew the hospital in England would give the boy a clean bill of health to return to France soon enough, but he hoped that once home, his parents or guardians would be able to get him discharged on grounds of age.

  The doctor wrote ‘ICT’ on the form. Inflammation of Connective Tissue was an umbrella term that covered a wide range of conditions affecting the skin such as poisoned sores, tears from barbed wire or gangrene. The boy did not have any such condition, but the doctor wanted his patient to appear to be suffering from more than a mere bang on the head. He also wrote on the form ‘childish’. It was a vague term that implied the patient was suffering from mild shell shock. If the boy turned out to be a lively sort, it would explain why such an apparently badly injured patient was so chipper. The doctor pondered the irony. To get a child home to his mother he was being termed childish.

  As soon as the boy flickered into life, the doctor saw the fear and horror appear in his eyes like the illumination of a couple of gas mantles. It confirmed what the doctor had already assumed. This boy had seen enough. The doctor told his patient that he was to be put on an ambulance train to Le Treport, from where convalescents were being sent home to Blighty.

  “You’ve had a nasty hit to the head. You will feel dizzy and generally bad for a while but that’s all right,” assured the doctor matter-of-factly. “You should stay on your feet. Best to be walking wounded otherwise you will find yourself back at a field hospital. Stay on your feet and you are going home. Lie down and you will not. This war may be coming to an end. Get home and stay home. Do I make myself clear young man?” barked the doctor brusquely.

  The boy gazed up at the doctor, initially uncomprehending. Then his head cleared and he nodded. He immediately wished he hadn’t, as seemingly a ton weight appeared to slip from inside one side of his head to the other. He winced.

  “That’ll teach you,” said the doctor knowingly. “Now keep your head down in more ways than one.”

  ******

  Sergeant Granger explained to WPC Nash that her duties were being changed. There had been heavy casualties suffered in France during the German Spring Offensive. As a result there had been convoys of ambulances running throughout the day from Charing Cross station to the London Hospital Whitechapel. But they were not something the government wished the general public to see, so now the Germans were being pushed back and the volume of Allied casualties, though still heavy, had lessened, it was decided the ambulances could now be run safely at night. And it was thought that Ruby and her group of volunteers could be better deployed by keeping an eye on these convoys to ensure they ran smoothly.

  There was no increase in rank or wages, but this was certainly extra responsibility on her shoulders and Sergeant Granger had informed her that it was a show of the high regard in which she was kept by their superiors. Her hard work helping to curb prostitution and its attendant problems had been much appreciated.

  Ruby didn’t believe that for a second. On the contrary, her sergeant was always rather off-hand with her, and she got the impression that she and her fellow copperettes were just a necessary evil as far as the police force was concerned. Especially now the air-raids had stopped and huge food queues were a thing of the past. Special constables could now be switched to dealing with juvenile delinquency, and Gorgeous Wrecks could keep prostitution in check. It was only the shortages of police manpower caused by the flu epidemic that was keeping her in a job.

  No doubt this ambulance work would simply be ‘women’s work’, liaising with nurses and chatting to the soldiers to keep their spirits up. She was disgusted by the cynicism behind her new duty. The government thinks it’s acceptable to have such huge numbers of casualties just so long as the public aren’t aware of it. Don’t speed the ambulances to the hospital in daylight when you can wait for the cloak of nightfall.

  This was not why she had joined the police service. She had joined to help women. To help the Home Front. And that didn’t mean keeping everyone as ignorant as possible of what was going on in the trenches.

  But she kept these feelings to herself. For one thing she knew she would get short shrift from her husband if she moaned. He would no doubt remind her that she had made her bed so she would have to lie on it. She accepted the new role in apparent good faith.

  ******

  To keep the discomfort of the injured soldiers to a minimum, and because the semi-blackout made night travel by motor vehicle potentially hazardous, the ambulances trundled slowly through the streets of London. Most of the vehicles had open backs which allowed people to run behind them chatting to the less seriously wounded, while often plying them with chocolate, cigarettes and other goodies. The authorities had mixed emotions about this. They liked the idea of the men being comforted, and to stop good Samaritans from doing the decent thing would be a bad show. But the whole point of running these convoys at night was to keep the public ignorant of the appalling scale of the number of casualties, and the less the soldiers could tell the populous about their experiences the better.

  Not that WPC Nash was informed of this. It was made clear to her that female police officers and their volunteers were to act as kindly overseers. Women were ideal for this sort of duty. Ruby was told that the injured men were not just in pain but terribly tired and must not be overtaxed by the public asking them any questions. Well-wishers could hand over chocolate and such, tell the men they were proud of them, wish them good luck, that sort of thing, but that was all. People running along the road at night, in the black-out, not watching where they were going, was obviously a public safety concern. And the last thing anyone needed right now was more people heading to the hospital, so WPC Nash’s group were to ensure nobody ran behind the ambulance for more than a few seconds at a time.

  Over the past four years Ruby, and everybody else for that matter, had seen more and more badly injured men come home from the war. Men hobbled about the streets on one leg and crutches; the no-legged pushed themselves about in wheelchairs; blind men sat about on the bench where someone had left them; and worst of all were the staring men with goodness knows what was wrong with them. Nash had also told her of some of the horror sights he had seen outside Queen Mary’s Hospital. Bandages only hid so much. But now, not just seeing the soldiers in the back of the ambulances in their unpatched up state but hearing their groans of pain and despair, with the blood and dried mud of the battlefield still on them, was quite a shock.

  The ambulances had a driver and a nurse sitting side by side in the open front section, with a thick enclosed dark green canvas behind, both sides of which had red crosses emblazoned on white circles. The vehicles were packed with injured men.

  Ruby saw men laying in two tiers, with a single nurse sitting on a little stool amongst them, doing her best to tend to them all. The bloodiest men, with blood seeping from under their dressings, were on the bottom racks to prevent them dripping o
n to other men. But the worst were the ambulances that stank of gas. Gassed men had the smell of gas clinging to their woollen uniforms, greatcoats and the blankets they had been given at the aid posts in France.

  There was also an unmarked grey ambulance, with its canvas fully down at the back so nobody could see in or out. Ruby had been told that on no account was this vehicle to be approached by anyone. The public or even police officers for that matter. This vehicle had the mental cases in it.

  And although Sergeant Granger had used the word ‘convoy’ when telling Ruby what she and her group were to oversee, she had not expected the word to be quite so accurate. It really was a convoy of ambulances, one after the other, almost nose to tail. People running in between the vehicles was certainly hazardous.

  Ruby’s group would spread out from Aldgate to the London Hospital Whitechapel, with each of them patrolling a section of main road along the route. This left each woman on her own, with no other officer within several hundred yards, which was not ideal, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Ruby took the first section, outside St Botolph’s Without Church through to Gardiner’s Corner, from where one of her volunteers would oversee the section around Aldgate East underground station. Ruby had chosen the busiest area, which included many pubs, so it would no doubt be the most difficult to control.

  Within minutes of the first ambulance appearing, as if on cue three men staggered out of a pub, saw the red crosses and immediately weaved unsteadily towards them. None had a bar of chocolate or anything else useful to hand. Nor did they retain the coordination to quickly roll up a cigarette. After a few drunken shouts of ‘good ol’ Tommies’, ‘God bless you boys’, and phrases to that effect, the men changed tack.

  “Here are boys have a fag on me,” said one, before haphazardly throwing his tobacco tin into the back of an ambulance.

  At this point another of the well-wishers lost his attempted grip on the back of the vehicle and face planted on to the cobbles with a terrible splat. The third man pulled out a handful of coins from a trouser pocket and was about to shower the injured men when Ruby’s truncheon made contact with his wrist.

  There followed the unedifying spectacle of slum dwellers coming out of the shadows to search for coins that had now been liberally scattered over the road. The next ambulance had to pull to a halt to avoid running down these people and the man who had splattered himself on the road. Ruby had to drag the latter out of the way and left him lying in the gutter. His nose was a bloody mess but he received little sympathy.

  Ruby cleared the road with a few shouts and threats, then apologised to the second ambulance’s driver and waved him on with a knowing nod of contrition. She gave the other two drunks a good talking to before venturing over to the pub with a view to informing the landlord of what had just happened and to make it clear she expected him to ensure it did not happen again. But before she could get a word out she was met with a loud chorus of sarcastic cheers and lewd comments about lady coppers from the lively clientele. But this was water off a duck’s back to an ex-Suffragette.

  “Never mind all that!” she shouted over the din. “Our injured boys from the Front are in those ambulances. Now bloody well show some respect or I’ll nick the lot of you!”

  The logistics of how, in reality, a single police officer, male or female, would be able to arrest a whole pubful of alcohol-infused rowdies without any back-up was neither here nor there. The little speech had the desired effect. As one, the men, mostly in the autumn of their three score years and ten, shut up immediately and lowered their eyes. Ruby walked out of the pub to the sound of her own footsteps on the wooden floor.

  She took up position again outside the church and fumed silently to herself. Christ, it was going to be a long night.

  But things settled down thereafter. Copious amounts of cigarettes, chocolates and anything else the public deemed a nice little tonic for a wounded Tommy, were handed into ambulances by eager, respectful fans. Short snatches of conversation were made with a soldier or two, before Ruby would intervene by saying that was enough and to let the men have some rest.

  Throughout the night Ruby exchanged short snatches of information with her nearest volunteer, Patricia, outside Aldgate East tube station, and it appeared that things had gone smoothly enough in that section. Most of the people Patricia dealt with, appeared out of the Brick Lane slum area of Spitalfields. They were either too poverty stricken to offer the soldiers much, or simply too weak to run behind an ambulance for much of a distance.

  When the final ambulance of the evening left Ruby’s section she followed it towards the London Hospital, receiving a report from each of her group along the route before sending them home with a thank you for their efforts. She packed off her final volunteer at the New Road junction and headed for the hospital entrance to hand over to the male police officers in situ there. Despite the early hour, a fifty strong crowd had gathered outside the ambulance entrance, and were being controlled by a sergeant and a couple of constables. It was an easy duty. The crowd stood in quiet, orderly, respectful fashion.

  The first light of a summer dawn was peeping out from below the horizon, allowing Ruby to make out silhouettes. Costermongers were starting to set out their stalls for the roadside market outside the hospital. She craned her neck to peer at a huge white canvas sheet flapping high above the main road care of a line running from the second floor of the hospital across to the roof of the Grave Maurice pub. In the improving light she could just about discern two of the four words written in bold black lettering. ‘Quiet Wounded’. That explained why the costermongers were putting out their wares in such gingerly fashion, without the cacophony of clattering and ribald East End language that would normally accompany such a scene.

  A queue of ambulances were waiting to turn right off the main road into the hospital grounds. A figure suddenly jumped out of the back of one. The ambulances were quite low to the ground. In normal circumstances it would have been an easy leap to make without falling, but the man had probably been lying prostrate in various transport vehicles since leaving the trenches. As he landed, his legs gave way under him.

  The vehicle had hidden the man from the crowd and policemen outside the hospital. The costermongers were too busy to notice. The other men in the ambulance were probably either asleep or simply beyond caring about, or reacting to, someone leaping out of their vehicle. Ruby was the only person to take notice.

  “Oi! What’s your game?!” she shouted, from thirty yards away.

  The man stared in the direction of the shout as he scrambled to his feet, slipping in his panic on the worn cobbles of a busy thoroughfare. Out of the murk he could see a policewoman closing in on him. He started to run. He deftly hopped between two costermonger stalls, and headed down the pavement back towards Spitalfields.

  Ruby gave chase. For a moment she considered blowing her police whistle but on second thoughts did not think it appropriate. Goodness knows what hearing a whistle might do to the poor wretch she was chasing. She had heard that in the trenches a whistle blown by your officer in charge was the last thing you heard before you went over the top. And besides it was not as if she was chasing a criminal. Just some poor chap who was probably suffering from shell shock or had perhaps just seen one hospital too many for his liking.

  A foot race began. The noise of rumbling ambulances was quickly replaced with the eerie silence that a great city in the early hours can transmit. The echoing footsteps and panting of the two parties involved added a surreal touch to the scene.

  The man was only a little fellow but quick on his feet. He was gradually pulling away from his pursuer along the Whitechapel High Road. Fearful that her recent bout of flu may have left her short of fitness, Ruby held something back and hoped that an injured soldier weakened from a spell in the trenches might run out of puff before she did.

  The tactic appeared to be working when her target suddenly stopped
to gulp air while he looked about him, hesitating as to what to do next. As Ruby closed in, he dived to his right down the poorly lit Vallance Road in a bid to shake her off.

  Nash had recently walked Ruby around Whitechapel to ensure she knew all the courts and alleys of the area. Not the ones she was shown during her police training, but the dark hidden ones where strangers feared to tread. Not that he believed that such knowledge might help her catch criminals or anybody else for that matter. More, it was to ensure she did not end up in such dangerous places by mistake.

  And now Nash’s guided tour was proving useful. She knew that if the next time the soldier changed direction he headed west towards Spitalfields via the likes of Hanbury Street, she dared not follow him. A policewoman in such an area in the early hours would be asking for trouble.

  And sure enough, the darkness of the alleys to his left dragged the man towards them like a black hole pulling him in. He stopped and grabbed another momentary breather before making a ninety degree turn towards the netherworld. Ruby, on the other hand, put on a spurt as she ran across the road at an angle without breaking stride. She cut him off just as he was about to enter an alley. The two of them collided, knocking the soldier off balance. He pitched forward next to the alley wall. Before he had time to recover, Ruby was pushing him against it.

  “Behave yourself Tommy!” she said.

  The soldier swung an elbow back at her, which she blocked with an arm. Ruby did not want to hurt the poor injured fellow unduly but she had to protect herself so grabbed one of his arms and yanked it behind his shoulder. She was surprised how easily she had blocked the attempted blow and got the man’s arm up his back. If she could overpower a trained soldier this comfortably it just showed how weak these men were.

  “Pack it in!” she shouted in his ear. “There’s no need for this. I’m only trying to help you!”