The Shattered Tree

by Charles Todd

  “No, stay where you are,” she ordered quickly. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  Turning, she took the chair that Simon had brought forward for her and drew it up close by my cot. Putting a hand on my brow, she said, “You still feel a little feverish. Are you in any pain?”

  “A little,” I admitted. Looking beyond her to Simon, I said, “However did you manage this?”

  He grinned. “I am merely her escort. Your father’s orders. Apparently he was prepared to speak to the King, if need be.”

  It was my turn to smile.

  Simon had been a part of my world for nearly as long as I could remember, my father’s batman and then his Regimental Sergeant-Major, and always a friend close to the family. He had got me out of many a scrape when I was small, and I would have trusted him with my life. If my mother had insisted on coming to France, my father would have moved heaven and earth to get her there, and if he himself couldn’t accompany her, Simon would have been expected to see her safely here and home again.

  “I can only stay for a bit,” my mother was saying. “I promised to be out of the way as soon as I was assured you were all right.”

  “I’m so glad you’ve come,” I told her, and I meant it. I hadn’t seen much of my parents on my last few leaves, and I’d missed them. A few days at home in the midst of this war had always been my anchor, keeping the nightmares of what I had seen and done at bay, putting my world back into perspective. I knew how lucky I was to have that sanctuary. I had chosen nursing on my own, had persuaded my parents to allow me to join the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, and however worried they might have been about my decision, they had allowed me to make what I felt was my contribution to this war.

  If I’d been a son, I’d have been expected to serve in the regiment in which generations of Crawfords had served, and no one would have thought twice about it. I couldn’t, of course, but I could try to keep the sons of other families alive to fight again another day.

  They knew the risks, my parents. My own father had served as a soldier most of his adult life, my mother had followed him from post to post, and they had both survived dangerous times. But I expect it took quite a different courage to send a child—in their case an only daughter—into harm’s way when they had no illusions about war. It was only at times like these when their worry showed.

  I lay there and listened to my mother telling me about Mrs. Hennessey, who owned the house where I had a flat for my infrequent leaves, in one breath and our cook’s ginger cat, Thomasina, who ruled the back garden, in another. She had brought me two small pots of honey for my tea, and an even tinier pot of plum jam from our own tree.

  “Not my best effort,” she said ruefully, “with nothing to thicken it, but it will have to do.” And she moved on to news of my father, who was away again, this time—she thought—for the Foreign Office. “But who knows,” she added lightly, concealing her own worry, “it could be for the Bey of Tunis for all I know.”

  “He was in Calais not very long ago,” I told her—much to her surprise, for she hadn’t known he’d crossed the Channel. Nor had Simon, I could see from his expression. “One of our ambulance drivers spotted him on the quay and recognized him.”

  She asked again if I was all right, if I needed anything, if the wound was serious enough that she might carry me home with her. But I reassured her that all was well, and no one would wish me to take up the space a wounded man might need.

  They spent an hour with me, and then it was time for her to leave. I said a very reluctant good-bye, and as she rose to seek out Matron and thank her for her kindness, I said, “Could Simon stay for a moment? I have a question I’d like to put to him.”

  “Yes, of course.” She smiled. “It will give me an excuse to come back.”

  When the door had closed behind her, I said quickly, “I don’t look too pale, do I? Mother seemed worried, although she tried to hide it.”

  “You are pale. I’ve been shot, Bess, remember? I can see how tired you are from enduring the pain. Let them give you something.”

  In fact, he’d fought against morphine too, until there had been no alternative.

  “The pot calling the kettle black? I try not to be any trouble, and I do hate to feel my head swim with the sedatives. But, Simon, there’s something else. I’m probably wrong, it all happened so quickly. Still.” And I told him what I knew about Lieutenant Moreau. “It’s a rather common name,” I added, “and yet if he did escape from the Germans, he’d have been in a French prisoner column, wouldn’t he? Then how did he manage to reach our lines instead of his own?”

  Simon was frowning. “There haven’t been any more spy rumors than usual. Although the French were fairly certain the Germans had a spotter in Paris during the shelling earlier in the year.”

  The Germans’ so-called Paris Gun had been the talk of the Army. Anyone returning from leave in Paris from April to August had seen the damage.

  The frightening thing was that the shells didn’t come screaming over. They were fired so high that they came in silently, and at first there had been fears that the city was being bombed from high-flying zeppelins. But no one had actually seen one, and it was soon realized that the Germans were using a new and very efficient weapon. It had raised the possibility of a last attempt to take Paris and change the course of the war. The shelling had kept the city on edge for weeks.

  The new weapon had turned out to be a gun that was so large it had to be fixed on railway cars, and fired from them. With the Allied advances as the Americans engaged the enemy, it had been withdrawn to prevent its capture, and either hidden or dismantled, depending on which rumor one heard. We would have given much to get our hands on it, and failing that, on the engineering plans for it.

  “Was he ever found? This spotter?”

  Simon shook his head. “If he ever existed. But it would have made sense to have someone there to advise and report. Especially if the gun had been a prelude to an attack.”

  “I don’t imagine Lieutenant Moreau could be that man. At the same time, I felt I ought to say something.”

  “And quite right. Stranger things have happened. But I’ll report it to the Colonel, and he can make the necessary inquiries.”

  My mother was back, coming forward to give me a last kiss, and Simon gave up his chair for her. I hadn’t had a chance to ask him to keep me informed somehow.

  And then they were gone, and my room seemed too quiet and too empty. I was reminded of the time I’d had measles, and I’d been kept in a dark room, to spare my eyes. Only my mother had been allowed in, for fear the contagion would spread through the cantonment. It was she who fed me and bathed me in something to soothe the rash.

  I was smiling at the memory when a new VAD ward maid brought me my breakfast.

  Chapter Four

  During the evening my fever spiked again, and when a convoy of wounded was collected to be sent on to Rouen, I was among them.

  Dr. Webb said, “We’ve been worried from the start that there might be something in the wound. Or that it might have run deeper than we knew. It’s that X-ray machine for you, Sister. I’m told it’s completely painless.”

  “I’m sure it is.” I looked him in the eye. “How likely is it that the machine will find the problem? Or am I already seeing the beginning of a serious infection?”

  “I needn’t tell you that infection is our greatest fear. I also don’t need to tell you that infection kills more patients than we care to admit. Once it’s established, there’s too little we can do. I’m erring on the side of caution, Sister Crawford.”

  “Then it’s more than just being in the way.”

  Smiling, he said, “Much as I would like to say that you’re a nuisance, you are not. No, Matron and I have discussed the matter. Rouen it is. If it weren’t for this worry, it would have been England instead.”

  And so, bundled onto a stretcher like the other wounded, I was carried out to one of the ambulances and put in
side.

  There were three other cases traveling with me: one with a bandage that covered most of his head and a good part of his face, another with shrapnel deep in his shoulder, and the last with trench foot so putrid I could smell it.

  We made good time to Rouen, despite rain that began some twenty minutes out of the base hospital. The jolting was bad, although this road had never been shelled. It was rutted from hundreds of vehicles and thousands of marching feet, and I tried to cling to the sides of my stretcher to prevent the worst of the shaking. Above me I could hear the shoulder case swearing under his breath at every bump. The foot case and the head wound lay quietly—too quietly, I thought, for a head injury.

  Reaching the once-fashionable racecourse where the Rouen Base Hospital had been set up, we passed through the gates and then stopped for the Sister—in this case, an American nurse—handling the reception of incoming patients.

  Her cheerful American voice reached us from the ambulance just ahead of us, and then an orderly was opening the door to ours.

  “Good morning. Ah, the wounded Sister. We’ll have you out in just a moment.”

  I said, “I’m worried about the man in the upper berth there.”

  She climbed in with a flourish of skirts and reached for his hand to take his pulse. “Oh, dear.”

  Clambering out again she had a quiet word with the orderly, and then stretcher bearers came on the double. The sergeant was whisked away as gently as possible in the circumstances, and I could hear the footsteps of the bearers receding into the distance.

  Soon enough we were all where we ought to be. I found myself once more in the staff quarters, and twenty minutes later an harassed doctor came in to look me over.

  “Hmmm,” he said, examining the wound. “Yes, I can see the problem. Ever been X-rayed before?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, it’s painless. Nothing to fear. We’ll send you over in the next hour. It’s been busy here all morning. Urgent care first. Now, according to this, your fever has risen to high levels twice. The first time, quite understandable, fresh wound and all that. But this second time? Well, we’ll see, won’t we?”

  With a brief smile he was off, and I closed my eyes, grateful not to be bouncing about. I must have drifted off to sleep, for the next thing I knew two burly stretcher bearers had come in to shift me from my cot. We moved along the outer ring of the hospital for some distance, then turned toward the building housing the X-ray equipment.

  The machine was noisy and cumbersome, but far from terrorizing. While she worked, the young woman who operated it so efficiently talked about finding bullets, shrapnel, bits of debris, broken bones, even kidney stones with the X-rays. What she found in my side was nothing so dramatic—a particle of button that had been missed when I was first examined.

  “You’d be amazed how frightened some of the men are, when they come in here. They’re certain we’ll find something that will keep them from returning to the Front. And then there was the French Lieutenant who refused to let us look at his head wound. We managed to do it, and there was no fracture. But he was quite upset.”

  I was dressing again, and I turned my head to look at her. How to broach the question I wanted to ask? I fell back on Millie, the VAD ward maid.

  “Don’t tell me this was the handsome Lieutenant Moreau who left broken hearts behind when he was sent from Base Hospital Three to Rouen?”

  She laughed again. “It must have been. Lieutenant Moreau? He could think of nothing but being released to convalesce in Paris. I wondered if he had a wife or sweetheart there. We were sad to lose him.”

  For an instant I thought she meant he’d died. And then I realized that he had been released. But how, with his wounds?

  “To Paris?” I asked, to be sure.

  “Oh, yes, one of the orderlies put him on the train for the city. His uniform was in shreds, and so we gave him an American one to wear until he could replace his own. A nurse in the surgical ward has one of those lovely Brownie cameras, and she took his photograph. That seemed to upset him no end. He told us he was afraid his mother might see it and worry. He did look quite pale, that scar where your lot had shaved his head a little. And he was still wearing his sling. His feet were too heavily bandaged to put on shoes. We had to cover them with sacking.”

  Worried about his mother? I wondered. Or about being identified?

  “I’d like to have a copy of that photograph to take back with me. We could pin it up in our quarters where Matron wouldn’t see it.”

  Cameras had been forbidden in the early days of the war, a directive handed down by the Army, for fear captured film might be useful to the enemy. But my father had said he believed the Army had not wanted photos of what was happening in France sent back to worry the home front.

  “Speak to Wilma Johnson. She might be able to make a copy for you.” She gestured to her machine. “I can manage this, but photography is a mystery to me.”

  The stretcher bearers were outside waiting for me, and they carried me back to my quarters.

  My search for Nurse Johnson was put off by surgery early that evening to remove my bit of button. The doctor even showed it to me.

  “Keep it for a souvenir, if you like. The good news is, we got it. The worrying news is that there was a tiny pocket of infection around it, but I think we cleaned it out well. You’ll be sore for a day or two, but we’ll soon have you on the road to recovery.”

  And so another day passed before I could ask the nurses who attended me about Wilma Johnson. The ether had made me slightly nauseated, and Dr. Meadows had been right about the soreness. It was as if the bullet had creased me a second time. I could only pray that neither Sergeant Lassiter nor Simon got wind of this and came to find me.

  When at last I could ask for Miss Johnson, she was on duty and I had to wait until she was free.

  She was a large-framed woman with bright red hair and very pretty blue eyes.

  “Hullo, my dear,” she said briskly, coming into my room. “And how are we feeling this evening?”

  “Better,” I told her truthfully. “I understand you have a camera?”

  “Yes, my father gave it to me as a gift just before I left for France. I’ve enjoyed using it. Would you like me to take your photograph, to show your family back in England that you’re recovering nicely?”

  “Actually,” I said wryly, “I wanted to ask for a copy of the photograph of Lieutenant Moreau, the French officer we sent over to you here. He left a trail of broken hearts behind him and I thought it might be quite lovely to show the others how well he looks fully recovered.”

  “He wasn’t fully recovered. He won’t be doing much in the way of walking for a bit, and his arm is still mending. I took my photograph with him standing there, pretty as you please, and as soon as I’d snapped the shutter, he was back in his wheeled chair, pale as my apron.”

  “Still. Standing there in his American uniform, he’ll look a hundred times better than he did when he came in to us. He couldn’t even tell us his name.”

  “I see what you mean.” She hesitated. “Did you work with him while he was there?”

  “I did,” I answered, though it wasn’t quite true. I could tell something was on her mind, and I wanted to know what it was.

  “One night when I was on ward duty, he was having a nightmare. And he spoke German in his sleep. I couldn’t tell you what it was he was saying, but there are quite a few Germans living in St. Louis, families who have been there for several generations. I’ve heard the older people conversing in German among themselves, and I’d swear that’s what I heard Lieutenant Moreau speaking as well.”

  “Did you report it?” I asked.

  “It was just that one time, and so I didn’t. I thought there might have been a good reason for him knowing it.”

  “It’s possible his family is from Alsace-Lorraine. They were forced to learn German there after the Franco-Prussian War. Many of them still count themselves as French.”

  He
r frown eased. “That’ll be it, then. I’m glad I said nothing.” She smiled, and dimples appeared in her cheeks. “I’ve been amazed here in Europe at the number of strange languages I’ve heard. There was a Sikh in my ward one day, and on another occasion, a French Colonial from Africa. Tanganyika, or some such place. I met a Russian in a coffee shop in Rouen. He’d escaped the revolution, he said, and he was selling pretty little enameled boxes. Snuffboxes, he said. His family didn’t have time to collect very much before they fled. And there have been Belgians, of course. Refugees, many of them, and soldiers as well. One of the Belgian soldiers spoke Flemish. Everyone thought it was German, but I knew better.”

  We chatted for a quarter of an hour, and then she said, “You must be tired, my dear. I’ll see if I can make a copy of that photograph for you. I have the negative in one of my boxes.”

  I thanked her, and hoped she would remember.

  The next day, Dr. Meadows pronounced me on the road to recovery, and he asked if I would like to finish my convalescence in Paris. “It doesn’t make sense to send you all the way to London. But you aren’t ready to take up your duties. Can you manage on your own in Paris? There’s a house, calls itself the Hôtel de Belle-Île, where I’ve sent a number of wounded. They should be able to find a room for you. It was turned into a convalescent clinic in 1915, and it’s well managed. I’d recommend it.”

  I could have asked for London, but I’d seen my mother only a matter of days earlier, and I didn’t expect to be more than a few days longer recovering. I’d reach London just in time to turn about and leave for France. I wanted more than anything to return to Dr. Winters and the forward aid station.

  “Yes, I’m sure I can manage.”

  “I’ll see to it that you are given the address. There’s a doctor in residence, but I doubt you’ll have much need of his services. With that button out, you’ll be right as rain before very long. But don’t overdo it,” he cautioned.

  And so it was settled. To my surprise and delight, Wilma Johnson did remember, and the next afternoon, before an orderly took me to meet my train, she brought me an envelope, saying, “I wouldn’t open this until you are on the train. It might not be a good idea.”