Unnatural Issue

by Mercedes Lackey

  Then would come the bursting shell, which might hit a patch of empty ground, or might hit a dugout, burying whoever was in it, or might hit the trench, obliterating everyone there. The veteran on hearing that whistle would often try to find a shell hole, thinking that, like lightning, shells would never hit the same place twice.

  Right now, no one was shelling this part of the lines. Charles was not grateful; this only meant that everyone was waiting for the shelling to start again. Shelling was like the rain—more or less, but never absent. And no shelling meant that the rats were out in force.

  The damned things were the size of cats and utterly fearless. They ran over your face at night; put down food for a moment, and there’d be a dozen on it when you turned back. The brown ones were the worst, gorging themselves on the dead, starting with their eyes.

  Oh, yes. The dead. They were supposed to be removed and shipped home. Reality meant that unless you were an officer, that was unlikely to happen. You got shoved into a shell hole, and if you were lucky, you got dirt shoveled on top. Or if you’d been blown to bits, the bits just got shoveled any old where. At least three times Charles had had an arm or a leg fall out on him when he had been helping the men dig a new trench.

  All that water meant that the men, unable to keep their feet dry or even get them dry for a little while, once a day, were contracting something everyone called trench foot. At its best, it was disgusting and painful. At its worst, it turned into gangrene, and the foot had to come off.

  And the stench . . . there was no way to get away from it. Over everything, the bitter fug of rotting flesh. Layered on that, the different fug of men who had not washed in weeks, and who had been sleeping, eating, fighting in the same clothing for all that time. Layered on that, the smell of sickness—trench foot, trench fever, infection. You were supposed to report to the field hospital when you were wounded, but the reality was that no one could be spared unless they couldn’t shoot anymore, and untended wounds festered quickly. Grace notes of urine and feces from the latrine trenches, rat piss, rotting sandbags, stagnant mud, filthy water, creosol, chloride of lime, cordite, cigarette smoke, woodsmoke, coal smoke, cooking food.

  Sometimes Charles thought that the smell alone would drive him mad. The men said they got used to it. He didn’t believe them. No one could get used to this.

  If the smell didn’t drive him mad, the lice might, first.

  Lice were everywhere. You could strip down (in the freezing rain,) delouse yourself, delouse your clothing, put it back on, and the eggs hidden in the seams would hatch and infest you all over again.

  Around him, the men were repairing and draining the trenches— the draining being an exercise in futility, since the water pumped out wasn’t pumped out very far, and it would find its way back into the trench again. Unless there was an attack, that was the daytime routine: fix the trench, fill sandbags, hope that night had brought a supply of duckboards to put a floor in with, and maybe some tin. Keep your head down. Listen for artillery. Read or write letters. Read a book, if you had one. Snatch a few minutes of sleep. And remember to keep your head down.

  This was no place for an Earth mage. The pervading aura of wrongness was so intense it clogged Charles’ throat, and made it hard to choke down food.

  Oh, yes. The food . . .

  There were supposed to be field kitchens supplying everyone with hot meals three times a day. Well, that might be happening off the front, but no one was willing to get shot just to bring food to the soldiers in the trenches. There might be one hot meal in the morning, brought before first light. Often there wasn’t that. They weren’t going hungry—but—

  At first light, Charles would give the order to “Stand to!” and all along the zigzag trenches, as the men were roused from their little rathole dugouts, they got up onto the fire step to prepare for a morning raid. If there was no raid forthcoming, the little exchange known as the “morning hate” ensued, with both sides letting off tension by firing at each other. Once feelings had been relieved and the gunfire died away, the morning rum was issued. Charles had been appalled by this at first. Now he drank down his ration as quickly as anyone else. It was the only way to dull the constant headache and feel a little warmer.

  Then, inspection, which consisted these days of making sure each man had cleaned his rifle and no one’s feet were falling off, followed by breakfast. Which, unless an unofficial “breakfast truce” was in effect, was not always the hot food from the field kitchens, but rather bacon cooked over little trench fires, tea, bully beef, bread, and plum and apple jam. Sometimes there was cheese. They were supposed to get vegetables, dried or fresh, but Charles hadn’t seen any in weeks. They were supposed to get a great many things that never materialized. Two things never seemed to be in short supply: rum, and plum and apple jam. The same food turned up for dinner and supper, unless there was a lull and the field kitchens could send real meals. Or unless things were so bad that nothing got through, and they had to fall back on ration-biscuits, concoctions that were literally hard enough to drive nails with. Charles’ orderly generally boiled water and soaked them in it to make him a kind of mush, with plum and apple jam atop it. At least it was hot.

  Charles was an officer; he had better conditions than his men. He had a bunker with a floor of duckboards, walls of sandbags, and a tin roof with more sandbags on top of it. He had an orderly to cook his bacon, make his tea, and—resourceful fellow!—round up whatever variations to the menu he could manage. In the early days, he’d been able to set snares and catch rabbits; now all the snares caught were rats.

  They were supposed to spend only eight days in the trenches, four in the support trenches behind the front, and twelve days in reserve, followed by eight days of rest. That never happened, not here. This rotation had been the longest they had been stuck out here. Charles and his men had been here for two weeks, and he had been praying daily for word that they would finally fall back to support.

  His orderly ran up, in the hunched-over position the prudent man always took when running along a trench, a muddy scrap of paper in his hand. Charles took it, and could have sobbed with relief.

  He passed the order down the line: Gather up your kit. Be ready to move out at dark. Being relieved at last, and not to the support trenches, but all the way to the reserve. Reserve! Hot meals, a bath, a delousing—sleep in a bed, clean uniforms, dry feet at last. Visit the hospital tents and get the “little things” attended to . . .

  The hours until dark passed with interminable slowness, and then, finally, the relieving troops arrived, crawling up the trenches, loaded down with their own guns, equipment, supplies. The officer relieving Charles looked like an angel . . .

  Of course, this was an angel wearing the expression of one assigned to hell.

  He cheered up a little at the sight of Charles’ bunker; this had been Charles’ work, and that of his orderly, during the two weeks they had been there. When he had arrived, there had only been a little rathole of a dugout, like everyone else’s.

  Four hours later, he and the men were crawling back toward the rear, past the support troops, and then, finally, far enough away that they could stand safely, stand and march like men, back to the reserves, behind the lines.

  They reached the relief tents at last. Real tents, waterproof canvas, with stoves in them keeping them warm. There was fresh hot food waiting for them, really hot—hot enough to burn your mouth, the first they’d had in two weeks. The men fell on it like starving wolves. He took his time, eating slowly, feeling a fog of fatigue coming over his brain. At the start of his time at the Front, when he and his men got to the support or the relief barracks, the first thing he did was to make straight for whatever passed for a bathing facility—rarely an actual bath, but at least there would be hot water, soap, something to kill the damned lice. Now . . . now he was worn down by six days more at the Front than he had reckoned on, and all he wanted was to lie down someplace warm and relatively soft. Someplace where rats wouldn’t run ove
r him.

  But no; he’d clean up first. Exhausted he might be, but he would clean up first. Wash the stink off, then sleep without dreaming of wandering aimlessly through a city of the dead. Finally, finally get that stink out of the back of his throat, out of his nose.

  He finished his stew, got his directions, and stumbled through the rain to his assigned quarters, where someone had left buckets of steaming water, soap, a sponge, and creosol to kill the lice. He dropped his filthy, stinking uniform, stiff with mud and crawling with lice into one of the empty buckets; it would have to be fumigated. Smelling like a tar factory of creosol, he pulled on gloriously clean pajamas and fell into the bed at last, lulled to sleep by the steady roar of artillery, which sounded, in his dreams, like thunder.

  Some of the girls said they dreamed of home, of dancing, of handsome, unwounded men. Susanne dreamed of bandages.

  In her dream, she would open a huge crate and find it packed to bursting with beautiful pure white gauze and white cotton bandages, clean and new. In her dream, these bandages were miraculous; she rushed into the ward and began putting new dressings on all the boys, who began to heal as soon as the clean fabric touched them. She woke from that dream with silent tears pouring down her face, sobbing into her pillow.

  The little old lady with whom she lodged always met her reddened eyes over the breakfast table and nodded knowingly. Then fed her a bowl of boiled milk, an egg, and that marvelous French delicacy, a croissant. With butter. The nursing sisters got generous rations; food was one thing there was no shortage of here at the field hospital. It wasn’t always the sort of food she would have preferred for her patients, but between them, she and Madame Lebois could turn it into something that actually was suitable.

  “You had that dream again,” Madame said, handing her the jam. “Did you say goodbye to another last night?”

  That was Madame’s polite way of asking if one of her patients had died. She nodded. “I couldn’t do anything,” she said, helplessly. “I—”

  “Earth Master you may be, but you cannot mend everything,” Madame said wisely. “Eat your egg.”

  When Suzanne had so blithely told Uncle Paul that she would be a nursing sister, she’d had no idea what the job would be, exactly. She assumed it would be mostly waiting on the patients. With ample opportunity to slip in some magic now and again.

  She was too determined to be horrified when she learned that she, and not a doctor, would be expected to clean out wounds and irrigate them with Dakin’s solution or alcohol. That she, not the doctor, was expected to put in drains and keep them clear. She, not a doctor, would change the dressings on even the worst wounds.

  She’d also discovered it was a good thing she had the uneasy patronage of someone rich, for she had been expected to supply virtually everything for herself. The list that the Red Cross had presented to her was astonishing:

  Coat with unbuttonable collar or turndown cloth 1

  Hat, bonnet, or headcloth 1

  Cap Vest, Cloth or knitted scarf 1

  Washcloths 2

  Wool dress 1

  Collar or neckcloth 6

  Aprons, white 3

  Aprons, colored 4

  Night jackets or nightshirts 3

  Shirts 5

  Wool undershirts 2

  Corset or Reform-corset 2

  Petticoat 2

  Dust-skirt 2

  Bloomers 3

  Trousers 4

  Stockings 6

  Leather laced boots, high 1

  Leather shoes, half-height, with double heels, pair 1

  Shoes, warm, pair 1

  Galoshes, pair 1

  Handkerchiefs 9

  Gloves, pair 2

  Umbrella 1

  Toilette kit, incl. toothbrush, nail brush, comb 1

  Hand-towel 1

  Mirror, small 1

  Clothes brush 1

  Shoe cleaning kit 1

  Sewing kit 1

  Mending bag 1

  Knife, fork, spoon; in a case 1

  Drinking cup 1

  Canteen 1

  Pocket knife 1

  Pouch with writing implements 1

  Change purse 1

  Travel inkwell 1

  Lantern 1

  Lighter 1

  Stearine candle for lantern 1 pack—1

  (Collapsible) Rubber basin 1

  Neutrality insignia 3

  Identity card 1

  Expenditure book

  Bandages 75

  Bandage packets 2

  Identity disk 1

  Iron Ration 1

  Fortunately, Uncle Paul had taken care of the list, with the help of the estimable Garrick, who was serving as Peter’s orderly. Garrick had also helpfully added other things: a spray bottle for antiseptic solution, two thermometers, and her own syringe kit with extra needles and a sharpening stone. She hadn’t needed to use the ward’s syringe, which kept getting “borrowed.”

  It was raining again; she and Madame finished breakfast in silence that had the constant rumble of artillery fire beneath it. She pulled on the boiled-wool cape—selected by Garrick and infinitely superior to the plain woven capes the other nurses had—slung her kit over her shoulder, and stepped out into the muck.

  She wondered, often, if the other nurses noticed that she took a little longer beside each patient than they did. But then, “her” doctor, the one who was in charge of her ward, was a fanatic for antiseptic irrigation, and she was the one that had to change the complicated dressings, tubes, and drips. Some of the other nurses thought he was mad, obsessed, or both; she thought he was a genius. His system, even without her help, was saving twice as many wounded as anyone else, and was saving men other doctors thought doomed. With her help? While she did lose the ones who really were too badly torn up to survive, the ones with ruptured spleens, perforated intestines, livers that looked as if Zeus’s eagle had been pecking at them, or multiple amputations, most of the men who came into her ward left it healing.

  What happened to them afterward, when they were evacuated to recovery hospitals? She couldn’t say. She did her best for them, and that was all anyone could do. At least they were going to places where the sheets were changed daily, where rats didn’t scamper among the beds at night, where they weren’t in danger of being killed by shells or bombs in their beds.

  There was one small problem, of course. If anyone ever found out that she was not a real nurse, nor French, she would probably get shipped summarily back to England. And now that she had found Charles, that was the last place she wanted to go. So far, Peter had held his peace, but if something happened and she was in danger—he might just reveal it all.

  I just have to make sure that nothing does, she told herself, then amended the thought. Or, at least, nothing that he finds out about.

  As she neared the hospital, which had been set up in a donated farm building of the sort that Uncle Paul owned (or had owned), she saw ambulances discharging their cargo and speeding away, Uncle Paul’s among them. She broke into a run.

  “What happened?” she asked the orderly at the door, breathlessly, as she paused long enough to shed her cloak and hang it on the hanger.

  By now she was conversant enough in French that she could pass as a provincial native from the north. It was funny, there were as many dialects of French as there were of English, and those from the Ardennes found it as hard to understand the Parisians as a London Cockney did broad Yorkshire.

  “Cursed boche got their artillery fixed on a company coming off the lines for relief,” the man spat. “There must have been a spy or a spotter behind the lines, or maybe a nighttime balloonist. We’re only now getting them in, as no one dared get to them before dawn.”

  Susanne nodded, ran to the scrubroom and doused herself in Lister Solution. It was going to be a long day, and she would need to be at her best for every man still alive.

  When she stumbled out of the ward, it was dark, and she ran right into an officer just coming in the door. “Scuse moi,
mam’s—” said a familiar voice, “Susanne? What are you doing here?”

  Charles caught her elbows and held her upright as she swayed with fatigue. She looked up at him and smiled wryly. “Just doing my part,” she said. “I can’t exactly go back to England, after all.”

  He looked at her sternly. “No, but you can go somewhere else. New Zealand. Australia. Canada. Even America!”

  She bristled a little. “So it is perfectly all right for you to risk your life, and not all right for me to be safely behind the lines doing what I can?”

  “But it’s not safe behind the lines!” Charles objected. “Hospitals have been shelled!”

  “And I could be run over by a cart, or a flock of sheep, or a—a—kangaroo!” she retorted. “Meanwhile, you know I am an Earth Master, and you must know how many I have helped and will help!” Then she stopped, set her jaw, and let her broad Yorkshire come through. “And tha’ knows that short of bodily restraining me and puttin’ me on a boat in chains, tha’art not going to keep me from doing what I wish, so tha’ might as well give over.”

  He stared at her. And then, ruefully, began to chuckle. “Cursed stubborn woman, you are true Yorkshire stock. But I’ll persuade you, see if I don’t!”

  She sniffed. “Tha’ can try.”

  “What if I knew where you can get a hot bath?” he countered. “A real bath.”

  She stared at him in disbelief.

  “A mile down that road—” he pointed “—is a lunatic asylum. It has a men’s side and a women’s side. Part of their treatment is hydrotherapy, and they have opened the bathing facilities to us. You can have a real hot bath there, provided you don’t mind the company of people who wear dead bats on their heads.”

  Her skin itched at the mere thought of a hot bath. Her landlady was a lovely old dear, but the only tub was an ancient thing you had to fill from water heated on the stove, and was hardly big enough to sit upright in, with your knees to your chest.

  “This is not going to make me go to New Zealand,” she told him.

  “And if I were to take you to dinner?” He smiled.