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A Rose In Flanders Fields

Page 9

by Terri Nixon


  I slipped off my wedding band before the car arrived, and on the way home I rehearsed my cheerful lies; I’d already said I was attending a wedding, giving the impression it was a friend from London who was getting married, and fixed the description of my own gown in my head, ready to attribute it to the fictitious bride. The way the lies fell from my lips, cheerful or otherwise, disturbed me, but I wasn’t ready yet to place this burden on Mother’s shoulders; she was already distressed about my imminent departure to the Red Cross. Neither was I ready to turn this joyful news into something cold and hurtful, to be argued over rather than held tightly and treasured.

  I tried once more to tell the truth before I left, but my mother’s despair at my stubborn insistence on going overseas, instead of serving in England, stole any inclination I had to heap more woe upon her, and it simply grew more and more difficult to tell her the truth. It seemed easier, and kinder, to let her believe I had too much to think about to waste time on hopeless, and unsuitable, romantic entanglements.

  My training began in St Cross Hospital, Rugby, on a chilly October day. The hospitals were already taking in wounded from the various fronts and, although I knew I’d have heard if Will were hurt, I still felt my heart clench every time I went to the docks. When I realised he wasn’t among them, I fought the guilty relief and threw myself harder than ever into helping those who were, to make up for it. I know I wasn’t the only one to feel like that, and I soon bonded with a cheerful, freckled girl named Barbara, who was in love with an airman and talked about him non-stop. One day I called her “Boxy”, for “Chatterbox”. during one of our regular one-sided conversations, and it stuck. It suited her surname, Wood, too, and soon everyone was calling her Boxy but they didn’t know why. It was our joke; a small thing, but in our situation it was the small things that could sometimes get you through the most difficult times.

  Boxy Wood shared my interest in motor vehicles and their workings. She told me what it was like in the ambulance corps; her sister had gone out two months before to join a convoy in France. ‘Honestly, Davies, it’s the most awful sort of torture you could imagine. And I’m not talking about the wounded, or even the driving. Clara says their commandant waits ’til they’re all falling asleep after a fourteen-hour shift, then blows her damnable whistle for inspection. And woe betide any poor girl with a mucky uniform; punishment duties are dreadful.’

  It did sound awful. On the other hand the War Office had been calling specifically for young ladies of good breeding to go out there and do their bit. ‘We have to go,’ I said. ‘They need people like us, and it doesn’t look as though the war will be over by Christmas after all.’

  She sighed. ‘I know, poppet.’ Then she looked at me with a little glint in her eye I was starting to recognise, and I felt a smile twitch at my lips in anticipation.

  ‘What are you cooking up now?’

  ‘All right, listen. We’ve missed out on our chance to go out with the Munro corps, correct?’

  ‘Correct. Unfortunately. Why do you suppose Doctor Munro only took six in the end?’ We’d both been keen to apply to Hector Munro’s exciting-sounding venture; working with the support of the Red Cross, but independent of their strict regimes, closer to the lines, and right in the thick of things.

  ‘Well, he had to pick the cream of the crop, and Mrs Knocker and Dorothie Feilding are certainly that.’

  ‘They’re so lucky,’ I grumbled, ‘avoiding all the huff and puff of inspections, uniforms and rotas. Doesn’t seem at all in the spirit of why we want to help.’

  Boxy nodded. ‘Even worse since we’ve paid for our own training. It galls rather, doesn’t it? So, why don’t we just set up by ourselves?’

  ‘What?’ It was such a casual comment I wasn’t sure I’d heard properly.

  Boxy warmed to her suggestion, and became more animated. ‘Look. We just have to find a base, some building no-one’s using, and you can be sure there’ll be plenty of those. We’ll find a place as close to the lines as we can get, and move forward as they do so we’re always within reach with emergency help. We’ll do a bang-up job, I know it. If we’re going to suffer I’d much rather it be on our own terms, wouldn’t you?’

  I would, of course, but there were practicalities to think of. ‘How on earth would we get passes to work up near the lines, if we’re not attached to the Red Cross?’

  ‘We’ll just have to prove they need us. Think about it, are they really going to turn us away if we arrive with our own vehicles, and fully trained to boot? You and I are just what they need out there.’

  The more I thought about it, the better it sounded. We could take our own ambulances, or cars if we couldn’t get them, and act as whatever was needed at the time; stretcher-bearers if they’d let us, ambulance-drivers if they wouldn’t, both if we possibly could. Boxy wrote to the commanding officer of a unit just outside Dixmude, a friend of her airman, and he wrote back advising caution, but hinting that an independent ambulance base would be just as welcome as another Red Cross one.

  Later, as he realised we were serious, Lieutenant-Colonel Drewe offered to arrange passes for us, provided we were certified and able to supply our own vehicles, and so we continued our training, knowing there would be little back-up once we were out there and making doubly sure we were proficient in all we could be.

  Between us we raised enough cash through savings and donations, and bought a rattly old ambulance that we named Gertie in honour of an amusing pig we had seen on a postcard.

  ‘She sounds rather like a pig,’ Boxy had said, as we drove a noisily snorting Gertie off the ferry and onto French soil. ‘A splash of pink paint and who’d know the difference?’

  I rolled my eyes and laughed, a tingling excitement was making me feel a bit giddy despite the very real fear that was taking hold now. ‘Barbara Wood, we are not painting her pink!’

  The cottage in Belgium was a decent enough place. We had to give it a number, so as to identify it with the ambulance convoys and the hospitals nearby, so it became Number Twelve. Abandoned shortly after the Yser Canal had been flooded, to stay the German advance in late October, it sat alone in its own little courtyard, miraculously whole and quite the ugliest place I’d ever seen. But oddly beautiful at the same time. We loved it from the very first. Although it was just a one-bedroomed cottage it had a roomy cellar, perfect for converting into a small ward, and with room for seven beds and an equipment store. We, and those we planned to help, would be safe down there from shellfire, and it was somewhere to administer basic first-aid before moving the wounded along to the Clearing Stations once they were more likely to survive the journey.

  Not being part of an officially designated field ambulance division meant we lacked mechanical backup, so I was grateful Uncle Jack had always been firm with me, and shown me the basics of engine maintenance when he’d heard about my clandestine driving lessons.

  ‘No good just learning to drive,’ he’d said when I’d pulled a face. ‘You need to know what to do if something goes wrong. You’ll like it, once you get going, I know you.’

  He was right and, even better, I discovered I had an aptitude for it; I couldn’t help grinning with delight the first time I was able to correct the problems he’d deliberately caused, and I was glad he’d persisted – especially now, given the work Gertie was putting in over increasingly rough roads.

  We’d arrived in November 1914, and collected as much bedding as we could find, but the luxury of gathering equipment, and setting up what we’d fondly imagined would be our sweet little dressing station, with comfort and curtains, and hot drinks for the Tommies, was not to be. We were thrown into it right away, attached to the military unit a couple of miles away, and, with no field telephone, we quickly grew accustomed to the shrill whistle of the runner on his bicycle as he summoned us to duty. Days blurred into long, cold nights, and weeks into months, while we battled extremes of boredom and terror, and we faithfully wrote our sunny “gosh it’s exciting being in the thick of it!” l
etters home so our parents could boast about us to their friends. Heaven forbid they should find out what we actually did, night after night, I’m not certain Mother would have sat quietly at home if she’d known.

  Our own tentative excitement had been crushed out of us after the first, awful night. With nothing of our own base ready we’d volunteered our services at least, and turned out to help the Red Cross convoy, lining up with the other drivers at the railway station. The trains had come in; old, rattling things in these early days of war, filled from end to end with wounded. Weeping men; silent men; angry, bewildered men; men numbed with misery and mute with horror…dear God, was Will in danger of becoming one of these?

  We’d sat, still and shocked, while the orderlies loaded us up and barked our load: four stretchers, one sitter, and then driven, somehow, to the sergeant at the gate. ‘Four stretchers, one sitter,’ I repeated, stumbling over the impersonal words that were supposed to somehow explain the softly moaning, tangled mass of humanity I was carrying.

  He consulted his clip-board. ‘Number Five.’ He waved us through, and we were on our way. Where was Number Five? I was utterly lost, both mentally and geographically, but we found Number Five hospital mercifully quickly and were unloaded. Then it was back again; the train was still crammed with men awaiting their turn. Or their deaths. As dawn raked the sky with glorious pink rays that belied the tragedy beneath it, Boxy and I returned, in trembling silence, to our beds. Different women. Grown up in the space of a few horrific and nauseating hours.

  The next morning, after we’d opened the ambulance doors to begin cleaning, and instead contributed to the mess, we looked at one another, wiped our mouths and both of us had broken down in tears. It was the last time we did so as a result of our work, and since that night our bond had been unbreakable and if ever one of us wavered in her determination to stick it out, the other would simply touch her hand and walk away, leaving her standing alone. It served to remind us how the fighting men felt, away from the comradeship of their unit, hurt and frightened – it was why we were there.

  But it was not all terrible; there was a certain amount of freedom we’d never have experienced if we’d joined the Field Ambulance, or were tied to the other units. There were a couple of friendly girls who came over now and again to spell us: Anne and Elise were based near Furnes, at a unit with which we often joined forces when things got especially hot. They enjoyed the chance to spend some time away from their slightly more regimented atmosphere too, and were keen to give us the opportunity to go into town now and again.

  Will was with the 19th brigade of the 2nd Division at the start, and they rarely seemed to remain in one place for long. Letters were scarce – sometimes weeks would pass and then three or four would arrive at once; those were days I’d take myself off and find a quiet place to read, and read, and read, hearing his voice in my head as clearly as if he were sitting next to me. Except when I was particularly exhausted, when I sometimes struggled to remember what he sounded like, and then I had to put the letters aside or risk smudging the ink with tears of terror – what if I never heard him again? What if this was all I had left of him, only I didn’t yet know it? How would I cope?

  In June 1915, he was stationed a mere two hours away from me in Northern France, and towards the end of the month he wrote a hurried letter telling me he was due a weekend leave and would arrive at the station in Cuinchy on Friday afternoon. He would be staying at a hostel nearby, the name of which he jotted at the foot of the note, and he desperately hoped the letter reached me in time.

  It arrived on Saturday.

  Boxy and I had been working solidly for sixteen days; late April had seen the first use of chlorine gas, and the results were so shocking it was difficult to comprehend such a thing had been invented by human beings. We spent long days at the hospital, and longer nights collecting wounded and gassed soldiers from the dressing stations, barely snatching three or four hours sleep and eating very poorly indeed. We’d reached that point of exhaustion where you don’t quite feel you’re there at all; drifting around each other, avoiding collisions more by luck than judgement, and taking it in turns to clean and disinfect the ambulance and the two cars we’d been loaned by the Belgian Red Cross. When we received our visit from Anne and Elise, with instructions to “flipping well get out of it for the day”, we both threw guilt to the four winds and seized the chance.

  Boxy and her airman, Benjy, were unable to meet, but she had friends stationed at the nearby hospital and went off to see them. No doubt she would be called into service there, so it was not much of a holiday. I was luckier; our saviours had blown in the day I received Will’s letter, and I was able to shake off my tiredness and drive to Cuinchy in time to meet him before the cycle began for him again; front line, support, reserve, rest…then back to front line.

  Walking into the hostel, I didn’t have to ask at the desk to find him. The place was filled with uniformed men, most in high spirits, and some singing – under the influence of some dubiously obtained wine, no doubt – but over by the window there was a small group, making the kind of appreciative noises that pushed long-distant marketplaces to the front of my memory. I felt the smile on my face before the instinct had solidified into fact, and my feet had already carried me halfway across the room, but I stopped short of drawing his attention, preferring to watch him for a moment, unnoticed.

  He sat with his back to me, his dark head was bent to his work, and my fingers itched to brush gently across the back of his exposed neck. There were, perhaps, eight or nine men standing around, calling out suggestions, and the tallest of them was writing busily.

  ‘Unicorn!’ one man shouted, and the tall man rolled his eyes.

  ‘Did you ’ear that, Davies? Bleedin’ unicorn, he says! Look, mate, he might be good, but he ain’t no Leonardo daVinci!’

  ‘Two toffees for a unicorn,’ insisted the soldier.

  ‘Oh, I can manage that all right,’ Will said, and at the sound of his voice, this time for real, my entire body tightened with anticipation. I waited, curious to see how he could fulfil this lucrative commission. He worked quickly, and in less than a minute he stood up, turned to the soldier, and planted a narrow cone of paper firmly against the man’s forehead.

  ‘Unicorn,’ he said, and the soldier’s friends hooted laughter, clapping the newly created unicorn on the back, and taking over possession of the horn in order to fasten it to the man’s helmet.

  Will stepped back, smiling, and in that moment he saw me. His tall friend followed his suddenly still gaze, and he nodded to me, and squeezed Will’s shoulder.

  ‘I’ll be busy tonight, mate,’ he said softly. ‘Room’s yours.’

  The two-bed room was tiny, but clean. Will closed the door and locked it, and then his hands were at my waist, pulling me against him. Urgency gripped us both, quite suddenly, as though we were two different people from the shy, hesitant newly-weds of last year; this was the first time we had been together, alone, since that night. Romance was the farthest thing from our minds; need was everything. The narrow, single bed was chilly, the sheets felt slightly damp on my bare skin, but Will’s warmth covered me and I gave it no more thought. He gave me the most cursory of kisses, bruising kisses, the kisses of a man fighting for control, and I returned them equally savagely. I bit his shoulder as he entered me, and we both cried out at the same time, rocking together, pulsing heat between us and growing warmer with every beat. We hardly moved, either of us, just stayed locked together until the sensation of mutual release faded and our hearts regained their normal rhythm. Will eased away, as far as the small bed allowed, and we both lay there, searching for the words to express the complicated and contradictory feelings of gratitude and despair, but eventually fell into our exhausted dreams without saying anything at all.

  Sometime in the night he woke me with a press of his lips on my forehead, and, wordless, we danced again – this time with slow, sweetly drawn out touches and kisses, and when we next fell asleep it
was in a tangle of limbs, and with our heads close together on the single pillow.

  All too soon it was morning, and the end of Will’s leave. The tall soldier from yesterday met us at the station with a girl in tow, and Will introduced him as “Private Barry Glenn, Lothario and souvenir-collector extraordinaire. Does a good line in German helmets, but no lady’s honour is safe, from Reims to Nieuport.” Barry grinned good-naturedly, flicked Will’s ear, and left us to our last half an hour together.

  Looking at him across the table of the café, where we sat clutching our mugs of weak tea, I tried to pinpoint what exactly it was that made him look different now. His eyes had not lost their sparkle altogether, but it had dimmed, and his smile was still wide, beautiful and with the hint of the impish charm from before. But a hint was all it was. He looked older and leaner, and the dark stories he kept locked away had put circles beneath his eyes, but he was still unmistakeably my Lord William and I loved every new line and shadow that graced his face.

  ‘When are you expected back?’ he asked. ‘Will you be in trouble if you’re late?’

  ‘Not really, since I’m not governed by Red Cross rules. But Anne and Elise will be missed if they’re not back at their unit, and I don’t want to leave Boxy on her own for too long. I’ll begin the drive back as soon as your train leaves, it’s only a little over two hours.’

  ‘Do you have to go back?’

  The question came out of nowhere, but when I looked at him, startled, I could see it was something he’d been thinking about for some time. He stared back at me with cautious hope, as if the very suddenness of the plea might surprise me into giving the answer he wanted.

  I shook my head. ‘You know I must.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said quickly, and gave me a little smile. ‘But you can’t blame me for trying.’

  ‘It’s safe there,’ I insisted. ‘Safer than you’d think. We’re very well looked after, and as soon as we hear any sign of shells we can get down into the cellar. It’s quite exciting sometimes –’

 

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