Connie’s Courage

by Groves, Annie

  ‘No doubt Mr Clegg will give you the news himself when he does his round.’

  She was about to walk away when the Sergeant whispered urgently to her, ‘'Ere Sister, there’s sommat I wanted ter tell yer!’

  Frowning a little, Connie moved closer to his bed.

  ‘It’s about old Jinxy,’ he told her in a confidential whisper, nodding his head in the direction of Jinx who, since Connie’s quiet revelation to him, he had begun to treat far more kindly. ‘I don’t like to tell tales outta school like, especially not where there’s an officer involved, but old Jinxy, well I feels I owes him one like, and knowing as how you ‘ave a soft spot for him …’ He paused and looked uncomfortable.

  ‘It’s the Captain you see, Sister … Yer gets men like ‘im in the Army. All right if yer stands up ter ‘em like, but they can be buggers – if you’ll excuse me language – if yer lets ‘em.’

  Connie’s whole body had gone bone cold. ‘What is it you are trying to say, Sergeant?’ she pressed him.

  ‘Well, it’s old Jinxy, Sister. Captain doesn’t like ‘im and he’s stirred up one or two of the lads like, as well. Of course, whilst I’ve bin here I’ve kept me peepers on wot’s goin’ on like, and I’ve bin able to put ‘em right about Jinx – tried ter tell the Captain as well but he weren’t having it – and wi’ me only being a Sergeant and ‘im Captain … Aye, a real nasty piece o’ work he is and no mistake! Jinxy is scared shi … er, sick of him and, all and well, I just thought I’d give yer a warning like, Sister.’

  ‘I ll remember what you ve said, Sergeant, Connie thanked him sombrely. It made her feel guilty that she hadn’t realised for herself that the Captain might have had some part in Jinx’s recent deterioration.

  ‘Well, Sister, it’s not my place to interfere, but he’s not really a bad sort old Jinxy like – sorta got a bit fond o’ him mesel as it ‘appens, although Gawd knows what’s goin to happen to him when he leaves here.

  ‘I don’t know that either, Sergeant, Connie answered truthfully, as she glanced toward the darkening sky outside the ward windows.

  Mavis had written to invite her to join them for her Christmas off-duty days, adding excitedly that they were hoping that Rosa would return from her cousin’s in time to spend Christmas with them, prior to her lying-in.

  ‘For, after all, Connie, Harry’s baby is far more closely related to our family than it is to Rosa’s cousin s. We all grieve so for Harry, Connie, but Mother more so than any of us naturally.

  More so than her? In a different way, perhaps, but not more so, Connie thought painfully. She already knew that she would not accept Mavis’s invitation and go to New Brighton. There would be too many painful memories there for her, and some even more painful reminders of Harry’s love for someone else. And apart from that, she suspected that Mavis’s invitation was borne more of duty than because she wanted to see her.

  They had been exchanging letters it was true, but Mavis’s had been full of the coming baby, and Connie had replied almost tersely to them, unable to express on paper how she was feeling, and how much she missed the closeness they had once shared. And she did miss it, and Mavis herself, most painfully.

  In her most recent letter, Mavis had expressed her anxious concern for Rosa so strongly that Connie had felt a physical stab of misery. To make matters worse, Mavis had only made the most cursory enquiry into Connie’s own happiness, leaving Connie feeling as though she didn’t matter at all.

  Stubbornly determined not to reveal how hurt she was, she had deliberately written back to Mavis describing her own life and work as though she was in the best of spirits, and even implying that she was too busy with her life without Mavis to have time to visit New Brighton over Christmas.

  Mavis had taken longer than normal to write back to her, and she had not once pressed Connie to change her mind and visit over Christmas. Connie had shed more tears than she wanted to admit over that letter, before screwing it up and pushing it into the pocket of her cape.

  Surely if Mavis had thought anything of her at all, she would have made some push to persuade her to go to New Brighton, Connie had thought forlornly, forgetting that the tone of her own correspondence might have hurt Mavis as much as Mavis’s had hurt her.

  At least she would be needed on her ward over Christmas, she tried to comfort herself. Her patients did not stop needing her just because it was Christmas.

  She had come to accept that, from now on, the hospital must be her home and her security, and that her life would be spent here, and, as she already knew, her situation could have been much worse.

  The Captain’s visitors had gone. Reluctantly she made her way back to his room. The door was closed. How were her nurses supposed to keep a check on him on their way up and down the ward with a closed door? Frowning she opened it, and then froze. The Captain had one arm around the waist of the bold-eyed probationer who reminded Connie so much of her old self, whilst his free hand was cupping the girl’s breast.

  ‘Ooh, go on, you are a one you are, Captain, and no mistake. You re aving me on. That’s no way to take a pulse … Connie heard her giggling.

  ‘Maybe not, but it is a sure fire way to get a good strong pulse going in any man who isn’t a corpse, Connie heard him replying thickly. ‘Why don’t you feel for yourself if you don’t believe me.

  For a second Connie was tempted to slip back out of the room and to pretend she had neither seen nor heard what was going on – the probationer was plainly both encouraging and enjoying the Captain’s attentions. And besides she herself …

  She herself was what? Afraid of interfering? Afraid of the Captain?

  This was her ward, Connie reminded herself, and its standards and reputation, and those of the nurses who worked on it, were her responsibility. Would Matron – the yardstick by whom she now measured all her working actions – have walked away?

  She took a deep breath and said coldly, ‘Nurse, go back to your duties immediately.’

  Hot-faced the probationer gave a shocked gasp and immediately started to pull away from the Captain.

  ‘No stay Sukey!’ he commanded the probationer, giving Connie a glittering look of malice, as he fastened his hand around the girl’s wrist.

  The probationer had stopped giggling, but the look she gave Connie was one of mingled excitement and rebellion.

  ‘Still here Sister? Of course, if you want to join us …’

  The probationer started giggling again. The small room suddenly felt icy cold to Connie and filled with danger. She wanted to turn and flee but she knew she had to re-assert her authority.

  Thankfully the door was still open. Ignoring the Captain’s comment, she turned her head and looked into the corridor.

  ‘Mr Clegg is doing his round, Captain. I shall leave it to your own judgement as to whether or not you wish him to observe your behaviour. I

  understand your father is most anxious to know when your fiancée may commence preparations for your marriage.

  The probationer had stopped looking smug, and was now looking angrily sulky. Mutinously she pulled away from the Captain who released her without a word.

  Connie felt sick as she saw the malevolence of the look he was giving her.

  Ignoring it, she addressed the probationer telling her coldly, ‘I shall wish to see you before you go off duty.

  EIGHTEEN

  There was darkness, and movement and pain, so much pain, too much pain. It gripped and mauled him in fire-red, savagely sharp teeth. Sounds punctured the darkness, explosive and urgent, then voices uttering words that were unfamiliar to him, but which his brain and body registered with panic and fear.

  He tried to move and could not do so, and the panic grew and changed and became a dread not of others, but of and for himself. He began to struggle but the pain seized him, dragging him bodily into the nothingness that was its hot, dark lair.

  Sometimes the darkness was splintered by explosive noise he struggled to recognise, knowing only that it made him sweat with a
nxiety. Sometimes he could smell blood and fear and death.

  There were the voices again speaking in an alien tongue. Harsh guttural words which he struggled to understand. And then there was movement; a cruelly rough jolting that made him cry out, but one split second before he did so, he suddenly recognised what he had not previously known. The voices he could hear were German voices, the hands he was in were German hands. He was a prisoner of war.

  Now a different panic clawed at him, and the pain inside his head was the pain of sick fear. There had been the most gruesome of stories told amongst his fellow soldiers. Stories of men done cruelly to death whilst they lay fallen and helpless, instead of being treated as a prisoner of war should be treated.

  A sudden movement sent pain cascading through his whole body and swept him back into the darkness.

  When he came round, he realised that he was strapped to a stretcher, lying on the floor of a train carriage surrounded by other injured men. A soldier in a German uniform walked up and down the narrow space between them, and Harry shrank back instinctively as the man’s long shadow touched his own body. He was a prisoner of war being taken to wherever it was he was to be imprisoned!

  He tried to turn his head, and had to bite back a scream as pain tore at his nerve endings.

  The man on the next stretcher had a bandaged stump where his arm should have been, and Harry could see and smell the blood seeping steadily through the bandage. He looked in vain for a nurse, aware that the other man needed help but could see none.

  The journey seemed to last for ever, through hot sweltering days and fever-soaked nights. The train stopped and stretchers were removed, but never his own. Only his pain and the sound of German voices, the German hands pulling at him – removing bandages, replacing them as pain exploded inside him and he escaped into unconsciousness – remained constants. He was too weak to do anything other than submit to whatever was inflicted on him, but whilst the pain was great there was no deliberate cruelty, he acknowledged.

  Through that pain he thought longingly of home and his family, but most of all he thought of Connie. If he closed his eyes he could hear her quick, warm voice, and almost feel surely the calm coolness of her hands on his fevered skin. Surely it couldn’t be a sin to think of her now, like this, when everything else was gone from him. Surely lying here alone in his pain-filled returns to consciousness, he had the right to let his thoughts embrace her. Connie. Connie. She would never know now just how much he had loved her!

  The train stopped. He could feel his stretcher being lifted. So he had arrived at his prison! Pain skewered him and he sank back into the darkness.

  A curiously bright light streamed in through the small window, and Harry immediately recognised its significance. Snow!

  Snow. He could only remember heat. Too much heat. How could there now be snow? Panic flared inside him as his confused brain tried to make sense of vague, unconnected, and surely illogical, memories. He tried to lever himself up so that he could look out of the window and confirm his suspicions, but his body was too weak.

  A tall man came into the room, not a soldier –

  he wasn’t wearing a uniform – he was some kind of servant, Harry recognised.

  ‘Who are you?’ Harry demanded. ‘Where am I?

  What …’

  The man shook his head, his eyes widening as he saw that Harry was struggling to sit up. Putting down the tray of food he had been carrying, he told Harry forcefully, ‘Nein … Nein,’ before hurrying back to the door.

  As he heard the key turn in the lock behind him, Harry closed his eyes. He was a prisoner of war! He had to be. But where exactly, and why was he alone and not with other prisoners? The last thing he could remember properly was no man’s land.

  He could smell the coffee the man had brought and his stomach rumbled. The food on the tray looked simple but nourishing, a bowl of soup and some unfamiliar dark, flat-looking bread, along with several slices of sausage.

  He knew he must have been wounded – he had sharp memories of pain, and a long train journey, and before that much hazier ones of low voices, of the sharp, harsh smell of carbolic and something else, sweeter and cloying … chloroform? Did that mean he had had an operation? An amputation? Quickly he checked his body, trying not to groan as pain ripped at his side and spread through his chest, forcing him to sink back against the bed.

  He still had his arms at any rate and his hands; although one of them was so heavily bandaged he could not move it properly. Why was he here alone? He could hear feet on the stairs, two sets of them and not just one. He tensed as he heard the grate of the key in the lock.

  The tall man entered, followed by someone else, a smaller, darker, man – older – who looked as though nature had designed him to be plump but whose body and face had been stripped of that plumpness by some kind of anxiety.

  ‘Ah, Herr Braun you are back with us. This time maybe for good, eh? That is good!

  Herr Braun? Why was he calling him that? There were more pressing questions he needed to have answered, Harry reminded himself as he tried again to sit up.

  Immediately the older man was at his side, shaking his head, ‘Ah, no, Herr Braun, please be so kind as not to move. Your wound is healing very well, but there were so many stitches, I had to dig deep to remove the bullet, and my sewing does not take too well to too much strain …

  Behind his steel-rimmed glasses, the man’s dark eyes reflected more anxiety than humour at his own joke, causing Harry immediately to do as he had requested.

  ‘Good. That is good. You have been a very good patient already but you still have a long way to go. You lose much blood and I was afraid …’

  ‘You are a doctor,’ Harry interrupted him, ‘and you speak English.’

  ‘A little English. I learned it whilst I was studying in Austria. But nein,’ the man denied forcefully, ‘nein, I am not a doctor, Herr Braun. I am a professor. A surgeon, I am Professor Siegfried Freidmann Brante,’ he told Harry fiercely.

  ‘And you are German, Professor?’ Harry demanded quietly. ‘You are a German surgeon, and I am a prisoner of war? Where is this place … this prison?’

  The Professor’s mouth compressed.

  ‘I am Jewish, Herr Braun, and Austrian.’ The Professor hesitated and then continued in his careful English, ‘As to the rest. Yes, you are indeed a prisoner of war, but, as to this being a prison … Indeed it is no such thing!’

  At any other time, Harry suspected that the indignation in the man’s voice would have made him smile. As it was, he felt far too anxious and apprehensive to do anything other than demand tersely, ‘I do not understand what you are saying. I am a prisoner of war, but you say that this is not a prison. Is it then a hospital?’ If so, where were the nurses, the other patients? Harry could feel his heart starting to hammer frantically, as confusion and dread gripped him.

  ‘Please let me explain … After the Battle of the Somme we have news that the soldier son of my old friend has been badly injured. We go immediately to the field hospital, his father and I, and it is then that he tells us of the Englishman who has saved his life. He is badly injured but he tells us of how this Englishman comforted him, and how he placed a bandage around his wound.

  ‘He points you out to us, for as luck would have it, there were so many wounded that you were only four beds away from him – the German soldiers and the prisoners of war had not yet been separated.

  ‘My friend, his father, who has some influence in these matters, tells the authorities that he owes your family the same compassion you have shown his son, and that it is a matter of honour that he does not leave you to die alone and uncared for.

  ‘My friend’s son, Heinrich, is very weak and has lost much blood, but his wound is not so serious as your own. The army surgeon allows us to take you since he says it is obvious that you will die. That is what he says … I say that since you will die anyway, then there is no problem in us removing you and saving them a burial. The officer-in-charge commands u
s to take you, but first he removes your papers and we see that your name is Johnny Brown.

  ‘We bring you here to the small village where both my friend and I grew up. It takes many days on the train and I fear that you will die. There is no hospital here, but I have my laboratory and, with the aid of the good nuns who nurse our sick, I am able to attend to the wounds of both my friend’s son and your own.’

  He was a prisoner of war, Harry recognised, and according to the Professor lucky to be alive. But he did not feel lucky. How could he? His family … Connie … did they know what had happened to him? His mother would worry so, and his sisters. But not Rosa, of course. She would not care if she never saw him again. And Connie, did she care? Did she think of him? … Connie … his family. Would he ever see any of them again?

  Filled with despair, Harry wrenched his pain-filled thoughts back to the Professor to hear him saying, ‘Once I have cleaned the hole left by the bullet, Heinrich’s wound will heal quickly, but your own is not so easy. The bullet had lodged deep in your chest and there was also a bayonet wound in your arm.

  ‘I had not truly dared to hope that you would survive, I was able to experiment with a new procedure, a method that is all my own – I first of all treat the gut I am to use for the stitches, and then … But my first attempt was not successful and your wound showed signs of infection. I had to remove the stitches, and clean the wound and then try again. It was very important that you did not move, and I had to sedate you in order to keep you still.

  ‘It was Gunther’s task to watch over you and make sure that you did not move too much, and that nor did your stillness give rise to bed sores.

  The tall, grey-haired man who had brought Harry his food, gave a small bow. ‘Gunther is valet to my friend Baron von Hapsburg.

  ‘Baron?

  Harry struggled to make sense of what he was being told. He tried again to sit up but the sharp pain searing his arm stopped him.