A Duty to the Dead

by Charles Todd

  Barbara, stretching, turned to me and said, “The arm hurts, I daresay. But from the looks of it, this isn’t the best place to try and set it.”

  “A little, yes,” I answered, managing a smile. “But nothing like what Eileen must be feeling.”

  “More than a little. I broke my arm when I was twelve, falling out of the apple tree while trying to emulate my brothers. As for Eileen—” She shrugged expressively.

  “Yes.” If we weren’t found soon, if she didn’t have proper care…

  “We were lucky,” Barbara went on, as if to convince herself. “We got off, and no one in this boat was terribly hurt.” She glanced down at Eileen. “Except of course for her. We’ll have to bathe her legs in seawater again soon, to keep the wounds from suppurating. It’ll have to do.”

  I knew what was in Barbara’s mind. The Irish girl might survive, but she could lose one or both legs to infection.

  Barbara was older than most of us, an experienced nursing sister before the war had begun in 1914. She had told me once that her family had been horrified when she decided to train as a nurse. Now, with the war on, it was socially acceptable to tend the wounded. But not then, not a woman of her class, not in 1905.

  With a sigh I leaned back as best I could, still trying to find comfort for my spine. The life belt was cumbersome and very little help.

  One of the nursing sisters moved a little, as uncomfortable as I was. “We will be rescued, won’t we?”

  “Of course we will,” I answered to cut off the rising fear in the girl’s voice. “There must be shipping, fishing boats—”

  Barbara added, “There are so many of us. If a ship finds one lifeboat, it will begin to search for others. If you must worry, ask yourself how we are to get home, with no Britannic to carry us to England.”

  A very good question. Her words turned all of our thoughts from rescue to passage back.

  Lucy said, “They’re chronically short of nurses. That’s in our favor.”

  “I’d rather not be sent to Egypt,” Margaret put in. “I hear hospitals there are appalling.”

  Most of us understood appalling conditions. We’d worked in them, more often than not. “Egypt is no worse than the others,” I said.

  Fishing boats out of Kea began to appear over the empty horizon. A cheer went up. After what seemed to be an eternity, the first one arrived on the scene, and then others, spread out behind it. Watching them move past us, I realized that there were people bobbing in the water, even though from our position we couldn’t see them, and the boats went first to pull them out. But there wasn’t much space on the little craft, and so they couldn’t manage taking any of us from the lifeboats.

  While we were watching them turn back for Kea, wondering how long it would be before we saw them again, HMS Scourge steamed into view and began to pick up survivors.

  Our boat wasn’t one of them. But Scourge was followed soon enough by HMS Heroic, which seemed to tower over us as she came up.

  The worst of the wounded, including Eileen, were sent by motor launch to Korissia, the port on Kea. We were taken aboard, climbing the ladder if we could or waiting our turn on the sling if not.

  From Heroic’s deck, I watched our progress in, the mountainous interior growing higher, the numerous small coves and bays giving the shore a ragged outline. What sort of medical care would we find here? I wished I had two good arms. It rankled that I was a burden. There were enough injured without me.

  “We’re forty nautical miles from Piraeus,” one of the officers said reassuringly, as if he’d read my thoughts. “You’ll be all right.”

  The doctors and nurses already landed there had begun working frantically to save the most critical cases, making use of whatever they could collect among themselves to bind up the severest wounds, some including loss of limbs. Supplies were being off-loaded from the naval vessels now, and that was a blessing. I was a little unsteady when I got to shore but went directly to do what I could to help. Then someone noticed my swollen hand, discovered it came from a broken arm, and ordered me to step aside.

  “We’ve enough nurses,” Dr. Paterson told me. “I’ll see to you directly. Meanwhile, there’s a little shade over there. And Eileen could use the company. She’s awake now. We’ve given her something for her pain, thanks to Heroic.”

  Silently cursing my uselessness, I did as I was told, pausing to speak to a pair of ratings lying on blankets and to the nurse with the bandaged head before sitting down by the Irish girl.

  Eileen recognized me and said, shakily, “Well, we’re alive. It counts, doesn’t it?”

  I smiled. “I should say it does.”

  “I made such a fool of myself, didn’t I?” she added after a moment.

  “I don’t think there’s any way we can predict how we’ll behave in an emergency until we’re there,” I answered judiciously.

  “You didn’t panic.”

  “My ancestors were battle-hardened soldiers. I wouldn’t dare panic,” I said lightly. “They’d rise up from their graves in horror.”

  That brought a flicker of amusement, quickly gone. “I’ve never been hurt before. Not like this. It’s odd, you know. To be one of the wounded.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing myself, not half an hour ago.”

  “I’m not enjoying the experience.” There was a pause. “Will I lose my legs, do you think? Dr. Menzies wouldn’t answer me when I asked.”

  “I doubt it. He’s always been the cautious one, you know.”

  “Yes.” But I didn’t think she believed me.

  One of the island women brought us cold water to drink, which was pure bliss, and then a little later gave us bread baked only that morning, with a small dish of almonds and olives. I was surprised to find I was hungry, and I dipped little chunks of bread into the water, sharing it with Eileen, insisting that she must keep up her strength, even if she didn’t feel like eating. Another woman brought us fruit, and gesturing with a smile, mimicked biting into it.

  “Will I lose my legs?” Eileen asked again, as if she’d forgotten she’d spoken to me before about it. Looking at her, I could see she was groggy, and perhaps a little feverish.

  “There will be scars,” I said, avoiding the question. “But who will see them? Here, have a little more of this orange. It will help ward off scurvy.” But she barely noticed my little joke.

  Just then I realized that Lieutenant Browning had arrived, bringing in one of the last boats, and he began to take charge almost at once. I thought he was actually speaking Greek, but it was French, and he’d found someone among the local people who could translate for him. I smiled, thinking that it was just the sort of thing he would do, find a way to cope.

  At some point in the afternoon he came over to speak to me, asking how I was.

  No one had had time to set my arm, and I said nothing about it, although he could see my purpling hand, and the swelling. By that time Eileen had been taken to someone’s home where it was cooler, and I was sitting with one of the engineers, who’d broken his leg jumping into the water, listening to his tale of another sinking before the war.

  Lieutenant Browning came back shortly with Dr. Brighton, and although I protested that it could wait, my arm was cleaned and braced and wrapped, and I was given a stronger sling. It looked suspiciously like a part of someone’s tablecloth. But there was no morphine to help, because we didn’t have enough.

  I slept for a time after that, in spite of the pain. It was beginning to put my teeth on edge. And so my sleep was restless at best and my dreams were filled with mines and explosions and fear.

  In late afternoon, two more warships came in, and I was among those taken to Piraeus. Crowds of people had come down to the grimy little port to watch us disembark, as if word had run before us like wildfire. A number of us were put up in one of the small hotels near the harbor. It was called the Athena, and the staff was very kind. Margaret shared my room and helped me undress and bathe and dress again. She also cut my meat (i
t tasted suspiciously like goat) and broke my bread. Four times I was taken to hospital for my arm to be seen and treated and rebound. I could tell no one liked the look of it, but there was no infection, and I thought perhaps the bone was beginning to knit. Pulling Eileen into the boat, I’d managed to turn a simple fracture into a compound one, and it appeared for a time that I’d need surgery. Thank God the doctors were wrong.

  Several days after our arrival, someone came to tell us the final death toll: thirty men. It was astonishing, and I put the good news into a letter home, written with my left hand and barely legible.

  The question now was how to get us back to England. And how soon.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AS IT HAPPENED, I arrived in England before my latest letter, traveling aboard a smaller hospital ship where I was given light duties, from reading to patients to sitting with the surgical cases. It was an odd experience to stand aside while other nursing sisters did what I could do with my eyes shut, but I also had the opportunity to observe techniques or oversee the skills of new probationers, who were still struggling to remember all they’d been taught.

  My father met my train at Victoria Station and tut-tutted over the bandaged arm strapped to my side under my cloak. He reached into the carriage for my valise, saying gruffly, “Well, it could have been worse, Bess. Britannic was in all the newspapers, you know, and speculation has been rife that she was torpedoed. They’ll be giving you a campaign ribbon next. Captain Bartlett is already in London, facing an inquiry.” As we made our way through the throngs of people—most of them families greeting soldiers or saying good-bye to them—he added over the uproar of the next train pulling out, “I told you to stay out of harm’s way!”

  “Yes, well,” I said dryly, “I was trying. The mine had different ideas.”

  “Damned efficient Germans.” He studied my face. “Still in pain?”

  “A little,” I lied. The train from Dover to London had been crowded, and my arm had been jostled in spite of the sling and every care.

  He tried to shield me from the bustle of people coming and going. “Let’s get you out of here, then.”

  We threaded our way through the valises and trunks and people cluttering the platform, and he handed in my ticket for me. Then we were outside, in the street, and London was cold, wet, and rainy. A far cry from the warmth of Greece. All the same, I was so thankful to be home. The journey from Athens to Malta to Dover had been long and arduous, and somehow a ship no longer seemed to be a haven. We had spotted submarines on three different occasions, but they had been after more important prey.

  My father was saying, “My dear, there’s not a hotel to be had anywhere. We’ll have to make do.”

  “There’s the flat for me. What about you?”

  “I’ll stay at my club. Tomorrow the train leaves at some ungodly hour, seven, I think. We’ll have to be down again by six-thirty.”

  “Wake me up at five-thirty, if you will. It takes me longer to dress.”

  He was trying to conceal how worried he was about me, but he said only, “Growing conceited about your looks, are you?”

  “Quite vain,” I retorted. It was an old argument. Richard Crawford, career officer in the Army that he was, had wanted a son to follow in his boots. Instead he’d got a strong-willed and determined daughter. We had battled ever since I was three.

  He waved to a cab that was waiting down the line, and it pulled up for us. “In you go. At least you haven’t a great deal of luggage to worry about. That’s a blessing. But your mother has already bethought herself of that. The house is full of female things, and she’ll expect you to make a fuss over all of them.”

  “I shall.” The war wasn’t over for me, whatever Mama might hope. I’d have to find myself new uniforms, or have them made up.

  We stopped at the flat I shared with four other nursing sisters, and I made a clumsy dash through the rain for the door. My father, at my heels, got there first and opened it for me.

  Mrs. Hennessey, in the ground-floor flat, answered my knock and was on the point of sweeping me into a copious embrace when she glimpsed the strapped arm.

  “Oh, my dear!” She hardly came to my chin, an elderly widow who had lived in this same house since her husband died in 1907. It had been converted into flats in 1914. She reached out and took my left hand. “You’ll be wanting the key, and with that arm, who’s to see to you? None of the others are here just now, you know. But I’ll be glad to come up and clean, cook a little, whatever it is you need.” She hesitated. “We heard that Britannic had gone down. Was it very bad?”

  “We were so fortunate there were no wounded onboard,” I answered. “But for the rest of us it was a little wearing. Still, we were very lucky.” A response I’d given so often it was like a parrot repeating a lesson and not a part of me. Of my experience.

  “Indeed.” Mrs. Hennessey peered into the hall. “Is that your father with you, dear?” She had strict rules about men coming up to the flat. If we wanted to say good-bye to any male over twelve and under sixty, it had to be done at the foot of the stairs, in plain view of anyone coming and going. Diana called it the cruelest blow to romance she’d ever encountered, but none of us had so far complained to Mrs. Hennessey’s face.

  “Who else?” I asked with a smile. “There are no handsome young men left in London to meet my train. He’s dragging me home tomorrow, but I’ll have to stop over tonight.”

  “Then here’s the key, my love, and if you need anything, just ask. I’ll be bringing up a bit of hot soup later. Tell your father I’ll keep an eye on you.”

  I thanked her and let my father see me up the stairs to the flat under the eaves.

  “A mercy it was a broken arm and not a broken limb,” he said as we reached the last landing. “I couldn’t have carried you another step.” He unlocked the door for me and stuck his head inside. “I’ll have dinner sent round to you. I expect the larder is empty.”

  “Mrs. Hennessey is bringing me soup. That will do. There’s tea,” I said, glancing toward what we euphemistically called our kitchen. “I’d do anything for a cup.”

  He laughed and came in, shedding his coat. He was not presently a serving officer, he’d retired in 1910, but they had found work for him at the War Office nonetheless. A tall, handsome man with iron gray hair, broad shoulders, and the obligatory crisp mustache, he wore his uniform with an air. We called him Colonel Sahib, my mother and I, behind his back.

  He made tea quickly and efficiently while I pored over the mail collected in the basket on the table.

  Three of the letters were for me, friends writing from the Front. I wasn’t in the mood to open them and set them aside. The war seemed too close as it was, the streets filled with soldiers, some of them wounded on leave, the drabness of late November feeling as if it reflected the drabness of another year of fighting. For a little while I just wanted to forget that somewhere bodies were being torn apart and people were dying. We could hear the guns as we disembarked in Dover, and I had no way of knowing whether it was our artillery or the Germans’.

  Something of what I was feeling must have shown in my face.

  My father misinterpreted it and said, “Yes, you’ve had a rough time of it, my dear. Best to think about something else for a bit. Your leave will be up soon enough.”

  “Soon enough,” I echoed, and took the cup he brought me.

  It was a souvenir from Brighton, with the Pavilion painted on it. I had never understood where Marianne, one of the nurses with whom I shared the flat, had found all of them, but the shelf in the tiny kitchen held plates from Victoria’s Jubilee, Edward VII’s coronation, and half the seaside towns in England. My father held a cup with Penzance on it.

  He raised his eyebrows as he noticed that himself. “Good God, your mother would have an apoplexy. No decent dishes?”

  “We do very well,” I answered him. “Didn’t you notice the teapot? It’s Georgian silver, I swear to you. And there are spoons in the drawer that are French, I’m
told, and the sugar bowl is certainly Royal Worcester.”

  He joined me at the table, stretching his long legs out before him. “Bess.”

  I knew what he was about to ask.

  “It wasn’t bad,” I said, trying to put a good face on all that had happened to me. “Frightening, yes, when we first hit the mine, and then when we had to abandon ship.” I didn’t mention the boats pulled into the screws. “And worrying, because there were so many who were hurt. The papers said we were lucky in the circumstances that only thirty died while over a thousand lived. But what about those thirty souls who never came home? Some are buried near Piraeus, in the British military cemetery there. Others were buried at sea or never made it out of the water at all. I think about them. On the whole, everyone behaved quite well. And it was daylight, and sunny, though the water was cold. That made an enormous difference to those who jumped.”

  “Do you want to go back to duty?”

  He was offering to pull strings and keep me at home to work with convalescents.

  “Yes, I do. I make a difference, and that matters. There are men alive now because of my skills.” And one who died in spite of them…

  I changed the subject quickly. “Do you know the Graham family? Ambrose Graham? In Kent.” Too abrupt—I’d intended to broach the subject casually. But his concern had rattled me.

  He frowned. “Graham…Rings a bell somewhere.”

  “He had something to do with racing, I think—a horse called Merlin the Wise.”

  “Ah. One of the finest steeplechasers there ever was. That Graham. He died some years ago. His first wife was a cousin of Peter Neville’s. He lost her in childbirth, and Merlin had to be put down that same year. Neville wrote me that it turned his mind.” He finished his tea and sat back. “Any particular reason why I should remember the Grahams tonight?”

  My father was nothing if not all-seeing. His subalterns and his Indian staff had walked in fear of him, believing him to have eyes everywhere. I knew better—it was a mind that never let even the tiniest detail escape his notice.