Flora's War

by Pamela Rushby

  We walked out and got into our motorcars.

  Down at the train we thought we’d emptied, we could see something was happening. We all pulled over to see. The ambulances had returned and stretchers were being carried out of the train. Unlike earlier there was no hurry, no urgency, and no doctors or nurses in attendance. The men on the stretchers were covered completely, a sheet or blanket pulled right up over their heads.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh. They’re –’

  ‘I’m afraid they are,’ said Frank. ‘They must have died on the way here.’

  ‘But so many of them!’ said Gwen.

  If so many had died on the train, I thought, how many had died at Gallipoli itself? How many as they were carried down to the Gallipoli beaches? How many on the ships bringing them to Alexandria? I didn’t think I wanted to know the answers to those questions.

  We each drove our motorcars back to the city. Mr Bilal and Mrs Maryam opened the door, looked at me in dismay and fussed over me like a pair of nannies. A bath was drawn, my dirty and stained clothes spirited away, tea was made, and tiny delectable snacks were offered to tempt me to eat. Then I fell into bed.

  Chapter 13

  I slept so deeply I felt I’d only been asleep for a short time when I was disturbed by knocking at my door. Why am I being woken in the middle of the night? I grumbled to myself. But when I opened my eyes it was well into morning. Mrs Maryam had a message: could I go back to the hospital as soon as possible?

  My stomach lurched. I was very afraid it meant another train of wounded. You can do it, I told myself, you’ve done it once and at least this time you know what to expect. I dressed as quickly as I could, trying not to think about the things I’d seen yesterday. I told Fa where I was going, Mrs Maryam gave me some flatbread sandwiches and I drove to the hospital.

  And there was no train there. I closed my eyes for a second in relief. So why was I needed?

  ‘We’re to drive patients to other hospitals,’ Frank told me. I’d found him and Gwen with other drivers, waiting at the hospital steps. The steps, I noticed, were still dirty and bloodstained; everyone must be too busy to bother cleaning them.

  The entrance hall had been packed with wounded soldiers yesterday. Today it was empty.

  Florence, the tiny nurse who’d been at the disastrous picnic at the Sphinx, gave each driver a list of patients requiring transport to other hospitals. ‘We’re keeping the most serious cases here,’ she explained, giving Frank, Gwen and me a smile. ‘The patients who are only lightly wounded are being sent to other hospitals, or to convalescent homes.’ She didn’t add, ‘So we have room here for more trainloads of wounded’, but we all knew that was what she meant.

  My soldiers were in the main hall. It had been a huge, splendid, open space. It was two storeys high with a wide balcony running all around at the first storey level, reached by a grand staircase. There were columns and arches, magnificently painted in a fantasy, Arabian Nights style. There had been a lounge where settees and armchairs were arranged around coffee tables. Dances and formal receptions had been held here. The hall wasn’t magical anymore. Now it held row after row of narrow, iron-framed hospital beds, separated from each other only by a low, open-fronted cupboard that held each soldier’s belongings. So many beds!

  Jean, another nurse I got to know, came to meet me. We smiled at each other. ‘How many wounded were admitted here yesterday?’ I asked her.

  ‘Hundreds,’ Jean said. ‘At one stage we were admitting two hundred every hour.’

  ‘But where have you put them all?’

  She gestured to the packed hall. ‘As you see. The dining room in the rotunda is like this, too. The wards upstairs are smaller, of course, but even they have more beds in each one than we’d ever have reckoned could fit.’ She beckoned to three soldiers. ‘Now, here’s your first lot, Flora. This is Albert and Fred and Martin. Can you drive them to the Sporting Club, please?’

  I looked at her, confused. I knew these soldiers were considered lightly wounded, and certainly they were all on their feet and moving, but surely they weren’t ready for the Sporting Club!

  Jean laughed at me. ‘The pavilion at the Sporting Club’s been turned into a hospital,’ she said. ‘They’re not going off to play tennis! When you’ve delivered these fellows, there’ll be more waiting.’

  I smiled at the soldiers. ‘Please follow me to my motorcar,’ I said, and led the way. They looked far different from the dirty, untended boys I’d driven from the train to the hospital the day before. Each clutched a parcel with a red cross printed on the wrapping. ‘You look as if you’re feeling a lot better than you did yesterday,’ I said.

  They agreed, enthusiastically. ‘The nurses are angels!’ Albert said. ‘They got us washed and our bandages changed in no time.’

  ‘Clean pyjamas,’ sighed Fred. ‘Clean socks. Handkerchiefs. Slippers!’

  ‘Some decent food,’ said Martin. ‘Proper tea.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Funny how little it takes to make you happy.’

  ‘And what’s in the parcels you’re carrying?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re comfort parcels from the Red Cross. They have soap and toothpaste, chocolate and cigarettes, writing paper – things like that.’ Albert closed his eyes and sighed. ‘After Gallipoli, I think I’ve died and gone to heaven.’

  There was a short silence and Fred and Martin looked at him. ‘Um, sorry, bad choice of words,’ Albert said, abashed. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  ‘Is it very bad there?’ I said. ‘We hear so many stories, you don’t know what to believe.’

  The soldiers looked at each other again. ‘Yes. It’s bad.’ The answer was so short, I knew it was far worse than any of the accounts I’d heard.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I have friends there.’

  At once Albert tried to reassure me, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad!’

  ‘I’m sure your friends are all right!’ said Fred.

  ‘We were just – well, unlucky, weren’t we, boys?’ said Martin.

  ‘Yeah. Got careless, like,’ Albert agreed.

  I knew there were some who were far, far more unlucky. I’d seen them yesterday. But I didn’t want to upset these boys by questioning them further, and we’d arrived at the Sporting Club.

  The hospital had been set up in a large, open-sided pavilion surrounded by flowering bougainvillea that overlooked the green sports fields. From the motorcar, I could see rows of narrow cane beds in the pavilion. A breeze blew gently through, ruffling the crisp white sheets on the beds. The soldiers climbed out of the car and stared, entranced.

  ‘Will you look at that!’ Martin said.

  ‘Only thing that’d make it better would be a beer!’ sighed Fred.

  A nurse, Emily, came to meet us and grinned at them. ‘Well, you won’t be getting any of that! Cup of tea do you?’ She turned to me. ‘Thanks, Flora. We’ll get them comfortable now.’

  I nodded, waved to the soldiers and headed back to the hospital. Gwen and Frank had just arrived and we walked back up the steps together.

  ‘You’ll never guess where I’ve just taken soldiers!’ Gwen said. ‘Would you believe, Luna Park! All the buildings have been converted into a hospital. They’ve set up beds in the skating rink and the skeleton house, the Ferris wheel building, the bandstand – just everywhere. Even the ticket office is an operating theatre now.’

  I tried to imagine hospital beds in a skeleton house, and failed.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I asked Frank. ‘Right out to Helouan, there’s a convalescent hospital there,’ said Frank. ‘The army must be taking over every building they can lay their hands on. It doesn’t look good, does it?’

  ‘So many wounded already,’ I said. ‘So many hospitals. How much worse than this can it get?’

  Frank shook his head.

  In the next ten days, sixteen thousand wounded flooded into Cairo from the Dardanelles. Every hospital was bursting at the seams. Every building that could be used as some sort of hospital w
as taken over. Cane beds were hastily thrown together all over Cairo to stock the new hospitals.

  Doctors and nurses worked to exhaustion.

  ‘We’re working twelve hours at a stretch,’ Emily told me when I delivered some patients to the Sporting Club. ‘We’re snatching a few hours sleep and going straight back on duty.’

  Frankly, she looked like it. Her face was white and strained and I was sure she had lost weight. It was now really hot, and it would only get hotter as full summer arrived. ‘I wish we had cooler uniforms,’ Emily said, her sleeves rolled up as far as they would go. ‘I’m sweating all day. Look, my whole back’s soaked.’

  Every day I drove Fa to the excavation – nothing was going to stop his work there – then I worked with him as I waited in readiness to be contacted if the motorcar was needed. If it was a day of ferrying soldiers between hospitals, I breathed a vast sigh of relief. If it was a day, or night, when a train of wounded arrived, I set my teeth and got on with it.

  Even though I knew what to expect now: the smell, the awful wounds, the cries, the groans, it never, never, got easier. Any of the soldiers, each caught in his own web of pain – bleeding, sometimes dying – could be one of my friends. I hadn’t seen any boys I knew arrive wounded – not yet – but I knew nurses who had. Many had friends, brothers, cousins at the Dardanelles. I heard from Emily of one wounded boy who was desperate to contact a nurse called Sarah Turnbull, the girl Gwen had teased Frank about flirting with all those months ago. ‘And he chose that exact nurse – you know Sarah, Flora – to ask where he could find Nurse Turnbull to tell her how her brother died.’ Emily’s eyes were full of tears. ‘And Sarah just stayed on duty. Can you believe it?’

  Whenever they had a few hours off, I urged the nurses to come to the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith, just to get away from the hospitals for a bit. There were no parties or dancing on the roof terrace now. We sat, talking a little, trying to rest, while Mr Bilal and Mrs Maryam fussed over us with fragrant mint and lemon-flavoured tea and tiny honey cakes.

  ‘It feels good to sit down,’ Florence said.

  Emily and Jean nodded.

  I stood by the doorway. The days were so unbelievably hectic and demanding it should have felt good to sit and rest. But I simply couldn’t. I was on edge, nerves fluttering and jangling all the time, anticipating the next call to the trains.

  ‘How is it at the hospital?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re improvising all the time, we don’t have all the equipment we need,’ said Emily wearily. ‘We’re boiling up water in old kerosene tins to sterilise instruments.’

  ‘You get a bit sick and silly from lack of sleep,’ said Jean. ‘When I do get to sleep I have queer, awful dreams. If I’m on nights, it’s too hot to sleep during the day so I get even more tired.’

  I refilled her cup from the teapot.

  ‘I look at the face of every boy who comes in,’ said Florence. ‘Wondering if the next one I see will be a friend or relation. It’s dreadful to say, I know, but sometimes I hope the next boy will be someone I know, just so he’ll be out of the fighting. Just wounded a little bit, of course, not badly! Because even if he’s wounded, he’ll be safe now.’

  We all looked at her.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Florence. ‘Some cases really affect me. This nice boy arrived a few weeks ago, his name is – was – Tom. And he was getting better. He’d lost a foot, but he was cheerful. Then he got an infection, and they had to amputate higher up. It didn’t work and he got worse and worse.’ She pressed her lips together for a moment. ‘He talked about his home and his sisters and brother, and how happy they’d been. He knew it wasn’t going well, and he asked me to help him to write a letter to his mother. He didn’t want a word about how sick he was. But he knew, and he asked if I’d add a few words to the letter before I sent it. “Just to let my mum know what happened,” he said. Then last night, he died.’

  Florence was crying. We were all crying.

  ‘Some of mine,’ sniffed Jean, ‘I don’t know if they’ll ever get better either.’

  We knew she didn’t mean they’d die. Jean didn’t talk much about the ward she was currently working on. Some of the patients were wounded, we knew, but they had other problems, and they weren’t ones you could see. Her boys were referred to as lunatics – the mental cases.

  It had become a tradition among the nurses to peer into the dark water of the Well of Bats before they left. That night, they all performed the ritual – Emily, Jean, Florence. No one ever said what they saw, if they saw anything.

  I never bothered to look into the water. After all, I had no absent sweetheart.

  What I did have, however, was mail. I began to receive letters from the Dardanelles. I stared at the first few, turning them over in my hands, confused. I didn’t remember these names. In the turmoil of the past two weeks I’d almost forgotten that I’d promised to write to soldiers who were going away. But the soldiers hadn’t forgotten. The letters came and came, several every day. I had to write back, I’d said I would, and I couldn’t disappoint the boys. But it was so hard, at the end of a long, hot, dusty day’s driving, to sit down and take out pen and paper.

  One of the first I opened was from Alex Hendy. It was short and contained little news about the war. I supposed the censor would have cut that out, if Alex had included it. The letter said he was well and safe, and so were Ted and Stan.

  They’re writing to you too, Alex wrote. Things are quiet here at the moment, so we plan to go down to the beach this afternoon and have a good wash in the sea. That will be a treat as water is short here and we have to save it to make tea.

  I wrote that when Alex returned, I’d make him all the cups of tea he could drink at the rest and recreation centre.

  Then I opened another letter, and another. These were from soldiers I didn’t know as well as Alex. What on earth was I going to write to them? I knew I had to make the letters different. It wouldn’t do if I wrote exactly the same letter to Alex and then to Ted and Stan. I had to force myself to push the pen along, writing several letters every night. Dear Tom, Dear Bill, Dear Bob, Dear Albert, yes, of course I remember meeting you at the rest and recreation centre in the Ezbekieh Gardens …

  I wrote six letters the first night and left the others, planning to reply the next day. But the next day, another dozen letters arrived. Over the next few days, my desk piled up with letters and they were dropping onto the floor. I couldn’t possibly write to all these boys! But I knew I had to.

  I didn’t remember most of them of course, but the boys wouldn’t know that. Dear Jim, Dear Fred, Dear George, Dear Charlie …

  From the letters, I learned a little about the conditions in the Dardanelles. I was struck by the image of our boys crouching in the trenches, barely able to put their heads up.

  Gwen was receiving letters as well, and we compared the news they contained.

  ‘They’re being fired on constantly,’ I said.

  ‘The food’s bad and boring, and they’re plagued by flies and lice,’ said Gwen.

  ‘The heat’s unbearable,’ I said.

  But we weren’t getting this information from the soldiers’ complaints, never that. It was from their jokes.

  ‘This one says they’re having competitions to see who has the most flies drowning in their tea,’ I said.

  ‘They take bets on whether the flies can manage to drink a whole mug of tea before a man can lift it to his lips,’ Gwen read out.

  ‘This one’s made a pet of a rat and he’s training it to salute the sergeant,’ I said.

  And then, a letter came and I did know the name, only too well. A letter from Jay.

  His letter was very much like the others. He made light of the conditions, he talked about how wonderful his men were, how they got on with the job, didn’t grouse. ‘I lost a few in the first attack,’ his letter said. ‘I don’t know yet where they are, I trust they made it safely to a hospital. I’d ask you to enquire about them, but they may be on Lemnos or
in a hospital in Alexandria, so I won’t waste your time, which I’m sure is limited. Are you still working hard on the excavation?’

  The excavation? I hadn’t been there for weeks. The work would be piling up, but I was very busy elsewhere. Jay must have no conception of what was happening in Cairo. His letter ended, ‘I am thinking of you all the time, Flora. It is what gets me through the days here. I hope you are thinking of me, too, and thinking of something else, which of course we will talk about when I come back. I am, yours very truly –’ And, as it had been on the note he sent before he went away, the ‘very truly’ was heavily underlined.

  Oh dear. It didn’t sound as if he was forgetting about becoming engaged. I had to reply, though. I dipped my pen in the ink again and took a fresh sheet of paper. Dear Jay …

  …

  Lydia came back to Cairo on leave for a few days. Gwen and I went to see her at the nurses’ home when she arrived and I was appalled at her appearance. She’d was very thin, her face was gaunt and she looked exhausted.

  ‘It’s so good to see you.’ I hugged her gently. I felt that if I hugged her heartily, as I wanted to, she might snap right in two. ‘Where have you been? Lemnos?’

  ‘No, I’ve been working on a hospital ship off Gallipoli, collecting wounded from the beaches and transporting them, sometimes to Lemnos, other times to Alexandria,’ she replied. ‘Look, I’m not being rude, but I just want to sleep. Can I come and see you in a day or so?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Lydia came to the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith two days later. I sent a message to Gwen and she joined us on the roof.

  ‘Tell us what you’ve been doing,’ I demanded.

  Lydia gratefully took a glass of iced lime juice from Mr Bilal. ‘Working,’ she said. ‘Oh, have we been working! Thirty-six hours at a stretch, sometimes, snatching an hour or two of sleep, and feeling guilty about it because there’s some boy not being cared for while you sleep.’