The young soldier moved behind Gabriel and with a thrust of his chin indicated that he should walk over to join the other captives sitting in the middle of the field. Gabriel did as instructed. As he arrived at the group, one of the guards surrounding the prisoners motioned to Gabriel that he should sit down. The ground was muddy and Gabriel squatted on his haunches with his arms raised, trying to keep his balance. Klaus was marched across to join the circle of prisoners and sat down on the tails of his greatcoat next to Gabriel.
‘Those bastards took my hipflask,’ he whispered.
‘I think that’s the least of our problems, Klaus.’
’I can’t believe this is happening, Captain.’
‘How far did you manage to get?’
‘I was just leaving the field when I collided this group of Serbs. They took my horse and ordered me back into the field. I think they must be an advance patrol, because in the distance I could see a large column of enemy coming towards us. I couldn’t see any sign of our own soldiers. It looks like a disaster, Captain. They must have completely overrun all our forward positions.’
‘Any sign of Flieger or anybody else from the forward dressing station?’
‘No, all I could see was Serbs.’
‘No talking!’ one of the guards shouted in German, glowering at Klaus, who cast his eyes down submissively.
Gabriel shifted uncomfortably as he observed the Serbian captors surrounding them. The guards were grinning confidently as they looked down at their prisoners, and a feeling of utter hopelessness grew in Gabriel’s chest and throat; for the Serbs to have captured his hospital so easily, told him that the entire Austrian front must have collapsed during the night. The magnitude of this insight was so shocking, so humiliating, that he was almost incapacitated with frustration, angry that incompetent leadership had resulted in this catastrophe. After several minutes of squatting in the mud, the feeling of helplessness became so unbearable that he decided he must do something.
He slowly began to stand; Klaus’s eyes widened as he watched him. ‘Captain, what are you doing?’ he hissed. ‘They’ll shoot you if you’re not careful!’
Gabriel – ignoring him – was now standing completely upright, his arms still above his head. Two of the guards saw him and suddenly unslung their rifles. ‘Hirurga,’ Gabriel shouted. He had picked up a few basic Serbian phrases and words, and the Serbian for ‘surgeon’ was one of them.
Now all the guards had their rifles raised and pointed at Gabriel’s chest. His heart was pounding furiously and he knew he was taking a chance, but it was better than the feeling of vulnerability he had squatting on the ground.
‘Hirurga,’ he shouted again and then – hands still raised – he lifted an index finger and bent his wrist to point at the Red Cross armband on his greatcoat.
An irate-looking Serbian lieutenant, hand on the butt of his holstered revolver, walked through the circle of guards.
‘You are prisoner of Serbian army,’ he said angrily in pidgin German. ‘You must sit down, obey orders, or will be shot.’
‘I am a surgeon,’ Gabriel replied in German. ‘There are Serbian and Austrian wounded in my tents.’
‘Serbian?’ The officer frowned and then turned to look at the hospital tents. ‘Serbian soldiers in there?’
‘Yes, Lieutenant. Under the Geneva Convention, medical staff should not be made prisoner—’
‘Psshht.’ The Serbian lieutenant held his index finger to his lips and Gabriel stopped talking as the officer thought for a moment. ‘Who chief here?’ he asked.
‘I am the senior surgeon,’ Gabriel replied. The officer turned to speak to two of the guards standing nearby, who stepped towards Gabriel. The lieutenant spoke again.
‘You will follow. Bring one other.’
Gabriel looked down at Klaus, who nodded and then stood. The lieutenant motioned that they should lower their hands: with relief Gabriel obeyed, feeling the blood rush back to his fingertips. With Klaus beside him, Gabriel followed the officer towards the tents; the two guards trailed behind. The lieutenant lifted the entrance flap to the recovery tent and ducked inside, and Gabriel and the others followed him in. Inside the tent the officer quickly scanned the rows of cots and lines of bandaged men, then barked a few words of Serbian.
Three soldiers slowly raised their hands and the lieutenant walked over to the nearest. The man – a huge, bushy bearded Chetnik called Luka, wearing an eye-patch over his left eye – had arrived at the aid station four days earlier, blinded by grenade fragments from his own, very-short-fused, Serbian grenade. Angry at being taken prisoner, the surly guerrilla fighter had initially refused treatment from the Austrian medical staff. But eventually he had let Gabriel examine him: after anaesthetising the Chetnik’s eyes with cocaine and using a magnifying glass and tweezers, Gabriel had managed to pick out several fragments of grenade casing imbedded in the man’s cornea. Klaus had regularly irrigated his eyes with saline, and within a few days his sight had returned – completely in his right eye and partially in his left – for which the Chetnik appeared very grateful.
With his curly black beard and eye-patch the grinning Serb resembled a medieval pirate, and Gabriel watched anxiously as he spoke with the lieutenant. But the Serbian officer seemed satisfied and after a moment he walked back to Gabriel.
‘He says you make good care,’ the lieutenant said to Gabriel. ‘But all Serbian patients will be transferred to military hospital in Kragujevac. Maybe is today, maybe is tomorrow. Until they go, you will look after, will make good care.’ He pointed at Gabriel and Klaus. ‘You two will look after everybody here.’
‘I need the other doctors and orderlies—’ Gabriel began to say, but the lieutenant shook his head, his hand moving assertively to the handle of his revolver.
‘No. Just you two,’ he repeated and then, leaving no time for further discussion, turned to speak to the two guards before leaving the tent.
The guards were clearly under instructions to watch Gabriel carefully. They sat on upturned wooden supply boxes just inside the entrance-flap to the tent, watching as Gabriel and Klaus began the post-op round of the casualties. Most of the Austrian casualties were terrified at the double uncertainty of their predicament – of being wounded, and of being taken prisoner by a bitter foe – and the only happy faces were those of the three Serbian patients. Luka grinned as Gabriel peeled away the dressings on his arms and then looked underneath the eye patch, noting with a degree of professional pride that all the wounds were healing without infection. He told Luka – using a mixture of pidgin German and Serbian – that in time the sight in his left eye might improve further, but that he should wear the eye patch for the next few weeks. Luka extended his hand and even though the Chetnik’s arm had several wounds in it, Gabriel’s hand was crushed from the strength of the other man’s grip.
‘Good luck, Luka. Stay out of trouble,’ Gabriel said in German.
‘I no need luck,’ Luka deep voice boomed back at him. ‘You need luck, Hirurga: Austria finished now.’ He drew a finger across his neck in a throat-cutting gesture and then laughed, a low-pitched rumble from his chest, white teeth gleaming through the thick tangle of his beard.
The Austrian soldiers were more difficult to comfort, although Gabriel did his best to assure them he would do everything in his power to help. For the next few hours he and Klaus continued their round, inspecting wounds, removing dirty dressings, putting on new bandages and providing the injured with what little food and water was available.
As he worked, Gabriel could hear increasingly frenetic activity through the canvas of the tent: the tramp of feet on wet earth, the clank of buckles and buttons on field webbing and straps, the noises and voices of growing numbers of men. In spite of the wood-burning brazier in the tent it grew steadily colder as the morning progressed, and, looking upwards, Gabriel could see a gently spreading shadow on the sagging canvas roof as snow settled onto the tent. By early afternoon they had run out of water, so Gabriel picked up
a small steel basin and empty water can and walked over to the guards at the entrance-flap. Both soldiers stood as he approached, warily gripping their rifles tighter as Gabriel tipped the basin upside down to show it was empty. He put the basin on the ground and pointed outside the tent, and then waggled his fingers to mime snow falling. The two guards looked at each other for a moment; then one of them stood and opened the entrance-flap, indicating that Gabriel should follow him outside.
After being inside the tent all day, the brightness of the freshly fallen snow – even in the low December light – was dazzling, and Gabriel was forced to shield his eyes from the glare. Although it had already stopped snowing, several centimetres lay on the ground, and, squinting against the brightness, Gabriel was astonished to see that the field was now full of Austrian prisoners, either huddled under the awnings of the stables, or standing in groups in the central part of the field. Pairs of Serbian guards patrolled the periphery of the paddock just inside the hedgerow, their rifles pointed inwards as they walked. In the cold air, clouds of steam rose from the prisoners’ mouths as they clustered together for warmth, like penguins in an arctic storm. Gabriel guessed there must now be three or four hundred men standing in the paddock, with a further unknown number inside the stables.
The guard appeared impatient, jabbing the rifle barrel into the small of Gabriel’s back. Gabriel walked forward and chose an area where the ground looked undisturbed. He bent to scoop handfuls of clean snow into the steel bowl, compressing it until it was full of compacted ice. As he did this he discreetly scanned the men standing in the centre of the field: amongst the uniformly grey and blue coats he quickly spotted a flash of red; a Red Cross armband. The man looked towards Gabriel at the same time and began to wave his arms, and as Gabriel squinted back at him he realised with relief that it was Flieger.
Gabriel stood and turned to the guard, pointing first at his own Red Cross armband and then at Flieger, who was walking quickly towards him. The guard looked uneasy as Flieger approached but allowed him to walk up to Gabriel. Flieger’s nose was red from the cold and his lips and ear lobes were blue, but he appeared otherwise unharmed.
‘Thank goodness you’re alright, Peter,’ Gabriel said. ‘What’s happened?’
Flieger’s breath was a cloud of white in the freezing air. ‘Our frontline troops ran out of ammunition and entire regiments surrendered en masse. It’s a disaster.’
Gabriel heard the guard stamp his feet and turned to see him gesture with his rifle that Gabriel should pick the snow-filled basin up. Gabriel lifted the basin, but before starting back to the tent he turned to Flieger again.
‘Find the senior-ranking Austrian officer and ask him to talk to the Serbian commander. It looks as though they are turning this field into a holding camp and we’ll need to dig latrines and find shelter for the men.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘In this weather and with little food or shelter, we can expect a lot of medical problems.’
Flieger nodded and Gabriel started back towards the recovery tent. But he stopped just before the entrance flap and looked back to see Flieger, a forlorn figure, still standing on his own, hugging himself for warmth. And then Gabriel remembered: today was 4 December, the Austrian feast of St Nicklaus. Back in Sarajevo, Flieger’s children would be writing wish lists for their Christmas presents. This year, thought Gabriel, Christmas would be unlike anything they had experienced before.
12. London to Kragujevac, December 1914–February 1915
Salonika port: the gateway to the Balkans.
Elspeth stood with twenty other women on the harbour front, her suitcase by her side, a strong smell of fish and sea-salt in the air, watching the ten remaining VADs rowed ashore. The oarsmen – good-looking, sun-tanned Greek boys with well-muscled forearms – skilfully steered the rowing skiffs through the crowded waters and deposited the VADs and their baggage on the harbour wall. While the boats were unloaded, Elspeth looked back out to sea, at the Nile – the French passenger ship they had just arrived in – which was anchored nearby. Beyond the Nile was a line of dirty black colliers with green electric lights slung between their funnels, and beyond them a white hospital ship with a red cross on its flanks.
‘Why is everybody looking at us?’ someone asked, and Elspeth turned to Dr Frances Wakefield, the Serbian unit’s physician, who had spoken the words. Dr Wakefield was staring at the mix of people on the quayside: khaki-clad British and French troops; traditionally clothed Arabs, Greeks, Spaniards and Turks; tall, deeply black French Senegalese soldiers, red fezzes perched on top of their heads. All of these men were gazing back at the women with interest.
‘Well, I don’t suppose they’ve seen many women in uniform before,’ Elspeth replied with a smile. She liked Dr Wakefield, who was a small but determinedly cheerful woman with straggly light brown hair and merry eyes.
‘Aye, they’ve probably never seen a Scotswoman either,’ added Dr Lillian Chesney curtly. She was the unit’s senior surgeon, a gruff but well-meaning woman with a sharp-featured face, short black hair and a piercing gaze.
‘Well, they could hardly miss us in all this tartan,’ joked Sylvia, and Sister Louisa Jordan – a dark haired, plump-faced girl standing beside her – burst out laughing, but then stopped when she realised that Dr Chesney was giving her ‘a look’. All of the women were dressed identically in scots-grey skirts and jackets – the collars and epaulettes trimmed with tartan – a broad tartan sash and rainproof poncho, and a grey, wide-brimmed, tartan-ribboned hat. It was certainly an eye-catching uniform, thought Elspeth, although not a particularly elegant one.
‘Nothing wrong with tartan, Sister Jordan,’ Dr Chesney said, and Elspeth saw the young ward sister squirm under the intense gaze of the unit’s senior surgeon.
‘I think that’s everyone ashore now;’ said Dr Eleanor Soltau. A tall figure with curly dark hair and blue eyes, she was the last of the unit’s four doctors and would be the hospital’s chief medical officer until Dr Inglis was able to travel out to Serbia in a few months time. As well as Elspeth and the other three doctors, there were twenty-six other staff: eleven trained nurses, including Sylvia; two cooks; two drivers, one of whom was Vera; a laundress; and ten VADs, the last of whom were climbing out of the skiffs and onto the harbour wall.
‘I’ve asked the harbour master to organise some porters to take our luggage and medical supplies straight to the railway station,’ Dr Soltau said. ‘But as it’s only a short distance from here, I thought we could follow them on foot; it’ll be nice to find our land legs again.’
It did indeed feel good to be to be on solid earth, Elspeth thought, as she strolled through the cobbled streets with Sylvia and Vera by her side. The ten-day sea voyage from Southampton had not been without risk. They’d travelled in a Royal Navy transporter, HMS Ceramic, which did not fly the Red Cross flag from her mast, and had explosives and ammunition in her holds. This made them a legitimate target for the enemy, so immediately land was cleared the lifeboats were swung over the sides and Elspeth and the others were summoned to lifeboat drill. They’d even been tracked by a German submarine through the Bay of Biscay, Elspeth learnt from one of the ship’s crew. It had been a relief to arrive safely in Malta, where they’d transferred to the Nile for the final stage of their journey.
As Dr Soltau led the women towards the station, Elspeth looked at the exotic shapes and vibrant colours that surrounded her. Between the rows of high whitewashed stone buildings, she saw the blue-green of the surrounding hills and the icy grey of snow-capped mountains; within the city itself the red-tiled roofs of turreted houses and minarets contrasted against the green of cypress trees and palm fronds waving in the breeze. It all looked breathtakingly wonderful.
They were met at the station by a tall, black-moustached Serbian army major, dressed in field-grey uniform. He spoke good English and introduced himself as Dr Curcin, their designated Medical Liaison Officer, who would look after them during their stay in Serbia.
The Serbian government’s original
plan had been for the women to set up their hospital in Skopje in the south of the country. ‘But circumstances have changed,’ Dr Curcin announced. ‘The good news is that the enemy have been comprehensively defeated and the war is temporarily over in Serbia. But there are hundreds of casualties, and several thousand Austrian soldiers are being held prisoner. They are all in the north of the country, near the town of Kragujevac. That is where the fighting has been particularly fierce and the military hospital in Kragujevac is struggling to cope with all the wounded. There are also worrying reports of fever.’
‘Fever?’ Dr Soltau asked, a troubled look on her face. ‘What sort of fever?’
‘It is not yet clear,’ he replied. ‘But a number of hospital staff have fallen ill with it and some have already died.’
‘It’ll probably be typhoid, or maybe typhus,’ Dr Wakefield interjected.
‘Typhus?’ Dr Soltau repeated, looking alarmed.
‘Yes, that is our fear,’ said Dr Curcin, ‘that it might be the beginning of a typhus epidemic. There are also reports of fever breaking out in the prison camps surrounding Kragujevac, which hold thousands of Austrian captives. That is where medical assistance is most urgently required.’ He hesitated before continuing. ‘So my question to you, dear ladies, is: would you be willing to go to Kragujevac?’
Dr Soltau conferred with the rest of the unit. The women had already been vaccinated against cholera and typhoid, but there was no vaccine for typhus. Therefore, travelling up to Kragujevac presented a significant risk to everyone. Nevertheless every last woman agreed that if this was where they were most needed, this was where they should go.
The Furies Page 15