by Kate Hewitt
In the beginning of September, just a few days before Ellen was meant to start teaching, Norah paid a visit to her little house. She sat in the kitchen, her hands cradled around a cup of tea as she subjected Ellen to one of her intense gazes.
“This war won’t be over before Christmas,” she began in her stern, no-nonsense way. “Any fool can see that.”
“I suppose,” Ellen said slowly. She had never really believe it, but she still didn’t like admitting it. It all felt so bewildering—the boys in khaki, marching to the train.
Norah was silent for a moment, her lips pursed in thought. “I know I’ve always said art is important,” she finally said. “And it is. It’s one of the things that makes life worth living.” She paused, her face drawn in sober lines. “But sometimes more is needed, and this is one of those times.” Ellen said nothing, for she had no idea what her former landlady and current friend was getting at. “I intend to join the Scottish Women’s Hospital at Royaumont,” Norah said. “I’ve given in my notice at the school.”
“You mean as a nurse?” Ellen said in surprise.
“Yes, although I have no formal training, so my duties will be minimal, and most likely menial. I still need to do my part.”
“Royaumont…”I’ve never even heard of it.”
Briefly, Norah explained the origins of the hospital: it had been founded by the suffragette Elsie Maud Inglis only recently. Rejected by the British army despite having raised five thousand pounds, the Women’s Hospitals had offered their services to the French, and, joined with the French Red Cross, they were planning to set up a hospital to treat the French wounded.
“They won’t be able to take patients until January, but I intend to leave as soon as possible, to help in the organization,” Norah said.
“That’s very good of you,” Ellen told her. “I shall miss you.”
“One does what one must.” Norah paused to take a sip of tea and then putting her cup down said, “You trained as a nurse, did you not?”
Ellen’s mouth dried as her friend’s implication became clear. “Only for a year…”
“Then why don’t you join me, Ellen? There can be no greater cause than serving the wounded, and women with skills are so desperately needed. I will be doing nothing more than making beds and emptying bedpans, but you have training—“
“Very little training,” Ellen protested. Her stomach seized with fear at the thought of leaving Glasgow, and Ruby and Dougie, as well as her dear little house and the teaching she hadn’t even started. She’d arranged her life so pleasingly, and now Norah was asking her to give it all up?
“Still, it’s something,” Norah persisted. “And it will be needed. All those boys out there in khaki?” She nodded towards the window, and the sunny September day outside. “They have no idea what awaits them. They’ve never seen a war, and plenty of them have never even seen a gun. They think they’re heading out for a lark, and they are so badly mistaken.” She leaned forward. “They are going to need women to bind them up, and give them water when they are thirsty. They will need nurses to change their bandages and stitch their wounds, and hold their hands as they are dying. Think of your painting, Ellen, all those lost souls on the Starlit Sea. How many more lost souls will be on the battlefields of France?”
By the end of this impassioned speech, Ellen had tears in her eyes, even as she hsook her head. “I don’t know… what about Ruby and Dougie? They depend on me now…”
“They can still live here while you are away,” Norah answered with a shrug.
Ellen knew that was true, but she wanted to cry out for all the other things she would miss—her own comfort and safety, the pleasure she had in painting and drawing, and the anticipation she felt for teaching. All of it gone in a single moment, if she agreed to go with Norah to France.
And yet how could she not? How could she put her comfort above those of the soldiers who might die on muddy battlefields, calling for their mothers? Boys who played at war and paid the greatest price. She swallowed hard.
“The school will be here when the war is over,” Norah soothed her. “We shall all have to pick our lives back up, one way or another. But now, we are needed now. You see that don’t you?” Ellen didn’t answer, but Norah saw her reply in her eyes. “You’ll do it,” she said, a statement, and slowly, feeling both a sense of dread and one of duty, Ellen nodded.
CHAPTER TWO
Royaumont Abbey, France, December 1914
The ghostly arches of Royaumont Abbey were illuminated only by a sliver of moonlight as the lorry, soon to be an ambulance, pulled up in front of the building. Every muscle Ellen possessed ached not just from the jarring journey across the rough countryside under the cover of darkness, the sound of the shells a constant, distant thunder, but the train journey from London to Viarmes, and the sea crossing before that. She felt as if she’d been travelling forever.
She, Norah, and her old friend Letitia Portman had crossed the Channel neary a week ago, on a military convoy in the middle of a stormy night, by far the worst sea journey Ellen had even endured. She, who had prided herself on never being seasick, had been as wrung out as an old dishrag.
The commanding officer at Folkestone had wanted them to wait for calmer waters, but the indomitable Frances Ivens, an obstetrician who was Royaumont’s chief medical officer and surgeon, had insisted they travel as soon as possible.
Arriving in France had felt surreal, the city of Paris possessed by gaiety and sobriety in turns. Ellen, who had once dreamed of going to Paris to see the paintings of the Old Masters, now found herself wandering streets, trying to buy bread and coffee, waiting for a train that kept being cancelled because the Germans had blown up the rail line.
Frances Ivens had gone ahead of them, to arrange accommodation, for apparently ‘the fine house’ the owner, Monsieur Gouin, had leased to them, ‘with ample accommodation, good drainage and water supply, and electric lighting,’ had nothing of the sort.
‘It needs a bit of work,’ Miss Ivens had admitted, in a way that Ellen suspected meant it needed a lot.
They’d spent four days wandering around Paris, waiting for a train, and feeling a guilty for sightseeing when a war was going on. But Paris was still Paris, with the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, the Tulieres Gardens and the electric-lit Champ d’Elysees. Ellen had seen it all, filled with both wonder and dread.
Now, as she and the others disembarked from the lorry, she wondered what awaited them at Royaumont. The abbey looked ghostly in the moonlight, a tower to rival that of Notre Dame pointing towards a starlit sky, the ground blanketed with crisp white snow. It was beautiful in an ethereal sort of way, and it hardly seemed a likely place for a hospital, but Letitia had told her how she’d heard of all sorts of buildings being used as hospitals—town halls and schools, small and great houses. Why not an abbey?
Two heavy wooden doors guarded the entrance to the abbey, and when Norah knocked, the sound seemed to be absorbed by the stillness and the snow. Then, after what felt like an age standing out in the bitter cold, the air freezing painfully in Ellen’s lung, the door creaked open and Frances Ivens stood there, tall and sturdy, her homely face split by a smile, an oil lamp in one hand, casting a yellow circle of light on the stone-flagged floor.
“Ah, the Scottish contingent!” she exclaimed, for Ellen had heard that the women recruited for the Scottish Women’s Hospital came from all sorts of places, even Canada and Australia. They were some of the only Scots. “Come in, come in. I’m so glad you’ve arrived. And you’ll be pleased to know you have something to sleep on—the mattresses arrived last night, thank heaven.”
Ellen stepped into the vast entrance hall, the ceiling soaring up into darkness, the smell damp and musty. Royaumont was an imposing structure, but it was not the welcoming place Ellen had naively hoped it would be, despite all warnings to the contrary.
As Miss Ivens guided them through the rooms towards the back of the abbey, she was struck by the improbability, and even the
impossibility of the situation—how on earth could this mouldering wreck be turned into a hospital? It would take months, if not years, and, as Miss Ivens cheerfully told her, they did not yet have any medical equipment or supplies, because they could not find someone willing to ship them.
“No one wants to do a favor for a woman,” she said with a philosophical shrug. “Isn’t it ever the way?”
The kitchen, at least, seemed welcoming, in a ragtag sort of way; a huge blackened range took up one side of the large room and threw off a reassuring amount of heat, and two long trestle tables occupied the main space, where around twenty women, of all shapes, sizes, and ages, sat eating their evening meal.
Miss Ivens made a quick-fire round of introductions that Ellen knew she’d forget, and then told her, Letitia, and Norah all too sit down and set to the simple but nourishing fare, a vegetable soup with brown bread.
As Ellen sat and ate, she was regaled with tales of spiders, rats, and worse occupying many of the rooms; one room was full of straw and horse manure from when the Uhlan, the Germany Calvary, had bivouacked there during the Battle of the Marne.
“The only thing the abbey possesses,” Miss Ivens announced with her unique combination of humor and asperity, “is space. Too much space, I fear.”
That night Ellen curled up on a thin straw mattress, wearing every single piece of clothing she’d brought in an attempt to keep warm, and wondered what on earth she’d got herself into.
The next morning, her muscles aching and her fingertips and toes numb with cold, she crept out of the dormitory back to the abbey’s kitchen, the only place she knew she might find some warmth.
Dawn light stole across the stone flags of the floor, streaming in from the high, arched windows. In daylight, the room was even bigger than Ellen remembered, with no corners lost in shadows. It was also empty, save for Miss Ivens, who sat at one of the tables, a tin cup of coffee cradled between her hands.
“Ah, Ellen. You, like me, must be an early riser. Isn’t the light beautiful? The way it glimmers on the snow… you could almost believe there isn’t a war going on, or that the Germany are less than twenty miles away.”
“Are they that close?” Ellen asked, her insides tightening. Last night, as she’d listened to the shells, she’d lulled herself into believing it was distant. The ancient abbey, with its medieval arches and towers, seemed untouchable.
“Yes, and I’m afraid they will certainly come closer. But you can hardly have a hospital too far from the fighting, can you? Especially not with the state some of these poor chaps are in.” She sighed and then nodded towards the pot on the stove
“Fresh coffee, weak but hot. We’ve got to make it last.”
Ellen poured herself a cup, sipping the watery liquid with appreciation for its warmth. “Miss Ivens,” she asked tentatively once she’d joined her at the table, “do you really think you can turn this place into a hospital?”
Miss Ivens subjected her to a frank look over the rim her cup. “No, I don’t,” she said. “But we can.”
Ellen had already heard from some of the other volunteers—orderlies and nurses and two game ambulance drivers—that Frances Ivens was something of a force of nature. Always cheerful, invincibly determined, she radiated capability and confidence. After talking to her for just a few minutes, Ellen started to believe that Royaumont could indeed become a hospital, and even in time for the inspection by the Croix-Rouge, the French Red Cross, on Christmas Eve in just a few weeks’ time, which it needed to pass before they could officially open as a hospital.
The next few weeks almost felt like some strange sort of holiday, sleeping on straw mattress in the big, empty rooms, and making do for meals with a handful of dishes and cutlery borrowed from the local ironmonger, as well as a single knife they passed around, as the clerk administrator, Cicely Hamilton, said, “so everyone can have a chop with it.”
There was, Ellen found, something surprisingly invigorating about scrubbing stone floors by candlelight, and singing as they washed the dishes with buckets of icy water brought in from the spring, knowing in just a month’s time, God willing, the hospital’s one hundred beds would be filled with men needing their care.
When the medical equipment arrived, and the water and electricity came on, it started to seem as if it was all really going to happen. One sunny morning just before Christmas, when the sun on snow made everything crystalline-bright, Ellen made up twenty beds in one of the wards, gazing around at the neat beds with their tight hospital corners, with both pride and hope. She imagined them filled with soldiers, men who had fought bravely and were now receiving the care they so desperately needed.
She knew it was a hazy image, pleasant in its vagueness; she had not yet seen the realities of war, had not experienced it other than in the cancelled trains and the distant thunder of the guns. A sudden ripple of apprehension chilled her; what was it really going to be like, when the beds were filled and the hospital was up and running?
First, however, the hospital had to be inspected by the Service de Santé of the Croix-Rouge, and Miss Ivens and her team received yet another setback when the hospital failed to pass its inspection on Christmas Eve.
The wards they’d worked so hard on had been dismissed by the inspectors as ‘cowsheds’, too large and ill-equipped to be of any use to potential patients. Some of the orderlies were in furious tears as the officious little inspector left; Miss Ivens, however, was far more pragmatic, and within mere hours of the inspectors’ departure, she was calling to Ellen and the others to help her shift beds and sweep floors.
Despite the bad news from the Service de Santé, the twenty-five women who comprised the first contingent of doctors, nurses, orderlies, and drivers had a merry Christmas. The cooks, under the leadership of Dorothy Littlejohn, rose magnificently to the occasion, and provided a traditional Christmas dinner, although no one knew from where.
Cicely Hamilton, who had been both an actress and a playwright as well as a suffragette back in England, designed a pageant of the abbey through the ages which some of the women gamely took part in, while Ellen watched and laughed at the women’s determined theatrics, celebrating in the face of hardship and tragedy.
A local woman had given them a mistletoe decorated with flags and ribbons, and everyone’s spirits were raised by the festivities, so that they returned to their work with renewed vigor. To everyone’s relief, including Ellen’s, the second inspection on the sixth of January passed without a hitch.
By the thirteenth of January 1915, The Scottish Women’s Hospital at Royaumont was open for patients, with all of its staff full of fresh optimism for what was ahead, eager for beds to be filled and men to be treated.
“You see, Ellen?” Miss Ivens said cheerfully as she clapped her on the shoulder. “Anything is possible when you turn your mind, and more importantly, your hand to it.” She nodded towards the arched windows that provided a perfect view of snow, sun, and sky, the fields outside the abbey blanketed in pristine white. “Soon the men will come, the wounded both in mind and body, in desperate need of care. I’ve been to the front lines and seen what happens. It’s tragic, the men dying for lack of care.” She shook her head. “This is our last moment of peace before the storm.” Her normally cheerful face fell into serious lines, her friendly eyes becoming shadowed. “This is the last, before the war truly comes to Royaumont.”
CHAPTER THREE
May 1915
“Nurse Copley, you are needed in theatre.”
Quickly Ellen nodded, sparing only a minute to tidy her hair and wash her hands. For the first few months of 1915, both Germany and the Allies had been enduring a stalemate on the Western Front, with trenches running all the way from Verdun to the coast south of Ostend. Then in February the fighting had been renewed and the French had lost fifty thousand men by the end of March.
Ellen could not remember ever having worked so hard, or feeling so tired. Often she felt as if she were stumbling through a fog, binding wounds, checking f
evers, and changing bandages without even realizing what she was doing. She fell into bed every night to catch a few hours of sleep, before the porter’s horn sounded again, signaling an ambulance had been sighted coming up the abbey’s sweeping drive.
When the hospital had first opened in mid-January, they had only been sent French soldiers who were ill from fevers or the flu, men who were tired and hungry and dirty. Miss Ivens had remarked, rather tartly, that the men needed a bath and a hot meal more than they needed medical care, but those things were provided as well.
Ellen was moved by the gaunt-faced men who clutched her arm and told her she was an angel, and that Royaumont felt better than heaven. She didn’t like to think what horrors they must have endured to be so grateful for a warm blanket, a bowl of soup, and a female touch.
The men had also needed new uniforms, as the French army did not replace ones that had become rent or worn. Miss Ivens arranged for a woman nearby to take in the uniforms for repair, so that the French soldiers left the hospital well-fed and properly vested.
“It seems a shame that we’re just sending them back to the misery of the Front,” Letitia said when they had seen off a convoy of soldiers back to Ypres. “You patch them up and get them well, just so they can have a chance to be blown up again—and for what?”
It was a refrain they all felt sorely, for as the months slogged on, and men died by the thousands, nothing seemed to be gained. The Front moved a few feet this way or that, a town was lost, and then retook, but there was no end in sight at all. Ellen recalled Amy’s assurance that the war would be over by Christmas and knew now what naïve, wishful thinking that had been.
After the first wave of soldiers, the doctors and surgeons at the Front were satisfied that the women of Royaument could treat men properly, and in February they began to send the wounded.
