by Kate Hewitt
First, however, the hospital had had to be inspected by the Service de Santé of the Croix-Rouge, the French Red Cross, and Miss Ivens and her indomitable crew had 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’, sending many of the hardworking orderlies and nurses into a fury. Miss Ivens, however, was far more practical, and within hours of the inspectors’ departure, she was shifting beds and sweeping 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.
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. A local woman had given them a mistletoe decorated with flags and ribbons, and everyone’s spirits were raised by the festivities so that the second inspection on the sixth of January passed without a hitch.
That fresh wave of optimism, Ellen remembered, had lasted perhaps through the spring of 1915. Both sides had been enduring a stalemate on the Western Front, and trenches ran all the way from Verdun to the coast south of Ostend. Then in February the fighting was renewed and the French had lost fifty thousand men by the end of March.
Ellen could not remember ever having worked so hard. By the end of February the one hundred beds were filled with French soldiers, most of them privates or poilus, as they were known. Norah was an orderly while Ellen, thanks to her training back in Kingston, had been made an auxiliary nurse. She spent her days assisting Miss Ivens and the other surgeons in operations, changing bandages and bedpans when an orderly could not be found, and administering what medicines they had. She fell into bed each night exhausted and frozen to the bone, and woke with the grey light of dawn to drink a quick cup of coffee and hurry back to the wards.
Letters had, somewhat to her amazement, found her at Royaumont. She learned that both Jed and Lucas has joined Canada’s First Expeditionary Force in early 1915; Jed was a private and Lucas an officer, thanks to their differences in education, which seemed hard to Ellen, but she knew that’s simply how it was. Then in late 1915 Lucas had been given an appointment in London, doing Ellen knew not what, and Jed remained in the infantry, fighting his way from Neuve Chapelle to Loos to Vimy Ridge, and now possibly, to Ypres, where the Allied armies were launching an offensive on the Messines Ridge.
Gazing out at the peaceful meadow, Ellen mouthed a soundless prayer for the safety of both Jed and Lucas, and all the island boys who had crossed the Atlantic to give Jerry what-for.
“Sister?” Miss Ivens walked up to her with her quick, purposeful stride, seeming inexhaustible even in the middle of the night. She touched Ellen briefly on the shoulder before nodding towards the ward. “The patient in Bed Five is stirring. I believe he needs his medication, and his dressings should be checked.”
“Yes, Miss Ivens.” Ellen moved away from the window and hurried back to the ward. The poilu in Bed Five blinked up at her as she approached.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” Ellen said with a smile, and checked the bandages on his arm where he’d been hit by some flying shrapnel. The bandages were soaked with blood and the sutures, she saw, had come undone.
She shook her head at him, for she knew he had probably fiddled with the bandages, as many of these poor men did. They were sad cases, and not just because of their injuries. When the first poilus had arrived back in 1915, Ellen had been appalled by their conditions. They were half-starved, with uniforms that were bloody, dirty, and threadbare; their officers, some of whom also came to Royaumont, had little use for them away from the battlefield. Letitia, who was one of the few women at Royaumont who spoke fluent French, had overheard an officer say in disdain, “At the Front the soldier may be a hero; in the rear he is merely tiresome.”
Another officer whose men were being treated in a separate ward had not even inquired about their state, but merely complained about his own lack of hot food and fresh water.
“You must leave the bandages alone,” Ellen now told the poilu, and he smiled at her blankly. “Ne touchez pas!” she said severely and he grinned and nodded.
Despite their rough looks and ways, the poilus loved the abbey, which they called The Palace for both its comforts and the kindness of its staff. One poilu had called the nursing staff ‘the happiness of Royaumont.’
Smiling, Ellen patted the soldier on his good arm and moved to the next bed. By the time dawn was streaking the sky pink, Ellen had checked all the soldiers in the ward, settled the restless ones, and administered what medicines she could.
She was just going off duty when she heard the sound of footsteps on the gravel outside, and she peered out of one of the abbey’s ancient, arched windows to see the drivers hurrying to the row of trucks that served as makeshift ambulances, and then the sounds of cranks turning and engines sputtering to life in the still, frosty air.
She turned to Edith, the nurse who had come to take over her shift. “The wounded are arriving at Creil?”
Edith nodded. “We just received word. The hospital will be full again. So much for sleep,” she said, her lips twisting ruefully, and Ellen nodded in sympathy.
Life at Royaumont was conducted in frenzied, staggered bursts; they might have days or even weeks of peace, when the fighting had stopped and the operating theatre remained thankfully empty. In those times Royaumont could be a jolly place; once two orderlies had dressed up in the French horizon bleu uniform and pretended to be patients, much to the delight of the soldiers who called them ‘the naughty Misses’. There might be card games and singing, and jokes and laughter and celebrations; after the Somme rushes in 1916 they had got up a Halloween party in every ward, with Chinese lanterns and fancy dress and ‘Halloween potatoes’ with all manner of things put in them: rings, buttons, badges, and pennies.
Christmas of 1916 saw the abbey decorated with a large tree given by an army bakery in Boran, decorated with what ribbons and candles could they find and set up in the huge refectory. Christmas dinner was a feast prepared by their French chef Michelet, who had served at one of the country’s great houses before the War; after convalescing as a patient, Miss Ivens had worked her considerable charm to have the chef seconded to the hospital for the duration of the war.
“He has a way with meat and potatoes,” she told Ellen frankly, “that is quite unparalleled. And good food increases morale, I am sure.”
Yet even amidst these merry times, the war always encroached; word would come that the ambulance trains were arriving at Creil and the drivers would set off in their rubber boots and goatskin overcoats, and all would be panic and haste as the wounded poured into Royaumont and the operating theatre’s floor became sticky with blood and the wards were filled with the tortured groans of the suffering.
Now Ellen hurried to her own quarters, a draughty room on the top floor of the abbey that she shared with three other nurses. Her bed was nothing more than a straw mattress on the floor, her chest of drawer a few wooden crates, and her dressing table an old door propped on top of some blocks. Still, the view was unparalleled, with the meadows, now filled with wildflowers, glinting under the dawn light.
Ellen stripped quickly out of her uniform and lay on her mattress in her chemise; the heat at the top of the abbey was stifling even though dawn had only just broken. She would grab what sleep she could, for when the trucks returned loaded with stretchers, she knew all hands would be needed and sleep would become a distant memory.
She managed to doze for an hour before she was wakened by Rosemary, another nurse, and she hurried to tidy herself and slip back into her uniform of grey-blue.
The next two days Ellen barely slept at all as they dealt with the onslaught of wounded from Ypres. A
lthough most of the patients at Royaumont were French, others were British, Canadian, and some from the French Colonies in Africa. It made for a motley crew, but one that was almost always cheerful, even in the midst of so much suffering and pain.
Ellen was continually amazed and humbled at the forbearance the patients showed again and again, and how they were able to laugh and joke in even the most tragic of circumstances; she would never forget the tight-lipped, uncomplaining faces of the soldiers with mangled limbs who had to be adjusted on the hard metal table for an X-ray, or the one-armed poilus playing draughts, or the soldiers blinded by the dreadful gas who painted watercolours of the wildflowers from memory.
Their fortitude was a lesson she took to heart, considering the tragedies in her own life, and she vowed that whatever happened after the war, she would face it with the courage and cheer that the poilus had shown her so many times.
One afternoon a few days after the first arrival of soldiers from Ypres, Ellen came into the ward to find an Algerian soldier protesting at the top of his lungs and Letitia standing at the foot of the bed, her hands planted on her hips as she looked at him in exasperation.
“Monsieur, s’il vous plait,” she said for what Ellen suspected was not the first time. She continued in French that Ellen could only just understand, “I must see to your wound’s dressings. If you will only permit me…”
The man held the bed sheets to his chest, his face red with fury and humiliation. “Non, mademoiselle,” he returned. “Non, non, non!”
Ellen suppressed a laugh at the absurdity of the interaction; a few of the patients in nearby beds, those who were well enough to sit up, were watching the scene enfold as if it were a great drama on the London stage.
Ellen touched Letitia’s arm. “What is the matter here?” she asked quietly. “Can I help?”
“Only if you can hold this man down long enough so I can check his dressings,” Letitia answered shortly. “He is being ridiculous.”
“Where is his injury?”
Letitia’s face, already flushed nearly as red as her patient’s, turned a shade rosier. “On his buttocks. He was hit with flying shrapnel. I sewed him up myself last night while he was unconscious, but he is now insisting that he cannot show himself to a woman, and—oh!” She shook her head impatiently. “He is at a hospital with all women staff. There is no one else, as you very well know.”
“Does he know that?” Ellen asked.
“I have explained it to him several times.” She tried again. “Monsieur, s’il vous plait—“
The man shrank back against his pillow, wincing as his wound pressed against the mattress. “Non!”
“Oh dear,” Ellen murmured.
“You will reopen your wound!” Letitia warned the man, shaking a fist. “And then what? You shall die of sepsis, sir, if you are not careful!”
“Perhaps I can help, mademoiselle?” A man had appeared in the doorway of the ward, speaking in English. He was a patient, but well enough to walk, and clearly an officer, judging by the dressing gown and slippers he wore. The poilus had nothing but the tattered uniforms they came in.
“Perhaps you may, sir,” Letitia answered as she drew herself up with dignity. “Do you know this man?”
The officer’s gaze flicked to the man in the bed and he smiled. “I do. He is in my regiment. Private Henri Sahnoun.” He spoke to the man in French, rapidly and in a low voice so neither Letitia nor Ellen could make out what he had said.
Amazingly, the man in the bed grunted his acceptance and rolled onto his stomach so Letitia could inspect his wound; as she had feared, the dressing was soaked with blood.
Ellen stepped back to give the man some much-needed privacy. She glanced at the officer, who was leaning on a cane, his face now pale and haggard.
“Monsieur, your help is greatly appreciated,” she said quietly, “but I think perhaps you should return to your bed.”
He nodded wryly and Ellen took his arm as she helped him out of the ward to one of the other wards reserved for officers.
Ellen was just settling the man into his bed when Letitia came into the ward. She looked more composed, her face its normal colour, her coat of grey-blue with its caducées of surgeon-major in silver now straightened. “I must thank you sir, for your kind intervention. What did you say to the man?”
The officer leaned back against his pillows and smiled. “I simply told him he was fortunate indeed to have a lovely young woman such as yourself inspecting his backside.”
Letitia’s flush returned and her eyes sparkled with anger. “I’d thank you, sir, to remember I am a doctor.”
The man inclined his head in acknowledgement, his blue eyes flashing in amusement. “And a woman, mademoiselle,” he returned softly. “A beautiful one, at that. But let me introduce myself.” He extended one hand which Letitia did not take. “Lieutenant Lucien Allard.”
Letitia stared at him a moment and then nodded stiffly. “Thank you again for your assistance,” she said and turning on her heel, she left the room.
Lucien Allard met Ellen’s gaze with a humorous one of his own. “I fear I have insulted the good doctor.”
“She is merely tired,” Ellen demurred. Letitia was the youngest and most newly qualified doctor at Royaumont, and had thus been given the status of medical dresser rather than fully-fledged doctor. As a result she was, Ellen suspected, always trying to prove herself, to the staff as well as to the patients.
News of the dashing Lieutenant Allard and his rescue travelled around the abbey quickly enough, and by dinnertime as they gathered in stone kitchen with its vaulted ceiling to eat the meat and fruit that comprised their evening meal, a few orderlies dared to tease Letitia.
“It seems you have an admirer, Miss Portman!”
“He is in the French Foreign Legion,” another sighed. “So romantic.”
Letitia sawed the single piece of stringy pork that the chef Michelet had dressed up with stewed apples with grim determination and did not answer.
Lucien Allard, however, would not be put off. He’d been in the hospital for over a week and despite the wound to his knee was well enough to walk, with the help of his cane, outside to the abbey’s gardens and pick a posy of flowers that he offered to Letitia as she was doing her rounds.
Her face red, Letitia took them with a suffocated whisper of thanks and stuffed them in the pocket of her coat. Ellen watched on in amusement; Lucien Allard, with his dark hair and tanned skin and sparkling blue eyes, cut a dashing figure indeed. There had been, over the course of her time at Royaumont, been a few flirtations; one of the orderlies wrote letters regularly to a French private who had returned to the Front. Letitia, however, hardly seemed susceptible to the lieutenant’s charms.
A week into July when the sun baked the fields and even the cool, shadowy rooms of the abbey were stifling, Ellen and Letitia packed a picnic of cold cheese, meat, and fruit and headed off for an afternoon’s much-needed leisure.
As they waded through the waist-high grass, the only sound the babbling of the nearby brook and the occasional twitter of birdsong, it seemed incredible to think they were not all that far from the barbed-wire and barren fields of the trenches, the burned-out villages, houses and barns reduced to rubble, as war cut its bloody swathe through France and Belgium.
Ellen spread a blanket by the brook while Letitia set out their meager feast.
“I think I have been hungry since this war began,” she said as she portioned the scraps of meat onto two plates. “But not as hungry as the men we treat, I suppose.”
Ellen tucked her feet under her skirt and picked an apple from the basket. “When do you think it will be over?” she asked quietly.
Letitia smiled wryly and plucked a grape from the bunch. “Do you remember how at the beginning they said they’d be home by Christmas?”
“Miss Ivens never thought that,” Ellen countered. “She set up the hospital in December!”
“I think women can see sense more than men can,�
� Letitia answered with asperity and Ellen smiled.
“I suppose you are thinking of Lucien Allard.”
Letitia pressed her lips together. “I don’t ever think of him.”
“Oh, Letitia!” Ellen shook her head. “He is handsome, is he not?”
“Handsome enough, I suppose,” Letitia answered with a shrug. “But honestly, Ellen, you are worse than some of the orderlies! I am not here to have a grand romance.”
“Of course not. But if one happened…”
“With Lieutenant Allard? I grant he is charming enough, but then what Frenchman isn’t? And he lives in Algeria, of all places, after all. What future could we possibly have?”
“You have thought of all that already?” Ellen countered. “Then you must like him more than you’ve let on.”
“I don’t,” Letitia answered automatically, but she blushed and Ellen laughed, daring to tease her friend a little more.
“You do! Oh Letitia, I am glad for you. I think you could use a little levity, and even a little romance, in your life.”
Letitia didn’t answer; her face looked frozen and then, to Ellen’s shock, it crumpled and she burst into tears.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ellen exclaimed. “I didn’t realize… I’ve been thoughtless. Letita, I am sorry.”
“No.” Letitia shook her head and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m being so foolish. It’s only… hope is such a dangerous thing, isn’t it? I see that now more than ever. We bandage these poor boys up and push them out the door, most likely to their deaths. And so much of the suffering is needless…” She shook her head, her tears drying on her cheeks. “We are perhaps a few feet ahead of we were last summer, after the Somme rushes. A whole year of fighting, and who knows how many thousands dead, and for what? A few paltry feet of ground?” She sank back onto to the blanket, her expression turning grim. “I hate this war,” she said flatly. “I truly hate this bloody, bloody war.”
Ellen remained silent, for what could she say? She hated the war too; they all did by now, though few spoke of it. Miss Ivens was adamant that her staff keep their spirits up, and yet as the months had slid into years and so little had changed; as each battled had become bloodier and the casualties had mounted up and the soldiers who had once been cheerful and chipper become more gaunt and hollow-eyed, who could keep from questioning the point of it all?
