Liam's Story

by Ann Victoria Roberts

  By the shattered ruins of the great medieval Cloth Hall, the battalion turned right, to leave Ypres by a gap in the ramparts known as the Lille Gate. They crossed a battered bridge over an ancient moat, ran the gauntlet of shell and mortar fire at ‘Shrapnel Corner’, and found their way, eventually, to the Canadian trenches north of the Ypres-Comines Canal. The line, what they could see of it in occasional illuminations, was a boggy, meandering maze of duck-boards, sandbags and wire. Shallow communication trenches and battered parapets glistened with rain and mud. The dug-outs, such as they were, were in poor repair. Apart from defending this particular sector, it seemed the Division would also be making some extensive alterations.

  It was past midnight when they arrived, some five miles from the little railway halt; limbers were unpacked, stores, guns and ammunition carried a further three hundred yards to the front line. With the Vickers and fourteen boxes of ammunition, Liam’s team were directed to a muddy, sandbagged gun-pit, still containing all the litter of previous occupation.

  Chilled to the bone, shivering despite his exertions, Liam set about clearing the mess of empty tins, cigarette packets and used cartridges. Warned not to move or light fires by day, and desperately in need of something warming now, he ordered a brew-up of tea, and from their store of rations, took a tin of Maconochie’s meat and vegetables. It seemed to take an age to heat through, and his stomach felt hollow and queasy, but he thought it might improve with food. Carl and Matt shared it out, the three of them huddled in the confined space of the gun-pit, with barely enough head-room to sit up. It seemed strange, being reduced to three; with no reinforcements as yet, Gray had been sent to make up numbers in another team. It made Liam feel very vulnerable. One man to fill the belts, another feeding them into the feed-block, and himself firing the gun, three was the necessary minimum. Looking at these poor defences, and with the Canadians’ warning about sniper-fire still ringing in his ears, it was not a comfortable thought on which to sleep.

  With his stomach issuing painful threats after that meal of Maconochie rations, Liam offered to take the first watch, but Matt was concerned about him and said he should rest. He tried to, but the pain grew worse, sending him out to find a latrine. In the hour before dawn, he was up and down several times, crawling along the shallow trench, wondering what he would do in daylight. No-man’s-land was a wired stretch of some two hundred yards – with Fritz on the other side. He could see it in his mind’s eye, every bobbing head presenting a target, like wooden ducks at a fair.

  After periods of short relief, in which he shivered and shook and felt as weak as a baby, the cramps intensified; he drank water and was violently sick, munched hard biscuits in an attempt to absorb the fiery liquid in his guts, and was forced by daylight to crouch just outside the dug-out, using a make-shift latrine the others had dug. Even lying down he was in agony, trying not to moan as the fever gripped and chills racked his body.

  Bursts of gunfire from the German trenches kept the others busy. They dared not abandon the position, nor cease to keep up a sporadic response. From time to time mortar bombs whistled across, exploding with deadly crumps up and down the line. It was a nerve-racking place in which to rest after all they had been through at Pozières, and it was no place in which to be ill. In between filling belts, Carl, the broad-shouldered, slow-talking Dane, wiped Liam’s face with damp cloths, and murmured reassuringly. They would get him out at nightfall, get him to the medics, and make sure he got some treatment. He mustn’t think of staying in the line, he wouldn’t be letting them down, they’d find a replacement from somewhere.

  But by mid-afternoon, when he was passing nothing but blood, and vomiting even on sips of water, Liam was beyond protest. He thought he was dying. Slipping in and out of delirium, he lost track of time; lucid for a while, he was aware of lying in his own filth and being unable to move. All he could do was apologize for his weakness. From his position crouched over the gun, Carl was suddenly brusque, telling him to save his breath; Matt sponged his face and tried to persuade him to drink.

  As soon as it was dark, they got him to the 8th Battalion HQ, carrying him between them and bundled in greatcoats. The MO was busy dealing with a series of both major and minor injuries. Liam had to wait. Seen at last, he was and diagnosed as being just another victim of dysentery, albeit an unusually virulent case. In a painfully conscious moment, Liam wondered whether the MO was right; on Gallipoli, in company with almost every other man, he had suffered from dysentery most of the time, but never like this. Never before had it attacked with such ferocious speed.

  On Gallipoli he would have been given arrowroot and left to suffer; here, blessedly, he was ordered to the 2nd Field Ambulance Dressing Station. A lack of stretcher-bearers meant his friends had to carry him, staggering over duck-boards and through the mud in pitch darkness. They found the place eventually, just behind the second set of lines. About midnight, half-conscious, he was bundled into a horse ambulance. Matt and Carl pressed his hands, said goodbye and set off back to the front line; the horse ambulance trundled off on its rough journey to Ypres.

  A motor ambulance conveyed him to an Australian Clearing Station, where someone had the sense to mark him infectious and keep him apart from the wounded. Morning brought another journey, this time as far as Poperinghe, to a Canadian Clearing Station which could offer a clean bed and a vast amount of pills. A nurse gave him a cup of milk to drink, but that started a bout of vomiting which continued, on and off, all night. Next morning brought a doctor who paused to ponder at the foot of his bed, and that afternoon Liam was on his travels again, this time by hospital train to the base at Boulogne.

  He was there for a week, seven days and nights of pills and blood tests, medicines and various liquid diets. As the cramps and vomiting lessened, Liam slipped into natural, healing sleep. He slept for hours each day, woke to be washed and fed and dosed, and slept again. In the evening of 11th September, which Liam remembered was his mother’s birthday, the doctor returned to mark his card with just one word: ENGLAND.

  Twenty-three

  People were kind. Extraordinarily kind. He kept thinking that all the way home. Home, that word again. But England was home, even if London was not. British troops were afforded the choice of hospitals in their native counties, while the Australians had but one destination, London, and for that Liam had no real regrets. Despite advice and entreaties and promises made, for the moment he felt unable to face his mother, and more desirous of Georgina than ever. She was somewhere in London, and as soon as she knew where he was, would probably come to see him. With the decision made for him, he allowed anticipation to outweigh all else.

  Of his old uniform, only his hat remained. He had managed to hang on to that, while everything else had gone to an incinerator. The new uniform was fine, if a little stiff, but he was glad of the hat, it had been with him since Gallipoli. To lose that would have been like losing a friend.

  It was good to feel clean again, to meet smiling faces on the dock at Portsmouth, to accept small gifts and blessings, to feel kindly hands assisting him from place to place. Although he was classified as walking wounded, he was still very weak, and standing for more than a minute of two produced debilitating waves of nausea. But hospital trains, at least in England, seemed to run to better time, and they were soon on their way to London and Waterloo.

  What looked like a fleet of private cars awaited them. While the stretcher cases were transferred to another train, those who could walk were directed to the cars. A middle-aged lady in black drove Liam and two companions to the Australian hospital at Wandsworth. She chatted amicably as the car bounced over tramlines, requiring little in the way of reply. Just as well, Liam thought, because one of the men was close to passing out, and he felt horribly sick with every jolt. Had she asked what the problem was, he would have hated to embarrass her by telling the truth.

  She pointed out various places of interest along the way: Lambeth Palace and, across the river, the Houses of Parliament; Vauxhal
l Bridge, and, further on, Clapham Junction, nerve centre of London’s railways.

  ‘The Zeppelins keep trying to bomb it,’ she announced in her well-bred, penetrating voice. ‘Oh, yes, we’ve had some fireworks in Wandsworth, you haven’t had it all to yourselves over there, you know!’

  The very sick man looked at Liam and managed a feeble smile; the other muttered something about it making them feel at home. Despite the fresh air whipping into his face, Liam knew that if they did not see the hospital soon, he would have to ask her to stop, his stomach was threatening to disgorge itself.

  ‘How far to the hospital?’ he managed to ask.

  ‘Not far – we’re almost there.’ She indicated the broad green common ahead of them, and beyond the trees the great sooty mass of Hospital No. 3, London General, which had been set aside for Australian soldiers.

  Apart from the blackened stonework, Liam thought it looked out of place with its turrets and towers. Like a grand French chateau standing in its own grounds, with the dip of a railway cutting for its moat. Through waves of nausea, he had a moment of wondering what it might have been before. As they bounced through an imposing gateway, their lady driver informed them that it used to be a school, a girls’ school, the pupils now evacuated to the safety of the countryside.

  In the warm, early afternoon sun, convalescents were walking the grounds in the company of nurses, friends and volunteers. Mildly curious glances were cast in their directions as they pulled up beside other cars at the main entrance. A bevy of young nurses, all bearing red crosses on their aprons, all looking like angels, were waiting to assist them inside.

  ‘This is more like it!’ someone was heard to declare, and a little ripple of laughter touched the gathered arrivals. They were ushered into a vast assembly hall, where names were taken and wards allocated; and then, at last, a ward with long rows of beds, a hot bath, clean towels and the soft blue drill of hospital uniform.

  But to his consternation the nurse who handed him these things insisted on staying.

  ‘We don’t want you passing out in the bath, now do we?’ she declared briskly, and with that proceeded to unfasten his tunic.

  ‘I can manage,’ he protested feebly as her fingers reached his waist.

  ‘I’m sure you can, but I haven’t got all day.’

  After that, he let her get on with it. At the base hospital in Boulogne, he had been given sponge baths, in bed, and the nurses there were stony-faced, far too busy to give more than perfunctory attention to basic needs. It seemed very strange to be standing naked in front of a pleasant young woman of his own age, one who helped him into the bath and stood over him while he soaped himself; stranger still to feel those firm hands scrubbing back and neck and the base of his spine. But it felt very good. Sinking back into the water, all embarrassment gone, Liam was aware of faint relief that he had not disgraced himself. Athough with towels wrapped around him and her hands rubbing him dry, he was thankful that she left the intimate parts of his anatomy to himself.

  Assigned to a bed at last, it was bliss to crawl into it, to feel the cool, fresh linen surrounding him and the softness of pillows beneath his head. Within minutes he was dead to the world.

  He was woken for tea, and again for supper, both meals consisting of toast and a hot drink, and then he slept again, ten solid hours until six the next morning. Another nurse came to check his pulse and temperature, bringing water and a towel so that he could wash, and later, a lightly-boiled breakfast egg, with tea and more toast.

  A man from further down the ward brought over a selection of books, but beyond introducing himself and a few others, did not stay to talk. Liam was grateful for that. He glanced through the books, read a little, and dozed again. The doctor came, asking the usual questions, giving the usual answers that he was in good hands and recovery was just a matter of rest and time. The problem of his deafness, however, was something that would be attended to just as soon as Liam was fit to be out of bed for a few hours. It was probably nothing more than a severe build-up of wax, the body’s natural defence against noise. Reassured, for he had no pain in his ears, Liam thanked him and settled back against his pillows. The doctor, with the ward-sister in tow, moved on to the next patient.

  The Sister in charge was a buxom, middle-aged Australian woman with a weatherbeaten face and a map of lines which suggested great good-humour, but enough steel, he guessed, to keep a firm hold on the motley collection of men beneath her rule. Liam tried to picture her in civilian life, and imagined her nursing at some small medical station in the outback, at a mine or logging camp, perhaps, or serving a vast area of small settlements. She was not a city woman, he was sure of that, and wondered how she coped with London.

  The ward, once the doctor had gone, erupted into its usual buzz of chatter, bursts of laughter from men who had been ill and were recovering well; a medical ward, this, with none of the hush and incipient tragedy attached to surgical cases. There were perhaps thirty beds, not all of them occupied, and most of the men were up and dressed. Liam’s bed was nearest the door, and he recalled from his previous spell in hospital that as he improved he would move further down. The man next to him had come in two days previously, and a couple of others across the way had arrived by the same train as Liam. All bore the same hollow, dark-eyed look, a look he had come to associate with utter exhaustion. He supposed his own face must tell the same story, and no longer wondered at that overwhelming urge to sleep.

  He managed to stay awake until lunchtime, looking out of the opposite window at a hazy sky above the line of slate roofs and chimney-stacks. Down the centre of the ward an array of lacy ferns stirred in a slight breeze from the open window at his back. So peaceful, it was like heaven. To be here, away from the war and the constant presence of death, was enough to prompt an overwhelming surge of gratitude. As tears welled, he had neither the will nor the strength to check them. He told himself that he had been terribly ill, but the worst was over and now he would get better. He had all he required, and could ask for nothing more. When he felt a little stronger, he thought before slipping off into sleep, he would write and let people know where he was.

  Visitors arrived that afternoon, but Liam was only dimly aware of them. Rolling over onto his side, protected by his deafness, he drifted back into dreams.

  Something stirred him. Not a sound but a touch, light and cool, against his wrist. Through half-open lids he saw the outline of a nurse beside his bed, stiff white wings of a headdress, a short shoulder-cape of grey edged with scarlet, starched cuffs above a hand which held his own. Another nurse come to check pulse and temperature, he thought, closing his eyes again, wishing they would leave him alone. He drifted for a moment, expecting the brisk word, the sharp prod of a thermometer against his lips; but a minute passed and none came. The fingers against his hand tightened perceptibly, then relaxed and lifted.

  He opened his eyes more fully, but the nurse had not moved away, she was still sitting there, head bent, her fingers busy with a handkerchief. She was dabbing her eyes.

  Frowning, he blinked several times, trying to muster sight and sensibilities, trying to find a logical reason why a fully-fledged sister of the military nursing reserve should be sitting beside his bed, crying. The answer came to him even as she glanced up, even as he recognized the pale oval of her face and met the deep, dark blue of her eyes. Like cornflowers, he thought, noting the wet, spiky lashes; and her hair, what little he could see of it, was still the colour of summer wheat. He saw her lips curve into a hesitant smile, and he felt his own mouth responding, broadening as he whispered her name.

  ‘Georgina?’

  She nodded and he pressed her hand, not really believing it, sure the image was just a dream and that in a moment he would wake to emptiness and disappointment as had happened so often in the past. But he felt her responding pressure, heard a little sound, between a sob and a laugh, and experienced the wonder of seeing two fat tears escape her eyes and roll, unchecked, to her chin. Was she really crying
for him?

  She said something then which he did not catch, shook her head and dabbed again at her eyes, more forcefully this time. Although he could have watched her, contentedly, for the rest of the afternoon, he realized she was asking questions but apart from the odd word, he was at a loss.

  ‘Come closer,’ he begged, with a little tug at her hand. ‘I’m very deaf.’

  Concern clouded her eyes, and she edged the chair forward, leaning her elbows on the high bed. She was close enough, almost, to kiss.

  ‘Can you hear me now?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he breathed, knowing that if he raised himself even a little, he could press his mouth to hers, and who would object?

  She would. She most certainly would. But the idea delighted him, that she should be here, close enough for him to touch, to hold, to kiss. And so soon! With a little laugh in his throat he glanced away, pressed his lips together in a smile, and looked back into those beautiful, concerned, compassionate eyes.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Casualty list.’ She glanced down, at the scars on his hands, the trimmed but badly-damaged nails. ‘I got to hear about it this morning.’

  There was a vague question in his mind as to how she had come by the information, in her hospital at Lewisham, but he was too enthralled by her presence to express it. ‘What time is it now?’

  ‘A quarter to four. I managed to get an early break. Usually I take a couple of hours from four till six, but I changed it.’

  ‘And came straight here.’

  She laughed, softly. ‘I wanted to be sure you were all right.’

  ‘I’m fine, just fine.’ Although his hands were a mass of scars that he tried to hide, she seemed to find some fascination there, smoothing the rough and dented knuckles with her fingers. He was supremely conscious of her touch, every tiny movement sending echoes into his heart. For a while he watched her fingers, long and fine, whiter than he recalled from her days at the Retreat, but still those of a working woman. The nails were short, neatly filed to cause no pain, the skin across her knuckles slightly rough from constant washing. He wanted to touch them to his lips, which suddenly, like his throat, seemed terribly dry.