The Longest Winter

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘Damned if it wasn’t our friend James. What do you think of that?’

  Sophie stared glazedly at words leaping from the paper. Her hand shook and the words spun. Mars had taken to the air and was unleashing his thunderbolts from the heavens. Oh, Olympus! Oh, dear and precious enemy!

  She felt in giddy wonder. He was not dead. Her German allies had him safe and sound, and out of the war.

  She read on, hungrily, dizzily.

  ‘Like to have been there myself. Colonel Huebner thought him a cool devil. Remembering Bosnia I wasn’t surprised. How do I know it was James? Well, it’s an idiot’s game, war, and a funny one. Colonel Huebner took him up to the regimental mess and gave him some schnapps, then asked him how he got his liking for it. And James said, “I shared a very fine bottle once with a friend of mine, Major Frederic Moeller. Don’t know him, do you?” Huebner did, of course, and said so. So James said, “Give him my regards and a message, will you? Tell him that Sophie was right, it was nobody’s business but the emperor’s. Tell him to give her my love, if he can.”’

  The giddiness buzzed in her ears and she sat heavily down. It took a few moments before her swimming eyes could focus again.

  ‘They’d cut away the scorched sleeves of his flying jacket and uniform and given his burns a light dressing. Huebner sent him to the casualty station for better medication and damned if he didn’t walk off as calm as you like while waiting to be sent to a clearing centre. It was dark at that stage and no one picked him up. If I know James he got back to his own lines during the night.’

  No, oh, no!

  The letter shook again in her hand.

  ‘I was bitterly disappointed at not seeing him myself. My dear Sophie, I tell you, I’d have shared another bottle with him. Honourable enemies, you know. What else would anyone have done with any friend who dropped in as an enemy?’

  Oh, dear God, thought Sophie, this one should have been held safe and secure for me. James, how could you! You could have been safe for the rest of the war. Was it amusing to you, to send me your love and then to escape to fight me again? Colonel Huebner, whoever you are, why didn’t you chain him up, why didn’t you? He’ll fly again and Richthofen will get him. Oh, James, couldn’t you have thought of me just a little?

  She gave the letter to Anne and her mother, saying in a flat voice, ‘Isn’t it odd, isn’t it very odd? Here is a letter from Colonel Moeller, with news of James. You remember James? He was shot down and captured by the Germans. And they let him escape.’

  ‘Sophie?’ said Anne, seeing the pain in her sister’s eyes.

  ‘No one can survive all through this war, can they?’ said Sophie. ‘Especially an airman. There’s only one airman who can. Richthofen. He’ll get James now, don’t you think?’

  The baroness, who had begun perusing the letter, looked up and said, ‘Sophie, there’s nothing we can do for those who fight against us. What little we can do must be for Austria.’

  ‘I know, Mama, I know,’ said Sophie palely, ‘but why did he escape? He’ll only have to fly again. Does he want to die?’

  ‘Sophie—’

  But Sophie, so bitter, was gone. Anne went after her, caught her in the wide corridor leading to the domed vestibule. Sophie stopped, her face pale, her teeth clenched, her eyes glittering.

  ‘Sophie, please don’t.’

  ‘I am not going to cry!’

  ‘I know, but please don’t be so tragic.’

  ‘Why did he do it?’ Sophie was distraught. ‘I think of him so much, why doesn’t he think of me a little?’

  ‘Isn’t it the duty of captured men to try and escape?’ said Anne. ‘Perhaps Ludwig will one day.’

  Sophie found calmer breath.

  ‘I hope he will, darling, I hope he will,’ she said, ‘you deserve that and so much more. You’re a far better Austrian than I am. I’m a traitor, aren’t I? I’m praying for my enemy when I should be praying for my country. Is that unforgivable?’

  ‘No,’ said Anne, ‘never. When the war is over we can’t still go on fighting each other, can we?’

  ‘I shan’t have the chance to fight with James. Richthofen will get him.’

  She worked and danced more feverishly than ever then. She descended more frequently on convalescent soldiers, who discovered her aristocratic brilliance provided the strangest comfort. But it was comfort, because men who have been shattered by war acquire a sensitive awareness of the unseen wounds suffered by women. They understood every word she said.

  ‘There, you see, I’ve managed to bring you some wine today. It won’t bring any missing legs back, I’m afraid, but it will help you sing some sorry songs. Well, it is a sorry state we’re in, isn’t it? And, my dear gentlemen, it’s beginning to show. On all of us. The emperor himself wears a very sorry face for one so young. And look at mine. Did you ever see anything sorrier? But listen to this. Misery, you know, is the most honest emotion of all. I’m so miserable myself I’m the most honest woman in Vienna. In the empire. Is there an empire? Well, whether there is or isn’t, I exist very sincerely on my misery. In another six months at the outside I think we can all have a good honest howl together, don’t you? Now, who will sing with me the lament to the fallen angels?’

  They laughed. She laughed. They were all smiling as she left them a little later. They watched her go, the green lawn of the convalescent home a carpet for her elegant feet. They did not see the tears in her eyes.

  Carl had not had leave for months, not been home for months. He was a major in command of a mountain regiment, fighting the Italians in a hard, bitter slog around the Tyrolean Alps. He wrote less frequently than he had done, and more briefly. The baroness worried about what the war was doing to him, how it was changing him.

  ‘It’s not a cause for worry, Mama,’ said Sophie.

  ‘How can you know that?’ said the baroness.

  ‘It’s never a cause for worry when a man grows up.’

  ‘Carl is still so young.’

  ‘He was. He’s now a man. I like him for it.’

  Captain Hans Doerffer reappeared in Vienna in January 1918. He called on Sophie. He looked older, tireder, but was just as amusing. And still in love with her. For eight days they either danced or went to the theatre. He wanted her but was neither demanding nor tiresome. He did not flirt with her or worry her. He was glad to be with her, to watch her, admire her and talk with her. He had one advantage unknown to himself. He was a little like James. He was dark like James and he could be talked to, as James could. He liked to listen to her, as James did. Sophie, restless and loquacious, was never still, never silent. In eight short days she found in Captain Doerffer someone necessary to her, someone who could help her forget that Austria was bleeding to death, that the summer of her life had gone a thousand years ago and the winter was endless.

  Anne said one evening, ‘He seems very nice.’

  Sophie, at her dressing table, said, ‘He’s going back tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m sorry. None of them stay very long, do they?’

  Sophie rose. Anne thought her so thin, so huge-eyed.

  ‘Anne,’ she said with a brittle smile, ‘we’re going to lose them all, aren’t we? There’ll be no men left in the end. Only Richthofen.’

  ‘Sophie, don’t.’

  ‘I’m not bearing up as well as you, am I?’

  ‘You’re bearing up better than any of us,’ said Anne, ‘going to the hospitals and making yourself look beautiful when the rest of us look very glum. He is still on your mind, isn’t he?’

  ‘Hans? Captain Doerffer?’

  ‘James.’ Anne did not know how her sister and James could ever get together again. The Allies were tightening their hold on the Central Powers, and Austria was growing more embittered. The British naval blockade of Europe was strangling Germany and Austria. If Austria was broken beyond recovery Sophie would never forgive James. Or his country.

  ‘James?’ said Sophie, as if Anne had conjured up the unknown. But she thought oh, le
t me go, James, let me go. Don’t possess me so, then perhaps I can make Hans happy. ‘James?’ she said again. ‘Who is James?’

  ‘Someone we both feel sad about,’ said Anne.

  ‘There’s Ludwig,’ said Sophie, ‘he’ll turn up, darling. And there’s Carl. Let us feel for them. I am proud of Ludwig and Carl. And Hans is worth a thought too, don’t you think? He’ll propose again tonight or before he leaves tomorrow.’

  ‘Do you want him to?’

  ‘I must make someone happy.’

  ‘Unless you love him, Sophie, you won’t make him happy, and you’ll make yourself quite miserable.’

  ‘Well, the satisfaction of sacrificing myself will ring my misery with a halo. Not many of us have haloes, darling. I shall marry Hans if he asks me.’

  Captain Doerffer did ask. On this his last night they had danced until suddenly the strength ran from Sophie. He was concerned and took her home immediately. She recovered on the way and expounded in brittle amusement on him being the only man who had danced her off her feet. He escorted her from the cab to her door and proposed going up the steps. In front of the door, with the dark night shadows about them, Sophie looked into his earnest face. He smiled in hope, for Sophie was smiling too.

  ‘Do you wish it so much, a wedding?’ she asked.

  ‘As long as you were there and as long as you wished it yourself.’

  ‘Then,’ began Sophie and stopped, the silence of the night broken by the noise of a solitary plane. A plane over dark Vienna. They heard it coming from the west, its engine harshly booming and echoing, and because there were times now when the city, for all its traditions of revelry, withdrew into sombre quiet, the machine alone seemed relevant to the pursuance of life and war. Sophie, her face turned up to the echoing black cavern of the sky, was like a woman transfixed. Captain Doerffer saw her expression, one of strange, mesmerized wonder, and realized that she had simply gone from him. She was a dark world away.

  So that was how she had lost her hero. He had fallen from the sky, shot out of it, and Sophie was listening to the flight of his ghost.

  ‘Never mind, Sophie,’ he said.

  She did not hear him. She was following the noise of the invisible plane.

  ‘Sophie, will you at least say goodbye to me?’

  She drew a deep breath and came out of the night sky. James would not let her go. He was there, sometimes as a faint but insistent whisper, sometimes as an undisguised longing, but always in possession of her soul. She was sentenced to a lifetime of looking for him, listening for him, hating him and loving him. She could not make Hans happy. She could only say goodbye.

  ‘Hans?’ she said and lifted her face.

  For all his regret and his realization that it would be of no help to him, he kissed her. Her mouth was soft, sweet, but so cold. And Sophie, apart from wanting to make the gesture, felt nothing. Only, after a moment, an impossible imagining of what it had been like when James kissed her on the day she fell into his arms.

  ‘I think I understand,’ said Hans, ‘it’s too soon, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she said in distress.

  ‘But I’ll call again,’ he said. ‘In a year, perhaps. If I may, if I can.’

  ‘A year?’ She wondered how long a year could be.

  ‘If I may. Perhaps they’ll have gone by then, your ghosts.’

  ‘I do have them, don’t I?’ she said.

  ‘Not for ever. A year can work wonders, Sophie.’

  But the year lasted less than a month for Hans Doerffer. On the Eastern Front the Russians, despite their revolutionary convulsions, still held their line. They even made the occasional assault. In one desperate Austrian counter-attack Captain Doerffer ran into a stream of bullets and out of Sophie’s life. It added sadness to her bitterness.

  ‘Mama,’ said Anne on a day when things were going dismally for Austria in every way, ‘do you worry about Sophie?’

  The baroness, dejected by so much bad news but still resolutely coping with its effects on their daily lives, looked up from her sewing.

  ‘I worry about Austria, darling,’ she said. ‘You’re speaking as much about James as about Sophie, aren’t you?’

  ‘She still hasn’t got over him,’ said Anne. She was a quieter person now. The war made laughter and gaiety very much out of place these days. Her beloved Vienna was grey, food scarce and dear, fuel a constant problem. ‘I think she still has hopes.’

  ‘Nothing is more impossible now than Sophie marrying James,’ said the baroness. For all her tolerance, even she had begun to feel bitter. ‘She’ll never really forgive him for leaving her, for going off to fight against us. Nor is she the kind to go on loving such a man. She’s much too proud.’

  ‘Mama, because of the war is that what you want to believe? It isn’t like you to refuse to see the obvious. I don’t think Sophie will marry any man if she can’t have James. She would never really have married poor Captain Doerffer. It’s rather terrible for her knowing James is on the other side. You’d think she’d hate him by now. We’re a funny lot, aren’t we? Not all of us love a man for the best reasons.’

  ‘You may be right about Sophie’s feelings,’ said the baroness. She bit through a thread. ‘But she and James are both going their separate ways and in a way that makes me doubt if they’ll ever see each other again.’

  ‘I wish Ludwig were home,’ said Anne. She thought wistfully about her cheerful, easy-going husband. ‘I’d like to have something out of this war.’

  She had married Ludwig on a high note of excited love. If only he could come home they might have a child. That would give her a lovely reason for putting up with everything else. There was no reason why the Russians couldn’t send him home. They seemed far more concerned with their revolution now than the war.

  Chapter Two

  Sister Margaret Kernan took one of the mugs of Bovril from the tray in the hands of an orderly. As she left the ward she hoped she would not meet Matron in one of the corridors. Matron would be sure to ask what she was doing, carrying a mug of Bovril around. She was lucky. Matron was in her sanctum, dressing down a slightly erring nurse with kind severity.

  It was bright outside. June was almost on them. The red cross on the bodice of her uniform blazed. She looked around the terrace and out over the lawns and shrubberies. Some walking patients were out and about, some just dreaming. One was sitting on a white bench, a sketchbook on the table in front of him. She went down the steps of grey, glinting granite and over a broad sweep of lawn. He heard the crisp rustle of her starched uniform, glanced up, smiled at her and then gazed suspiciously at the mug.

  ‘What’s that, for God’s sake? Not more unsolicited medicine?’

  ‘It’s your Bovril, as you know very well—’

  ‘That’s a winter warmer.’

  ‘It’s an all-year-round tonic,’ she said, ‘and what’s this talk about unsolicited medicine?’

  ‘Something between me and Nurse Paterson. Was it you who put her on to me?’

  ‘Drink your Bovril,’ she said, putting the mug on the table. She had a soft voice but a clear one, her enunciation disciplined so that patients had little reason to ask her to repeat herself. Her ancestors came from both sides of the border and had probably fought and murdered each other in the distant past. She had moved from Hereford to Derbyshire in 1915, when they had converted Hattersleigh Hall into a military hospital. Here her Celtic warm-heartedness was kept under professional control by her English coolness. ‘I heard about Nurse Paterson.’

  ‘Trapped me,’ said James. ‘She had the spoon halfway down my throat before I wondered what the devil she was up to.’

  ‘She’s new here,’ said Sister Kernan, ‘she thought you were Captain Davis. You were sitting on his bed, I believe.’

  ‘Waiting for him to come back from the bathroom. Could have been serious.’

  ‘You didn’t actually swallow any, I’m told. But even if you had it would have done you no harm.’ />
  ‘I’m advised by Captain Davis that it does extraordinary things to him.’

  ‘Oh, fuss, fuss,’ she said but she wanted to smile.

  ‘Sit down, won’t you?’ said James, rising to give her the courtesy of half the bench. ‘I know you’re frantically busy as usual, but sit for a moment or two.’

  ‘I can’t, I really am busy.’ She had snatched a minute to bring him his Bovril and breathe in some fresh air. ‘And you’re due in therapy at eleven. Try not to be absent-minded about it. Nurse Upton says you’re never on time.’

  ‘Tell her if she’ll keep hoping I’ll keep trying.’

  She smiled. Captain Fraser was nearly as good as new. He had been gaunt on arrival. The sun was getting at him now, giving him a healthy tan.

  ‘I must go,’ she said, and went. He looked after her, her cap and uniform a dazzle in the sunshine. There were women and women. There was one who was unique. It did little good to look for someone out of the same mould. Sister Kernan was no one but herself, as she was entitled to be.

  She spared herself a little more time in the afternoon. She talked first to some of the patients whose beds had been wheeled out on to the terrace, then went down the steps and crossed the grass to the white bench near an old apple tree. Year after year it produced a generous crop of fruit for the hospital, but last year the apples had been specked. A diagnosis had resulted in a lavish dressing of potash. The forming fruit this year looked as if the harvest might be abundant and healthy.