Secrets of the Frontline Nurses

by Holly Green

  ‘Stripped? How? When?’

  ‘On the field of battle, I presume. There are always those who will grab the opportunity of scavenging for anything valuable once the fighting is over. It might have been local people, but more likely it was Bulgarian soldiers. I’ve never seen an army so desperately short of even basic necessities, like boots and warm clothing, as well as weapons. Anyway, it seems that a Bulgarian medical team was scouring the battlefield looking for wounded and they came across me. I was unconscious and stripped almost naked. Even my signet ring had gone.’ He glanced down at the empty sleeve. ‘Whether my hand was blown off in the fighting, or someone cut it off while I was unconscious to get the ring I shall never know.’

  Leo shuddered. ‘That’s a terrible thought!’

  ‘Well, these things happen. If it hadn’t been the depths of winter, so that the arteries froze, I should probably have bled to death. The point is, without any insignia or means of identification they had no means of knowing whether I was one of their own or an enemy. So that was how I came to be in a hospital for Bulgarian soldiers. Of course, as soon as I opened my mouth they realised I was a Serb, but to do them justice they kept me until I was strong enough to be transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp.’

  ‘And you still couldn’t remember who you were?’

  ‘No, not with any certainty. Sometimes I got flashes of memory, like pictures from a book, but I couldn’t tell if they were things that had really happened or something I’d read or been told about. And, of course, as the Bulgarians didn’t know who I was or what rank I held I was sent to a camp for ordinary soldiers, not officers, so there was no one who recognised me and could tell me who I was. At least—’ he paused and smiled ironically ‘—there were men there who had served under me but I suppose they had only seen me at a distance and by then I looked so different – thin and ragged and unkempt – that it’s not surprising they didn’t know me. The first time I looked in a mirror after I got out I hardly recognised myself. All you could see was two eyes peering out of a mass of hair and beard.’

  ‘So you did remember, in the end?’

  ‘Slowly. The flashes of memory got stronger and clearer, and also I kept feeling that I had a right to command. I wanted to give the other men orders. Then one morning I woke up with this name in my head – Aleksander Malkovic – Colonel Malkovic. And I thought perhaps that’s who I am. But when I went to the commandant and asked to be transferred to an officers’ camp he only laughed. He said I wasn’t the first one to try that on and unless I could prove my identity I would have to stay where I was. He pointed out, quite reasonably, that none of the men in the camp had recognised me. So I decided he must be right. I thought perhaps I’d served under Malkovic, or heard of him somewhere.’ He half closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘I can’t describe how terrible those months were. I kept getting these images in my mind – pictures of a childhood I thought couldn’t be mine; pictures of you; memories of battles – and none of it made sense. I honestly began to believe I’d gone mad. And then I got ill again. I don’t know if it was this flu that is going round or some other infection. Food was very short and we were all weak. And the fever just left me even more confused.’

  ‘Oh my poor love!’ Leo murmured. ‘But you did remember in the end. How did it happen?’

  ‘One day a man came up to me and said, “I know you. You’re Colonel Malkovic.” He was a pretty unsavoury-looking creature. I’d noticed him mooching around the camp. He hardly ever spoke and the general opinion was that he was a bit half-witted, but at that moment I could have embraced him. But then he said something that really stopped me in my tracks. He said, “What’s it worth to you to know you’ve got a kid out there somewhere?” It seems he’d been listening to some of the other men gossiping and one of them had actually been in Lavci that night, the night I was supposed to have been killed, and knew that you had been there and had given birth.’ He had been looking into the fire but now he turned his eyes to her. ‘Leo, what on earth were you doing there, in your condition?’

  ‘They sent word to the hospital in Bitola that you had been wounded – they said wounded, not killed. Pierre Leseaux went with an ambulance to fetch you back and I insisted on going too. He didn’t want me too but I was terrified that …’ she faltered, ‘after that last meeting, when you were so angry, I was terrified that we might not have a chance to put things right between us. I didn’t know how close I was to my time. But it was hearing the news that you had been killed that brought it on.’

  He held her close. ‘My poor, foolish darling. You must have had a terrible time.’

  ‘I don’t remember much about it now. In the end Pierre gave me chloroform and by the time I came round I was back in the hospital in Bitola and he’d given the baby away to that woman. I never even saw her until today.’

  ‘How cruel! Whatever possessed him?’

  ‘He did what he thought was best. And he was right. I probably owe him my life – and so does Alexandra.’

  ‘It was my fault you were there at all,’ he said. ‘I behaved abominably to you. I knew that afterwards. I wrote you a letter. Did you ever get it?’

  She reached for her bag and took out the envelope. ‘You mean this one?’

  ‘You have it with you, after all this time?’

  ‘I have never let it go. It was all I had to hold on to. And besides, today, I thought I might need it.’

  ‘Need it? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know how Alexandra got here, but I was told by the woman who fostered her that a man had come and taken her to be with her family. I thought Eudoxie must have somehow heard about her and decided that as your heir she should be brought up here. I thought I might need the letter to persuade her to let me take her.’

  ‘You’ve been in Skopje?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’ve been looking for her for months.’

  He rubbed his cheek against her hair. ‘What a nightmare! I’m so sorry, my love.’

  ‘It isn’t your fault. Go on with your story.’

  There was a tap on the door and the little maid came in with a tray bearing the traditional Serbian welcome offering of jam and water, and steaming cups of sweet black coffee. Sasha took a spoonful of the jam and held it to her lips. She sucked it in and felt her nerves tingle with the unaccustomed sweetness. Food had been in short supply everywhere and even in the hotel there had been nothing to eat but bread and cabbage and gristly meat. For the first time she understood how much the jam she had collected in England and sent out to the soldiers in Bitola had meant to them. She washed the jam down with a sip of water and then a sip of coffee.

  ‘Real coffee! Sasha, how have you managed it?’

  ‘I can’t take any credit for that. My steward had the presence of mind to wall up all our preserves and the best wine at the back of the cellar before the Bulgarians took over. They never suspected it was there.’

  Leo finished the coffee and leaned back against him. ‘Go on. What happened next?’

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘You were talking about the man who recognised you.’

  ‘Oh yes. His name was Slobodan and he wasn’t as stupid as he made out. He told me that the man who had been in Lavci remembered that he and others had been sent out to scour the village for a women to be wet nurse for the child. They assumed from that, understandably, that you must have died. The amazing thing was that the man even recalled the name of the woman – but Slobodan wouldn’t tell me what it was.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he wanted a reward for finding the child. Of course, I told him that when we finally got out of prison he could ask for anything he liked if he helped me find her, or him. But he didn’t trust me enough at that stage to take the chance. And I didn’t press him. All I could think of at that point was that you were dead. It was as if I’d found you and lost you again within a couple of minutes.’

  Leo lifted her head and kissed his cheek and they were both silent for a few moments. Then
she said, ‘So how did you find her?’

  ‘Slobodan promised that if we could get out he would come to Lavci with me to find them. I’d had no incentive to escape up to that point but from that day we began to make plans. After a while we noticed that there seemed to be fewer and fewer guards. The Bulgars had decided that the war was lost and they’d heard that there were riots in Sophia. They weren’t getting supplies and I think they were as hungry as we were, so they started deserting in increasing numbers. The regime got slacker and slacker and one morning Slobo and I just walked out through the gate, when one sentry went off duty and his replacement didn’t show up. We started walking, aiming to go south to Lavci, but we had no money and no food and our clothes were in rags. We lived on berries and roots, but there was precious little of anything left in the fields. The locals had had whatever there was. I still wasn’t strong and after a while I realised I couldn’t go on without food. I suggested coming back here, but Belgrade was still in enemy hands and anyway it was too far away. It turned out that Slobo came from Skopje, which was much closer, so he suggested we went there instead. His father is a cloth merchant in a small way and the family was not well off but they treated me as if I was a second son. I was in a pretty bad way by the time we got there and they fed me and looked after me until I got my strength back. But then we had an amazing stroke of luck …’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We had to explain to the family where we were trying to get to and why and Slobo’s mother mentioned that Skopje was full of refugees. In fact, she knew a family in the next street who had taken some in, so she suggested we should ask them if they knew anyone from Lavci.’

  ‘And they did?’

  ‘No. That would have really been a miracle. But they told us there was a café in the town where refugees sometimes met to try to find out about missing relatives. So Slobo started to hang around the place and ask questions. I was still more or less confined to bed, but I have to give him credit for persistence. It was several days before he got any help, but then he met someone who recognised the name – Popovic, wasn’t it? They didn’t know exactly where these people were staying but they had a rough idea of the area, so he started knocking on doors and asking if anyone knew them. I was beginning to lose hope by this point and come to the conclusion that we would have to go south to Lavci as soon as I was able to travel. Then, one evening Slobo came home and said he thought he’d found them. There was a women with a foster child who said she came from Lavci, but she wouldn’t let him take the child away unless he could prove he had been sent by the family. She showed him a gold locket that had been left with the baby and said that unless he could tell her what was inscribed inside it she wouldn’t believe him.’

  ‘The locket you gave me, all those years ago, when we thought we should never meet again,’ Leo said with a catch in her voice.

  He reached inside his shirt and took out a locket on a slender gold chain. ‘The very one,’ he agreed. ‘But I don’t know how Alexandra came to have it.’

  ‘That was Pierre’s doing. I was terribly upset when I realised it was missing but he told me he had left it round the baby’s neck so that if there was ever any question about her identity she would have some proof.’

  ‘Clever man!’ Sasha said. ‘We owe Pierre Leseaux a great debt, one way and another. I’d like to meet him and thank him.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to go to Paris to do it.’

  ‘All in good time,’ he promised.

  ‘So she showed Slobodan the locket. Then what?’

  ‘Of course, he had no idea what was inscribed inside it but when he told me I knew at once that it must be this one, and that the inscription was my family motto. So I wrote it out and Slobodan took it back the following day to show the woman. I don’t imagine she could actually read it, but presumably she was able to match the letters with the inscription and it was enough to satisfy her, because within a couple of hours he was back, bringing Alexandra with him.’

  ‘Oh, that must have been wonderful!’ Leo said, her voice shaking. ‘But how was she? She must have been frightened, being taken away from the people she knew by a stranger.’

  ‘Yes, she must have been, but she didn’t show it. She was very quiet. It was several days before I could get a word out of her. And she was thin – you wouldn’t believe it to look at her now – and dirty and ridden with lice.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Leo drew back and looked at him in dismay. ‘I always imagined that whatever happened she was being looked after properly.’

  ‘Well, bear in mind that the whole family had had to take to the road as refugees. There were older children, I understand, and it must have been hard to keep them all fed and clean. Mrs Popovic probably did the best she could, in the circumstances.’

  ‘I didn’t take to her, when I finally tracked her down,’ Leo said bitterly. ‘I think she was glad to get rid of Alexandra.’

  ‘Perhaps. It was one less mouth to feed. But we shouldn’t judge her too harshly. After all, Lexi was alive and she hadn’t suffered any real harm. Plenty of children in those conditions wouldn’t have survived. And she soon started to pick up. Slobodan’s mother was wonderful. She bathed her and got rid of the lice. Her daughter had a little girl a year or two older, so she passed on some clothes for her.’

  ‘And she wasn’t upset? She didn’t cry?’

  ‘We had a few tantrums, but that came later. I think to begin with she was just overwhelmed. I imagine as the baby of the family, in difficult circumstances, she had been used to well, not neglect exactly, but having to wait for her share of whatever was going. Suddenly she was the centre of everyone’s attention, made a fuss of, given all she wanted to eat. I don’t think it took her long to realise that her life had taken a turn for the better. The problem now, of course, is that she expects to get her own way all the time.’

  ‘Poor little lamb,’ Leo murmured. ‘She deserves a bit of spoiling.’

  He leaned back and put his fingers under her chin to lift her face to his. ‘So do you, my love. I’ve been so busy telling my story that I haven’t asked about you. You told my mother you’d been ill. You look pale and thin. Are you really better?’

  ‘Yes, I’m all right now. I had the flu, like so many other people, but I suppose I’m one of the lucky ones.’

  ‘You said you had been looking for Alexandra for months. But how? The war has only been over for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘I came back to Salonika at the beginning of the year. I re-joined Pierre’s field hospital in the summer, just before the last big push started. We followed the Schumadia Brigade up through the Sar mountains.’

  ‘Through the Sar? I heard about that. Miscic conducted an amazing offensive, but what a feat of endurance! And you were with them?’

  ‘Yes, until we reached Skopje. That was where I went down with the flu.’

  ‘You are amazing! But have you been in Macedonia all the time, from when Alexandra was born?’

  ‘No. They sent me back to England to recuperate. I didn’t want to go but I was too ill to argue. I was home for a year – the worst year of my life. I was desperate to come back but there was no point as long as the stalemate persisted on the Salonika front.’

  ‘Did you come back alone?’

  ‘No. Victoria was with me. Do you remember her from Adrianople?’

  ‘Only vaguely.’

  ‘She has been a wonderful friend to me. I don’t know how I would have got through the last two years without her. But she has gone to New Zealand now. She married Luke. He was at Adrianople, too.’

  ‘And your brother, Ralph? And Tom? I know they were both fighting on the Western Front. Are they …’

  ‘Ralph was killed near a place called Passchendaele. And Tom was badly wounded. He recovered, but he was confined to a wheelchair. I heard last spring that he had died of flu, like so many others.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I liked Tom – even if he was technically your fiancé.’ He sighed deeply. ‘
This terrible flu! After all the thousands that have died in the war it seems as though the flu will kill thousands more. It makes you wonder if God has decided to purge the world, like another Noah’s flood.’

  ‘I don’t believe God has anything to do with it,’ Leo said firmly. ‘Why would he purge the best and bravest? It’s our own weakness and folly that’s to blame.’

  ‘For the war, perhaps. But for the flu?’

  ‘Perhaps if we hadn’t been stupid enough to go to war we would have had more strength, and more resources to fight the flu.’ She shook her head and sighed in her turn. ‘Anyway, here we are and it’s up to us, the survivors, to see that we don’t make the same mistakes again.’

  He looked into her eyes. ‘Us, the survivors. Yes. Now that Tom and Ralph are gone, are you completely alone in the world?’

  ‘I was, until I found you and Alexandra.’

  ‘And now? Are you still prepared to give up your adventurous life to settle down as the wife of a country gentleman?’

  ‘Is that what you still intend to be?’

  ‘If I am allowed to. Serbia is going to be very different. Different people are in charge. Who knows what may happen. But that is what I hope for.’

  ‘And it’s all I dream of, too.’

  He kissed her, properly, on the lips, for the first time and she felt the hard knot of pain and loss at the core of her being begin to loosen.

  The door opened and small feet pattered across the room. A voice demanded, ‘Up, Papa! Up!’

  Sasha reached down and lifted the child onto his knee. She clung round his neck and, with her free hand, tried to remove Leo’s from his shoulder.

  ‘My Papa! Mine!’

  ‘I know, darling,’ Leo said. ‘But I love him too. I love you both. I never meant to leave you but it wasn’t my fault. And I’ll never leave you again. I promise.’

  ‘Your mama has had a long journey and she’s been ill, so she needs us to look after her just like Grandmama and I look after you,’ Sasha said gently. ‘Will you help us?’

  The child regarded Leo with solemn, unblinking eyes for a moment. Then she nodded and Sasha carefully lifted her onto Leo’s lap. For the first time Leo cradled her to her breast and felt the warm, silken skin of her face against her neck. Sasha reached across and slipped the chain of the locket over her head. She pressed the clasp and it opened to display a twist of black hair.