White Feathers

by Susan Lanigan

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Got my papers – same as you. I wasn’t going to let you have all the fun.’ She had to shout to be heard above the din.

  ‘How did you get them so quickly?’ Eva shouted back.

  ‘I went up and asked for them, you big booby. How else?’

  Eva was left to reflect, and not for the first time, that things got done much faster in Sybil and Roma’s world than in hers. But she was so pleased to see Sybil that she couldn’t feel any resentment. ‘Shall we try and get a seat?’

  They managed to find the last seating compartment left in their carriage and squeezed in. The train rattled and shook its way across the Kent countryside to Dover, where the troopship was waiting, with several destroyers, to escort them to France.

  IV

  War

  22

  It started on a fine July day in 1916. In the woods near Fricourt, Mametz, Bazentin; in the hamlet of Ovillers, seven thousand to a field, and La Boisselle; along the Roman road that leads from Albert in the south to Bapaume in the north. Throughout the Somme valley, at seven-thirty in the morning of the 1st, the offensive began.

  For several days beforehand, masses of Kitchener’s New Army entrained at Étaples and left, heading north to the front line. Others followed on foot, along with processions of horses and trucks, some with red crosses on the side, to set up and maintain the casualty clearing stations. All day long, the road to Boulogne was full of marching troops, and the trains ran up and down the line, collecting more troops each time and returning empty for the next batch.

  ‘They couldn’t be less secretive,’ Sybil commented, ‘if they got the Brighton Pierrots to do it as a travelling theatre company. All that’s missing is the one in pink playing the piano.’ She mimicked the movement of hands on keys, doing a little dance.

  ‘Less of your levity, Faugharne,’ barked the charge nurse. Nobody used ‘Lady’ any more. Titles did not matter here – not on the surface anyway.

  The field hospital at Étaples was a vast encampment of long, low huts separated from the sea by a series of sand dunes, a military cemetery with rows of wooden crosses, and the busy railway line. Once, Étaples had been a seaside holiday town; now it swarmed with military personnel. It served as a training centre for arriving British troops – and heaven knows they needed training, since the time from enlisting to engagement was getting ever shorter.

  The three months since Sybil and Eva’s arrival had been a period of febrile waiting. The troops in the camp drilled and drilled, carrying out long marches on the road to Boulogne, saddled with a full kit on their backs. They practised bayonetting burlap sacks at close range, their efforts arousing the displeasure of their colour sergeant: ‘Call that bayonet work? Giving Jerry a bloody cuddle, eh? He needs to get what for! One – two – three – again!’ The sacks would swing a few times, then hang impotently in the sweltering sun, waiting for the next onslaught.

  But now it looked as if the boys would be having a close encounter with the real thing. Eva heard it from a Tommy travelling back to base with a box of provisions retrieved by his diligent quartermaster when their trench narrowly escaped a shell. ‘There’s a big push on, I reckon. The French have been shelling for nearly a week, some of our lads too. Should start in the next few days, I’d say.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ Eva said, ‘there go my chances of getting any shut-eye.’ It did occur to her afterwards that her response might have been a bit more considerate – there was rather more at stake than her sleep. But even in the trenches, men would argue about tea and cigarette rations and all sorts of things that would never bother them in peacetime. In such a way could the mind distract itself with the trivial. The truth was, her chances of a good sleep had been ruined already, before any battle had even started.

  On her first night in Étaples, the air had been pleasantly warm, even this far north on the French coast. Spring was giving way to early summer. Silence would have been impossible in a camp of thousands of soldiers, but there was a deep peace humming in the air, along with the heady scent of lily-of-the-valley and the sharp smell of the sea.

  When she was first shown to the makeshift Alwyn hut in which she was to live, Eva thought it was empty. She was expecting a roommate – not Sybil, alas, who had been directed elsewhere. Carefully she switched on her Orilux trench torch, one of Cronin’s possessions returned to her after his execution. The beam of light swung across the hut in an arc of whitish-yellow – and stopped at a pair of eyes that stared back at her with all the affront of a domestic cat disturbed mid-grooming. The face was heavy-cheeked and the mouth thin as a crack in a wall.

  ‘So,’ the crack opened and said, ‘you showed yourself at last.’

  The accent was cultured, Corkonian. Eva had not heard it since she was a child. She continued to shine the torch in the woman’s face, and the woman continued to stare, sitting squatly on her bunk. ‘Are you sharing with me?’ Eva said.

  ‘I am, and it’s no accident I’m here. Do you remember Mrs Michael Stewart? A good woman who troubled to look after you, when you gave her nothing but backchat and bad manners?’

  Eva’s gut constricted. She could hardly keep the torch straight. Mrs Stewart: Catherine’s friend, the chaperone who had accompanied her to Eastbourne that first time and who, worst of all, had eaten a week of Christopher’s wages in cake? My God, would she ever be free of them?

  ‘I’m Breedagh Stewart, her great-niece. You may shake hands.’

  Eva, more than familiar with the Irish use of ‘may’ as a command rather than a suggestion, put her right hand behind her back, making sure to illuminate her gesture with the torch she held in her left, so that Breedagh Stewart might be in no doubt where she stood on the matter.

  ‘The family knows you’re here, by the way,’ Breedagh said, pretending to ignore Eva’s gesture. ‘They found out you were at Queen Alexandra’s, and since I was doing the same thing up the road at Charing Cross they asked me to swing by, keep an eye on you, like. I’ve known Roy Downey a long time, you know. And Catherine’s a lovely woman. She would drop anything to help you, really she would. ’Twas she got me and my Great-Auntie Gretta to come over to London after my two brothers died in a terrible fire, the Lord have mercy on their souls.’ Her hands flew across her forehead and shoulders as she made the sign of the cross.

  Eva said nothing. This gnome-like horror of an Irishwoman had put the fear of God into her.

  ‘It’s not realistic, you know, to waltz around France pretending you’re somebody else. And it’s very disrespectful of you to forget your married name. I made it my business to put that right with the sister.’

  ‘It was disrespectful of my husband,’ Eva commented, as if to the open air, ‘to have forgotten to fight, don’t you think?’

  A hiss of indrawn breath. ‘You think you’re so smart, don’t you?’ The words landed like a slap. ‘Let me tell you, before you insult the memory of your poor dead husband, you should think about your record with cowards. The family have told me everything about your behaviour. Everything.’

  This woman is dangerous. Eva was glad Breedagh could not see her face. The heat of the night and the tension in the little hut were getting to her. She felt her period coming on and sweat leaking through her petticoat. Stains in two places, she thought, tightening her thighs and inner muscles to contain the flow.

  ‘Now, I’ve no great love for the English and their war, even if I am here. I think you did the right thing: that fella got what was coming to him. But if word got around this camp that you gave a man the white feather, even a conchie … well, soldiers tend to take that badly from a woman. Your life would be very difficult.’

  ‘I’m going to the sister straightaway,’ Eva said, trembling. ‘I want to move rooms.’

  ‘You will do no such thing,’ Breedagh replied, ‘if you know what’s good for you.’

  Eva felt like something was tightening around her neck. She knew Breedagh was right. ‘Why do you care so much? Why
do you hate me so?’ she said at last. Her voice sounded like a squeaky version of itself.

  ‘Don’t be so childish, Eva. Nobody hates anyone. I care because it looks bad on all of us, on the community, if one of us lets the side down.’ Breedagh rose and put her hand on Eva’s shoulder. ‘Never forget: for us Irish, family always comes first. Always.’

  Nausea rose up Eva’s gullet. She almost wished she were pregnant again, if only because it would have been so much easier to puke. No court martial would convict her for puking all over Breedagh Stewart, then and there.

  ‘Now, don’t upset yourself,’ the voice crooned, ‘you’ll be needing all your strength for your first day. I have a little something you can put in your drink if you need to sleep.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ Eva answered, ‘it’s probably poison.’

  Breedagh laughed lightly. ‘Ah, would you go away with yourself? You’re obviously a very imaginative young lady indeed. Well, lie awake in the dark if you must.’ She stepped back to her bunk and began to undress; Eva immediately moved the torch’s beam. She did not want to see any more of Breedagh than was strictly necessary.

  That night was the first of many difficult ones she was to spend in that Alwyn hut, its canvas flapping in the occasional breeze as her unpleasant roommate snored her head off.

  And now battle was imminent, and the charge nurse, Sister Coker, rushed about all day long, looking flustered. ‘Downey, are you loitering? Where should you be?’ It was her constant question: every girl under her regime had to be somewhere, or something was wrong.

  ‘I need a drink of water, sister. I’ll be straight back.’

  ‘Mind that you are. When this first push is over there’ll be plenty of work to do. Expect a fall-in tonight and tomorrow.’

  Sister Coker’s prediction turned out to be optimistic. When the field telephones started to ring and the divisional sergeants answered, their pale faces and abrupt instructions told their own story. All the staff of Eva’s unit were summoned to a briefing. ‘Downey and Faugharne, we will be moving you both to the surgical ward. Merton, you can supervise the medical ward in case of emergencies, but really it’s going to be all hands on deck now. Mr Philbin, Mr Doyle and Mr Russell, if you gentlemen can be ready in Operating Theatre One—’

  ‘The three of us?’ Doyle interrupted, leaning against the room’s flimsy plywood wall, gripping his forehead with his thumb and middle finger.

  ‘Will there be room?’

  ‘There will have to be,’ Sister Coker said grimly. ‘We are going to get a lot of casualties. Brace yourselves; it isn’t going to be good.’ Sixty thousand, somebody murmured. The word went around the camp. Sixty thousand in one day.

  ‘They attacked in broad daylight,’ Sybil told Eva later, her face haggard from horror and overwork. ‘The German guns picked them off like fish in a barrel. They never stood a chance, none of them.’

  ‘But why didn’t they stop? Why in God’s name didn’t they stop?’

  ‘The generals said keep going. So they did.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Eva said wildly, ‘if you keep trying to do the same thing and people keep getting killed and you don’t get anywhere, why not just stop? Why kill more men?’

  ‘Because that’s cowardice,’ Breedagh interrupted smartly, appearing from nowhere. ‘Besides, it’s not true to say that they didn’t get anywhere. We surely have the Hun on the back foot now. The brave Ulstermen have taken the hill at Beaumont-Hamel. If we did what you said and ran away, the Hun would have the place overrun. As a woman, the thought of that makes me frightened. Very frightened indeed. And you should be frightened, too.’ And off she went, serene as an ocean liner on a moonlit sea, oblivious to the submarine lurking underneath.

  ‘She’s unbelievable,’ Sybil said, shaking her head.

  ‘She’s like Grace,’ Eva said, ‘full of declarations that she’d be fighting herself. She’d rush over to the enemy trenches and kill them all in their beds.’

  ‘Perhaps someone should tell her,’ Sybil said, with a voice heavy as stone, ‘that they already tried that this morning.’

  They were interrupted by the sound of bells and alarms and the call to ‘Fall in! Fall in!’ which meant it had started. They were directed to No. 1 Surgical Ward, which had been divested of patients before the next influx. It was silent within its walls but already the sound of the vans and the rattle of the trains on the line from Boulogne could be heard.

  One moment, calm; the next, pandemonium.

  Ambulances arrived in endless numbers, disgorging their loads of patients, most of whom were gravely injured and on stretchers, stitched up as best as could be done at the advanced clearing stations before being brought down to Étaples. Some walking wounded, though not many; these had to stand and wait while the more seriously injured were brought into the surgical hut and set down in a long line outside the door of the operating theatre, where Doyle, Philbin and Russell worked in boiling heat. The black and white tiled floor, so assiduously cleaned that morning with a solution of bicarbonate of soda, was soon covered in puddles of blood, fresh and congealing, into which everyone stepped, spreading bloody footprints all over the place.

  Nobody cleaned up, because there was no one to do it: all the nursing staff were busy sorting the rows of groaning men, their triage basic and unspoken. Those who might live should go to theatre while those who were going to die were left to wait where they were, under few illusions, if conscious, of what was to come.

  Doyle’s first patient was a quiet one, at least compared to the man on the next table, who was screaming in pain at a half-lost leg while Russell tried to sedate him to the point where he could perform the amputation necessary to save his life. Eva had worked with many amputees in London and had seen the skin rupture and bleed, the drawn look of pain on the men’s faces, but she had never actually been in theatre when a man got his leg cut off before. The commotion almost diverted her attention from the quiet, whey-faced Canadian under her care who had suffered an abdominal wound from machine-gun fire. Pain made him selfish; softly, obdurately, he clung to Eva’s wrist, murmuring over and over, ‘Please, nurse, give me a drink. I’m so thirsty. Just a little drink. Water, please, nurse, oh please.’ Over and over again he begged, insensible to Eva’s explanations that his injuries meant that he could not eat or drink anything.

  Doyle, looming over the man, shook his head. ‘I can’t operate. Not until he has a stronger pulse. Give it a few moments.’

  ‘But sir!’ Eva protested. ‘There’s a whole division out there!’

  ‘If I take him off now, he won’t survive the wait, and you know it.’

  Doyle was a tall, pale Irishman, thin as a lath, with a bald, bullet-shaped head. His demeanour defaulted to a wired alertness, as if he had drunk too much coffee, giving him a certain appeal to Eva, for she liked restless men. In fact, Doyle would not have drunk coffee or any other stimulant; he was a strict teetotaller who proudly wore a pin on his jacket and was willing to tell anyone who would listen how he had joined the Pioneer Association after being picked up out of a gutter once too often. As if determined to eschew any trace of his life as a drunk, he worked with a delicacy and precision Eva had never seen, not even in her friends’ and sisters’ most intricate needlework.

  All his skills were lost on the dying Canadian. Doyle could not begin until the pulse strengthened, and the throb was weakening and fluttering along with the man’s own life force. Blood and other matter gushed internally while Doyle and Eva stood helpless and the abdomen grew dark blue and hard to the touch. And over and over and over, the Canadian called to Eva: ‘Give me some water! Nurse, please, just a sip. Nurse, it’s dark, I can’t see! Are you there?’

  At last Doyle sighed. ‘Give him some water, Downey. Sure, it can do no harm at this stage, poor craytur.’

  Eva filled a steel tumbler and brought it to the man’s lips. His throat bobbed faintly as he swallowed most of the water. ‘Thank you, sister. You’re so good, so good.’ Then his
breathing grew rapid and shallow. ‘I can’t see! Where are you?’

  Eva interlaced her fingers with his. They were cold and clammy, the fingernails encrusted with black, dried blood. ‘I’m here, lieutenant. I’m here.’ So oddly formal, yet she would not take his title away from him.

  He called out for his mother. Instinct made Eva bend down to his ear. ‘It’s all right, sir. She’s here. She’s going to take you home now.’

  Doyle grabbed her shoulder and called ‘Stand back!’ just as the man’s body went into sudden spasm, and horrible, strangling sounds escaped from his throat. A torrent of greenish, bilious gunge poured out of him onto Eva and over his bloodied uniform. It was warm, acidic, foul-smelling. Doyle put up his hand to indicate to Eva to wait – an unnecessary injunction since she was too horrified to do anything else. Then he checked the man’s pulse and shook his head. ‘Poor bastard. Never stood a chance. Get the next one.’

  ‘But where do I put—’

  ‘Just get him out of here. Go clean yourself up and then come back.’ Doyle spoke abruptly, but there was something in the aggressiveness of his elbow movements that made it look as if he was fending off grief. Of course, he was right. There was nothing more he could do for this poor man, nothing any of them could do. She had probably done the most useful thing of all, sending him off with comforting words.

  She called the orderlies to lift his body off the table, and they did so with speed, given that they were well used to hauling and heaving corpses from vans to graves, but also with as proper a reverence as they could muster. A moment ago he had begged her for a drink of water. Now he was dead.

  With an efficiency that only shows in times of war and great need, another group brought in the next stretcher, and a new case was unloaded, live, groaning and wriggling, onto the table still warm from the last man, still stained with his blood.