White Feathers

by Susan Lanigan

  THUMP!

  Eva cast her blankets aside immediately and put her feet on the floor, just in time to be thrown backwards as the ship lurched violently. ‘What was that?’ she called out, rubbing her skull, only to hear commotion everywhere as voices in the corridor shouted and warning horns began to sound.

  She pulled on her uniform, left her cabin and joined the ranks of RAMC staff and nurses all making their way to their posts, as they had been instructed to do in the event of an emergency. ‘Is it another storm?’ someone demanded to know. A male voice replied, ‘I think that’s a storm called “German submarine”,’ which was in turn loudly contradicted by several others. Nobody knew what was going on.

  Eva passed a VAD who was sobbing, ‘We’re going to drown, we’re going to drown!’

  ‘We’re not going to drown,’ Eva comforted her. ‘The ship has many watertight compartments. Even if one fills up, it won’t sink.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the watertight compartments,’ an older nurse said sarcastically. ‘Now where have we heard that one before?’ She was talking about the Titanic.

  ‘They’ve added extra ones since then,’ Eva said shortly, putting her arm around the younger girl’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Dorothy. The water won’t reach us.’

  ‘It might do,’ the older woman said, ‘if anyone has left portholes open.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Eva exclaimed, realising.

  The woman’s prediction was confirmed by the ship’s suddenly listing far to starboard, amid screams, and pipettes, trolleys and plates crashing onto the floor. Then the call came to prepare the lifeboats. So, it was official. They were going to abandon ship. She looked around for Sybil but could see no sign of her. Then she remembered something else: she had left her letters in the cabin. All of them. I need to get those back. She about-turned, elbowing all the staff who were frantically moving in the opposite direction.

  By now the ship had listed so far to starboard that it was impossible to see over the port deck. The smell of bilge water and sulphur was overwhelming. Eva wanted to be standing on a level again. But she could not leave without her letters. She could hear the roar of the engines at full steam and a tugging, which felt like an attempt from the bridge to turn and head towards the land, but how could the captain steer a ship filling with seawater and leaning to one side? Surely he knew he hadn’t a hope?

  The water was coming up along the corridors, lapping at Eva’s feet and soaking her skirt, as she navigated her way back to her cabin. She retrieved the letters and stuffed them in her apron pocket, then tightened her sash around her head and headed back out. She was alone below decks as the wash gurgled up and down, but then, at the end of the corridor, at the top of the ladder, she saw Sybil.

  ‘Where the blazes have you been, Eva? They’re lowering the lifeboats.’

  ‘I had to get my letters,’ Eva said.

  ‘You lunatic!’ Sybil cried. ‘Fat lot of good they’ll be to you if you end up at the bottom of the sea. You want to be alive for him, not dead for keeping his letters, you absolute fat chump.’ She ran down towards the aft port side, where a crowd gathered around three lifeboats.

  ‘Sybil,’ Eva called, ‘I thought the lifeboats were for’ard.’

  ‘Oh, just shut up and be grateful they’re here at all!’

  The first two were full, and they secured seats in the third, in among a group of doctors and just two other nurses. All they could do now was wait to be lowered. This was not done smoothly. The boats flew down the listing side of the ship, roughly jolting everyone inside. They stopped suddenly a few feet away from the water. One of the women screamed, and Sybil held on to Eva’s arm so tightly that her fingernails almost drew blood. Finally, they touched the water and the ropes were released.

  Then they heard shouting. Another officer had appeared, calling out, ‘Stop lowering the lifeboats! Who is responsible for this? We said no lifeboats. My God, can you not see the engines are still at full power?’

  The blood drained from Sybil’s face. ‘Eva, what is he saying?’

  Eva could not speak. She pointed at the stern. The Britannic’s propellers, half out of the water, were still spinning, their massive steel blades slicing the churning water. Towards them drifted the other two lifeboats, and their own, the current relentlessly bearing them along. They had no oars to row their boats away.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Sybil said, ‘we’re done for.’

  ‘Shall we jump out, Syb?’

  ‘No, you fool, look.’ Sybil’s voice was taut with fear. A man and a woman had jumped out of one of the boats, but the sea carried them sternwards so quickly that they soon stretched their arms out and were hauled back on board.

  They could hear screams as the two boats ahead of them drifted towards the whirring, driving propellers. ‘Something has to happen,’ Eva said, feeling vomit form at the back of her throat. ‘The captain will turn them off.’

  Sybil shook her head without a word. The first boat was only feet away, the poor people on it screaming and screaming. Then it was closer still, then closer, then—

  Eva felt a heavy pressure on her arm that nearly knocked her off her seat. ‘Don’t look for God’s sake!’ somebody shouted. Eva, her face towards her knees, did not look. But she could hear everything. When she raised her head once more, the first boat was a boat no more, just broken bits of floating timber. The foam near the propellers had turned crimson with blood, and bits of bodies lay on the surface of the water, some still bearing signs of rank and uniform.

  Instinctively, she crossed herself. For all she had seen during the Somme, nothing matched this carnage.

  It was not over. Not yet. Now the second boat was meeting its fate. This time Eva did not avert her eyes. It was a fate that would soon be her own. It was unmentionable, unthinkable, what they endured in those last, grinding seconds. Hearing the death agonies, seeing them suffer what she and Sybil were about to undergo, made Eva feel weak and nauseous in her belly, loose in her bowels; she cried without restraint.

  This is the last minute of my life.

  She realised that she was vomiting, pale green, almost liquid stuff, down the front of her tunic. She saw a wet patch on Sybil’s thigh, her mouth round in a noiseless O – at least, Eva could not hear its sound, her own fear gripped her too tightly to be aware of much outside her own heart beating powerfully in her chest. She knew, she could feel, from the sudden heat on her legs and feeling of release, that she too was wetting herself, but she could not prevent it, the terror was stronger than anything she had ever felt before. Her very bowels would loosen in a moment.

  The last thirty seconds.

  She gripped Sybil’s hand as their boat swung away and back towards the wash of the engines. And now the dark shadows of those propellers were casting themselves on them.

  Oh, God, please let it be fast.

  Away and back, away and back.

  Ten seconds.

  And then something in Eva began a warrior shout, a hoarse yell. As she drew close to the propellers, the shout grew louder until she was roaring like a soldier going over the top, ready for the German guns—

  The propellers stopped. The noise of the engines vanished. There was only the sound of the waves, the shouts from the other lifeboats and the creaking of a distressed ship at sea.

  Sybil released Eva’s hand. The wild thud of her heart began to slow down. They both looked at each other.

  ‘Christ,’ Sybil said, with a shaky laugh, ‘we’re alive.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Eva said. ‘It might start up again.’

  Sybil shook her head. ‘Oh, my God, I’m a mess. Don’t look at me.’

  ‘I think we all are.’

  One of the men stood up, causing the boat to lurch from side to side. Eva noticed with some relief that his trousers didn’t look too clean either. With all his might he pushed against one of the propeller blades, causing the boat to shoot several feet back out to sea, where the waves brought it safely away. A sigh of deliverance rose from
all the passengers in unison.

  The ship sank, of course. It had taken on too much water to stay afloat. The speed at which it went under was frightening. Fifty minutes after impact the stern finally vanished into the sea with a terrible, roaring sound, like water going down a giant plughole.

  By then, all the dead and injured had been gathered up and laid out on the pier at Korissia, the nearest harbour. The locals were kind, though they did not speak the same language, and offered fish and fruits. But Eva could not stomach a thing. The sight of some of those bodies, people she had known to speak to, brought fresh tears to her eyes.

  There was no time to change from their sodden, filthy uniforms; she and Sybil went to work, caring for the injured, dressing the wounds and stanching the worst of the bleeding. To one pale-faced man who had lost both legs and was bleeding to death, Eva was tempted to administer a small, painless nick to the main artery to help him die quickly and without pain. She did not, of course, but rather did her best to save him. He died anyway. Others, though horribly mutilated, were more fortunate. They would survive, but the injuries they had suffered as the propellers sliced through their limbs meant that their lives were for ever altered.

  The young officer Eva was tending to, his clothes around his pelvis and legs dark with fresh blood, began to make that familiar, rattling noise Eva knew and dreaded. He too was lost. A hand rested on her shoulder. ‘Downey, you have done enough. Leave that poor man, he is beyond help. We have arranged transport to the mainland. Come with us.’

  They were conveyed to a hotel in Palaio Faliro, just southeast of Athens proper, where finally Eva and Sybil could get rid of their uniforms, which were by now in a disgusting state. ‘They’d better boil it before I wear it again,’ Eva remarked to Sybil, who responded, ‘Boil it? Burn it, more like!’

  There was just one bathroom on each floor, and the water was lukewarm, but it was so warm outside, even on a winter evening, and Eva was so glad to be able to scrub herself down, that she didn’t mind.

  When she had cleaned and dried herself, she didn’t bother going down for dinner but returned to her and Sybil’s shared room and carefully placed her letters on the nightstand before throwing off all her clothes and falling into what seemed like the softest, whitest bed she had ever been in, although in reality the sheets were worn and yellowed, the mattress hard. A cool breeze blew on her forehead through the louvred shutters as she slept at last.

  34

  Sybil patted her belly and leaned so far back in the wicker chair that she nearly lost her balance. ‘My stars, Evie,’ she said, ‘I am absolutely stuffed.’

  It was no wonder. They had been sitting at the terrace for the past half hour, enjoying a late breakfast of olives and feta cheese, cold cuts of meat with dips of yoghurt and herbs, followed by strong black coffee and loukoumades. These last were little balls of light pastry dipped in sugar and rose-water, and Eva and Sybil could not get enough of them, summoning the waiter back for more, licking the syrup off their lips and fingers.

  Their hotel looked over a busy road, and beyond that there was a beach where the sea glittered. Faliro lay barely two miles from the Acropolis, but neither Eva nor Sybil felt like sightseeing. Some of their colleagues had gone to work in the Russian hospital in the city, but, after the rescue work they had done, Eva and Sybil had been assured that they could rest for a day.

  Eva was starting a new letter to Christopher to tell him about their ordeal, though her reluctance to write down the more distressing parts as well as constant breaks to scoff more loukoumades did not help her in its composition. Sybil was fretting about Roma, who was due to arrive in Piraeus later that day, having talked her way into being included on a Canadian troopship, the RMS Andania. ‘It’s just that after yesterday, and the Galeka just a month ago … I’m a bag of nerves. If anything should happen to her …’

  ‘Stop worrying, Syb, I’m sure she’ll be fine. You’ll see for yourself.’

  A girl in white slacks appeared on the terrace. ‘Downey! Faugharne! The Matron wants to see you.’

  Eva set a half-eaten loukoumas back down on the plate, while Sybil put her hand to her mouth. She had gone quite pale.

  ‘Whatever for?’ Eva asked the girl.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘Just that she wants to see you as soon as possible.’

  When she left, Sybil leant over to Eva and said in an anguished whisper, ‘Oh, ye gods, Matron knows about Roma and me. She’s been funny with me ever since we got in. She’ll tell the War Office and get us kicked out.’

  ‘Sybil!’ Eva wanted to give her a good shake. ‘For heaven’s sake, her ship just sank! She’s probably trying to get a headcount. I doubt she knows who Roma is, to be frank. She’s the kind of person who thinks Lesbos is a Greek island. Which it is, of course. She might even bring us on a trip there if we’re lucky.’

  ‘I really don’t want to see her,’ Sybil whimpered.

  Poor Sybil, so unlike her usual self. ‘You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. The matron doesn’t know what you do behind closed doors, and, anyway, what if she did? It’s not illegal.’

  ‘If it comes out in the divorce court,’ Sybil said, through gritted teeth, ‘whether it’s legal or not will be the least of my problems, believe you me. I just can’t shake the feeling that something terrible has happened.’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Eva reassured her. ‘Honestly, Syb.’

  *

  Matron Dowse had been installed in an office near the docks, a few minutes’ walk from their hotel along the coast road. The sea glistened and roared in the near distance as the sun warmed their backs. Small fishing boats moored here; the real business of troopships was at the port of Piraeus, further along the bay. Although she appeared to be very busy, with a noticeboard full of maps and pins behind her and an assistant tapping away at a typewriter at an unbelievable speed, Matron Dowse rose at once when Eva and Sybil came in.

  ‘Which one of you is Downey?’ she asked, with a frown.

  ‘Me.’ Oh? What had she done? Though at least Sybil was off the hook now, after all her complaining.

  ‘I have received a communication from my opposite number in France,’ Matron Dowse said. ‘She had some important information I need to pass on to you.’

  ‘Eva, I’ll wait outside,’ Sybil said, scarcely bothering to disguise her relief.

  ‘No, stay!’ Matron Dowse’s voice was so sharp that Sybil jumped, and Eva felt a strange tightness in her chest. ‘Please,’ she added, in a softer voice, ‘it would be better if you both were here.’ She motioned them to sit and did so herself.

  ‘Well … all right.’ Sybil, bemused, took the chair beside Eva. The chairs were wicker, like at the hotel; Eva could feel the pattern through her dress. For some reason, she did not want to look into the matron’s eyes.

  ‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ Matron Dowse said. ‘Downey, I understand you know a Lance Corporal Shandlin from the 1/2nd London Division? Currently on transfer to service in Greece?’

  ‘Yes,’ Eva said, in a voice that was not hers, though it sounded like it. ‘I do know him.’

  ‘Your matron in France received a notification yesterday from his commanding officer, Captain Bailey, and she passed it on to me. I am very sorry to tell you that’ – for a moment the ceiling roared into the walls and Matron Dowse’s voice boomed and echoed – ‘while being called to evacuate two wounded officers from Tumbitza Farm, he came in the way of a falling shell and was killed instantly.’

  Sybil swore in the name of Jesus.

  Eva did nothing. She did not move or speak. She heard the words, but could not take them in. Matron Dowse’s hand, clean, stern and bony, reached for hers. ‘I’m so sorry, my dear.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Eva said, like an automaton. Because that was what one did when people offered condolences, one thanked them.

  ‘Captain Bailey found some correspondence in Lance Corporal Shandlin’s personal effects. He saw that it was very … affectionate.
Pardon the intrusion, but he needed to establish whom he should let know. He has promised to forward them on to you and also offers his own condolences.’

  Sybil was crying now, openly and loudly. ‘Oh, the poor bastard. He should never have been there, and now he’s dead!’ Matron Dowse looked unimpressed. It was not done to make such noise. Eva was doing better, evidently.

  Her breakfast churned in her stomach. She thought she would throw up, but all that repeated on her was sweetness. Those loukoumades … ‘Is he—’ she could not finish. Her throat was drying up, closing in. Hurry, Eva. The matron has important things to do. See that stack of papers on her desk? And you still have to write that letter. No. You don’t have to. He will never read anything you write again.

  ‘Was he—?’ the matron kindly prompted her.

  Eva ignored the prompt. ‘Is he … whole?’

  Matron Dowse supported her chin on her hands. ‘Why, what do you mean, my dear?’

  ‘The shell that hit him. Is he whole or is he … damaged?’

  Sybil gave a low cry of agony. Matron Dowse’s face softened. ‘Downey, he was hit directly by that shell. It was instantaneous. At least he had that blessing.’

  ‘“Blessing”,’ Eva echoed.

  ‘Yes,’ Matron Dowse said. ‘Compared to what many endure, it is a blessing.’

  Eva remembered a voice once telling her something, a voice that now had no existence: ‘“tiny fragments of flesh and blood on the ground. Just like that. Not even an eye.”’

  The plain earth floor rose up to meet her, but Sybil’s hands were faster. From far off, further than the sea in the bay, Matron Dowse’s voice rushed in like a wave and then receded again. Eva could hear her own surname, but barely anything more.

  Sybil held her tightly around the shoulders. ‘It’s not fair,’ she said to no one in particular.

  Matron Dowse nodded in agreement. Her mouth drooped a little, the lines around it deepening. She was altogether plain, with small eyes and coarse cheeks, but the fullness of her lips gave her a motherly look. ‘It’s not, no. I never get used to delivering news like this.’