by Peggy Savage
The news from the Front was already so bad, the casualties so high. There was a memory, an image that she couldn’t get out of her head. A year ago, a lifetime ago, she and her father had been to a slide lecture in London. The speaker was an old man who had actually fought in the American Civil War, on the Southern side. That lecture came back to her, almost a premonition, a preparation. The old man spoke haltingly, and now and again, even after all those years, struggled to hold back his tears. His descriptions of the carnage had been utterly horrifying. He told how he had watched his best friend die beside him, shot through the head; how he had watched a man die holding his own bowel: how he had nearly died in a prison camp of pneumonia and malnutrition. This was not a battle, he said, this was a new kind of war, a war that lasted for years, that drained the country of its finest young men. Could it really be true that civilized men did this to each other? Could it be true that thousands and thousands had died in agony, had limbs removed without anaesthetic when they ran out of chloroform and morphine, had died of dysentery and pneumonia because there was no way to treat them? He told of barns discovered, half filled with rotting, stinking amputated limbs, of mass graves, of farms and homesteads devastated, women and children starving. She and her father had been shocked and horrified, but it seemed like fiction then, too far away to be real, too horrible to have happened. Yes, the suffering human body had been exposed to her, but in the best conditions, in an English hospital; not the kind of suffering that was happening now, here, in France. The rumours had been appalling, thousands already dead and injured, shocking injuries, tetanus, gas gangrene, dysentery. She lay awake until sheer exhaustion put her to sleep.
The next morning they woke early.
‘Come on,’ Helen said. ‘Let’s get to the bathrooms first. There’s going to be a rush.’
They bathed and dressed and put on their uniforms over their bodices and bloomers.
‘At least we don’t have to wear corsets.’ Helen said. ‘They’re an invention of the devil anyway.’ She picked up her suffragist’s badge. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll let me wear this,’ she said, ‘but I’ve still got it in my head. I won’t be giving up.’
‘After the war,’ Amy said grimly. ‘After the war, perhaps. They wouldn’t be bothered with it now.’
‘Breakfast,’ Helen said. ‘And lots of cups of tea.’
They walked along the silk-lined corridor and down the marble staircase. Matron and Dr Hanfield were standing in the hall.
‘In here, girls,’ Matron said. ‘Get your breakfast quickly and get to work. We have to be ready tomorrow.’
They went into a small room with bare tables and chairs and the comforting smell of bacon.
‘The cooks must have got up at the crack of dawn,’ Amy said.
‘I don’t know why we brought our own cooks,’ Helen said. ‘I was looking forward to a bit of French cooking.’ She grinned. ‘Though I don’t suppose the Tommies would fancy snails and frogs’ legs.’
Amy took porridge and a boiled egg. They reminded her achingly of home.
Matron was waiting for them in the hall. ‘Aprons and long cuffs, girls,’ she said. ‘You can start making the beds as soon as the cleaners have finished the floors.’
‘It’s chaos, isn’t it?’ Helen whispered.
The crates and boxes were open and strewn about. Amy watched the doctors unpacking the surgical instruments, enamel basins and kidney dishes, scalpels, saws, retractors, hypodermic syringes, packs of needles. She found herself gazing at them, almost unable to bear it.
Dr Hanfield looked up and saw her. ‘It’s Amy, isn’t it? Help me with these, dear. We’re setting up the operating theatre in the ladies powder room. There are sinks and water in there already. M. Le Blanc has worked wonders – he’s found us an operating table and an electrician to put up the light.’
Amy carried in the bundles of familiar instruments. Sister Cox, the theatre sister, was already sorting them and putting them away in boxes and drawers.
‘Where shall I put these retractors?’ Amy said. She knew she had made a mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth.
Sister gave her an odd look. ‘What do you know about retractors?’ she said.
‘Oh – nothing,’ Amy stammered. ‘Dr Hanfield said that’s what they were.’ I’ll have to be careful, she thought. That was a close one, but Sister appeared to be satisfied.
‘Thank you, Amy,’ she said. ‘That’s all you can do in here.’
The words were like a blow. No it isn’t, she thought. I could do everything in here. Men were dying and she could do nothing.
She turned abruptly and hurried out. ‘Help in the wards, Amy,’ Matron said. ‘The beds have come. They all need making up.’
The big luxurious lounges and the dining-room had been stripped and emptied and scrubbed and the beds arranged in rows, a strict four feet apart. Amy wrinkled her nose. The wards smelt strongly of carbolic, astringent and sharp. An efficient smell. So much for French perfume. Helen was already there, spreading sheets and tucking in neat corners.
‘You have to do the corners right,’ she said, ‘or the nurses will shout at you.’
The nurses moved about, crisp in apron and headdress, and crisp in manner. One bed was piled with dressings and bandages, thermometers and pairs of scissors. There was a crate of hydrogen peroxide and a box ominously marked in red letters – Morphine.
The morning wore on. They scrubbed and dusted and made beds and put away supplies. A brief lunch of roast beef and potatoes and cabbage, and then they began again. Slowly the piles of boxes disappeared. Slowly the equipment was put away.
Amy stood in the doorway of the biggest ward, looking back. The rows of beds stood silently in the late afternoon light, waiting in terrible expectancy. The empty beds had a soul-chilling air of impersonal indifference, as if all feeling, all emotion, had left the world. Who knew who would lie there? Does it matter, they seemed to say? Does anyone care? They will lie here and die, and more will come and lie here and die and this is just the way it is. Men have always killed each other. They always will. It will never end. Does anyone care? Not the heads of state, she thought, who cause it all, not the generals in their fine uniforms, safe behind the lines.
We care, she thought. We care. The beds waited. She was too horrified to cry.
The next day they arrived. One after another the ambulances unloaded their dreadful cargo. The whole staff watched them arrive, standing in the foyer. Amy was overcome with pity and dismay.
‘My God,’ Helen whispered bedside her. ‘Oh my God.’
The orderlies and nurses got the men to bed and stripped them of their lice-ridden clothes and washed them. The doctors hurried round the wards; the chest of morphine was opened. Dr Hanfield and the other surgeons operated all the day and far into the night. In the hospital, the war had begun.
CHAPTER THREE
1914
THE work was relentless. Amy had not really known what to expect, but certainly not this endless flow of wounded men, many of them already dying of their wounds, of infection, gas gangrene, septicaemia, blood loss. They arrived filthy, in tattered uniforms, most of them covered in lice. They brought every wound imaginable; limbs shot away, abdominal wounds, head injuries, eyes missing and facial injuries almost too dreadful to look at. The operating theatre was working all day and half the night. She and Helen fell into bed every night, utterly exhausted. Helen cried herself to sleep for the first few nights. ‘Oh, those men,’ she sobbed. ‘Those boys. How can they be so quiet, so patient? They should be raging. I don’t understand what this war is about. It’s about nothing, just men wanting power – more and more power.’ Amy could only agree, horrified and sickened.
Every day those men whose wounds had been treated and were fit to travel were taken to the railway station and loaded on to hospital boat trains en route for the many hospitals that had been set up in England, set up in schools, church halls and country houses, and largely staffed with women volunt
eer VADs and orderlies. And every day the orderlies and ambulance drivers collected more shattered men from the trains that carried them from the trenches and brought them back to fill the waiting beds in Paris. On too many nights a heartrending cargo of plain coffins was moved hurriedly through the corridors and loaded on to carts and lorries at the back of the hotel to be transported home, invisibly, in the night. Often the dead were not taken back to England but were buried in France. Sometimes there was no way of even knowing who they were. Their funerals took place in the early morning. Usually the coffins were placed on an open hearse, and the people in the streets would cover them with flowers. They were taken to cemeteries outside Paris where the local mayor would say a few words of sorrow and gratitude. The rows of graves and simple crosses grew every day.
Suffering and pain, courage and death were laid before them every day. Two of the young orderlies who had come out with them left almost immediately, their faces stiff and stretched with horror.
‘What’s that smell,’ Helen said one day, her nose wrinkled. ‘It’s horrible. Smells fusty, like mice or something.’
‘It’s gas gangrene in the wounds,’ Amy said. Another batch of men had just arrived and the dressings that had been applied hurriedly in the aid posts at the trenches or at the clearing stations were soaked and stinking. ‘The wounds will have to be excised and irrigated.’
‘What’s gas gangrene?’
‘An infection, a germ in the wound. The germ is one of those that doesn’t need oxygen, and it goes very deep.’ She paused, dismayed, knowing what might happen next to these men.’ If it gets bad enough, they will have to amputate the limb. Otherwise it just spreads.’
‘Oh my God.’ Helen looked as if she were about to burst into tears. Then she looked puzzled. ‘How do you know all that?’
I’ve done it again, Amy thought. I really must be more careful. ‘I heard the doctors talking,’ she said hurriedly. ‘It’s not something you see very often in England – apparently. They’re trying some new method of irrigating the wounds. I don’t know whether that will work, but it’s worth trying, if it saves a limb.’
Some of the wounds were alive with maggots. To her surprise, Amy thought that the maggoty wounds looked cleaner than the others. She mentioned it to one of the nurses. ‘It must be just a coincidence,’ the nurse said stiffly. ‘Maggots are horrible things.’ Still, Amy wondered.
They wrote letters home for the men who could not use their hands or could not see. The letters were simple and brave and were all much the same:
Dear Mother
I am all right but wounded in the leg. The hospital here is very good and all the doctors is ladies. They are very good. We are having good food. Do not worry.
Then there were the letters to wives and sweethearts, sometimes very intimate, sometimes very descriptive. The younger orderlies often had flaming cheeks.
The dreadful letters, those to tell the appalling news to the bereaved families, were written by the doctors. It was one task that Amy was glad that she didn’t have to do. What could you possibly say?
Occasionally they got an English newspaper. There were lists and lists of the dead, or the ‘missing, believed dead, believed wounded, taken prisoner’, appalling, endless lists. Sometimes Amy could hardly bear to look. Often, in the same regiment, there were several dead men of the same name – William Weaver, Henry Weaver, John Weaver. She knew that men from the same area, the same towns and villages, often joined the same regiment. Were they related? Were they perhaps even brothers? Did some distraught mother see that dreaded boy with the telegram visit her home again and again, with the same ghastly news? She could hardly bear to think about it.
Some of the news from home seemed so trivial. ‘Look,’ Helen said one day. ‘It says the Duchess of Devonshire has asked people not to wear mourning in the streets for fear of lowering morale and Selfridges is going to put up an honour board of all their men.’ She gave a wry, bitter smile. ‘That should help a lot.’
‘I suppose they have to find ways,’ Amy said, ‘to bear it.’
The news from the front at the beginning of September was dire. The British Expeditionary Force had retreated at Mons, and the Germans were even closer to Paris. Very close, apparently. M. Le Blanc kept them informed, as much as he could. He came to the hospital every few days to see the doctors, to ask if they needed anything that he could possible get for them. His face became more clouded every day, his fear more obvious. The news was as bad as it could be. Paris was in great danger. At any time the people who had bravely stayed in the capital expected to hear the screech of shells bombarding the city, or even worse, the apocalyptic clatter of hoofs as the German cavalry rode through the city streets.
‘Do you think they will get here, Amy?’ Helen was obviously nervous, though she tried to sound jaunty and calm.
‘No,’ Amy said firmly. ‘Of course they won’t.’ We must believe that, she thought. We can’t let fear overcome us. Unfounded fear is more destructive than anything. We must believe that.
They were given a few hours off one afternoon. ‘Let’s go out,’ Helen said. ‘I’ve never seen Paris and I must get out, just for a little while. I’m getting claustrophobic. We need to look at something different.’
Matron was dubious. ‘Don’t go far,’ she said. ‘We don’t know what is happening.’
‘I don’t think the Germans are going to come today,’ Helen said. ‘Surely we would have heard something. There would have been some news, some shelling, or something.’
Matron still looked worried. ‘Well, keep together,’ she said. ‘and if there’s the slightest sign of trouble, come back at once.’
Paris was surprisingly quiet; there was no sign of panic or confusion. In the side streets the shops and apartments were nearly all closed and shuttered and the streets almost empty of people. They passed a little church, with the doors open, and it was packed with women and children and old men, praying on their knees, rosaries in their hands. Their prayers spilled out into the street, in desperate chanting. ‘Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce.’ The many candles flickered and wavered in the gloom; the plaster saints stood inscrutable in their niches.
Here and there in the streets they saw small groups of people clustered about a young man, and they would hold him and kiss him until he turned and walked away, leaving behind their shocked, white, tearful faces. Very soon they realized that these were families, saying goodbye to their sons and husbands and brothers. Helen clutched Amy’s hand. ‘Oh, Amy!’ By now they knew what was waiting for these men. In every street there were more and more women, bent with grief, wearing their widows’ veils.
The people who were left seemed to be steadfastly going about their usual business, an old cobbler in his shop still mending shoes, a little milliner’s shop, open, but bereft of customers, a dressmaker, sitting alone in her little shop, staring out of her window. There were signs of jobs half done – a strong smell of horse dung in some of the streets where there was no one to clear it away.
There was none of the usual cheerful tables and chairs outside the cafés, no one sitting in the sunshine with their coffee or wine. M. Le Blanc had told them that they were no longer allowed, that the French had to drink inside now like Englishmen in their pubs. The cafés had to close at eight o’clock, and the restaurants at half past nine and there was to be no music after ten. The Louvre was closed, but the most frightening news of all was that the government had decamped to Bordeaux.
‘They must think the Germans are coming,’ Helen said, ‘or they wouldn’t have gone. Why didn’t they warn everybody? And I suppose everybody has to stay inside in case they start shelling. And why do they have to close at eight o’clock?’
‘M. Le Blanc says there is a curfew,’ Amy said. ‘No one goes out at night. Apparently they have policemen patrolling the streets in case anyone is up to no good.’ There were constant rumours of spies. Shops with German sounding names had been hurriedly abandoned, and their owners fled. Som
e of them had been wrecked by angry Parisians, the broken windows boarded up.
They walked on. Many of the monuments and statues were completely surrounded by sandbags, the history and beauty of Paris covered and obscured.
‘Look, Amy. There’s the Eiffel Tower.’ They looked up at the great structure that was now the signature of Paris, known all over the world. ‘I wish we could go up to the top, but M. Le Blanc says we can’t. They have searchlights up there at night, and there is a machine-gun post on the top. In case of Zeppelins or aeroplanes, I suppose.’
Aeroplanes, Amy thought; such a wonderful invention, such a leap forward in man’s ingenuity. Her father had been so delighted when he heard of the first powered flight. ‘I knew it would happen,’ he said. ‘I knew someone would do it one day.’ And now aeroplanes were just another weapon of war, just another way to kill. Could such a thought ever have entered the Wright brothers’ minds when they flew for the first time? Could they ever have imagined this? Did every wonderful thing have to be used for destruction?
They walked on. ‘It feels peculiar, doesn’t it?’ Helen said. ‘Creepy.’ Amy nodded. There was an atmosphere of deep apprehension that showed clearly in the strained, white faces, the hurried steps. The words hung in the air – are the Germans coming? Will they be here, in Paris, tomorrow? What will they do to us? The memory of the siege of Paris in 1870 had returned, with all its terror.
They walked into the wide boulevards. There was a scattering of bright uniforms; the red of the Zoave – the North African soldiers; the Turkos – the Algerian riflemen in their blue jackets, and the splendour of the French Hussars in their light blue tunics. Amy wondered at the bright colours. Surely they would be easier for the German riflemen to see. They would surely stand out against the greens and browns of the land. The British Army had long used khaki – ever since the Boer War.
