by Mary Hooper
He shook his head. ‘The last thing anyone would want to do is travel with a clutch of dead bodies,’ he said. ‘Imagine in the hot weather . . .’
‘Oh, of course not.’
‘It would be depressing for those who’d survived to travel among corpses, and disheartening for the hospital staff who’d have to take them off at the other end.’
Poppy nodded. She began to take more notice of what was outside and saw several more little mounds and crosses beside the railway line. ‘It’s so sad to think that these boys survived the battle, but couldn’t take the journey.’
‘Exactly,’ said Michael. ‘If they could have been operated on in a field hospital, they might have lived.’
‘Then why weren’t they?’
‘Quite simply, there have been far too many casualties. Even with double the number of tented operating rooms and treble the number of doctors, they still couldn’t have coped with the numbers coming in these past few days.’
Michael and Poppy should have been at their destination by ten o’clock, but the train came to a complete halt after Albert station, and no information was forthcoming about when it might move again. Passengers got up, stretched their legs, even left the train to walk around outside.
In the distance – but not so far in the distance as Poppy might have liked – the guns could be heard, a constant rattle and boom, as smoke rose in dark, menacing whorls and mingled with the clouds. Boys dying everywhere, Poppy thought dismally, friends and enemies. Every bang and boom meant another death – or ten, or forty. The war was like some fiendish machine demanding a constant supply of dead bodies to keep it going.
The heat, her early start and the fact that she’d barely slept the night before all made Poppy feel weary, and to try and stay awake she suggested a game of I Spy. The next thing she knew was waking up to find the train moving again and her head on Michael’s shoulder.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, sitting up straight. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Imagine – oh, imagine if a sister or a senior officer had seen her!
He looked at her quizzically. ‘That was the biggest cheat ever.’
‘What was?’ she asked, embarrassed.
‘You asked me to play I Spy, gave me the impossible letter Y and then fell asleep so I couldn’t play.’
Poppy laughed. ‘I don’t even remember what I thought of now.’ She looked around the carriage. ‘Where did everyone go?’ she asked. Apart from them, the carriage now held only one sleeping soldier.
‘We stopped at a couple of places while you were fast asleep. God knows where we are now, though.’ He stood up, looked out of the window and up and down the line. ‘Not that I don’t enjoy being with you, but I’m thinking about our patient. Bad lungs, possible trench fever and a piece of shrapnel lodged near the brain are not a good combination to keep waiting.’
Poppy stared out into acres of countryside, worried about the patient they had to care for and also wondering how vulnerable they were to fire from enemy aircraft. This time, there were no big red crosses on the top of their carriages to help keep them safe.
‘We’ll be coming back on a hospital train, won’t we?’ she asked.
‘Definitely,’ Michael replied. ‘Patient X’s head will be in a holding device – he has to be kept flat and still.’ He glanced at Poppy. ‘That’ll be your job.’
Poppy nodded.
‘We make a good team, eh?’
‘We haven’t done anything yet!’ Poppy said. He really was, she thought, awfully nice.
Another half-hour went by. The train stopped for ten minutes, and when it started again it went backwards.
‘We seem to be going off on a branch line,’ Michael said.
‘How can it go backwards?’
‘There’s an engine at each end,’ Michael said. ‘Didn’t you see them when we got on?’
Poppy shook her head. ‘Can I tell you something?’ she asked abruptly.
When he said that of course she could, she told him that she’d not heard from her mother since she’d written to tell her about Billy, and then continued with the rest of the story about Aunt Ruby and her sisters. Hardly knowing why she’d suddenly felt compelled to tell him, she finished, ‘Oh, but I really don’t want to go home!’
Michael nodded slowly, as if weighing things up. ‘But you must.’
‘Yes . . .’
‘And you are going, aren’t you?’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I wrote to my aunt to tell her so this morning.’
‘Of course you must go to your family. That’s the sort of girl you are.’
He squeezed her hand and, as she turned to smile at him, there came the certain knowledge that, if it hadn’t been for the remaining chap in their carriage, he would have kissed her. What was more, she would have kissed him back.
When they finally arrived at the massive tented clearing station, Poppy discovered why it was that every nurse said they wanted the experience of working at one, for here was a bewildering, electrifying maelstrom of activity. There was a vast laundry where miles of clean muslin bandages fluttered on washing lines, and scores of small and large tents where patients were either operated on or made ready to move on to a more permanent place at a base hospital. Ambulances and Red Cross trucks were all over the place, while nurses and white-clad doctors scuttled everywhere, busy as ants. In far greater numbers, however, were the wounded. Hundreds of them, everywhere one looked, were being hurried along by stretcher-bearers, with injured faces covered, with limbs missing; some men screaming and with such horrendous wounds that Poppy could hardly bear to see them. They also passed a line of blind men, with stained bandages around their eyes, sitting with their backs against a wall as if scared to move from there. Nearly every casualty was caked in mud, weary, disillusioned or tearful.
‘Oh, God,’ Poppy whispered.
‘This is what hell must be like,’ Michael said quietly.
He went off to try and discover the whereabouts of Patient X, while Poppy waited at the entrance to what she presumed was the mess tent and tried to keep out of everyone’s way. Looking at the half-cleared trestle tables within the tent, she could see several plates of food hardly started, abandoned by those who’d been called away to an emergency.
‘Just arrived, have you?’ a passing stretcher-bearer asked. Seeing her staring in, he went on, ‘The doctors don’t get no time to eat, see. They get a break and rush in here, then get called back again before they’re done.’
‘It all seems quite . . . unbelievable,’ Poppy said, indicating their surroundings.
‘Yesterday was worse,’ the bearer said. He was plump, in his mid-forties, and sweating badly. ‘We brought in wave after wave of ’em, lined ’em up on stretchers right round the camp, until the medics said they couldn’t take no more. Awful bad, they were. On the brink of death, many of ’em. Stomachs ripped open, chests caved in, faces gone.’
‘How terrible . . .’
‘But if they’s still breathing, see, they’s got a chance of pullin’ through. It’s them that disappears that gets to me.’ He shook his head as if having difficulty putting the concept into words. ‘Like, they’re here one minute, gawn the next. Not a trace left. They’ve been blown to smithereens, see. Disappeared into the air. Not even a fingernail left of ’em.’
Poppy bit her lip hard and stared at him, wanting very badly for him to stop telling her about it.
‘They’re saying that thousands got killed on the first day of fighting, ain’t they? Where did they all go, then? We got lots to bury, but not thousands like they say we’ve lost.’
Poppy gazed at him mutely.
‘Blown to bits, they was! It don’t bear thinking about, do it?’
Poppy was thinking that she’d have to be rude and just walk away, when there came a bellow from a tent of ‘Stretcher-bearer!’.
The man touched his forehead and winked. ‘Duty calls, Nurse! But I’ve enjoyed our chat.’
Poppy stood still, eyes brimming. Now she und
erstood why the War Office didn’t allow VADs to work at clearing stations. Hearing, seeing, smelling, walking with Death every day would be just too much for all but the most sensible, the most experienced of nurses with the strongest constitutions.
She stood waiting, watching, for twenty minutes or so, aghast and incredulous by turns. She could see why they called it the ‘Theatre of War’, for the sloping field before her was like a giant stage on which the actors – the men and women, nurses, soldiers and orderlies, – all had their vital parts to play.
Once she glimpsed Michael in the distance, where the hospital tents were on rising ground, hurrying behind a man, perhaps a surgeon, who was wearing a white cotton gown stained with blood.
When he eventually came back, his face was pale and his silver-grey eyes were clouded.
‘What is it?’ Poppy asked fearfully.
He took a breath. ‘I’m afraid our patient is dead. He died two hours ago, while we were still getting here.’
Poppy stared at him, then burst into tears. Amid so much death and so much sorrow, she knew it was absurd to single out one young man to cry about, a boy she didn’t even know, but she couldn’t help herself. She’d really wanted this nameless, injured, important boy – who might be her last patient – to be saved.
At three o’clock, Poppy was sitting with Michael on a pile of sacks by the gates of the clearing station. From here, they could see the small railway station with its tracks going off in both directions. The pair of them looked, and felt, drained and utterly despondent.
‘I thought that if I could bring him out, I would have helped something really good to happen,’ Michael said.
Poppy nodded miserably. ‘I thought that, too. One last deed before I went home.’
‘He was a young officer – nineteen, I think. His two older brothers are already dead.’
‘I know.’ Poppy’s instinct was to place her head on Michael Archer’s shoulder, but she couldn’t do that, so she leaned against him a little, trying to be of comfort without looking as if she was. ‘First his two older brothers, and then him. His parents must be . . . Oh, it’s just not fair! Perhaps if we’d got here earlier . . .’
‘I was told that the train we caught this morning was the first one.’ Michael sighed and looked at his watch. ‘Did they say three-fifteen for the train back to Albert?’
Poppy nodded. ‘Change there for Boulogne,’ she said, her voice croaky with tiredness.
‘Nothing coming yet – in either direction,’ Michael said, looking up the lines. ‘Funny how no one else is here, waiting for it.’
The sun was hot and Poppy was so tired that she closed her eyes. After a moment, her head drooped, making her start and wake up again suddenly.
Michael gave her a small smile. ‘I obviously have so much charisma that as soon as we’re alone, you fall asleep.’
Poppy stretched her eyes open, trying to wake herself. ‘Perhaps it’s just that I feel safe with you.’
He darted a look at her, surprised, smiling, and Poppy became embarrassed by the message her words must have conveyed. She was about to try and explain what she’d meant (and probably, she thought, get in more of a muddle), when an army doctor, kneeling beside a stretcher on the ground some distance off, called, ‘Nurse! Over here, please!’
‘I’m not a –’ Poppy began.
‘Nurse!’ he said, more urgently.
She looked at Michael, who shrugged.
‘Your choice,’ he said.
Poppy jumped up and ran over to help.
‘He’s haemorrhaging!’ The doctor shoved a clean wad of gauze and flannel at Poppy. ‘Just apply pressure on that wound.’
The soldier lying on the ground – just one of a line of unconscious casualties on stretchers, waiting to be seen and operated on – appeared to have been slashed in the groin by a bayonet. He was unconscious, with blood pumping out from a deep wound at the top of his thigh.
‘Press as hard as you can,’ the field doctor said. ‘I’m going to run up to the mess tent and get a couple of stretcher-bearers. This fella needs to jump the queue.’
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Michael said. ‘We can take him ourselves.’
With Poppy walking beside them and maintaining the pressure on the wound, the two doctors carried the unconscious patient to the nearest operating theatre and handed him over to the surgical team.
Michael went over to speak to a medic he recognised and came back to where Poppy was waiting, looking grim. ‘The doctors are saying they’ve never seen so many casualties from one source,’ he said. ‘They’re operating day and night – mostly amputations – and they still can’t keep up.’
‘And what about out there? Are we winning? Are we gaining ground?’
‘No one’s saying, but I can see from their faces . . .’ He looked away and struggled to compose himself. ‘Apparently our artillery bombed the German lines for several days in order to cut through the barbed-wire barricades and give our lads a chance of reaching the enemy lines, but it didn’t work. When the boys came out of their trenches and started towards the German lines, they got tangled up in great snarls of wire.’ His voice cracked. ‘They became sitting targets.’ He shook his head, too choked with emotion to say any more.
A padre called over to ask them to help take cups of water around to patients in one of the tents. By the time they’d done this, they’d either missed the train they were meant to take to Albert or it had never arrived. There being no later train stopping at the clearing station that day, they were advised by an official to walk to a siding two miles or so ahead, where a train for Boulogne was due to make a brief halt at six o’clock that evening.
As they set off, Poppy thought how very odd it was that at home in England, before the war, she’d hardly been on her own with a boy, let alone ever spoken to one as freely as she could speak to Michael. How much things had changed in just two years.
They were both exhausted by the time they reached the siding, which was no more than a short curve of extra line alongside the main one. Within the curve was an ugly bunker containing sandbags and piles of rubble, and Poppy went in to try and find shelter from the sun.
‘I’m so tired I could sleep standing up,’ Poppy said. ‘I hardly slept at all last night.’
‘Nor did I.’ He yawned widely, apologised for it, then said, ‘You first, then.’
‘Me first what?’
‘To say what it was that was keeping you awake.’
‘I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Oh, please do. I’m terribly curious – and anyway, we’re both so tired I’m sure we won’t remember anything in the morning.’
‘All right,’ Poppy said after a moment. ‘I was thinking mostly about my mother, my sisters, my life as a VAD and my . . . my ex-sweetheart.’
‘Really? Your ex-sweetheart?’ He looked intrigued. ‘Who was that, then?’
‘Oh, just someone I knew when I was at Netley,’ Poppy said.
‘And you didn’t think about anyone else at all?’
Poppy shook her head. ‘No one,’ she said innocently, knowing exactly what he was getting at. ‘Who else would there be?’
‘I wonder.’
‘Now it’s your turn. What . . . who . . . were you thinking of?’
‘You.’
The word came out in such a matter-of-fact way that Poppy wasn’t sure if she’d heard it correctly.
‘You,’ he repeated. ‘It’s always you that I think about. Ever since that moment in Netley where you mistook me for an orderly.’
‘Oh.’
‘Always you . . .’
For a moment they stared at each other, both of them amazed and thrilled, and then Poppy took a step towards him and tripped on a rock. She would have fallen, but he put out his arms, caught her and held her tightly to him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
No train came along that evening. At least, none that stopped at the siding. There was a train that steamed along when the last of the day
light was fading, sometime around ten o’clock, but Michael, who’d been asleep, didn’t hear it until it had almost gone by and it was too late to hail it. Besides, it was full of casualties going to base hospitals and there would have been hundreds of injured men crammed into every corner.
Poppy, too, was asleep by then, curled up on concrete sandbags, emotionally drained and so weary that she slept despite the heavy bombing just a few miles away. She managed to sleep a little more on the train which stopped to pick them up at first light the next morning and conveyed them slowly, joltingly, back to Boulogne.
When she woke properly, she found Michael very quiet, and couldn’t help wondering if he was regretting the things he’d said to her the evening before. Maybe he’d just been moved to speak because of the raw, traumatic day they’d had? Even if he’d meant everything he’d said, how could their relationship continue with him over here and her back in England?
Reaching the Casino Hospital at ten o’clock that morning, Poppy found a typed message lying on her bed:
VAD PEARSON. Please report to Matron’s office immediately when you arrive back at the hospital and before going on duty.
As she washed and changed into a clean uniform, Poppy read the note three or four times over, trying to judge whether Matron was annoyed with her – and, if so, what her defence should be. VADs had to obey so many rules and she hadn’t come straight back as she should have done, but when Matron heard that the field doctor had needed Poppy’s help with the man on the stretcher, surely she’d understand? As for missing the train – well, with the big offensive on, everyone knew that the trains couldn’t be relied on.
Poppy sorted all this out in her head ready to give the correct answers, but when she went into Matron’s office, she found, to her horror, that Matron was sitting there taking tea with none other than her old opponent, Sister Sherwood. There had been rumours that this lady, now completely recovered from her septic hand, was returning to the hospital, but Poppy had been trying to ignore them.
Poppy said good morning to them both and managed to smile, but when they stared at her rather coldly, the smile died on her face. She wasn’t asked to sit down, even though there was a spare chair in the room.
