A Rose for the Anzac Boys

by Jackie French

  Midge stared. ‘I don’t know. Cocoa and bread and canned meat, we thought.’

  ‘Perhaps that is best.’ Her uncle looked vaguely down at his son’s letter, as though surprised to find it still in his hand.

  ‘Uncle, may I read Michael’s letter? Please?’

  He hesitated again, then said, ‘Of course, my dear. Excuse me, will you? I must go and break this to your aunt.’ He smiled faintly. ‘You will probably hear her protests from down here.’

  ‘But you’ll convince her, Uncle?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Uncle Thomas. ‘I think I can convince her.’

  The heavy door closed behind him. Midge picked up the letter.

  27 July 1915

  Dear Pater,

  I am writing this on the edge of a bunk in the dugout I’m sharing with an officer of the [removed by censor]. Our trench is only 70 yards away from the Germans. Two bullets have just skimmed along the roof but as it’s well protected by sandbags there is no danger. Outside our guns are shelling a farmhouse behind the German lines. You hear the boom as the shell leaves the gun, then a scream as it passes overhead, then the crash as it bursts. Of course you cannot look over the edge of the trench or a sniper would pot you, but the men have rigged up periscopes. But the worst danger is being hit with fragments blown back from our own shells.

  Sorry, this letter is being written in pieces. Every three hours I need to go around the men and make sure they are in their right places, even at night. It takes me an hour or more if one of the boys has caught it, so I don’t get much sleep. We can’t take our clothes off here, so I just scrape as much mud off my boots as I can with my bayonet, tie a bag over them and get into my sleeping bag boots and all. Don’t tell the Mater but washing is not something we give much mind to here!

  You get used to the tiredness though, just like you get used to the noise and the…

  Later

  One of the boys started screaming just as I was finishing your letter. Some silly ass put his hand up over the trench and the Jerries blew it off. That wasn’t what the screaming was though. After they took him away, some other blighter found his hand buried in the mud, still moving.

  Just at the end of our trench are thirty graves, all men of the last regiment who served here, and three German graves with no names, just a piece of board with RIP on it in German. But thankfully only four of us have caught it so far.

  The wind has changed. We can hear the Germans now. Their voices sound very young, like the boys at school.

  Give my love to Mater and the girls and tell them not to worry about me and that I am very well off for socks! I could do with some chocolate or other food though, if you can manage it. The grub here is pretty rough, and sometimes when they move us we can go for days without rations. It’s silly but the one thing I long for is a big slice of fruit cake, the one the Mater makes for every birthday. It is strange how fancies like that take over. It’s harder than we thought, Pater. Much harder. But we will beat them. I feel sorry for any Englishman who isn’t here.

  Your loving son,

  Michael Macpherson

  Chapter 4

  Hotel Egremont

  [location censored]

  France

  1 October

  Dear Aunt Lallie,

  I hope you are well.

  Well, we are finally here and all set up. I don’t know if I told you that there was already a canteen at Calais? So we have come here, instead, a bit further north and inland. It’s only a small town—a big village rather. The fields start right opposite the railway station so I can watch the cows (French cows and pigs are sort of sleepy) and think of home. It is slightly closer to the battle front here but absolutely in no danger, and a good place to be as this is the nearest railway station in these parts to the front lines. The men get off here and are collected in cattle trucks, or else march if there are no trucks or carts available.

  Most of the soldiers are French so far. I never thought those irregular verbs would be useful! Though to be honest, I haven’t used one yet. I mostly stick to ‘Bonjour’ or ‘Bonne chance, monsieur’. The hospital trains also go through here to take men to the hospitals in Calais or Paris or over to England, but they don’t stop at our station so we don’t get any wounded men here either, just the troops heading off to the front lines.

  Ethel dragged us to every canteen she could find in London. (If you could meet Ethel you’d see that when she decides to drag you there’s no stopping her.) Her father will send us a shipment of bully beef, flour, cocoa and powdered milk twice a week. We can store it in what used to be the railway waiting room till Ethel persuaded the station master to let us use it. Ethel doesn’t speak much French yet, despite the best efforts of Mademoiselle at school, and Monsieur the Station Master doesn’t speak English. I think he gave up arguing with her out of sheer exhaustion.

  We need to store as much as we can as the troops and the wounded have priority on the railway and we can’t rely on supplies arriving regularly. We have the bread made here, but Ethel had to battle to get the bakers to take us seriously and give us what we ordered.

  The hotel is small and very plain, but it is right across from the railway station. I thought my feet were going to drop off the first couple of days, they were so sore, so it is good the hotel is close by. Madame is kind to what she calls ‘les jeunes femmes anglaises’. Monsieur is a prisoner somewhere in Germany, but her father helps and so do her two daughters and her grandson—when he is not minding his geese!

  Anne, Ethel and I share a tiny room. It’s got a little coal fire that’s never lit and hard narrow beds so it is just like school, and our maids are all in one other room, even more crowded than ours. We are still trying to convince Anne’s maid, Beryl, that Anne doesn’t need help to dress and wash and things. The poor woman is trying to serve cocoa for twelve hours at a time and still do all the regular maid work too! She even carried up hot water for Anne’s bath the other day! (We all used it after Anne.) But things have been sorted out now, I think. We work two shifts with three on each shift, one of us serving and the other two making the sandwiches or stirring the cocoa.

  Well, I had better go as we are rather busy. We served nearly 1 000 men yesterday. We give each of them a pannikin of cocoa, a bully beef sandwich and two cigarettes. Some of the men look younger even than we are. They are all eager to fight the Hun and it is good to think that we are finally doing our bit too.

  I had a letter from Dougie yesterday. He is well and in good spirits.

  Your loving niece,

  Midge

  The railway platform was long and narrow with a line of buildings on one side: the ticket office, the waiting room (now the storeroom) and the station master’s office. There was no spare room for the canteen, which was a nuisance when it rained. But after the first two days of drizzle, Ethel had found a man to rig up an open canvas tent to cover their four trestle tables, two coppers for boiling up the cocoa and two coke braziers. This made up the canteen.

  Now in the dawn’s grey light French soldiers tumbled out of the trains bleary-eyed from travel. They lined up along the platform for their cocoa, then took the pannikins and their bread and beef out to the station courtyard and sat propped against their kitbags or the walls. They were cheery for the most part—or at least put on a good show for the canteen girls.

  At times like this, the war seemed very near, thought Midge, as she lugged yet another box of cocoa along the platform and tried to ignore her cold fingers. But at other times, the rumble of the guns could have been simply thunder. And on the other side of the railway lines stretched farmland: neat fields still untouched by war; cattle that gazed curiously at the commotion at the station; and geese that grazed the grass along the line, herded by small boys with bare feet and ragged pants.

  The dawn was brighter than the gaslights as Midge dropped the box by the two big coppers Ethel had scrounged to heat the cocoa on the two small braziers of coke or coal.

  ‘Thanks, lass.’ Ethel began
to tear open the box. ‘I’m fair clemmed this morning. It was hard work last night.’

  Midge nodded. It would be good to hand over to the others in an hour or so and get some sleep. She glanced at Ethel. Ethel didn’t look ‘clemmed’. Ever since they’d left school, it was as though she’d found a new source of energy. She was like a steam engine, Midge thought with a private grin, as another train clattered into the station.

  It thundered through without stopping. Hospital train, she thought. Six of them went through the station each day. Ethel had discovered that each carried four hundred sick and wounded men, with two or three medical officers, four nursing sisters and about forty orderlies to tend them.

  Midge yawned and trudged over to the pump to fill a bucket of water to pour onto the powdered milk in the copper. Add half a bucket of cocoa, she thought as she pumped the handle up and down and watched the water splash into the wooden bucket, ten more buckets of water, stir for an hour, and there’d be cocoa for the next troop train later that morning.

  The noise of a different sort of engine floated over the morning sounds of roosters and the cows plodding off to be milked by Monsieur Brabant, the dairy farmer down the road. Midge looked up. A van was pulling into the courtyard. It looked like one of the new motorised grocer’s delivery trucks—there had been great excitement at school when one rumbled up the drive instead of the usual horse and cart. But this one was painted white, with a wobbly-looking red cross on the side.

  The driver leapt out, followed by a large spotted dog. His boots clicked on the cobbles as he dodged through the few civilian passengers waiting for the train, then strode up to Midge, the dog’s ears flapping at his heels.

  ‘Down, Dolores! Hello there! Any chance of a couple of quick cups of tea?’

  Midge stared. The driver was a girl.

  Midge had learned to drive Dad’s car back home. But she’d never seen another female drive before. The girl was a few years older than Midge, and tall in men’s trousers, boots and jacket. She grinned and held out a hand. Midge shook it, stunned. It was the first time she had ever shaken hands with another woman, too.

  ‘I’m Slogger Jackson. That’s Jumbo.’ She gestured to another girl leaning in to do something in the back of the van. ‘And this is Dolores, and that’s Boadicea. Down, Dolores!’

  Midge pushed Dolores’s nose out of the bucket of water. ‘Boadicea?’ she asked.

  ‘Our truck. Beautiful, isn’t she?’ said Slogger proudly. ‘Dolores, no! The nice soldier doesn’t want you sniffing him there. Boadicea used to be a butcher’s van. Jumbo and I gave her a coat of paint before we brought her over—well, you can’t have wounded men riding in a butcher’s van, can you? Might give them all sorts of ideas. Dolores, don’t kiss the poor man either! He doesn’t like it. Pardon, monsieur.’ She grabbed the big dog’s collar firmly and turned back to Midge. ‘Any chance of that tea?’

  ‘I’m sorry, only cocoa.’

  ‘As long as it’s hot and wet. Any grub going? I’m starving. We’ve been on the go since dawn yesterday. There’s another big push on.’

  ‘A push?’

  Slogger nodded. ‘Poor blighters are ordered out of their nice muddy trenches to try to take another few yards of mud. Mostly they’re just forced back—what’s left of them —but it makes a lot of work for us.’ She looked aroundthe quiet station. ‘No one told you you’re for it today?’

  ‘For it?’ Midge felt as though she’d stumbled upon yet another foreign language.

  ‘We’ve been ordered to start bringing the wounded here for the hospital trains. The stations down the line can’t cope. You’re going to have hundreds of wounded men here soon. Maybe thousands.’

  ‘Thousands?’ said Midge faintly. She pulled herself together. ‘I’ll tell the others.’ She hurried down the platform, her heels clicking on the damp concrete.

  Slogger strode beside her, Dolores bouncing at their side. ‘Don’t forget that cocoa.’

  ‘Ethel!’ Midge called.

  Ethel turned from slicing bread. ‘What is it, lass?’

  ‘They’re going to bring the wounded men here. Thousands of them! What are we going to do?’ she asked desperately. ‘There’s no way we can cope with that many! We haven’t got enough milk or bread.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to find it. Settle down, lass. I’ll see what we have in the storeroom.’ She hurried away down the platform.

  Midge turned back to the waiting Slogger. ‘Here’s the cocoa. Sorry the fresh stuff isn’t ready yet. You’d better take a couple of sandwiches too. I didn’t know they had women driving ambulances,’ she added curiously.

  ‘Could you make it three sandwiches? Just to keep Dolores happy. My dear girl, anyone and anything are drafted into service these days. As long as you’ve got hands or wheels. Or paws. Down, Dolores! No, you can’t have that poor man’s sandwich. We’re with the Duchess’s mob.’

  ‘The Duchess of Sutherland? I thought she was in Flanders.’

  ‘No, ours is the Duchess of Westminster. She’s wonderful

  —as soon as war was declared, she rounded up trucks, drivers, supplies and just came over. Dolores is hers. Her ladyship says she needs the fresh air.’

  ‘She brought her dog over?’

  Slogger bent down and rubbed Dolores’s ears. ‘A dalmation, two wolfhounds and a Pekingese, plus three trunks of evening dresses. Am I glad I wasn’t given Peke duty. It’s a horror.’

  ‘Bites?’

  ‘Wees. Her ladyship says having us in evening dress each night and the dogs around is good for the men’s morale. But I say it’s bad enough being wounded without being weed on by a Peke too. I’d better dash. Have to get our poor chaps onto the platform then get going again. We’ve got three more runs at least tonight—they’re really piling up. Those bloody generals ought to be shot.’

  Midge stared. She’d never heard a woman say ‘bloody’ before. ‘You mean the German generals?’

  ‘No, ours. Silly asses. They give the orders and we pick up the results. Thanks for these. Dolores, that is very, very rude! Be seeing you!’

  She strode off across the platform. Dolores gave one of the men dozing by the storeroom a final loving sniff, gulped the crust of bread from his hand, then loped after her.

  More ambulance trucks had arrived while they’d been talking. There were horse-drawn ambulances too, the horses thin and tired-looking, and even a few carts, the wounded lying on the straw. As Midge watched, orderlies unloaded stretchers and laid the men out along the platform, then hurried back for more. Most of the orderlies were women, in trousers and boots like Slogger’s or dresses with big white aprons like the canteen girls wore. Already a third of the station was covered. The tiny courtyard was full of vehicles, and others lined the street waiting to get in. How could this peaceful station change so fast, thought Midge dazedly. Midge had read Aunt Lallie’s letters and the newspaper reports. But nothing had prepared her for this.

  The stretchers seemed endless, laid on the cold ground. The men lay without blankets to cover them, much less pillows or sheets. Their uniforms—muddy, stained and torn—were French. Some of them had roughly bandaged wounds; others had been left with their wounds open when the bandages ran short. There were men with grey faces, white faces, faces cut by shrapnel. Men with closed eyes who might be dead or just blessedly unconscious. Men with strange hooped cradles where their arms or legs had been. They looked so still. So quiet. There were some groans and cries, but strangely few. These were men who had seen hell. And now they waited for what help a distant hospital might bring.

  Only the orderlies and drivers in their skirts or trousers were still whole. Even as Midge watched, the carpet of bodies grew. Whatever she had expected, she thought, it wasn’t this.

  Ethel strode back along the platform, her arms full of loaves of bread. ‘No point standing there staring. Reckon we’d better get cracking, lass.’

  ‘What if we run out of cocoa?’

  ‘Just keep adding water. So long as it’s
hot and wet.’

  Midge followed, half running to keep up. Impossible to expect these wounded and shocked men to line up like the soldiers they’d been serving, she thought. ‘We’ll have to take the pannikins to them, help the men to drink,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I sent the goose boy to ask Madame for help. We need more hands.’ Ethel was already cutting bread as she spoke.

  Midge tried to think. She could carry four pannikins at once, but she’d have to put them down to help each man to drink…Impossible. There must be two thousand men here already, more than they had ever served before. And this was just the start, Slogger had said. They couldn’t serve a tenth this many. Her knees felt weak with the smell of blood.

  Suddenly, she thought of her grandmother fording a river flooded with snow melt on horseback to get to her new home. Her mother facing what she must have known was her death in the isolated highlands, rather than leave her home and family for less pain and a hospital. Lallie working herself into exhaustion for the boys from Gallipoli, and Tim and Dougie out there somewhere, fighting for all of them…

  Impossible not to try.

  ‘Pardon, monsieur? Cocoa?’

  The man smiled with bloody lips. His hands reached for the cocoa. Thank goodness he could hold it.

  ‘Pardon, monsieur? Cocoa?’ This time she had to hold the pannikin while the boy sipped. One of his hands was bleeding, the other a stump strapped to his chest. His eyes were vague, but at least he drank.

  ‘Cocoa, monsieur?’ No answer. Sleeping? Unconcious? Dead? No time to check, nor was it her job. ‘Monsieur, un peu cocoa?’

  She glanced out at the courtyard. More ambulances…and more. The road was jammed with vehicles: carts, cars, trucks. How many more, she thought frantically, then bent to her job again. Anne and Beryl hurried between the stretchers up the platform to help Doris with the mixing and breadslicing. For a time, Midge and Ethel simply handed the pannikins to the hands capable of reaching for them. Ethel strode away to get more powdered milk and Midge looked at the men reaching desperately for something, anything, to drink. Please, she prayed silently. Help us, please.