A Rose for the Anzac Boys

by Jackie French

  Aunt Lallie shook her head. ‘My dear, I’m sorry. This isn’t like the Duchess’s operation. We have rules…Oh, here is Captain Salter.’ She stood up as the surgeon Midge had seen in the tent came in. ‘Captain, this is my niece, Margery Macpherson. Margery, Captain Salter.’

  ‘Miss Macpherson.’ The man’s face was thin above his uniform, his eyes red-rimmed. The hand that held his mug of tea looked surprisingly soft and white.

  ‘I was explaining to my niece that she can’t stay here. Much as I would like her to,’ added Aunt Lallie.

  ‘She’s your closest relative, isn’t she, Sister?’

  ‘The only one with half a brain,’ said Lallie drily. ‘Or any gumption.’

  Midge looked at her, surprised. She had never wondered what Aunt Lallie wrote to her cousins, or even if she wrote to them at all.

  ‘Well, Miss Macpherson, your aunt is right. This is an official army operation. I know things are different in some of the volunteer brigades. But here we need paperwork. And more paperwork. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-three…’ The familiar lie faded as she caught Aunt Lallie’s eye. ‘Nearly eighteen.’

  The surgeon lifted his mug to sip his tea. The tea slopped as his hand trembled. He grasped it with both hands to steady it. ‘Which means you’re seventeen. A good many years away from being eligible for overseas work.’

  ‘I’ve already worked in France for over a year now. My friends and I run a canteen…and I’ve been driving an ambulance.’

  ‘Not the Duchess’s affair?’

  Midge nodded.

  ‘They do good work.’ He shut his eyes for a second, then opened them with an obvious effort. ‘No, Miss Macpherson, I am afraid it’s impossible for you to stay here, either officially or unofficially. It’s my responsibility to make sure things are done properly, you know. I have no choice but to ask you to make arrangements to get back to your friends as soon as possible. Let’s see…shall we say in a couple of months?’

  ‘A couple of months?’

  His eyes crinkled as he smiled. ‘Yes. Do you think you will be able to make the necessary arrangements to travel by then?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Good. And if anyone from headquarters arrives, Sister Macpherson, you will of course inform him that your niece is in the process of leaving.’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’ Aunt Lallie smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she added quietly.

  ‘My pleasure. Now I am going to sleep for a fortnight. Or however long the Germans give me.’ He turned to go, then looked back. ‘By the way, good show about that head injury you spotted. Your niece has the makings of a good nurse, Sister.’

  He smiled again, and was gone.

  ‘He’s nice,’ Midge said.

  ‘He’s a good man,’ said Aunt Lallie softly. ‘I wish we had a thousand like him.’

  ‘Aunt…do you have to go back on duty straightaway?’

  Aunt Lallie glanced at the watch pinned to her uniform. ‘Not for another twenty minutes.’ She patted Midge’s hand. ‘I’m afraid we won’t get to spend much time together, my dear. But it’s so good to see you. Just out of curiosity,’ she added, ‘how exactly did you get here?’

  Midge explained. Then: ‘Aunt…in your letter you said that you met a man who thought Tim had been taken prisoner. Where is he? Can I speak to him?’

  Aunt Lallie shook her head. ‘Not possible.’

  ‘I know I can’t go and talk to a soldier on duty. But I could write to him, meet him when he’s next on leave.’

  Aunt Lallie sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I explained—I was more than usually tired when I wrote to you. He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Midge.

  ‘Sepsis. Infection. There was nothing we could do. Just stay with him. It was a quiet time, so I sat with him that night. Just let him talk. It’s what they need, sometimes. All you can do for them. He spoke about Gallipoli, so I asked him about Tim. Just for something to say. I didn’t really expect him to know anything.’

  ‘And he told you he had seen Tim captured.’

  Aunt Lallie nodded. ‘With three others. But Margery, don’t make too much of it. He was dying. In shock. Rambling half the time. He just wanted to make a connection with the nurse sitting with him. If I’d asked him if he’d seen the King at Gallipoli he’d probably have said yes.’

  ‘But it might be true,’ said Midge stubbornly.

  Aunt Lallie sighed. ‘Yes. It might be true.’

  Midge sat silently for a moment, then looked back at her aunt. ‘You’re right. There’s nothing I can do about it. Now what can I do to help here?’

  ‘I’ll take you to Miss Pleasance. She’s the most senior of the VADs.’ Aunt Lallie smiled wryly. ‘I’m sure she can find a job for you. Probably the worst on the station. You may regret ever coming here.’

  ‘No, I won’t. I’m glad.’

  Aunt Lallie laughed. ‘Oh my dear, I’m glad as well.’

  Chapter 13

  5 May 1917

  Dear Ethel,

  Sorry to vanish again, old thing—I hope I haven’t left you in the lurch. It’s a long story, but I’m staying down here with my aunt and lending a hand where I can for a couple of months. Would you mind awfully sending any mail down here?

  It’s impossible to describe this place. Well, if I tried the censor would blank it out anyhow. Everyone works to exhaustion. No one’s had home leave for over a year. The sisters work fifteen hour days, except when there’s a push up the line, when they work longer. But they still couldn’t find me much to do at first—it seems I don’t even know how to make a bed properly! We don’t even have any floors that can be scrubbed—it’s all planks across the mud. And as for washing dishes—well, that’s done by the orderlies and it would be quite improper for me to help them!

  Finally they decided to give me a VAD’s apron and headdress, but I wear them over my ordinary clothes, partly because I’m not official and partly because there wasn’t a spare VAD skirt!

  I mostly push the trolley of bandages and saline around while the nurses do the dressings, and go and fetch sheets and things from the packing cases that are all we have for cupboards. They have to be propped up on wooden chocks to stop the damp spreading up into the linen. They’ve got me ironing too—a hot iron is the only thing that kills the lice eggs, and of course we have to iron all the bandages before we reuse them. At least I get to stand next to the stove when I iron. It gets so cold here—the wind blows right under our tents. I am very glad I missed winter here. Aunt Lallie says her hot water bottle had ice in it a couple of months ago, so you can imagine what my toes are like sometimes.

  It’s wonderful that America is coming into the war, isn’t it? Though Captain Salter, our surgeon, says that it may be a long time before any American troops can get here, especially with all the submarines. I think we are all afraid to hope too much, these days. Sometimes it seems like the war will go on till every young man in Europe is dead or maimed and every woman beaten to exhaustion. I can’t think when I last saw anyone who wasn’t just deep bone tired.

  Well, that’s all I have time for now. Maybe they’ll promote me to bedpan duty today! See you soon.

  Your loving friend,

  Midge (Ironing

  Champion of France)

  The days became routine.

  There were no spare beds, so she slept in Lallie’s while her aunt was on night duty. She had thought it might be awkward sharing a tent with nursing sisters, rather than where she belonged with the VADs. But it seemed the nurses accepted her as Lallie’s niece, someone outside the hierarchy of the wards, where a lowly VAD wasn’t allowed to use the same staircase as a sister, much less share her tent.

  Even during the ‘off’ times the station was never quiet. All day the road was full of trucks and cars and horse carts—many official army vehicles, but others either commandeered or belonging to one of the volunteer organisations. Ambulances bringing the wounded or taking patients to the hastily set-up
hospitals in commandeered chateaux or schools; cars, trucks carrying troops to ‘somewhere in France’. At night the traffic was lighter but seemed heavier, as the headlights lit up the road and shone down into the wood below and on the military cemetery that stretched to the trees.

  There were funerals every morning. Never very long—a prayer, then the body consigned to the muddy ground, the sound of the bugles drifting on the wind, the shots of the last salute of the firing party, Mr Fineacre stepping from grave to grave with the same efficiency and compassion he showed in the operating tent.

  The first days there had been a hundred funerals a day or more; but even now, when there were only ten or so, Mr Fineacre still got through them at a speed which would have distressed his parishioners at home.

  ‘Funerals are for the living,’ he explained one day. ‘There are rarely any families to grieve here. The dead are in God’s arms now whether I say a long prayer or a short one.’ He shrugged. ‘These days the living need me more.’

  One end of the cemetery was mud, the white crosses the only brightness. But the other, where the graves were months rather than weeks or days old, was a mass of flowers—poppies and yellow mustard flower dancing between the wooden crosses as though to replace the flowers that mothers, wives and sisters might have brought, or the bright dresses of the women who were far away.

  Midge pushed the tea trolley along the bumpy duckboards laid on the mud between the tents. One more ward to do. This tent held the ‘temporaries’, the boys whose wounds weren’t bad enough to be sent to hospital but who needed a few days care before they were sent back to their units, or those who needed extra care before they could be shipped off to the hospital trains.

  The tent flaps were open, despite the cold. As always, the neatness of these temporary wards was startling after the mud and noise outside. Two rows of grey beds had their grey blankets, each with their edge of sheet firmly tucked in with every corner looking like it had been sliced out of cardboard. The nurses might not win their battle with death, or stop the chaos of the war. But here at least they kept control. Grey faces on white pillows.

  But there the uniformity ended, for these faces were anything but the same. Bandaged eyes or foreheads, pads fastened across the hair, other faces unmarked. But all the eyes had shadows, and all—except for those who might never see again—were trained on her.

  And then a voice. ‘Blimey, it’s Miss Macpherson!’

  The voice was vaguely familiar. And then she saw him, sitting up in the bed, marring the neat creases. ‘Corporal—I mean, Sergeant Harrison.’

  He propped himself up on an elbow and grinned. ‘What are you doing here, miss?’

  She hurried down the tent towards him. ‘Hiding from a colonel.’ She was surprised at her feeling of joy. It was just pleasure at seeing a familiar face, she told herself.

  His grin grew wider. ‘You’ve got my sympathies with that, miss.’ His mouth grew grim again. ‘He didn’t…try anything, miss? Some of those Pommy top brass would…’ He hesitated, as though the words he’d been going to say might not be suitable for a lady’s ears.

  ‘He commandeered me to be his driver, that’s all. And I don’t want to be commandeered.’

  ‘Too right. You want to stay clear of Pommy colonels.’

  Her gaze took in the bandage on his arm. ‘But what about you?’

  ‘This?’ He shrugged his good arm. ‘Bit of shrapnel. Second time I’ve caught it in that arm. The doc fished it out. Give me a few days and I’ll be good as new. Hey,’ he added, as a new thought dawned. ‘I sent you a letter last week. It’s your birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’ It was as though a breeze from another world washed through the tent door. She grinned at him. ‘For some reason I haven’t been thinking about birthdays.’

  He looked at her sternly. ‘It’s not right, forgetting something like your birthday. You need someone looking out for you. Too right you do. Someone to bring you flowers and…’ He hesitated, obviously trying to think of other appropriate gifts. ‘A box of handkerchiefs and things.’

  She smiled. ‘My old governess back home sends me handkerchiefs. And I can’t see where anyone can get a bunch of roses in early spring here.’

  ‘Is that your favourite then? Roses?’

  He suddenly seemed conscious of the interested gazes on either side, and grinned again. ‘I’m forgetting me manners. Miss Macpherson, I’d like you to meet Jacko.’ The boy in the next bed bobbed his head. ‘He caught it in the knee and in the stomach. He don’t do things by halves, Jacko. That’s Nipper. He lied about his age, just like your brother. And this big galoot is Davo.’ The man with the bandaged eyes raised a hand. ‘He got a dose of mustard gas, but don’t you worry about him, they’re taking that handkerchief off his eyes any day now.’ The voice was just a bit too convincing.

  ‘All this socialising’s very well,’ someone muttered. ‘But she’s going to be in for it if old Tin Drawers catches her yacking to us.’

  ‘Tin Drawers?’

  ‘Sister Macpherson. She’s a tartar all right.’

  ‘She’s my aunt.’

  Jacko snorted, which made him cough. ‘No way,’ he choked. ‘Sisters don’t have families. They’re made out o’ India rubber in the factories.’

  ‘Shut up, you donkey. Beg your pardon, Miss Macpherson. Oh he…’eck, here she comes.’

  ‘Have you finished the teas yet, Miss Macpherson?’

  ‘Nearly, Sister.’

  Midge winked at Harry, aware that Aunt Lallie was watching. She’d need to be careful, she realised. It was strictly against the rules for VADs to talk to the patients beyond the absolute minimum needed to care for them. Sitting with a dying man was excusable. Chatting to men almost ready to go back to their unit wasn’t. Any misbehaviour would seriously embarrass her aunt.

  But it seemed cruel not to be able to talk to a man who had been risking his life for his country, to do something to show friendship. Perhaps she could slip him another biscuit with supper. There might even be time to talk unobserved for a few minutes.

  How did Aunt Lallie stand it, she wondered, as she pushed the tea trolley over yet another warped plank of wood. The discipline, the exhaustion, day after day…

  But as it turned out there was another push that night—a gas attack, the shells fired into the trenches to burn flesh and eyes and to maim. There was no time to visit the wards, or even think of Harry. Another night stripping uniforms, cutting them into shreds before lifting them off to try to minimise the pain when the cloth stuck to gas-burnt flesh.

  It was dawn before she got to bed; afternoon when she woke, guilty that she might have slept too long. With no regular duties there was no one to wake her. She washed her face quickly in the icy water in the canvas bucket and reached for a clean apron, then hurried out towards the wards.

  ‘Can I take that for you?’

  The VAD relinquished the empty tray to her gratefully. ‘Would you? Collect the rest for me too. You’re an angel. I’m all in. I’ve still got the fomentations to do too. There’s just the trays to collect from Wards Two and Three now, and then the prisoners’ dinners.’

  The prisoners were wounded Germans, in a special hut under guard. To Midge’s surprise the men regarded the prisoners with sympathy, bringing them cigarettes and even precious chocolate.

  ‘I can manage,’ she said. ‘Go on. You look dead beat.’

  ‘Talk about walking wounded. My feet are about to fall off.’

  Midge began to clear the trays, tent by tent. At least it wasn’t bedpans.

  She hesitated when she came to Harry’s tent, guilty that he might think she had forgotten him. What if he had grown worse during the night? She only had his word, she thought, that it was just a minor shrapnel wound. Maybe there was sepsis, or even gangrene…

  But he was still there, propped up on his pillows, his tanned face brown against its whiteness, staring at the doorway. Watching for her, she thought with a pang that was half happiness an
d half guilt.

  ‘Miss Macpherson!’

  ‘Shh.’ She glanced around then hurried up to him. ‘I’m not supposed to fraternise.’

  ‘This ain’t fraternising. Me and the boys just wanted to wish you happy birthday.’

  She’d forgotten. Again. Her eyes filled with tired tears. ‘Thank you.’

  Harry reached under his pillow. He pulled out something long and flat and folded into two.

  ‘What—’ she began.

  ‘Don’t let Sister see it!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s made out of one of her precious charts,’ said Jacko from the next bed. He must have been coughing in the night, for the dish next to his bed was filled with blood and sputum, and his eyes were rimmed with shadows. But he still grinned at her. ‘Well, open it.’

  The chart, complete with someone’s medical notes and temperature recordings, was on the outside. She turned it over.

  It was a vase of roses, the vase and stems sketched in black pencil, the flowers in red. They were small—not long-stemmed florist’s roses, but the sort that might grow in a cottage garden, rambling over a fence.

  ‘It’s from me and the boys,’ said Harry awkwardly.

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Davo did it. He’s an artist back in civvie street.’

  She glanced at the man with the bandaged eyes.

  ‘He did it from memory, like,’ said Harry a trifle anxiously. ‘We handed him the pencils and sort of gave him instructions.’

  ‘Pack of useless drongos, beg your pardon, miss,’ added Davo. His face, with its bandaged eyes, seemed to stare a little to the right of where she was standing. ‘You do like it?’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ whispered Midge.

  It was true. The drawing was rough in places—a flower that didn’t match a stem, the vase lopsided on the paper. But how could pencil lines glow like that, as though the flowers were still touched by sun? As though a hand had only just picked them from a garden far away.

  ‘Still think they should have been bigger. You know, real proper ones. And we should have coloured them in,’ said Jacko. He held out a hand—a not very steady hand. ‘Here, pass it over, miss. We can soon fill in the bits.’