The Witch’s Daughter

by Paula Brackston

  ‘Ah, reinforcements!’ he declared on seeing me, grabbing my hand to shake it with surprising vigor. ‘Captain Young, exceptionally pleased to see you.’

  ‘Nurse Hawksmith,’ I said. ‘Hardly the cavalry, I’m afraid, but…’

  ‘… infinitely more welcome, and no doubt more useful,’ he assured me. He let go of my hand to stride about the interior of the concrete box. ‘We were lucky to get this,’ he said. ‘Last advanced aid post I set up was in a dugout. All very well being tucked in among the trenches, but we had the devil’s own job getting stretchers in and out. And a few sandbags and a bit of wood won’t keep the shells off a person.’ He patted the rough walls with pride. ‘This will do very well. They can throw the worst they have at us, to no avail. Ironic, really, that we should benefit from the enemy’s engineering skills.’

  ‘Isn’t it a little on the small side?’ I asked.

  ‘Compared to what? No, no, don’t you worry about that; space can be a mixed blessing. The more room you have, the more stretchers you can take, the more casualties pile up around you. This way we have to send them on quick sharp. No dithering. You don’t dither, do you, Nurse? No,’ he answered his own question, ‘I can see that you don’t. There will be no time for it. We are here to clear airways and staunch the flow of blood sufficiently to enable the wounded to survive the trip to the CCS. That’s the long and the short of it. No time for frills and furbelows. Forget cleaning wounds. Bind ’em up and send ’em out.’

  ‘But surely,’ I protested, ‘the risk of sepsis…’

  ‘… is considerably lower than the risk of a bomb falling on a casualty’s head if we have to start lining them up outside. And don’t go dishing out morphine like sweeties, whatever you do. Save it for the ones who can’t do without.’

  I wondered how I was to decide such a thing and imagined myself refusing pain relief to an agonized soldier. I closed my eyes briefly. There were things I could do. There were other remedies at my disposal. And I knew that I would use them to ease suffering. Just as I had used them for Corporal Davies.

  ‘Are you quite well, Nurse?’ Captain Young asked. ‘You’re not given to fainting? Not squeamish, I hope?’

  ‘I am perfectly well, Doctor.’

  ‘Last thing we need is women swooning all over the place…’

  It was my turn to interrupt. ‘I assure you I have no intention of swooning. Even if I had, I doubt there would be room for it.’

  He looked at me in amazement, failing entirely to see the joke of the comment, rather applauding my logic.

  ‘Quite so, Nurse, quite so. No fainting then. Excellent, excellent. Now, if you will assist me, we must organize our supplies. Everything must be to hand, d’you see? Organization is the key.’

  My dugout was situated only a few yards from the pillbox and still bore evidence of the German soldiers who had fled from it when the Allies had gained a few yards of ground and extended the salient farther into Flanders. There was a biscuit tin of German manufacture, the smiling child depicted on the front shown enjoying one of the long-gone brötchen. Beneath the lower bunk was a torn photograph of a young woman. In the stillness of the dugout, in an unaccustomed moment of idleness, my mind coasting, I became aware of a stirring of my sixth sense; a restlessness in the part of me that intuits rather than thinks. I should not have been surprised. I was in a situation, a time, a location so steeped in the blood of sacrifice, so echoing with the cries of the wounded and dying, so imbued with suffering that it was to be expected that the power of evil would be ever-present too. There is a dark energy that surrounds the battlefield, that feeds off the violence and cruelty of war. It is a frightening force. A potent one. And one in which those who practice the dark arts thrive. I shuddered, attempting to shake off the notion of Gideon being drawn to such a place. At that moment I sorely missed the company of my fellow nurses back at the CCS. Hearing light footsteps on the wooden stairs behind me, I turned to find a tiny woman, her overlong greatcoat trailing in the mud, her nurse’s headdress threatening to slip down over her eyes.

  ‘Oh, hello, dear,’ she said. ‘They told me there was already a nurse down here. I’m Annie Higgins.’ She held out a dainty hand.

  ‘Elise Hawksmith. Have you been sent up from a CCS somewhere?’

  ‘That’s right, dear, down at Beaumonde.’ She unbuttoned her coat and looked for somewhere to put it. ‘My word, this is a bit of a gloomy place, isn’t it? Never mind. I don’t suppose we shall be here long.’ She sat on the lower bunk and looked about her. She had an aura of motherliness and warmth. She was considerably older than any of the nurses I had encountered at the Front so far, and I wondered about her reasons for being there.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ I said, sitting down beside her. ‘I have a feeling we are going to be impossibly swamped.’

  ‘Well, we shall do our very best. You can’t do more than that. That’s what my Bert always says.’

  ‘Is Bert your husband?’

  ‘That’s right, dear. Married twenty-five years last month. Or would have been, had God seen fit to spare him.’ She glanced up at me and then down at her lap. ‘Lost him at the Somme. Still can’t get used to talking about him in the past. Still feels as if he’s with me, if you know what I mean.’

  I nodded. ‘Is that why you’re here? Because of him?’

  ‘He did his bit. Seems only fair I should do mine. Mind you, I wouldn’t have come when our boy Billie was still out here. He had to have someone back home to write to, didn’t he? But now he’s gone too.’ She fell silent.

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ I said. ‘To lose both your husband and your son…’

  ‘I’m not the first, and I dare say I shan’t be the last. No use me sitting at home feeling sorry for myself.’ She summoned a brave little smile. ‘Better to keep busy. See if I can help out.’

  She looked at me now, and in her gentle face and delicate features I saw the sorrow she had endured, the sorrow and the unbearable loss. I knew that she would indeed be a comfort to the young wounded soldiers. I knew also that they would in some way be a solace to her in her grief. I put my hand on hers.

  ‘We will do our very best, then, you and I,’ I said. ‘Our very best.’

  It was nearly midnight by the time we had been given our rations and made our bunks tolerable. Annie had clambered into the bottom bed and fallen immediately into a sound sleep. I was about to retire when I heard a now-familiar voice calling my name, and Lieutenant Carmichael stood in the entrance to the dugout.

  ‘I hope I am not disturbing you. I wanted to make certain that you have everything you need,’ he said, swiping his cap from his head as he stepped into the damp little room.

  ‘It was good of you to trouble yourself, Lieutenant,’ I told him, ‘but we have been well looked after. Nurse Higgins is already asleep.’ I indicated the slumbering form beneath the gray blanket.

  ‘Ah, good,’ he said more quietly. ‘That’s very good, then.’

  Seeing him hesitate, I stepped aside. ‘Won’t you stay for a few moments?’ I asked him. ‘I’m sure I shall never sleep anyway with the guns so close.’

  He allowed himself the slightest of smiles and joined me on the low bench.

  ‘I’m not sure I should be able to sleep without them,’ he said. ‘I’ve grown accustomed to the noise.’

  ‘It is a curious lullaby.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  I noticed he had succeeded in brushing some of the mud from his uniform, and some must have been washed off in the rain. It was still hard to get from my mind the image of him with the sobbing young gunner in his arms.

  ‘That was very brave, what you did when the horses bolted,’ I told him. ‘I’m certain that poor soldier would never have left them if you hadn’t been there.’

  ‘The shell holes are death traps. I’ve seen men lost in them in moments. Tanks even. Swallowed up. It’s no way to die.’

  ‘Is there a good way?’

  ‘I suppose I have to think so.
Otherwise, how could I, in all conscience, order my men over the top tomorrow? Most of them won’t survive the attack, you know.’

  ‘But the bombardment … surely the enemy’s defenses must have been weakened?’

  ‘They might. Then again, they can retreat and wait for it to stop. They may lose a few positions but nothing of importance. We don’t even know if the wire is still there. If it is, we’ll be trapped. And we have lost all possible element of surprise. Even if we advance under a creeping barrage, they will know that as soon as the heavy guns fall silent we are preparing to attack.’ His knuckles blanched as his grip on his army cap tightened. For a moment, neither of us spoke. ‘Do you know,’ he said at last, ‘I truly believe that out here more soldiers die of drowning than anything else? Imagine that, so far from the sea. Oh, I know it’s different in the clearing stations, and back home some suffer terrible wounds from which they never recover. But you don’t see what happens out there, in the salient, with nothing but bog and stinking water. It’s the accoutrements as much as anything. The packs are so heavy, and the guns, and the gas masks, and God knows what else they won’t go a step without. If they are hit, bullet or shrapnel, it doesn’t matter; unless they are blown off their feet, they nearly always fall flat. Onto their faces or backs, doesn’t make much difference, they start to sink the moment they hit the ground. Some pass out. Others simply can’t move. So they drown. Just like that. In a few rotten inches of water. It takes days for the stretcher-bearers to gather everyone in after a push. Some are never recovered. They just sink. And every time we gain a bit of this hellish territory, we walk over them. We’ve been doing it for weeks now. If one steps on a firm piece of ground, chances are it’s an Allied casualty beneath one’s foot. Sickening thought. Sickening.’

  I felt deeply sorry for him, and I badly wanted to take his hand, to hold him, to tell him everything would be all right. But I could not. For one thing, it would have been a lie. He was in as much danger as any of his men, possibly more. There was no guarantee we would ever see each other again. I could not bring myself to patronize him with empty words of encouragement and optimism. But there was something else that made me hold back. I realized that, had he been any other soldier sitting next to me sharing his fears of the coming battle, I would not have hesitated to take his hand in mine. Had I not spent my life trusting in the healing power of touch? But with this soldier, there was more to be considered. There were my burgeoning feelings for him. The way the sound of his voice had made me catch my breath. The way my body stirred beneath his gaze. The way I had already spent so many hours thinking of him, imagining him, wanting to be near him. And there was the way the closeness of him made me feel that I had come home. I remembered how I had thought of my family cottage at Batchcombe when I had first seen him. In his company, I had the sense of being where I belonged. A sensation that was so strong and so unfamiliar to me that I was afraid of it.

  ‘Don’t let’s talk of war,’ I said. ‘Tell me about your home. Tell me about your life before all this madness. You spoke of tramping the heather.’

  ‘Do you remember my saying that? How strange. In the middle of bedlam you remember heather.’

  ‘Tell me. Please.’

  I could see the tension ebbing from his body as he began to describe his home in the Scottish highlands. The taut muscles around his mouth relaxed, and his handsome face lost its haunted look.

  ‘Our family home is called Glencarrick. It is a truly remarkable place. The house is stone and ridiculously large but quite magical. It was built in the fourteenth century, and I don’t suppose it’s any warmer to live in now than it was then, but I adore the place. From the turrets on the west wing, you can see for thirty miles in any direction. If you look south, you can see the village of Glencarrick Ross, all of which used to belong to the estate originally. To the north and east are hills and open moorland, the most beautiful landscape you would wish for. And if you turn your face west, I swear you can taste the salt from the sea that lies over the blue horizon. In the summer, when the heather is at its best, the air is filled with the song of skylarks and curlews, and bees from our hives make splendid honey from visiting the blossoms. There are red deer, of course, and otters on the river nearby, and the swiftest mountain hare of anywhere in the world. I used to go shooting; everyone did. I doubt I shall ever pick up a gun again after this.’ He closed his eyes and leaned back against the gritty wall of the dugout. ‘When things get really very bad here, whenever I fear I might not be able to do what is asked of me, I shut my eyes and travel back to Glencarrick. If I listen very carefully, I can hear the mewing buzzards and the whirring larks. I can smell the wet autumn bracken or taste the damsons from the trees that grow wild behind the house.’

  He sat still as stone, his breath held. I watched him, and I shared his longing to be in such a place. Suddenly his eyes sprang open and he looked directly at me.

  ‘I wish I could take you there,’ he said. ‘One day.’

  ‘Perhaps you will. One day.’

  ‘You know, I’d like it very much if you would call me Archie. Would that be all right, d’you think?’

  ‘I think that would be perfectly all right,’ I said, ‘and you can call me Elise.’

  ‘Elise?’ He seemed surprised. ‘Strange. I would never have guessed that was your name.’

  ‘No? What name would you have given me?’

  He thought about it for a several seconds then said, ‘Bess. A good Scottish name. Yes, definitely Bess. Why, whatever is it? What’s wrong? If I’ve upset you, please forgive me…’

  ‘No.’ I struggled to regain my composure, knowing that my face must show my surprise, my shock at his choice. I should have been afraid, perhaps, and yet, hearing my name, my true name, in Archie’s gentle voice … I was not alarmed. Far from it. I knew at once I wanted to hear him say it again, and again. ‘You haven’t upset me,’ I assured him. ‘On the contrary.’ I smiled at him now, the most heartfelt smile I had bestowed upon anyone in a very long time. ‘Bess will do very well,’ I said. ‘Very well indeed.’

  5

  While it was still dark, Annie and I got up and went to the field hospital to take up our positions. Dr. Young was already there, pacing about the small space in an agitated fashion. Suddenly, just before dawn, the guns stopped. The silence that replaced their rumble was even more terrifying than the guns themselves. There was such an intensity to it, such a sense of anticipation and of dread. Annie gave my hand a squeeze.

  ‘Good luck, dear,’ she said.

  Dr. Young was dismissive. ‘I shouldn’t put your hopes in luck, Nurse. Lack of the stuff is what has brought us all here in the first place. Trust in your own abilities, that’s my advice.’

  His last words were all but drowned out by the sound of shrill whistles and urgent shouts. The order to go over the top had been given. I remember experiencing something close to a thrill as the voices of our soldiers were raised in their battle cry and immediately feeling disgusted at such a response. For a few seconds, there was only the sound of those determined shouts and their own rifle fire. Then the machine guns started. I saw Dr. Young’s face darken.

  ‘They were supposed to have been taken out.’ He voiced what we were all thinking. ‘The machine guns were supposed to have been obliterated by the bombardment. There shouldn’t be any left.’

  But there were. Soon the air rattled to the continuous sound of the deadly weapons as they cut down the advancing troops in their hundreds. We barely had time to register what the full impact of this would be when the first casualties began to arrive at the entrance to the pillbox.

  ‘Nurse Higgins!’ Dr. Young barked orders as he worked. ‘You are not dressing that soldier for parade. Get that wretched bandage in place and move on to the next one. We have no time for pretty finishes. Stretcher-bearers! This one’s ready to go, and that one. Take them down the line and come back. There will be plenty more,’ he said, his left hand struggling to stop a fountain of arterial blood that thr
eatened to end the life of the pitifully youthful corporal in front of him. Within minutes, the pillbox was full and casualties were being left outside. I stepped out to treat one with a leg injury and another who had taken a bullet to the shoulder. I heard Dr. Young shouting my name.

  ‘Nurse Hawksmith, if you please!’

  I hurried back in.

  ‘Stay inside, Nurse.’

  ‘I was just trying to…’

  ‘Well, don’t. You’re no good to anyone if a shell falls on your head. See to it that the casualties in here are dealt with swiftly, and then there will be room for more. You are not to attend to patients outside these walls. Either of you. Is that clear?’

  We assured him it was. Even so, I found it hard to focus on my work knowing that there were dangerously wounded men lying helpless in the mud only a few feet away. A rifleman clutched at my arm as I stooped to bind his head wound.

  ‘The wire!’ he gasped, his eyes wide. ‘Dear God, the wire.’

  ‘Shhh, lie still. We’ll soon have you away from here.’

  ‘They’re caught on it. Like rabbits in snares. The more they struggle, the more it cuts. They’re easy targets. Tommy Barret lost his arms. I saw them shot right off. What chance did he have, stuck in that wire? What chance?’

  ‘Dr. Young, could I have some morphine for this soldier? He has a head wound and needs to keep still, but he’s so agitated…’