by Robert Ryan
‘That you are who you say you are. You aren’t in uniform.’
‘I don’t have any identity papers on me, if that’s what you mean. Not genuine ones.’ He had left Major Watson’s papers hidden in the van Miss Pillbody had procured, in case they had been stopped and searched by the police. ‘You think I am a German?’
Harrow sat up on the edge of the bed, swung his legs over and dangled his feet. Watson realized he was only about five foot five or six inches tall. Still, they would have had him in a ‘Bantam’ battalion of under-height men. ‘Germans would love to know what I know.’
‘How can I convince you I am not one of them? The third verse of “God Save the King”? Name the fourth in line to the throne?’
‘Not by memory tricks, no.’
Watson considered for a moment. He played a card he was always loath to draw from the pack. ‘Well, I do have some small fame. It was I who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories.’
Harrow’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ Watson said.
‘My dad loved those. I’ve never read them. I prefer Buchan, Childers and the like.’
Watson tried not to show his disappointment. ‘I see. So it is no good me answering questions on, say, The Hound of the Baskervilles.’
‘No. Was it a real dog, by the way? The Hound?’
Watson gave a thin smile. ‘You’ll have to read the book, young man.’
‘Hold on, I’ve seen the pictures. Watson had a moustache.’
Watson ran a finger along the site of an absent friend. ‘Not quite the ultimate sacrifice for getting to see you, but close. Look, we are both here because of the Dover Arrow. Me, because I am interested in the fate of a friend of mine whom I suspect was on board, you because you appear to be able to answer the question of what happened to her.’
‘Her? A woman? A nurse? A white woman?’
The mention of her race puzzled Watson. There were some nurses from the colonies working in Europe, but precious few of a different skin colour; the majority were from Canada or Australia or New Zealand.
‘Yes. Staff Nurse Jennings. You knew her?’
‘I saw her,’ he said glumly. ‘In fact, I was probably the last man to see her alive.’
Watson let the dread at what was to come build and slowly transform into acceptance. The poor woman was dead after all. ‘So she died when the Dover Arrow went down?’
Harrow leaned in very close now, as if there were eavesdroppers next door with glasses pressed to the wall. ‘Oh, no, Doctor. You see, the Dover Arrow didn’t go down at all.’
FORTY-FIVE
It seemed to Staff Nurse Jennings that the ambulance train gathered velocity with indecent haste. Within a few minutes the men on board were being tossed around like rag dolls as it rattled over points and took bends at breakneck speed. She had never heard of a loco pulling a Red Cross transport travel at much more than a walking pace.
She retrieved the gun and tucked it in the waistband of her skirt. She was sweating now, and risked unbuttoning the top of her blouse. When she wiped her neck, her hand came away wet. Sweat or fever?
She took a deep breath to try to calm herself. All her training told her that developing a fever was impossible in such a short space of time. But why did her throat feel scratchy and swollen? Because she needed water – she should have drunk from the container herself before passing it over. Pull yourself, together, Jennings. Imagine what Sister Spence would do in this situation.
She swallowed a few times and then tried to yell over the rattle of bogeys on the track. ‘Anyone else speak English? Anyone?’
‘Little,’ said one of the men standing close by, holding up thumb and forefinger and pinching them together. ‘Only little.’
He was older than Jiang, judging by the gaps in his teeth and thinning hair, and had the build of a scrawny chicken. Again, his skin was still mostly its natural colour, but the whites of his eyes showed blue flecks.
‘Name?’ She pointed to herself. ‘Me Nurse Jennings. Jennings. What’s yours?’
He pressed a bony fist to his chest. ‘Lau.’
Was that a first or last name? No matter. ‘Right, Mr Lau, we have to get organized.’ She indicated the men on the floor. ‘We need to make room. Lay out the dead properly. Make space. Understand?’
He nodded, but she wasn’t sure he did. Nevertheless she got to work, pushing her way through the hollow-eyed workers and issuing orders for them to sit in seats, lay in vestibules or stand out of the way. The smell was by turns cloying and piercingly sharp, like a slap to the sinuses. She quickly tore up a handkerchief, wadded the material and pushed it up her nose. She would breathe through her mouth from now on.
She soon gathered that this was British rolling stock and consisted of coaches that had been converted into SIC – Secure Infectious Carriages – used to transport men suffering from typhus or measles. These could be opened only from the outside, to prevent the sick going walkabout with their germs. The barred windows, though, were a new addition.
Of the six carriages, three were kitted out for lying-down cases, with a stack of stretcher-like berths suspended from the ceiling at either side, and a narrow corridor running between the two stacks. She managed to convey to Lau what she wanted, and the men who had enough strength began piling the dead, one on top of another, onto the berths. The amount of bodily fluids spilled in the process was alarming, but soon she was so soaked with blood, pus and piss that she no longer cared. The main battle was to stay upright as the speeding loco dragged them onward.
At the front of the train, in one of the sitting-up carriages, she found a canister of water under a seat. After guiltily helping herself, she told Lau to pass it along. ‘One mouthful each. Yes?’
Lau raised the square tin to his lips and she watched his throat work, then pulled it away. She held up an index finger. ‘One for each man, yes?’
‘Yes.’
Oh, how she wanted to pour the whole contents over her head and rub at her face and hair. She watched it disappear with regret.
‘Right, we need men sitting here. You, there. You, take that one.’
Someone began to retch after drinking and she heard vomit – and the precious water – splatter on the floor and protests from some of the men splashed by it. ‘Take him to the rear. There’s a free berth in coach five.’
The train began to tip from side to side and she steadied herself on a seat back, watching the shapes of trees turn solid black in the twilight. A hand gripped her wrist. She looked down at a moon-faced man, who tried to smile. He said something low and, of course, unintelligible, closed his eyes and let out a long, last gurgling breath. His head dropped onto his companion’s shoulder, but he, in turn, was leaning against the window, too weak to move.
She felt a mixture of anger and shame curdle her stomach. How could they treat men like this? She supposed it was because they didn’t see them as men. They saw them as Chinese. Chinkies, as that colonel had said. What was that phrase the lieutenant had used? EXTO? What on earth was that? Ex-something. Another term for what they considered sub-humans?
She had to admit she had possessed a wide streak of xenophobia when she had arrived in France. She might have spent time in the West Indies but, even on St Kitts, she and her family had treated the locals like backward children, certainly not as equals. The thought that God had created them to be on a par with Englishmen and women would have made her father explode with rage. But exposure to the Sikhs and Gurkhas and other groups over the past two years had made her realize that the old certainties about the superiority of the British race in all matters was just national arrogance.
And ignorance. Where was Shandong, the place where these men apparently originated? And what calamity or need would drive them overseas to work for foreigners at the most menial of tasks? She didn’t know the answers. Growing up, to her, China had been a place of opium, foot binding, white slaving and, latterly, Fu Manchu.
She heard the raised voices and sc
reamed insults of an argument building in the next carriage. As she walked along the passageway, swinging from seat back to seat back like a monkey in a zoo, she noticed that the wall of trees had disappeared, replaced by the outlines of warehouses and other industrial buildings and, silhouetted against the deepening blue of the night sky, in the distance, skeletal cranes. The docks. They were nearly at the quays, where they would be unloaded and then transferred to an ambulance boat. She felt sure it would all be all right once they got to England.
FORTY-SIX
‘It was odd at the time. We were meant to be performing tidal experiments at Richborough.’
‘Where?’ asked Watson.
‘It’s in Kent.’ Harrow’s voice was still low, barely above a whisper, but there was hardness to it, the tension of suppressed anger perhaps. ‘The Dover Arrow was not a normal ferry. It had been designed before the war for the trains to drive straight onto it, so the passengers didn’t have to disembark. It was deemed perfect for transporting the badly wounded. Which is why we VADs were on board, to help with the medical side. Four of us. But suddenly, we are told we have to undertake docking trials at this new installation. You know that if you are taking a train directly onto a boat, you have to make sure the tracks are level in a tidal port. They were using pontoons and a levelling system at Richborough.’
Watson wasn’t interested in the technical details of a roll-on-the-train, roll-off-the-train system. It wasn’t relevant. ‘Go on.’
‘So we crossed the Channel to Calais, which was always nerve-racking, especially as we had minimum crew and a new captain. No VADS needed on the voyage, we were told.’
‘Why were you on the Dover Arrow in France then?’
‘I wasn’t meant to be. Just as we were disembarking at Richborough, the captain – Owen, his name was – managed to jam his hand in one of the ramp systems. Mangled a couple of fingers. He was determined to carry on, but someone had to splint it up, so I volunteered to do it while we sailed across.’
‘Did any of this strike you as strange?’
The VAD gave a cynical laugh. ‘Have you been over there, Major Watson? The whole damn war is one strange thing after another. I’m sure the average day in Bedlam makes more sense than what happens over there. Criminal.’
‘You’re a conchie?’ Watson asked, trying not to sound too judgemental.
Harrow nodded. ‘A conchie with a very influential father. I am an artist. A sculptor. I object to the war, to the waste of human life, and I refuse to kill another human being.’
‘It’s a brave decision.’ Conscientious objectors were roundly reviled and persecuted, and often either imprisoned or sent down the mines to do the most disgusting and dangerous jobs. Others were dispatched to the front as stretcher-bearers, not a recipe for a long and peaceful life. Watson knew that, had he been thirty years younger, no matter how uncertain he felt about war, he wouldn’t have had the gumption not to fight. But then again, he was a soldier by profession, a veteran of the Afghan Wars. He wouldn’t have faced the dilemma of this young man.
‘So the local Military Service Tribunal allowed me to join a VAD unit. I don’t know what it cost my father, in money or promises or favours, and I’ll probably never find out because he swears, having done this, he’ll never talk to me again.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
Harrow smirked. ‘You wouldn’t be if you knew my father.’
‘So you docked at Calais,’ Watson prompted.
‘And everything seemed fine there. The train came on, a locomotive and six carriages, and then we were told to get underway. I said at the time, we had four rail lines on deck, we could get another three trains on. The captain just ordered me below.’
‘And then?’
‘And then we laid off the port for perhaps twenty minutes, wallowing, as if giving everyone time to get thoroughly seasick. I’m perfectly fine if we are moving or if I can see the sky and the sea. But I was in the cabin I usually share with the other VADs, which doesn’t have a porthole and stinks of oil. So I went up on deck. I heard the noise before I got there.’
‘What noise?’
‘Shouting, screaming, banging. A terrible, inhuman racket. It was as I was halfway up the gangway, I felt the ship shift.’
‘Shift how?’ asked Watson.
Harrow swung his legs back onto the bed, pulled the covers over them and poured himself a glass of water from the side table. There was a stubborn set to the jaw when he had finished drinking.
Watson gripped his arm. ‘It shifted how, lad?’
Harrow turned and stared at him. ‘Let me ask you a question: Do you know what an EXTO is?’
‘No,’ said Watson truthfully. ‘What is it?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘You’re playing games with me, man,’ Watson snapped. ‘Why have you stopped?’
‘Because this is the part you won’t believe is true.’
FORTY-SEVEN
Staff Nurse Jennings was relieved when, finally, the driver applied the brakes and the train of sick and dying men slowed. The rhythm became the familiar, comforting one of slow clicks over joints as the platforms approached.
‘Not long now,’ she said to Lau, who simply blinked several times in response. She wondered if he was concussed. He had lost a tooth in the fight over the water, which Jennings had resolved by firing a shot into the ceiling. It had done the trick, but not before Lau had managed to get in the way of a flying fist or two.
The train decelerated some more, until you could count to four between the thumps over the expansion gaps in the rails. A platform finally hove into view and Jennings found herself pulling at her hair, as if it could make any difference to how stained and dishevelled she looked.
The train kept rolling.
All the men who could manage it stared out of the window, watching the station slide by. Now they were down to the jetties and the loco was barely crawling along. ‘We’re going straight onto the boat,’ she said, and made a series of signs to Lau, who barked out an explanation in his own tongue. ‘They are bound to let us out once we are on the ship.’
She moved to the very front of the carriage where there was room to squeeze past the seated Chinese and put her face against the window. A stream of salty air came through the cracked glass and she pulled out the makeshift nose plugs. There were people standing on the deck, watching as the train, as gingerly as threading a fine needle, inched its way onto the ambulance ferry.
She waved to the blurred figures, but they were clearly intent on making sure nothing went wrong with the loading and didn’t acknowledge her. After some long, slow grinds, the train finally came to a halt. She heard a great exhalation of steam from the loco like a sigh of relief.
She rapped on the window with a knuckle, but the men were hurrying away, towards the stern of the boat. There was movement as chains rattled and a sudden sense that the boat was floating free.
‘Thank God,’ she muttered.
‘We get out now?’
It was Lau, standing behind her. Engines thrummed into life, screws turned and the boat wallowed, causing a few shouts of dismay.
‘I don’t know,’ said Jennings. ‘If they could just open the doors and get some air to blow through.’
‘They frightened?’ he asked.
She looked around at the pitiful men, their cyan skin, stained clothes and blood-encrusted faces. Of course the British were scared. Scared that they might catch whatever this plague was. Scared of the unknown. But fresh air, fresh sea air purging the carriages, was that too much to ask?
‘I think, yes, they are frightened of this.’
He gave a freshly toothless grin. ‘Me too.’
Jennings gave him a squeeze on the shoulder, turned and banged on the glass again. ‘Hello! Anyone there? Hello!
‘Ràng w[i_ǒ]men ch[i_ū]qù!’ shouted Lau.
Another took it up, feebler. Then a third. Soon they were all chanting she knew not what. But the sentiment was clear. They
wanted out of there.
Hands and fists started to rattle the windows and there was the sound of more and more breaking glass as the occupants realized that once the panes had broken, cold, bracing air was driven in by the boat’s forward motion. Those who could stamped their feet to increase the cacophony.
‘Shush!’ Jennings yelled as she felt the vibration of machinery through her feet change note. ‘Quiet!’
The racket throughout the carriages gradually subsided. She looked out of the window and beyond the ship. The few lights on the shoreline were moving up and down, but stayed where they were laterally. ‘We’ve stopped.’
Lau repeated this, then asked her: ‘Why?’
‘Perhaps because of the . . .’ She had to steady herself as a decent sized wave hit them. They were beyond the breakwater. ‘Perhaps we were making too much noise. Let’s see if we can get some lights on in here.’
There were electric lamps, but she could find no way of turning them on. In the end, she lit the single oil lamp that was provided for each carriage. Still, there was no sign of help. The ship was pushed this way and that, the motion unpredictable and disquieting. Some of the men began to groan as seasickness and nausea took hold. There was more vomiting, but she couldn’t be sure whether it was from queasiness or the illness.
She had just reached the front of the first carriage when she felt the main engine boom into life once more and the low vibration as it built up power. The carriages began to thrum in harmony as the screws turned, and the ship swung in a wide arc, more purposeful this time.
‘How long England?’ Lau asked.
‘How long to England?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long was it last time? Did you come Dover–Calais?’
‘Not been England. Canada.’
So the workers were shipped direct to France. ‘Well, it normally takes less than two hours, but sometimes they zigzag.’
‘Zigzag?’
She was about to explain about avoiding submarines, but decided better of it. He had enough to worry about without fretting about torpedoes. ‘Nothing.’
