Chapter Ten
Ten
The triage area inside the hospital was full and stretchers were being unloaded from motor ambulances and laid on the ground outside.
Boys on crutches with bandaged bits and pieces hobbled towards benches that had been set up on the edge of things.
They would have to wait and they knew it.
Despite their pain and bewilderment, they were confident they would live, and that the others, stretched out on the ground, might not.
I ran to an ambulance, its back open, the driver waiting for help. She looked me up and down and smiled. ‘They’ll think they’ve died and gone to heaven,’ she said.
There was no time for flirting and yet I paused and smiled back.
‘It’s the least I can do,’ I said out of habit.
She looked like Helen – petite, with dark hair and brown eyes, though brown, I had begun to understand, was a lazy word.
Iso would have captured them with flecks of black, orange, yellow, even green, and for a moment I thought about asking her out for a drink when that push was over.
Then I thought of Dr Henning, and how I would prefer to ask him.
In the end I said nothing. I helped her empty the ambulance and she drove away.
I bent to one stretcher then another, man after man, boy after boy, British and Indian mostly.
For a while I refused to kneel on the ground and muddy the silk of my pyjamas.
I bent to check the labels assigned at dressing stations near the front.
If their forehead was not marked with a T I would call for a tetanus shot; if their groans were tortured I’d call for morphia.
I would check and redress their wounds and either give them a place in the queue or call for help because the queue would be the death of them.
My back began to ache in that distant way it did back then, and I took a moment to stretch, lest it seize completely.
Then I heard a boy calling from one of the benches.
It was my pyjamas, I thought, drawing his attention. I smiled to myself but ignored him, I wrote. How absurd that I would be smiling amid that chaos, and for the second time. But it is written in the journal, so I know it to be true.
My back was worth more than my pyjamas so I knelt beside the next stretcher. The ground was rough against my knees, the silk too thin to protect. I wasted a second wondering if the dirt would wash out.
The boy on the bench kept calling – like a mosquito, he was beginning to annoy me – and then he used my name.
‘Tilda,’ he shouted.
I looked up. His face was just like all the others, covered in mud and whatever else. But his voice was familiar. Probably a boomerang – a boy I’d nursed before, on his second or third turn through étaples.
‘Wait your turn,’ I shouted.
It took more than two hours for stretcher cases to thin – just a lull between trains – and there was time to see to the boys on the bench.
‘Tilda, it’s me, Jack.’
I remember it still. This boy, I knew. Helen’s neighbour on the Oxford Canal, a brother, almost, to her girls.
He was a mischief who could hold a tune and make anyone smile because his was always genuine.
And there it was, his smile, shining through the mud.
He was shouting my name and his and the journey he’d taken to get there, so loud that everyone could hear. He was half deaf from a blast.
‘Jack,’ I said, and he threw his arms around my waist. I felt his warm breath through the thin silk and I held him tight, like a mother would.
Like his mother would. Rosie, I thought, your boy is alive when he might not have been.
I began to compose a letter to her in my head – he ruined my red silk pyjamas, you know the ones.
He wiped his muddy face all over them. Helen’s girls would help her read it, and an image came to my mind of the three of them on Helen’s narrowboat, sitting at the galley table, the letter between them.
Jack will be fine, I would write, before I wrote anything else, and I imagined the relief of all three. Then I thought of my brother.
‘Have you seen Bill in your travels, Jack?’
‘Bill?’ he shouted, to check if he’d heard right, and someone along the bench responded.
‘What do you want?’
My breath became trapped between desire and knowledge. It wasn’t my Bill and I knew that before I turned. I caught his eye and hated him. He looked down and I think he knew I wished him to be someone else.
‘Haven’t seen him, Til,’ Jack said, too loud. ‘You heard from him?’
‘Two days ago. Wherever he is, he’s bored out of his mind.’
‘Hope it stays that way.’
‘Me too, Jack.’
When Dr Henning arrived on the German ward that night, I told him about Jack and all the losses.
‘There are three dead from his platoon, including his lieutenant,’ I said.
‘I remember him from Oxford. Gareth, his name was, married to a friend. Jack’s been told but seems not to remember – he kept asking after him.
’ I paused on the edge of the next sentence.
‘They used to work together,’ I said. ‘They were part of a Pals’ Battalion, some of the platoons have lost almost everyone. ’
‘A village of men,’ Dr Henning said. We weren’t talking about ourselves and conversation came more easily when it was dark outside and we could imagine that everyone but us was asleep.
I nodded. ‘A village of women with no one to dance with. Not now, not ever.’
‘It is the same for us,’ he said. ‘They join together, fight together, die together. Then their mothers mourn together.’