Chapter One
Day one
Large stones lined Isolation Road. They were whitewashed to reflect the moonlight and keep us to the path.
I imagined them as smudges of white on one of Iso’s pictures.
I imagined myself as an impression, a shape easily identified as female but lacking detail.
Except, perhaps, my hair. A brushstroke down my back, even if it was plaited, rolled into the nape of my neck and tied beneath my cap.
It defines you, Iso had said, weeks earlier, after one of those long days when the trains disgorged boy after broken boy and the cap had been used as a dressing.
My plait had actually loosed. We were drinking hot cocoa in the YMCA hut Iso volunteered at and one of her drawings was between us.
I was little more than an outline in charcoal with shadings of blue and white pastel for uniform and apron, but I recognised myself: a nurse, bent at the waist, a white band with a red cross around her left arm.
My thick plait, just three entwined lines, was uncoiled and almost touching the ground beside the stretcher.
She’d used golden ochre to colour it, though I’d always described my hair as honey.
I remember I put down the cocoa and reached for my plait.
I drew it through my hand. Something dark had dried in the frayed ends.
Something dark, I tried not to think what.
I was at the centre of the picture; everything else was shades of charcoal, khaki and brown.
Blood, Iso said, was never Venetian red when the men arrived from the front.
The journey would take hours if not days and their blood would thicken and grow dark, like a stain or shadow.
Hard to distinguish from mud and shit; my word, not hers.
Though it didn’t make her flinch – the word or the excrement.
I can’t recall her turning from anything, and maybe that’s what I admired most about her.
But at first it was my vanity that drew me to her.
She was an old woman in that camp and she made me feel younger than I was.
Her short sturdiness helped me maintain a long-held sense of myself.
I was tall, statuesque according to some, beautiful according to most, but not all heads turned my way in those years.
War mad, I would sometimes joke when the eyes of a soldier failed to catch.
Though the truth was, compared to the debutantes who joined the VAD in droves, I was middle-aged.
Old enough to be the mother of one of those boys who lay dying on a stretcher in the mud.
Iso admired me and that was enough for us to become friends.
We stayed friends because I admired her, though I may not have told her as much.
Iso only ever drew what she saw, she said, but her focus was particular.
And there were times, I’m sure, that she drew what she wanted to see – the order of the camp instead of its chaos, and my hair, honeyed and unblemished by that fucking place.
Maybe it kept her sane, for a time at least. It would eventually catch her up, but that was later, much later, and that is her story, not mine.
As soon as we’d finished our cocoa, I cut the muck from the ends of my hair, right there at the table with a little pair of scissors Iso carried around to sharpen pencils and trim brushes.
There was no time to wash it. Not that day, not for another week.
Like blood, my hair became dull with time and I doubt anyone would have described it as golden or honeyed after three weeks of double shifts.
But Iso continued to use golden ochre whenever she had the chance to make a picture, and I was glad she did, because my reflection in the mirror had become less than satisfactory.
But I’m going too far back.
We were walking up Isolation Road. It was early morning, no longer night but too early for the colour of day, and the camp was quiet.
A single lorry passed and we watched it disappear beyond the beech woods that crowned the hill.
The only other people I recall were two street cleaners coming down the road towards us, pushing a barrow with what they needed to pick up and sweep and cover over.
Even in that place we had them – Africans, then later, Chinese.
Cheap and hardworking and a long way from home.
Iso would sketch them, as she sketched us all.
There is more to war than battles, she once said. We passed them without a word.
I remember the chattering of birds as they gossiped about the dawn. I remember thinking that if I closed my eyes I could imagine myself back in Oxford, walking along the towpath beside the canal. I remember that morning as peaceful.
Such an odd word to use, I think now.
It’s hard to explain all the ways that place could disturb you.
Beyond the sounds and the sights and the smells of the camp there was the clatter and scream of trains, day and night, and the shiver and throb that came from the front.
It travelled through the ground and the air and, although we could hear nothing, it would inhabit us.
I’d tried to shake it off but it was impossible.
It was part of that place and so I had learned to live with it.
But sometimes, in the early morning when the trains and the bombs were at rest, the shiver and throb would stop.
At first the absence was disquieting and then we’d recognise the calm.
This was one of those mornings, and neither Iso nor I wanted to interrupt the stillness with talk.
We walked up Isolation Road and I could hear her breathing.
Then the reveille sounded and we knew that across the camp men would begin to dress, polish their boots, clean their guns.
They would spill from barracks and tents like ants to line up at the latrines, then mess tents would resound with the clatter of tin plates and cups and false cheer.
If we took our time we would hear lorries in convoy and then boots en masse – men marching towards the Bull Ring and a brutal day of training.
We would see those men and comment, as we always did, on how young some of them were.
Not men at all, I would say, and Iso would nod.
I’d scan their faces and wonder if I might recognise any of them in a few weeks’ time, when they came back through the camp on crutches or a stretcher.
As night follows day.
We were on Isolation Road, walking towards my first shift on a new ward.
A promotion or a punishment, it was not yet clear, and so Iso had decided to accompany me for moral support.
It was her half day and any decent friend would have told her to sleep in while she could, but the sky was clear and she said it would be a good morning to paint.
She’d walked from her house in the town and met me outside the hut I shared with other Red Cross VADs – Voluntary Aid Detachments.
Debutantes, all of them. Her plan was to accompany me to the ward then walk back the way we’d come, down Isolation Road, under the railway at Brick Bridge, past the VAD huts and into the dunes. There she would settle in for the dawn.
To the west she would have a beautiful view of the River Canche as it flowed into the English Channel.
She would see fishing boats and a colouring sky, the shimmer of swallows on the wing, dawn feasting; an impression of peace that Iso refused to paint.
It would be a lie, she once told me. Instead, she would turn her back on the river and concentrate on some detail of the camp as it was illuminated by first light.
The details were many, the camp was so vast – at first too big for a war that surely would soon end, and then not big enough.
In August 1915 there was row after row of hospital huts yet they were too few; the clusters of tents in their hundreds, too crowded; the stench from the incinerators that burned bloodied dressings and amputated limbs, and the pits holding the waste of nearly a hundred thousand people, overwhelming.
It was twenty years ago and I smell it still. But that is not what I am trying to remember.
On that morning, I was glad of Iso’s gentle company.
She’d lived in étaples when it was just a fishing village and artists’ colony.
When the railway separated the town from fields and woods, not tents and hospital huts.
When her view from the dunes was peaceful in all directions, and her paintings full of life and colour and light.
Unlike the rest of us, Iso belonged there and she lived in the town with her sister and mother.
Migrants, she told me, from the other side of the world, like the birds that roosted in their roof each summer.
But their season was long and the winds of war would not lift them from that place.
They stayed when all the other artists left, and when the camp was built they became part of the workforce.
Iso volunteered for the YMCA; her sister and mother helped in one of the charitable hospitals.
A few weeks after I’d arrived I sat dazed in Walton Hut and she’d brought me hot cocoa.
She sat with me until it was drunk then walked me back to my hut. We barely spoke and I was grateful.
Boots on the road behind us, but not a regiment.
We turned and saw two men, a Redcap and another.
Iso pulled me aside to let them pass and I saw the other was wearing clogs, blue trousers and an ill-fitting white jersey with PG painted on the front.
A prisoner. His cloth cap was pulled down low, as if he was trying to hide beneath it.
And yet he nodded as he passed, like someone entering a shop as you are leaving.
We nodded back, Iso and I, the most natural of exchanges in that unnatural place.
Then the Redcap shoved him in the back and made him stumble.
‘Eyes on the ground, Hun.’
The Redcap shoved him again and the German fell to his knees. He stayed very still, waiting, and the Redcap laughed.
‘Dog,’ he said.
I wondered if he would kick him and Iso cleared her throat.
The Redcap hauled the German up by an arm and they kept walking.
The German did not look around but I imagined he would have apologised, if he could, for the inconvenience.
Like someone entering a shop might apologise for bumping your arm as they passed you.
He kept his eyes on the ground as he walked away and it was we who stayed very still, waiting, watching.
The pitch of night had passed but it was still dusky and in no time they were just shadows, impressions of people.
No uniforms to distinguish them, just two men walking abreast.
The German ward was part of 24 General, a Red Cross hospital that occupied the whole length of Isolation Road.
It included thirty long huts, maybe more, and a fair number of tents for when the huts were full – nearly a thousand beds.
When I think of it now, it seems absurd.
24 General would have treated tens of thousands of men during that war, and it was just one of seventeen hospitals at étaples.
From the outside, the German ward was identical to every other, but I’d been told it was the last hut, furthest up the hill, so we had no trouble finding it.
In the shadows of pre-dawn it announced itself with twelve points of light, and I thought of how deftly Iso would render it.
Twelve quick daubs of yellow pastel, evenly spaced along a darkly charcoaled hut.
She offered to come in with me, but I shook my head.
What could they do, after all? They were bedbound and humiliated.
I’d handled far more dangerous men. ‘Go draw something,’ I told her.
I pushed open the door and entered.