Chapter Two #3
His top sheet hung loose at the end of the bed and Matron tucked it in to make it neat.
It would have taken a moment for her hand to rest on the leg that lay beneath, but instead she moved to the locker and picked up the cup of water.
She added a straw and held it to his mouth.
She didn’t put her free hand on his shoulder, and I wondered if he might have come alive a little if she had.
‘They are the enemy, Nurse Taylor. Scum, the lot of them. But I insist they get the care they need.’
We came to a bed where the doctor stood.
He was bent towards its occupant, the fingers of one hand encircling a limp wrist. In the other hand he held a gold watch.
They were large hands. The skin smooth and almost hairless.
Blue veins like tributaries. His nails were trimmed and clean, but there was stubble on his jaw and his hair needed cutting.
It was thick and the colour of oatmeal, the kind of hair that was hard to tame.
It curled and flopped over his forehead.
Did I think then about cutting it? I can’t remember.
‘Abdomen,’ Matron announced.
‘And?’ I said, my eyes flicking to the doctor.
She sighed and her brows rose up in unison. If I must, they seemed to say.
‘Dr Henning,’ she said. ‘He’s a Hun.’
He stiffened when she said it, or perhaps I just expected him to. Either way I looked down, to spare his embarrassment or mine. That’s when I noticed the clogs and blue trousers beneath the doctor’s white coat – there were scuff marks on his knees. Dog, the Redcap had called him.
He returned the watch to his breast pocket and laid the boy’s arm on the bed.
He pulled the sheet down to expose a puny chest and a bandaged belly.
The dressings were soaked and blushing pink.
It would have been the bright point in one of Iso’s paintings.
A contrast to all the grey and off-white of the ward.
Then, as we watched, a line of red appeared along the lower edge of the bandage.
A stroke of paint, loose and careless and beginning to drip. Matron left my side.
They spoke, the matron and the Hun. She on one side of the bed, he on the other. The boy was between them and she removed his dressings. She looked to the doctor for direction.
He bled to death. It didn’t take long.
‘He shouldn’t have,’ said Matron, and her lips thinned as she kept the reason from spilling out. But I knew. Filthy Hun. I’d heard a surgeon say it once, over tea and scones. A waste of my time, he’d said. No one agreed with him, but neither did they challenge.
I held the door for the orderlies as they brought in a stretcher.
One opened the window above the bed while the other wrapped the boy in his bloodied sheet.
They lifted him onto the stretcher with care, though there was no longer any need, then carried him out.
I bowed my head when they passed, I’m not sure why. I believed in very little, even then.
I gathered the rest of the bedding, still damp with the boy’s fluids, and walked to the storeroom.
Dr Henning was at the trough washing his hands, scrubbing his nails.
Pink suds from the carbolic soap made it impossible to know when they were clean of blood.
A flop of hair obscured his peripheral vision and there was no sign he’d noticed me.
I walked behind him and put the sheet in the laundry bag and the dressings in the bin for the incinerator.
I joined him at the trough and took up the soap he had just put down, suds still bubbling the surface.
Dr Henning rinsed his hands and shook off the excess water before drying them on a towel. He acted like I wasn’t there. I rinsed my own hands and dried them on the same towel.
‘I’m Nurse Taylor,’ I said.
He had taken off his doctor’s coat – bloodstained – and was putting on a clean one. He nodded, like someone in a shop who was in no mood to talk. Then he left the storeroom.
Matron stood at the nurses’ desk, fastening her scarlet tippet. A sister stood beside her.
‘He doesn’t say much, but his English is excellent,’ Matron said to me. ‘If you need to communicate something, he will understand.’ Then she turned to the sister. ‘I’ve been assured she’s competent.’
What do I remember about the rest of that day?
Very little, and I wrote nothing about it beyond those first impressions, but it must have passed like other days on other wards.
Germans, like Tommies, needed feeding, needed urinals held, needed wounds re-dressed.
Breakfast must have arrived and I must have helped those who could not help themselves.
It was a quiet time, relatively speaking, those weeks between Ypres and Loos.
The door to the small surgery at the end of the ward only opened twice, if memory serves.
Though sometimes I wish it wouldn’t. A boy went in with two feet and came out with none.
A British doctor operated, he was grey haired and portly and he slapped Dr Henning on the shoulder as if they were friends.
I stood at the trough in the storeroom and heard them through the wall.
They were talking in German, about the amputation, I assumed, though how would I know?
It might have been about Bavaria in the summertime, a different summertime.
When the surgery was done the sister told me to clean up.
I found the feet in a bucket on the floor, black and rotten, already missing toes from previous attempts to save them.
I wrapped them in separate pieces of cloth and put them in the bin for the incinerator.
When I went back into the ward, Dr Henning was gone.
‘You don’t need to worry about him,’ the sister said. ‘He’s rostered on nights for the rest of the week. He’ll only be brought back during the day if they need help with surgeries.’