Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Hun was a concept more than anything, a monster in a children’s story, designed to keep them from wandering too far into the woods.
It bore little resemblance to the German prisoners who laboured around the camp.
Up close many of them were as young and puny as our own recruits and it was hard to fear them.
Impossible to hate them. They were just part of the jigsaw that completed the picture of étaples, and most people gave them little thought.
‘Most do not approve,’ Dr Henning said.
‘Most?’ I said. ‘How could any approve? It’s barbaric.’
He struggled to respond, then finally: ‘It is all barbaric.’
People who’d been civil became mean.
What makes someone mean? I wrote in the journal. What gives them the bloody confidence?
I had no answer then, and I have no answer now, but there is confidence in meanness, even if it is momentary.
Even if the rest of the day they cower from someone else.
For a moment they are confident that this time they will be feared, heard, seen.
They will be on top because someone is beneath them.
I’d been careless with people, but not mean. Hopefully never mean.
Sister Morgan is mean, I wrote, and I have not forgotten the way she grabbed a wrist to feel the pulse or tore a dressing from a dry, encrusted wound. The meanness was in her instruction to wait when I began delivering meals to the patients; the soup, for once, was warm.
‘Not yet,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
‘We don’t want to spoil them.’
‘And what did you do?’ asked Alison later.
‘I delivered warm soup to every man capable of eating it.’
Alison raised her brows. ‘She has asked for you to be reprimanded.’
‘She could have done that herself,’ I said. ‘I was surprised she didn’t.’
‘If you’d been a debutante I’ve no doubt you’d have been given a voluble dressing-down.’ Alison took a ledger from the desk drawer. ‘You are beyond her experience.’
I smiled, pleased, and Alison smiled with me.
‘But you are not beyond mine,’ she said, before making a note in her ledger.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Making an official report.’ She looked up, tilted her head like a teacher who has given her final warning. ‘A reprimand.’
We stared at each other, and I wondered if she was recalling, as I was, our outing to the woods: the lavender, the brandy, Call me Alison, she’d said. But I knew there were conditions.
‘A reprimand? Why?’
‘Disobedience.’
‘She deserved to be disobeyed.’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘With respect, Matron, that’s hardly fair.’
‘Like everyone else, Nurse Taylor, you will follow the rules or suffer the consequences.’
‘And what kind of consequence results from giving sick men hot soup?’
‘A very small one. One worth risking, in my opinion, but these minor infringements can add up so I suggest you choose your battles if you don’t want to be noticed.’
‘And Sister Morgan? Are there any consequences for her?’
‘Oh yes, she violated her pledge to devote herself to the welfare of those in her care. She too has a note against her name.’
About a week later, it was official.
There was a headline in the Manchester Guardian: ENGLISH LADY EXECUTED IN brUSSELS. Then a paragraph. Then column after column of commentary and outrage.
She was an English nurse doing her job, caring for injured men without favour – English, Belgian and German alike.
Above and beyond, some might say, but the Germans called her a spy.
There was a picture in one of the papers and it might have been of any of the matrons at étaples, any of the sisters.
That’s what the uniform does, it makes us all the same.
The Hun with their pointed helmets are all brutes, the Tommies in their khakis are all brave, the nurses in their veils are all saints.
The German ward was full of prisoners but in their blue pyjamas they just looked like patients, and Dr Henning, in his white coat, might just be another doctor.
But suddenly he had no name. Many of the sisters found ways to strip him of it.
Most just avoided speaking to him and if it was necessary they’d issue demands instead of requests, but a few were more diligent.
To them he was nothing more than a prisoner. A filthy Hun.
‘You,’ I heard the sister say. Sister Morgan, the Gorgon, I wrote in the journal. She spat it out and I turned, as he turned. It was unclear who she was talking to. ‘Clear that up.’
We both looked at where her chin pointed. It was insignificant – just a towel that had fallen from the end of a bed. Close enough for her to bend and retrieve it (close enough for her to have knocked it off).
‘Now,’ she said. So I moved towards it. ‘Not you, nurse.’ She looked at Dr Henning. ‘You. Now. Clear it up.’
I looked at him and saw the colour rise in his face. I saw his jaw clench. I imagined, as he must have imagined, a sister speaking to him like that in his hospital in Leipzig. He did not move.
‘Now,’ she shouted, and I flinched.
‘I don’t think…’ I began, but he moved forward and I didn’t finish.
He kept his eyes on the sister’s and her face became ugly with the strain of her hatred.
When he bent I should have walked away, but I didn’t.
I watched her lip curl and quiver. I watched him pick up the towel and fold it.
I watched him place the towel on the end of the bed.
I expected him to turn from her then and go back to his patient, but he didn’t.
He faced her, as if waiting to be dismissed, and for a moment I despised him.
His obedience. But he understood more than I did, and more than Sister Morgan.
Her hatred was misplaced and her rage undisciplined – face to face, his eyes looking into hers, she did not know what to do next.
How further to humiliate him, why it was necessary.
She forgot her lines and walked off stage.
We all did, and the show should have been over, but it was just an interval.
Two weeks after the execution, every newspaper, English and French, gave more and more space to the atrocity.
There were columns of information. Copies of letters sent by the Americans to the Germans seeking clemency; editorial analysis, an account of her last words from her English clergyman.
Happy to die for her country, he wrote. And the quote began to appear in almost every dispatch.
But whose words were they? The English clergyman did not hear them from her mouth; he was given them by the German clergyman who escorted her to the firing squad.
From her, the papers reported nothing. A silence we are forced to interpret.
The record states that she fainted as she arrived at the place of her execution.
And it was when she was on the ground, unconscious, that she was shot in the head.
But the record was a contradiction of the preferred narrative and so it was adjusted.
She faced the firing squad, steadfast, and it was they who wavered.
They aimed wide, injuring her in the leg.
That is why she fell, it suggested, why a shot to the head became necessary.
It is the only explanation, for how could such a patriotic woman, happy to die for her country, suffer such paralysing fear?
How could she not?
The newspaper clipping is brittle now and yellowed with age, but the words have not faded and the years have not changed what I think.
In that place I saw fear every day. I saw brave men crippled by it and I knew in my guts that, as brave as she was, Edith Cavell was afraid, that she had fainted, that her bowels had opened and stained her skirts.
I like this image more because there is room in it for all of us. For all that we felt and feared.
She was sentenced at 5pm and shot, in secret, just nine hours later.
By daybreak she was a martyr and a hero, and all of us who wore the habit of a wartime nurse were touched by sainthood, though few of us deserved it.
We were doing our best, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. There is nothing more human.
In those weeks the few words Dr Henning and I had begun to share dried up. I did not hold him responsible and it was not his guilt to bear, but in some dark place, I thought of him as one of them, and in some dark place, he felt shame.
I came onto the German ward and Sister Morgan was there, again.
What had she done to deserve it? I wonder now.
Everything about the ward offended her – the patients, the doctor, even me.
Her uniform is poorly laundered, she’d reported.
She is too independent; she does not wait for instruction; she is wont to argue.
The German ward was meant to be my punishment, not hers.
For hours we worked around each other. She spoke little to me and almost nothing to Dr Henning. He had done a shift in the surgery and was waiting for the last to wake when Sister Morgan began to read aloud. It was from the Manchester Guardian, a few days out of date. She spat the words.
‘Germans often ask why it is that they are so little loved in the world. Let them examine the story of the death of Miss Cavell if they would have the key to a not very obscure mystery.’
I was changing a sheet, yellowed and damp. I had the boy rolled on his side, the soiled bedding bunched beneath him.
‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘It won’t hurt him to lie in his filth a little longer.’ Then she strode over to where Dr Henning stood vigil. ‘Translate,’ she ordered, and forced the newsprint into his hand. ‘Tell them what they have done. Then ask them why we should keep them from dying.’
He did not cower, but he did not refuse and I have always wondered what he was trying to avoid and what it must have cost him.
He held the paper and read it in silence, holding his face expressionless.
Then he translated, pausing now and then to arrange the words.
When they came, his voice was even and dull.
He could have made something up, there was no one there who would have known for sure.
But I don’t think he did. I listened to his translation, I heard a quaver enter his voice and watched the colour rise in his face.
I recalled him on his knees on Isolation Road, waiting for the Redcap to kick him. When he was done the ward was silent.
Then the man in bed four: ‘Englische Schlampe.’
‘What did he say?’ demanded the sister.
Dr Henning shook his head.
‘Tell me.’
But he wouldn’t.
‘Now.’
The man in bed four: ‘Englische Schlampe, englische Schlampe, englische Schlampe.’
Dr Henning spoke to him, tried to shut him up. But the sister was more effective. She strode over and slapped the face of the man in bed four.
He barely paused. ‘Englische Schlampe,’ he said, then he spat.
It landed on the cuff of her sleeve and slid slowly onto the skin of her wrist. She stared at it and her face contorted with disgust. I felt it too.
Ironic, I think now, since their fluids barely made us blink most of the time.
But their fluids were usually benign, a sign of their weakness.
Then he turned to me. ‘Englische Schlampe.’
I saw the disdain in his eyes and I knew what he meant.
I’d heard it in English often enough and it leaked from his mouth in the same way, like sewage.
He hated the sister and me and Edith Cavell, just as he hated the woman who served him beer or sold him stamps or cooked his dinner.
It wasn’t our Englishness, it was our sex.
There’d been times when I’d risked defending myself against such hatred, and I’d enjoyed the violence of it.
The sister slapped him again, and I felt the thrill.
But she was not in control. He’d brought her down and he knew it.
He smiled. You are no Edith Cavell, he might have said, and I thought she would strike a third time.
I moved, Dr Henning moved, the door to the ward slammed shut. We turned from bed four to see Matron.
‘English slut,’ she said. Clear and emotionless, taking all the power from his words.
‘That is what he is saying, Sister Morgan. English slut. And it is neither here nor there as far as we are concerned. It is simply the ravings of a diminished mind. Whether that is the result of this war or just his natural state, we cannot be sure.’
She walked forward, and I thought her composure slightly exaggerated – I would have done better, made it look effortless, but I appreciated the performance.
There are times when the performance is all we have, and in that moment I imagined her walking towards a firing squad.
I wondered then, as I wonder still, if she would have been happy to die for her country, or if fear would have loosed her insides and relieved her of consciousness before the bullets were fired.