Secrets of the Frontline Nurses Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Holly Green

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  When war comes, friendship will see them through the tough times

  In the midst of the First World War, Leonora Malham Brown is a volunteer with the Red Cross, while her best friend, Victoria, is a nurse at the Front in Calais. Despite the hardships of war, Leonora is delighted to be reunited with her sweetheart, Colonel Malkovic.

  Before long, Leonora falls pregnant but she daren’t tell Sasha for fear he would send her home. But when she finally plucks up the courage to tell him, tragedy strikes and he is reported missing in action. Heartbroken and now a new mother all alone, Leonora must turn to her friends back in England to help her…

  About the Author

  Holly Green writes historical sagas about love and war, and her books are inspired by the stories she heard from her parents when she was a child. Her father was a professional singer with a fine baritone voice and her mother was a dancer, but they had to give up their professions at the outbreak of World War II.

  Holly is from Liverpool and is a trained actress and teacher – her claim to fame being that she gave Daniel Craig his first acting experience!

  Holly is married, and enjoys spending time with her two delightful grandchildren.

  ALSO BY HOLLY GREEN

  Workhouse series:

  Workhouse Orphans

  Workhouse Angel

  Workhouse Nightingale

  Frontline Nurses series:

  Frontline Nurses

  Frontline Nurses on Duty

  Secrets of the Frontline Nurses

  Author’s Note

  These books are not romantic fantasies but are based on solid historical fact. They were inspired by the lives of two remarkable women, Mabel St Clair Stobart and Flora Sands. Stobart, who features as a character in this book, was the founder of the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy in 1912, led a group of nurses to care for Bulgarian soldiers during the First Balkan War and returned to help the Serbs during World War One. She gave an account of her experiences in her books Miracles and Adventures and The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere.

  Flora Sands was the daughter of a clergyman and an early member of the FANY – the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. In 1915 she volunteered to go to Serbia with Stobart, was separated from her unit and joined up with a company of Serbian soldiers, with whom she endured the terrible hardships of the retreat through the mountains of Albania. She later returned with them to Salonika and took part in the final advance which ended the war. She was the first woman ever to be accepted as a fighting soldier and ended the war with the rank of sergeant. Though she does not appear as a character in these books, much of the action is derived from her experiences, which are recorded in her own memoir An English Woman Sergeant in the Serbian Army and by Alan Burgess in The Lovely Sergeant.

  Chapter 1

  The streets of the Greek city of Salonika were crowded with soldiers in the uniforms of different countries. British Tommies rubbed shoulders with French poilous and Serbs in their borrowed French uniforms and English boots.

  Leonora Malham Brown threaded her way through the crowds in the narrow streets leading down to the harbour. Men stepped back to let her pass and some saluted, but she knew that their respect was due more to the red crosses on her nurse’s uniform than to her personally, though some of the Serbs greeted her by name as Gospodica Leo. She had earned their respect, and indeed their love, during the terrible privations of the retreat through the mountains of Albania in the winter of 1915 and its aftermath.

  The long dress and starched apron restricted her stride and she would have been happier in her FANY uniform of riding breeches under a divided skirt but she had abandoned it for two reasons. The first was the simple fact that the serviceable tweed was just too heavy for Salonika in summer. The second was more complex. It was important for her to give the impression of respectability, for Sasha’s sake. He had seen her in many guises, from a ragged urchin to a lady of fashion, but when they had arrived in Salonika she had quickly become aware that her irregular position as his companion was a source of scandal among the British and French contingents. That would not have mattered to her. She had always been ready to flout convention; but Colonel Count Aleksander Malkovic was more sensitive to criticism. As a Serbian nobleman, honour and reputation were of paramount importance to him. He had broken his own code by finally giving way to his love for her, but she had no wish to publicly embarrass him. Anxious not to be seen as merely a ‘camp follower’, she had hurried to offer her services at the local Red Cross hospital.

  Reaching her destination, Leo paused in the doorway of the restaurant and looked around. The crowded tables had spilled out onto the quayside, the lights from the candles on them reflecting in the water. The sound of laughter and conversation almost drowned out the music of the small bouzouki band sitting on a low platform in front of the building. It struck her that Salonika was a very different place to the one she remembered from her first visit with her friend Victoria. It was still full of foreign troops, but it was no longer a city that had just changed hands after bitter fighting, as it had been back in 1912. The shops and restaurants had opened up again and were doing a roaring trade, and the most fashionable of them all was Floca’s, where she now stood.

  There was, after all, very little for the soldiers to do. For the last six months they had been bottled up in a small salient that extended from the Adriatic in the west to the River Struma in the east by the Bulgarian army, which was intent on claiming the whole of Macedonia. Unable to break through, the Allies had settled for building a wire fence along the frontier, which had earned the area the nickname of ‘the birdcage’. Saved from the horrors of the western front, the British and French troops had to suffer the indignity of being called ‘the gardeners of Salonika’. It was small wonder that they’d made the best of their posting. There were football matches and concerts and plays; every evening when there was no other entertainment on offer they gathered in the bars and cafés to talk and drink and play cards, as tonight. In contrast, the Serbs, after several months on Corfu, were desperate for action and only prevented from staging a new attack by wrangling between the French and their Greek allies.

  Leo’s gaze searched the crowd until she found Sasha, sitting at the edge of the gathering at a table close by the water’s edge. He was with two other officers, one British, one French. He saw her and came to meet her.

  ‘You look tired. I expected you earlier. Did they make you work overtime at the hospital?’

  Leo had been warmly welcomed by the mixed collection of doctors and nurses of different nationalities who had volunteered to work for the Red Cross. There were few wounded to care for, but as well as the old enemy, typhus, the visiting troops had fallen victim in large numbers to malaria. Medical resources were stretched to the limits.

  ‘Nobody “made” me,’ she said. ‘I volunteered.’

  ‘You shouldn’t let them put extra
work on you,’ he responded. ‘It isn’t fair.’

  His tone was slightly petulant and Leo recognised with an inward sigh that now that they were lovers he expected her to regard his wishes as paramount. She could not blame him. He had been brought up to believe that women were primarily there to serve their menfolk. Nevertheless, she had no intention of knuckling under completely.

  ‘The regular nurses work just as hard as I do, if not harder. There are so many patients and not enough people to care for them as they should be cared for. Anyway, I’m here now. Shall we join your friends?’

  The two officers rose as she approached and the Frenchman exclaimed, ‘Ah, mademoiselle, you have come at just the right moment! We are in need of your services as interpreter.’

  Leo smiled wryly. It was easy to understand why she was required. Sasha knew only a few words of French and virtually no English, and the other two almost certainly knew no Serbian. Until her arrival the conversation must have limped along in German, the only common tongue.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said, ‘but let me have a glass of wine first.’

  It was the perennial topic of conversation: the political impasse with Greece. It was an animated discussion and Leo had to work hard to translate.

  ‘If only King Constantine wasn’t such a fool!’ Sasha said. ‘Does he really imagine that if he stays neutral and the Central Powers win, as he hopes, the Bulgars will meekly take themselves off and leave Macedonia to Greece?’

  ‘It didn’t help that General Serrail forced him to demobilize the Greek army,’ the British officer put in. ‘That has caused a great deal of resentment.’

  The Frenchman glared at him. ‘Would you rather that they were deployed to assist the Germans? My general was taking a sensible precaution. And that very resentment of which you speak has strengthened the hand of Prime Minister Venizelos.’

  ‘Oh, Venizelos is on our side, all right. But he’s only the prime minister. In the end it’s the king who has the final word.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure.’ His French counterpart tapped his nose meaningfully. ‘I hear rumours of a planned coup. If Venizelos takes over, there will be nothing to stop us opening a new attack.’

  ‘Then I pray God he succeeds, and soon!’ Sasha exclaimed. ‘If I have to stay cooped up here much longer I shall go out of my mind.’

  Leo squeezed his hand under the table. She understood his frustration. When they left Corfu he had thought that it was the first move in a campaign that would drive the occupying Bulgars and Austrians out of his homeland. The following weeks of inactivity on top of the long wait in Corfu had driven him to distraction. Her own attitude was very different. For her, every day’s delay meant another night they could spend together; a few more precious hours when she did not have to worry about his safety.

  Nights like this one. A full moon came up, so that towers and minarets stood out black against the sky, and the tables along the quayside began to empty. Sasha and his two companions ended their inconclusive discussion and finished their wine and they all said goodnight. Sasha had managed to find accommodation for himself and Leo in a small hotel near the port and had booked separate rooms, as a concession to convention. In public they had tried to maintain a decorous distance, until they discovered from various casual remarks that his men had taken their relationship for granted long before they themselves had given in to their mutual attraction. Since then, Leo had hardly ever slept in her own room.

  Later, after they’d made love and Sasha had fallen asleep, Leo lay watching him in the moonlight that streamed through the uncurtained window. Asleep, his face was unprotected by his usual expression of proud self-reliance and she could see how the strain of the past months had aged him. There were lines at the corners of his eyes and the hair at his temples was flecked with white. But there was something else as well, a vulnerability that contrasted with her early memories of him. She recalled their first meeting, when he had regarded her with such faintly veiled disdain. ‘That insufferable man,’ Victoria had called him. Yet even then she had sensed a kindred spirit. ‘So damned arrogant,’ he had said of his first impression of her, echoing her grandmother’s assessment. Well, as she had told him, it was obviously a case of like calling to like.

  She turned on her back and allowed herself to dream of the future. Sasha had told her that his marriage had never been consummated. It was his engagement to Eudoxie that had stood between them since their first meeting in 1912 but it had never been anything but a marriage of convenience, arranged to heal the long-running vendetta between two families. Eudoxie was fifteen years his junior, and suffered from poor health. According to Sasha, his early attempts to ‘carry out his duty as a husband’ had brought on such violent asthma attacks that he had not persisted; and not long after the wedding he had been recalled to his regiment and war had broken out. He had given instructions for his mother and wife to take refuge in Athens but so far he had not heard from them and had no idea if they had managed to evacuate the country while the borders were still open. But whatever happened, he had promised Leo that when the war was over he would ask for a divorce and they would then be free to marry. She had no doubt about his sincerity.

  She put her hand to her throat and fingered the locket he had given her when they’d parted that first time, and which she had worn ever since. He had said that he planned to leave the army once his country was free again and lead the life of a Serbian country gentleman. She imagined the two of them on the estate that she had visited once, on the occasion of his family’s ‘sava day’. They would ride out every morning to see how the crops were progressing; pick cherries and plums in season; drink wine produced from their own vines. Maybe they would breed horses. It was a subject that interested them both. The images soothed her and she drifted into sleep.

  Leo often remembered with pleasure the rides she had had with Sasha when they were encamped around Adrianople during the war against the Ottomans, and she thought sadly of the fate that had befallen their horses on that terrible retreat through the mountains. There was a detachment of Spahis, cavalry from French Algeria, stationed in Salonika and she sometimes watched them exercising their Arab mounts on the beach – beautiful horses whose delicate build belied their capacity for speed and endurance.

  One day, Sasha met her at the hospital with the words, ‘Come with me. I want to show you something.’

  He took her to the cavalry barracks and called to a stable lad to bring out ‘the horse’. The boy led out a splendid bright bay and trotted him round the manege where the horses were schooled.

  ‘What do you think?’ Sasha asked.

  Leo narrowed her eyes. ‘Good conformation. Nice short back and powerful hocks. Lovely head carriage. Very nice.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m glad you approve. And, you see, I have taken to heart what an impudent boy once said to me about greys being too conspicuous on the battlefield.’

  ‘You’ve bought him?’

  ‘Yes. After all, I shall need something to carry me when we eventually start the campaign. I am going to call him Plamen.’

  ‘Flame,’ Leo translated. ‘Yes, very appropriate.’

  ‘Bring out the other one,’ Sasha called to the boy.

  ‘Two?’ Leo queried.

  The boy came back with a chestnut mare with a white star on her brow. ‘You told me once your father gave you a horse like this one and she was taken by the army,’ Sasha said. ‘I thought you might find this an acceptable replacement.’

  Leo looked from him to the horse and back again. ‘Sasha, she’s beautiful! Thank you!’

  ‘She has a name too. Zvesda – Star.’

  Leo climbed over the fence and approached the horse, who stretched her neck and blew through her nostrils at Leo’s outstretched hand. The stable boy, smiling, handed her a piece of carrot. The horse took it with delicate lips and Leo slid her hand up the glossy neck and scratched her gently between the ears.

  ‘She likes you,’ Sasha said from close behind her. />
  ‘And I love her,’ Leo replied. ‘She’s perfect – and you are very kind. I couldn’t ask for a better present.’

  After that, they rode out together along the beach every day before breakfast. During the day, Sasha drilled his men and conferred with General Bojovic, who now commanded the Serbian army, and Leo continued with her duties at the hospital; and at night they slept in each other’s arms. It was a time of joy for both of them, but joy for Leo that trembled always on the brink of anguish, knowing that it must be short-lived.

  Letters arrived for Leo, re-directed from London. There was one from Tom, to whom she had agreed to be engaged in a move that suited them both for different reasons, and a shorter one from her brother Ralph. Both men were currently fighting on the Western front. There were two from Victoria, who was in the same area with the FANY. Tom described the beauties of the French countryside, as if he was there for a holiday, and Victoria relayed funny anecdotes about incidents in the Calais Convoy, the FANY detachment that had been set up to collect wounded men from the front line and transfer them to hospital. Neither of them spoke of the war, except tangentially; and since all the letters had been written several weeks earlier, Leo had no way of knowing if her friends were still alive.

  It was over a year since she had left her FANY comrades to join Mabel Stobart’s Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy in Serbia, and more than that since she had last seen Tom. Although their engagement had been a matter of convenience for both of them, freeing Leo from the oppressive if well-meaning control of her brother Ralph, and providing Tom with camouflage for desires he was afraid to acknowledge, she had developed a genuine affection for him. She found it hard to imagine how a gentle, artistic soul like Tom could survive in the midst of the horrors she had encountered while she was in France. But so much time had passed and so much had happened to her since she left there that her memories had become vague. Tom and Victoria seemed to belong to a different life and she herself was a different person. She wondered what they were doing – if they had survived until now.