Secrets of the Frontline Nurses Read online

  ‘Not at all. Of course you must stay.’ Leo rang the bell. ‘Now, tell me all your news. Is it terrible in France?’

  ‘Pretty bad.’

  ‘Not worse than Gallipoli, surely. From your letters that sounded like hell on earth.’

  ‘Near enough. But Flanders runs it close. It comes down to the question of whether you’d rather burn or drown, I guess.’

  ‘You poor man!’ Beavis came in and Leo said, ‘Sergeant Pavel is staying to lunch, Beavis. And I’m sure he would like a drink beforehand. I’m going to have sherry, Luke, but I expect you’d rather have something stronger. Whisky and soda?’

  ‘That would be great.’

  ‘Thank you, Beavis.’

  ‘Very good, madam.’

  When the butler had gone Leo went on, ‘I read in the papers that you Anzacs distinguished yourselves at Messines. Well done! Was it a very hard fight?’

  ‘Not to start with. But we lost a lot of men in the German counter attack. Then a day or two later we were ordered to push on to a place called La Basseville, across the River Lys. That was tough going. We won it and lost it and won it back again over the course of two or three days. Then we were relieved and I was lucky enough to get leave.’

  ‘How long have you got?’

  ‘It was a week, but I spent the first two days getting here. Men going on leave don’t have a high priority when it comes to seats in railway carriages.’

  Beavis re-entered carrying a tray. ‘Your drinks, madam. And Miss Langford is in the hall.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Leo clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the exclamation. She had completely forgotten that she had invited Victoria for lunch. Before she could speak, Victoria was in the room, handing her walking stick to the butler.

  ‘Take this horrible thing away and hide it, Beavis! I’m determined to learn to do without it.’ Then, turning to Leo, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you had a visitor.’ She stopped short, staring. ‘Luke? It is you, isn’t it? Leo, why didn’t you tell me …?’

  Luke broke in. ‘I just looked in on the off-chance. I didn’t know … Look, I’m going to be in the way. I’ll go.’

  ‘You will do nothing of the sort!’ Leo said robustly. ‘Vita, Luke’s just come back from the fighting in Flanders. I’ve invited him to lunch.’

  ‘Of course.’ Victoria recovered herself. ‘Please don’t go on my account, Luke.’ She crossed to him and held out her hand. ‘How do you do?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Luke responded, flushed with confusion. ‘But how about you? I mean, why the walking stick?’

  ‘I had a bit of an accident last January – skidded into a ditch. Careless of me.’

  He grinned suddenly. ‘You always were a tiger behind the wheel of a car.’

  ‘It wasn’t a car,’ Leo said. ‘It was an ambulance and poor Vita was trapped under it for hours, up to her neck in freezing water.’

  ‘Jeez! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of it …’ Luke’s confusion was increasing.

  ‘I’d much rather you did,’ Victoria said. ‘It really wasn’t anything to make a fuss about.’

  Beavis was hovering with the tray of drinks.

  Leo said, ‘Will you have a sherry before luncheon, Vita? I’m having one.’

  Victoria looked at the tray. ‘I think I’ll have something stronger, to celebrate Luke’s arrival. Bring me a horse’s neck, please, Beavis.’

  Beavis’s face took on a martyred expression. He disapproved of the new fashion for cocktails, especially when drunk by young women. ‘Very good, madam,’ he said on a sigh and left the room.

  ‘Do sit down, both of you,’ Leo said.

  They sat and for a moment nobody spoke. Leo was trying to work out how to deal with the situation. Victoria had been very non-committal when she had shown her Luke’s letter and she could not guess what her friend’s feelings towards him were, after a lapse of so many years.

  Luke broke the silence. ‘Look, Leo, I didn’t mean to gatecrash. I mean, I’m not used to moving in these aristocratic surroundings …’

  Leo looked round the room and was aware for the first time in years of the ornate chandeliers and the over-stuffed furniture.

  ‘Oh, there’s nothing aristocratic about this place. This was my grandmother’s house. It’s badly in need of redecorating and refurnishing, to get rid of all this stuffy Victoriana. But I’ve had other things on my mind. And don’t get the wrong idea. My grandfather was a self-made man who got his money building railways.’

  Beavis returned with Victoria’s drink. ‘Pardon me, madam, but Cook would like a word with you.’

  Leo could guess what the problem was. She excused herself to her guests and made her way down to the kitchen, where she found the Cook glowering at two small lamb chops.

  ‘This was all I could get from the butcher this morning, Miss Leo, and the boy had to stand in a queue for an hour to get these. And now you ask an extra gentleman to lunch. You tell me how I’m supposed to make three meals out of two chops.’

  Leo laid a hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry. You look after me so well it’s easy to forget for a moment how difficult things are. But the problem is easy to solve. Give both the chops to Sergeant Pavel and Miss Langford and I will make do with vegetables. I’ll tell him we’re on a special diet.’

  Back in the drawing room she sensed an atmosphere of understandable constraint. She lifted her glass of sherry. ‘Sorry about that. Cheers!’

  Victoria took her cue and raised her glass in turn. ‘Welcome to London, Luke! Oh, and I’ve just remembered, congratulations! Leo told me you are married. How is Sophie?’

  Luke lowered his glass, untouched, his face suddenly bereft of expression.

  Leo leaned towards him. ‘Luke? What is it? What’s wrong?’

  He spoke as if dragging the words from deep within him. ‘I wasn’t going to mention this till later. Sophie died. I heard last week.’

  ‘Sophie, dead?’ For a moment Leo could think of nothing else to say. Was there to be no end to the death and destruction, even in a remote corner of the earth like New Zealand?

  ‘It was some sort of flu,’ he said, his tone flat. ‘She volunteered to help in the hospital in Wellington. They reckon it came in with one of the hospital ships coming back from Europe. They say it was all over very quickly.’

  Leo looked at Victoria, who sat like a graven image. She got up and went to crouch beside Luke’s chair. ‘My dear, I am so sorry. To think she survived the typhus and all the other horrors in Adrianople, only to be struck down just when she seemed to have found a safe place. You must be devastated.’

  He looked at her, and his expression was hurt and puzzled, like a child unfairly punished. He said, ‘It’s strange. We were married for such a short time. Only a few months. And I’ve been away now for almost a year. It’s sort of … unreal. It’s hard to believe it ever happened.’

  ‘What about your little girl? Leo said gently. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She’s being looked after by my mother. I’ve got a photograph.’

  He fumbled for his wallet and produced a blurred image of a chubby child. The sight tore at Leo’s heartstrings. ‘She’ll be waiting for you when you get home, Luke,’ she said huskily. ‘You have that to look forward to, at least.’

  He nodded numbly. ‘And Anton – Sophie’s boy. Funny to think I’ve got a ready-made family waiting for me.’

  ‘Be grateful for that,’ Leo said, and turned away.

  Beavis appeared at that moment to announce that luncheon was served. Victoria regarded her meatless plate with a puzzled frown and Leo said breezily, ‘Vita and I have given up meat for the moment. It’s the latest health advice. And I’m sure we feel better for it, don’t we, Vita?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Victoria mumbled. ‘Definitely.’

  It was not an easy meal. Leo was haunted by the little-boy-lost look in Luke’s eyes and could think of no way of banishing it; and Victoria remained unusually taciturn. Leo managed to
keep the conversation going on neutral topics, mainly to do with the news from the battle front, but it was clear that Luke had no desire to be reminded of conditions out there. She racked her brains for some way to distract him. Finally, with the coffee, she said, ‘Vita, we should do something to entertain Luke while he’s on leave. Why don’t we take him to the Coliseum?’

  ‘The music hall?’ Victoria queried. ‘Do you think that’s quite …?’

  ‘It’s not the usual sort of programme,’ Leo said. ‘They are giving this new work by Sir Edward Elgar. It’s called ‘Fringes of the Fleet’, and the words are settings of poems by Rudyard Kipling. I’m told it’s very good.’

  ‘Kipling?’ Luke said. ‘I like his stuff. Let’s go.’

  For the next few days Leo put aside her fund raising efforts in order to show Luke round London, and found in the process that she was seeing the city through new eyes. It gave her pleasure to see his unaffected admiration for the splendours of St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey; but he was shocked to discover ruined houses, the result of bombs dropped from Zeppelins earlier in the war.

  ‘I’m glad we didn’t have to contend with them as well as everything else at Adrianople,’ Luke remarked.

  ‘We had our share of them in Calais,’ Victoria said, ‘until our chaps discovered incendiary bullets. Wow! You should have seen one of them go up!’

  Leo had not pressed her to join them but she seemed to take it for granted and it quickly became clear that Luke enjoyed her company. It seemed that the old spark of mutual attraction was not dead. On the last night of Luke’s leave they went to dinner at the Savoy and afterwards Leo found that the cab driver had been instructed to drop her off at Sussex Gardens first, leaving him alone with Victoria. Who had arranged it, she was not sure, but she speculated as she undressed for bed that it was not simple coincidence.

  Next morning they went to see Luke off at Victoria Station and she watched them both carefully, but their behaviour gave nothing away. After the train had pulled out, however, amid a frenzy of shouts and waves and tears, she was not entirely surprised to see her friend surreptitiously wiping her cheeks.

  Chapter 14

  Tom had come to the conclusion that, if the Somme represented Dante’s Seventh Circle of hell, with its plain of fire, Ypres in October with its unending cold and mud was the last and lowest circle. All through September the weather had been fine and the sodden ground had dried out again. That had allowed new roads to be laid across the swamp. They were constructed of planks of wood placed side by side and were quickly nicknamed ‘corduroy roads’. The German shelling continued unabated and very soon these roads were lined with the bodies of dead mules and overturned wagons, but slowly the necessary supplies and ammunition were brought forward, to support the new advance. Once again, all had gone well to start with, in spite of the fact that on the dry ground the troops were blinded by the dust raised by the shelling. The Anzac forces took and held the Gravenstal spur and pushed forwards to the edge of the salient. And then the rain started again.

  By the time Tom and his company were ordered forward no-man’s-land was once again an impassable morass, except for the narrow duckboard tracks that wandered this way and that across it. To add to the misery, the Germans had deployed a new weapon. At first it had stolen up on them without being noticed, an almost odourless miasma creeping along the ground, until men’s eyes began to sting and they started to retch and cough. It burnt through the soles of boots and blistered skin and clung to clothes so that a man who had been exposed to it could kill the comrades he shared a dugout with simply by proximity. It was some time before the British chemists could work out what it was. It was called mustard gas.

  This new hazard meant that as they were deployed the order went out: ‘gas masks on!’ The heavy masks had an eyepiece of thick, greenish glass, which made everything appear as if seen through water, and which very quickly misted up from the wearer’s breath. To negotiate the narrow paths while sight was so restricted was fraught with danger. One false step could send a man sliding into the mud, and once in there was no hope of rescue. Men and even horses disappeared without trace within minutes. Tom, like many of his men, found that prospect more terrifying than the constant shelling.

  On October 12th, 2nd Battalion of the Coldstream Guards was ordered to attack the Bellevue spur, east of Poelcappel. They went forward behind a creeping barrage, which had proved successful in destroying German resistance on previous occasions. This time it did not seem to be having the same effect. Tom could hear the shells going over his head, but there seemed to be comparatively few explosions.

  ‘I reckon they’re dropping onto soft ground and just disappearing into the mud without exploding,’ his sergeant remarked grimly.

  It was a two-and-a-half-mile trudge from the reserve lines to the forward trenches, encumbered with gas masks and other impedimenta. When Tom looked at his men, burdened with extra rations and ammunition, waterproof sheets, entrenching tools, grenades, rifles and their personal kit he thought it was a wonder that some of them could walk at all. By the time they reached the front line they were all weary; but after a brief respite the whistles blew and they were off again, over the top and into no-man’s-land. The ground was firmer here on the ridge, though peppered with shell holes, and they moved forward in open order, each man a few yards to the right or left of the next. Tom could see Ralph a little ahead and away to his left were the advancing lines of the next battalion. To his right were the men of the 66th Anzacs, newly arrived in Flanders, who were supposed to be guarding the flank.

  To begin with they met with little opposition. A few ‘whizzbangs’ exploded in front and behind them and there was the occasional zip and ping of a sniper’s bullet and a man fell, but there was not the wholesale slaughter Tom remembered from the Somme. Then, unexpectedly, they found themselves facing the German wire, still largely intact in spite of the barrage.

  ‘Spread out!’ Ralph ordered. ‘Look for a gap.’

  There was a frantic scuttle along the line of the wire and then a shout of ‘Over here!’ They all ran towards the man who had shouted and found a small break in the barbed wire, close to a stream called the Steenbeck. It was wide enough for three men at a time to pass through but as they scrambled forward a machine gun somewhere near the stream opened up. Tom flung himself flat behind the dubious shelter of some scrubby undergrowth and for a while nobody moved. Every time a head was lifted, the gun chattered again. Then he heard Ralph call.

  ‘You two – Robinson, Fletcher – with me. The rest of you keep your heads down.’

  Tom peered through the undergrowth and saw Ralph and the other men worming their way forward towards the position of the machine gun nest. He had to quell the impulse to follow. His place was here, with his men, and Ralph would be relying on that. Moments passed and then he heard a grenade explode, followed by another, and the gun fell silent.

  Tom got to his feet. ‘Forward, lads! Follow me!’

  They ran forward, meeting more fire from a half demolished pillbox. Tom’s sergeant hurled a grenade and the firing stopped. Then men rose up out of the ground ahead of them and it was hand-to-hand, with no time for thought, until suddenly the opposition vanished and they found themselves in possession of the enemy trench. Tom looked around him, panting. There was no sign of Ralph.

  Someone shouted, ‘Sir! Looks like the 66th are pulling back.’

  Tom swung round. It was true that the Anzacs appeared to be retreating. He looked to his other side and could see no sign of the battalion that had been advancing beside them. In the mad dash forward it seemed they had outdistanced the others and held a small salient cut into enemy territory. Tom was well aware of the danger of being cut off and surrounded. He swept one more look around the area and seeing no officer more senior gave the order, ‘Pull back!’

  They retreated in skirmishing order until they made contact again with the rest of the force, who were digging in under concentrated fire. There was still no sign o
f Ralph but Tom told himself that in the general confusion he could be anywhere along the line. They started to dig in like the rest but then Tom saw movement ahead among the shattered remnants of trees and a second later a line of grey-clad troops advanced towards them. They were big men, with the look of seasoned campaigners in the way they moved, and they were carrying the most fearsome weapons yet devised – flame throwers. All along the line the British and Anzac forces opened fire and for a while they held the enemy at bay; but the flame throwers were too much for some of the men. Tom saw them break ranks and run back, only to be caught on the remains of the wire, where the flame throwers reduced them to charred corpses in a matter of seconds.

  Soon the order came along the line. ‘Fall back! Fall back!’

  Tom passed the word along the line of his men. ‘Fall back in twos, head for the gap we came through. We’ll cover you.’

  He was the last to make the dash for the gap and once through it found three of his men were missing. To go back to look for them was certain suicide and, to add to his bitter chagrin, in spite of all their efforts, they were back where they had started that morning.

  Having checked to see that none of his remaining men was seriously wounded, Tom made his way along the trench, looking for Ralph. Eventually he found Fletcher, one of the men who had gone with him to attack the machine gun nest, lying on a stretcher with two medics bending over him. He was barely conscious, blood oozing from three bullet wounds in his chest.

  Tom leaned close to him. ‘Fletcher, where’s Major Malham Brown?’

  Fletcher mumbled vaguely and Tom repeated his question with greater urgency. ‘You were with him. What happened? Did he come back with you?’

  The wounded man opened his eyes and Tom sensed that he had recognised him. ‘Major’s gone, sir. Bastards got him at short range. We fixed them, though. Robbo got them with a Mills bomb.’

  A rising tide of panic and despair threatened to overwhelm Tom. ‘Where is he?’ he repeated. ‘You didn’t leave him out there, did you?’