Band of Angel (40 page)

“What’s the population of Balaclava?” he asked casually.

The adjutant drew in his lips.

“Whew! You’ve got me on the spot there—fifty, seventy thousand? I do know that around Balaclava the allies have two hundred thousand men living within the space of twenty square miles.”

“And the Russian army. How big?”

“Oh, twice, three, four, five times that amount. It doesn’t bear thinking about, so on the whole we don’t.”

His deliberately vague and patronizing reply annoyed Deio.

“I bet you don’t,” he thought, “because if you did, you would never sleep again.”

Two hours later, Deio looked around him and, through the gloom, saw row upon row of pointed tents pitched on a river of mud. They had arrived at the camp. In a clearing at the end of one row he saw a wooden triangle against the sky.

“There have been so many floggings lately,” the adjutant told him, “they don’t bother to take it down.”

“Why?”

“Drink mostly, or desertion.”

The flaps of one or two tents parted as they rode by. Gaunt men, blue with cold in their underwear, or in filthy uniforms, stared at them. It was shocking to see how ill some looked. Another group stood in a ragged line holding muskets. Most of them had no shoes.

“They’re fell in for trench duty,” said the adjutant. He rebuked one sharply for not saluting him.

“They’ll be over there tonight.”

He pointed toward the westerly horizon, where, as if on cue, a line of flames crossed the sky, followed by a whirling and a hissing sound as if a dozen snakes had been let out of the bag at once.

He asked the adjutant if they did that all night. With the same infuriatingly bland smile he told him not to worry about it. “You’ll get used to it—unless of course you die from it.”

November 1854, and real winter had arrived, more bitter than anything they had ever known. They had been at the hospital for less than a month but already it felt like a lifetime.

Every day from their window they could hear, above the whine of the wind and the screech of birds, the sound of the Dead March being played by a military band, twenty, thirty, forty times a day. The British had been defeated at Sebastopol, and now the army had more casualties than the whole of the rest of the war put together. And each day, the music sounded flatter and more wound down as, one by one, the musicians went down with dysentery, Crimean fever, chest infections, and other illnesses, and were replaced by less able men. Then, because the groanings and scrapings of the band were said to lower the men’s spirits, the music stopped altogether; but the new silence felt worse, said the nurses, and full of bad omens.

One morning, the redheaded orderly woke them early and told them to go to Miss Nightingale’s study, Mrs. Clark had letters for them. Yawning and scratching, they went downstairs. A charcoal fire was lit in the study and the nuns were waiting beside it. It was the first time since they’d arrived that they’d seen the full complement of nurses and sisters together and it was a shock to see how ill and ragged the others looked. Mrs. Clark, who had been ill for months with pneumonia, came into the room. All her old bounce had gone and she looked dazed and shrunken. When the nurses saw that the basket she was carrying had letters in it, there was a roar like animals at feeding time.

She passed Catherine two letters, which she opened hungrily.
The first, from her father, enclosed a sovereign wrapped up in cloth so it wouldn’t show through the envelope. He told her that the horses were well and hoped she was, too. She tried to feel happy that he had at least sent her some money, surely that showed he cared, but the contents of his letter, and the sight of her own red fleabitten hand holding it, pierced her. He felt like a stranger and so did she to herself.

The letter from Eliza was all about her wedding. How strange to think of her own sister married without her being there, and, even more strange and exciting news: she was with child. She and Gabriel would move soon into a new farmhouse, Ty Nwyyd, and were happily planning their first Christmas there. No other news and no mention of Deio. She’d so hoped for some.

“All right, my love?” Barnsie appeared at her side. “You’ve gone very pale.”

“Yes, thank you. My sister has been married. What about you? Did you get a letter?”

“Not really,” said Barnsie with a brave and unconcerned look.

“Do your children know your address here?”

Barnsie’s china-doll eyes opened a fraction wider. “No,” she said carefully, “they can’t—” She couldn’t finish.

“You should have asked me.” Catherine put her arm around her. “I would have written for you.”

“I didn’t think.” Barnsie folded her arms over her stomach and bent over as though in pain. “I never imagined for a solitary moment that a letter would get here, and now I haven’t got one. Stupid cow.”

Catherine had her arm around Barnsie and was trying to think of something she could say when the room went quiet.

Miss Nightingale walked in, radiating purpose and energy and wearing her important dress: the black merino wool with the spotless linen collar.

She walked to the window, folded her hands, and waited. When they were absolutely silent, she spoke in a low voice.

“Sisters and nurses, I have an important announcement to make. Listen very carefully, everything we have worked for depends on it. I have in my hand the order we have all been patiently waiting for. It comes from Dr. Andrew Smith, the director of hospitals in
Turkey, and from the British government itself.” She held up the letter, but did not need to read from it.

“What it says is that the situation at this hospital has reached a point of utmost seriousness. There are two thousand gravely ill men here, and only a handful of orderlies and doctors to look after them.”

Some of the nurses began to cry; the nuns crossed themselves.

“Hush! Listen! This is
so
important.”

She looked them over, she smiled.

“Ladies, our work can begin.”

She lifted up her hand to silence the small commotion that followed.

“Now listen
all of you
and listen well.” Mrs. Clark started coughing and hurried from the room with her handkerchief over her mouth.

“When you are on your wards in about one hour from now, never forget you are under the absolute authority of the doctor in charge of that ward.
Do nothing on your own initiative
.

“None of you,” she gave the nuns her famous stare, “have been brought here to save souls, or”—this to the nurses—“to find husbands or friends. If there is the slightest hint of a suggestion of any impropriety, I shall have no hesitation in sending you home.” Her face was hard as steel when she said this and Barnsie dug her fingers so hard into Catherine’s hand she almost shrieked.

Then the smile again. Dazzling. Delicious. She looked at each and every one of them as if they were precious to her, and all was forgiven in that moment—the waiting, the bullying, and the hunger. They would have died for her.

After this, she read out the lists of who was to go where. Lizzie was assigned to ward five, a mixed ward where Miss Nightingale explained that men with war wounds would be mixed in with men with diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Catherine prayed she would be sent to the same place.

“Ward four,” announced Miss Nightingale, “Sister Ignatius, Emma Fagg, Catherine Carreg, and Clara Sharpe. You’ll be working with Dr. Perrett, Dr. Stephenson, and Dr. Cavendish. Get your bonnets and cloaks and go down immediately. May God be with you.”

Ten minutes later, as she and Lizzie put on their cloaks in the nurse’s tower, she caught their reflection in the glass. They were white as ghosts.

“So Lizzie,” she said, “it’s come.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes—are you?”

“Yes.”

While Lizzie helped her tie the bow on her bonnet, she knew she’d never had a friend like this. Someone who was so clear about themselves that they seemed to reflect you back honestly, who saw all your best, and your worst, sides and loved you still.

“Catherine,” she said, “may I speak honestly? I am more frightened for you than I am for myself.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ve not been in a proper hospital and this will be worse. Are you braced for it?”

“Yes . . . no . . . I don’t know. How can I know? I’ve tried to learn as much as I can but—”

“You have, you have. You’ve done splendid,” Lizzie interrupted. “But there are some things you can’t know about because you haven’t seen them, and this will be beyond imagining. Try to keep breathing. I know it sounds silly, but if you stop breathing you may faint. Breathe and say to yourself, ‘This, too, will pass.’ Oh love . . . !”

It was unusual for Lizzie to be physically demonstrative, but she put her arms around Catherine and hugged her.

And then the orderly came. He took Catherine’s party
downstairs, and marched them along the corridors to a door marked Ward 4. The nurses and the nuns smiled at each other grimly. Here was the point of no turning back, what they had longed for during the past dreary weeks and what they now most feared.

They stepped through the door. Clara Sharpe immediately put her hand over her nose and called out a muffled “Oh
God
” for the smell was so atrocious: sickly sweet and rotten, a combination of living and dying flesh, of bodies unwashed for weeks, of fetid wounds, and of the night soil that lay in four huge tubs in the middle of the room.

It was fortunate at first that they could barely see. The smoke from the stove and the men’s tobacco was so thick that a ray of sunlight coming through the windows seemed to be cutting through fog. When the smoke cleared they were more careful to step around the heaps of rags that lay in puddles on the floor. Then they saw that the rags were men, lying there and staring at them, their hair matted, their chins grimy and unshaven. Now they heard them moaning and calling out.

Frozen like a stone, Catherine walked with the other nurses, through the smoke, to the far end of the room. When a sudden blast of icy wind cleared the smoke she saw that the ward was actually part of a crudely converted corridor. Above them, part of the ceiling had broken and you could see the sky, and now they felt flakes of snow falling on their faces. At the far end, in one of several ramshackle beds crammed together, was a boy no more than eighteen. Poking out from the end of the bed they saw his boots with the toes cut out, showing a foot half eaten by frostbite. Some of the others lay half naked in the remnants of army uniforms.

The nurses looked at the men, then looked away as though ashamed. Clara Sharpe moaned again.

After they had hung their coats up they were taken to another smoky room and introduced to the duty officer, Dr. Perrett, who was sorting in a feverish way through a pile of medical implements soaking in a bowl of rusty water.

They curtsied, and Sister Ignatius gave him their names.

“Emma Fagg, sir, and Clara Sharpe. Catherine Carreg.”

“Nurses, good day.” He sighed. He had deeply hooded eyes and looked foreign. He introduced them to the two ward orderlies: Private Wilkes, a rough-looking man with a dark stubby beard, and a boy called Nobby who was too shy to meet their eyes. Dr. Perrett had a bad cold and, between bursts of coughing, told them there were close to sixty men in the ward and that soon the number would swell—dramatically. Almost all of them, he said, were suffering from noncombat injuries: cholera, dysentery, frostbite, exposure. Most of the operations at Scutari were being done for sepsis and removal of bullets, or secondary amputations due to sepsis.

He told them there was no time for him to show them around properly, but that the best way for them to understand the place would be for them to listen to the orderlies’ report, which took place each morning when the men on night watch left their posts and the day shift took over.

He did not smile or look at them while he talked, but the impression was not of an unfriendly man but of a man who had become a kind of machine.

The night orderlies came into the smoky room, an exhausted-looking old man and a younger man whose arm was missing below the elbow. They closed the door, put down two empty unwashed food pails, and saluted Dr. Perrett.