Before the Poison (44 page)

We have moved to a stretch of apple orchard between Caen and Bayeux that is known as Harley Street because of the concentration of hospitals and medical staff. The accommodation is not much better than before, though, and we are still in tents. With all the confusion of the move, I did not see Lt. Maddox for two days after the incident at the chateau, though I puzzled and puzzled about what could have possibly been going on there. Dorothy and I discussed it, too, and we came to the conclusion that poison of some kind – possibly this ‘sarin’ – had been used on those poor men. There had been plenty of rumours of biological warfare, and we still carry gas masks, though fortunately we have not had cause to use them. Anyway, I was determined to find out what Lt. Maddox knows. He is a good doctor, and something of an intellectual, always with his nose in a book, if he isn’t repairing some poor boy’s spleen or sewing up a chest cavity.

I found him leaning against a tree smoking his pipe beside his tent, and when he saw me, he stiffened and asked me what I wanted. I said I would like him to tell me what his thoughts were about the other day. He did not want to talk about it at first, but I could tell that he had been dwelling on the incident, just as Dorothy and I had been.

He took me by the arm and led me away from the tent, towards the trees. Normally I would have been wary of such an action, but I knew that he simply wanted to avoid being overheard.

He did not know who Meers was, he said, but suspected he was connected with Porton Down. When I asked what that was, he told me it was a top secret military establishment in Wiltshire where they do experiments with chemical and biological weapons. So at least part of what Dorothy and I had worked out was true, I thought.

Lt. Maddox told me that the chateau had clearly been used for such experiments. Sarin and tabun, he told me, were nerve agents that the Germans had developed but had not used yet. Meers was clearly looking for evidence of any further experiments and inventions, or refinements they might have come up with more recently. When I asked if this was because he wanted to put a stop to it or find an antidote, Lt. Maddox just stared at me, then laughed harshly. He said that was very unlikely. Far more likely, he said, was that Meers wanted as much information as he could get in order to duplicate the experiments at Porton Down, to develop something just as powerful, or more so, to be used against the Germans. We wanted the same capabilities as they had. Then he told me that it would be best if I said nothing more about this business to anyone, and walked off, leaving a trail of sweet pipe smoke to vanish in the night air.

After Caen fell two weeks ago, we started to get many more German casualties. Most of the ordinary soldiers are glad that the war seems almost over, and happy to be still alive as POWs. We have enough problems, though, that we have had to increase the number of armed guards and sentries around the hospital. The SS officers are especially difficult. They are still devoted to Hitler and cannot accept the possibility of a German defeat. Then there is the Hitler Youth. Because the German army is running short of able-bodied men, so Major Tanner explained to me, it has drafted in a lot of old men and boys to make up the numbers. The old men are quite passive and glad to be cared for, but the boys can be a nuisance. We try to treat them the same as everyone else, and most of the time we succeed, but sometimes our patience wears exceedingly thin.

There was one boy called Dieter who arrived about two days ago. He had been shot in the upper thigh, had lost a lot of blood from the femoral, and was also suffering from some form of infection. He cannot have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Right from the start he made it clear he was going to be a nuisance.

In his livelier moments, he would urinate and defecate on the floor near his bed, knock the kidney bowl out of my hands when I approached him, pull out his intravenous lines, and take great delight in telling me what the victorious German soldiers would do to English pig women like me when they had won the war.

I grew to hate Dieter, and I dreaded having to approach him, but he was on my ward, and there was no way around it. Dorothy helped me as best she could, but he made her even more nervous. She shook so much around him that she could not administer an injection.

Last night, while I was on duty, I heard Dieter cry out, and I went over to his bed to see what was the matter. He was burning up with fever, his breath an ominous rattle in his throat. We had known that he had an infection, but we had not known how serious it was, how long he had lain unattended before the stretcher-bearers took him to the field dressing station.

His brow was hot and dry, his eyes unfocused. I made a move to go and get a cool cloth but he grabbed my wrist with a remarkably strong hand and begged me not to leave him. His English was quite good. I explained what I was going to do, and he relaxed his grasp but begged me to come back.

I brought the cloth and sat on a canvas chair beside his bed. It was dark, and the only light came from the few hurricane lamps placed around the marquee tent. The wind was flapping the canvas and making shadows like hand-puppet shows all over the place. Dieter seemed to be hallucinating, lost in a world of memory, or imagination, as I mopped his feverish brow and whispered endearments. I heard the word ‘mutter’ several times and knew he was calling for his mother. So many do when they are dying. All the time he was gripping my wrist like a drowning man hanging on to a raft. Occasionally, his body would go into spasms, and he would cry out, waking some of the other patients and bringing forth a few groans and requests to be quiet.

This seemed to go on for hours. Dorothy took care of the rest of my duties for the night, and I stayed where I was, mopping Dieter’s brow, telling him all would be well in the morning and he would soon be reunited with his mother. Soon, I could see faint daylight breaking through the canvas, the air outside turning slowly from black to grey. Dieter clung on. I had done all I could for him in the way of medicines and care, though perhaps if we had given him penicillin from the start, instead of the sulphonamides the Germans carry with them, it would have helped. The problem is that penicillin is so expensive, and we have so little of it that we must save it for our own wounded. At least, that is the rule at this hospital.

Dieter’s pulse fluttered under my searching finger, then it slowed down and became so weak that I could no longer feel it. He had one more spasm, then I heard the death rattle in his chest, an unmistakable sound, and he was gone.

I managed to uncurl his fingers from my wrist and gently close his staring blue eyes. I cried and cursed the war then, in that tent in the half-dark with the dead German boy lying before me, made fists and banged them against the mattress impotently. I had hated Dieter, feared him, even, but I hated and feared what had killed him even more.

Now I sit outside my tent exhausted and drink hot coffee and smoke a cigarette in the dismal morning light, the day’s activity starting up all around me. I hear the lonely whistle of the first train leaving Caen for Bayeux. If I do not sleep soon, there will be no sleep for me today. But how am I supposed to sleep after all this?