Home for Christmas (41 page)

Tonight was Christmas Eve. Whilst waiting for a nurse she was scheduled to deliver to the forward field station, she had visited one of the injured men she’d brought back the day before. On the day she’d collected him from the front line hospital station, he’d been soaked in sweat and blood, but coherent. He’d told her that he was one of seven children from some town up north – she couldn’t remember the name – only that the men in his family were miners who worked long hours in dreadful conditions and had precious little to show for it.

‘Better I thought to sign up for this lark than go down the bloody pit,’ he’d proclaimed, then apologised for swearing.

‘So you got yourself into a bloody war instead of into a bloody mine. Now which do you prefer?’ she asked chirpily.

He took a couple of puffs on the cheroot she’d given him and coughed a bit before rasping out a reply.

‘Did two years in pit. Glad to come up. Didn’t want to die down there now, did I? At least I’ve seen a bit of the world. Seen France anyway. And I crossed the sea on a boat to get here. Never been on a boat before. Met people from all over too. Blokes from India. Blokes from Australia. Blokes from Canada. Might go and settle in one of them places when this war is over. Me and Gertie. She’s my intended …’

Hope had brightened his eyes as he’d rambled on and on about his life, his thoughts on the past and his plans for the future.

Agnes took a swipe at one moist cheek. Ex-miner Arthur Cox would not be going to Australia or Canada when the war was over. Neither would he be marrying his darling Gertie. The piece of shrapnel that had entered his body had shifted and cut an artery. The injury plus the infection that had set in had done for poor Arthur Cox. Aged nineteen, it said on his details. Major Darius Emerson, the senior doctor at the hospital, a rambling place housed in what had been a convent, thought otherwise.

‘There’s lots like him who have lied about their age. They came for adventure and ended up dead.’

She liked Darius. She found him easy to talk to because of their similar backgrounds in that she had broken through the class barrier to get there, and he had broken through the barrier of race. Neither mentioned that single night when they’d given in to what had been a mix of lust and despair, sex born of a need for mutual comfort. She knew he thought of that moment just as she did. Every so often, their eyes would meet, mutely acknowledging what had happened and what it had meant to each of them.

Between lulls in the fighting, they travelled together to a small cafe in the centre of the village. The bread was fresh, the cheese was strong and both made the wine they drank taste all the better for it. She found Darius good company, and sometimes, just sometimes, she completely forgot about Robert. When she wasn’t with Darius she reassessed her relationship with Robert. It was hard to admit to herself that she didn’t feel the same as she once had. Darius had taken his place.

They were sitting at a small table in a dark corner, both with their chins resting on their hands, looking at each other, drinking and eating, but not saying much at all.

‘Can we meet after the war?’

‘There,’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve gone and spoiled it.’

He looked surprised, but also amused.

‘Spoiled what?’

‘We were enjoying the sound of silence. Silence between good friends is best of all. Nobody needs to speak. Silence is worth savouring. We have so little of it at present.’

He saw the dimple at one side of her mouth and wanted very much to touch it, to kiss it even. However, he had meant what he’d said about meeting after the war.

‘More wine?’ he asked her.

She nodded.

‘As I was saying,’ he said, raising the rather grubby glass and eyeing the blood-red contents, ‘meeting after the war should be high on our list of things to do with our lives. At present we are savouring silence because it is so rare nowadays, but after the war it could well be a different matter. We will need to make our own noise because the guns will have fallen silent. You see my point? How can we possibly savour silence if we are no longer surrounded by noise?’

Her smile widened, her eyes tilting gently upwards at the corners. He loved the colour and shape of her eyes, the wildness of her hair, and her refreshing attitude to stuffiness and overblown officialdom. In the depths of sleep, day or night, he’d sometimes imagined how she might be to wake up in bed with …

Agnes was surprised at her own reaction to this charming man. He had blue eyes and a fresh complexion, in a funny way very much like her own. He was also a man of integrity and very brave, if standing up to the establishment was bravery. Probably the High Command might not interpret his actions that way. For instance, he purposely added more intense physical injuries to those with only light injuries, anything to give them a prolonged rest and save them from going back into battle too soon.

‘Will you take me somewhere nice?’ she asked him.

‘Of course.’

‘And you will pay the bill?’

‘Of course,’ he repeated, looking taken aback as though to do otherwise would be almost criminal.

Agnes raised her glass, screwing up her eyes as she studied the local wine.

‘It’s a deal – as long as there’s nothing swimming around in the wine and the cheese isn’t threatening to charge off around the room!’

The sky on Christmas Eve was clear and, so far, the guns were silent. She’d picked up the nurse, freshly arrived from England and full of patriotism and the fervour of a modern-day Florence Nightingale.

The nurse was presently hanging on to the door with one hand. Her other hand alternated between clinging to the seat and rescuing her starched cap from falling off.

‘This … road … is … very … bumpy!’ Her voice jarred on each word as they bumped along and her cheeks trembled.

‘It’s hardly Pall Mall,’ returned Agnes and managed a tight smile. The poor girl sitting beside her didn’t know what she was letting herself in for.

Speaking coherently was far from easy because the springs on the ambulance had gone rock hard on one side and were close to breaking point. They bounced along roads and tracks alike, more violently once they hit the shell-pitted terrain close to the front lines.

‘Come on, Pretty Megan. Keep going. One last trip and I promise to get your springs fixed.’

Megan was the name she’d given the ambulance. She had named her after a maid at Heathlands, the one who’d once been in a relationship with the chauffeur.

They were travelling through an area where troops mustered around piles of mud and detritus spewed up from previous engagements. Every so often, the headlights would pick up the haggard faces of tired men sprawled around in groups, smoking, eating or reading a letter from home that they’d likely read many times before. An element of patriotic fervour still shone in the eyes of a few men, though how long that would last was anybody’s guess.

They were travelling to the most forward field hospital there was, one equipped for dealing with the less serious injuries and applying interim treatment before transfer. The nurse, a naive little thing in Agnes’s estimation, was going there to ‘save our brave boys’. Not long qualified, dear little Nurse May Wills had done a year on a ward at a hospital in Bristol but had jumped at the chance to join Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service and a posting close to the front line.

‘All those poor men. The hospital got so crowded we had them laying outside the new King Edward the Seventh hospital on stretchers until we could make room for them.’

‘That was a bit careless of them, not seeing this war coming. They could have made it bigger.’ Agnes was purposely sarcastic, not that Nurse Wills noticed.

‘Do you know any other members of Queen Alexandra’s?’ Nurse Wills had asked her.

‘Yes. I do,’ she replied, her smile hardened by experience. ‘They march about as though they could do battle with anyone if they’d half a mind to.’

It was good to hear May laugh even if it was a little too light, a little nervous. Might as well laugh now, thought Agnes, before you see how things are; then you might never laugh again.

They finally came to a ramshackle barn with half a wall missing but its roof still in place. At one end of the building, a large tent added extra ward space. A piece of canvas plugged the other end, also acting as a makeshift door, lifting if the wind was blowing in the right direction.

Agnes brought the ambulance to a halt and pulled on the brake.

‘Welcome to the Palace of Angels.’

‘Palace of Angels! What a wonderful name!’ Nurse May Wills sounded genuinely delighted.

Noting her companion had not heeded the irony in her tone, Agnes stared straight ahead. In these past months she had seen enough of field stations and hospitals. Her real names for them – she had more than one – were far less complimentary, but accurate: Castle of Casualties, Death Factory, Helpless Heroes; each name suited.

The newly trained nurse took in the field station’s details with a blank stare; decrepit, half ruined and barely protected from the cold. The field station provided interim attention to the injured, enough to keep them alive until they reached the larger hospitals further back from the front lines.

‘Oh well. I suppose it’s only to be expected. A bit smelly, though not really too bad.’

Agnes refrained from telling her that the smell would sometimes make her retch. Death had a smell all of its own, a mix of blood, gangrenous wounds and stomach contents. May could find that out for herself.

She lit and then breathed in the smoke from a freshly lit cheroot and watched as the smoke curled languidly upwards. She was smoking too much, but at least it smothered the smells; calmed the nerves too.

‘Do you want me to help you with your things?’ she asked, not wanting to but feeling obliged.

The girl’s attention remained fixed on the place Agnes had brought her to. She shook her head.

‘I’m sure I can manage. After all I’m going to have to put up with a lot more than carrying my own luggage, am I not?’

‘Very true.’

Although she admired the girl’s saintly enthusiasm, Agnes knew from experience that it would be short lived. However, being positive would help her cope – at least for a while.

‘Why do you call your ambulance Pretty Megan?’ asked Nurse Wills, her eyes fixed on what she’d let herself in for.

‘The boys like it. When they’re lying in pain I find it helps to distract their minds to tell them they are being carried away from the slaughter by Pretty Megan.’

‘With an ambulance name? How does that work? How very droll,’ said the nurse, turning now to face her.

Agnes blew a cloud of smoke upwards and watched as it swirled and whirled and tried to escape from the ambulance cab.

‘I tell them it was my sister’s stage name and that she was famous for doing a naughty fan dance dressed in nothing but parrot feathers.’

The nurse looked at her round-eyed and gasped. ‘Did your sister really do that?’

‘No. I have no sister. I lied. As I said, telling stories and lies helps take their minds off their pain.’

The pale face of Nurse May Wills, a girl from a sheltered background who had answered her country’s call, shone with admiration.

‘Oh my. Oh my. You are so clever. And so brave. So very, very brave!’

‘It’s not me that’s brave,’ Agnes said softly.

A male nurse came out and took Nurse Wills’s bag. Agnes waited until the man held the canvas door back exposing a triangle of light from within the ward.

Once they were out of sight, she checked the passenger door was shut, put the ambulance into forward gear and turned the wheel.

The few lights of the field station fell back behind her. She wondered how poor little Nurse Wills would settle in. A field station was bleak compared with a proper hospital. A great many men arrived close to death. The medical officer in charge had the job of choosing who was likely to live and who to die. He did this even before they were offloaded.

Within minutes of leaving the field station, she was en route for the front line. For some reason the evening seemed unnaturally quiet. The sound of guns firing could be heard, but softly, way off in the distance.

Agnes sang the first two lines of ‘Silent Night’. She fell to silence, not willing to believe that the guns had fallen silent simply because of the season.

The silence was as strange as the darkness. The ambulance bumped along over the uneven ground. Such silence following months of fighting.

She’d heard the line of trenches stretched all the way from the Atlantic to the Swiss border.

Men had battled over inches of mud since Mons but ended up entrenched at Ypres. The first battle at Ypres had claimed nearly eight thousand casualties. Tonight, at least in this sector, was different. Christmas Eve and for once – just for once – the guns had fallen silent.

There were tracks at all angles through the mud, fanning out and criss-crossing each other like a giant crossword, all roads leading to the trenches.

Darius had told her that he used to come on holiday to this area, and being a keen rambler had walked these lanes and fields where men now fought and poppies and corn used to grow.

‘I recall a high spot about here,’ he’d said, referring to a tattered map hanging from the wall in the cubby hole he called an office. ‘From here you can see everything. There’s a copse here where I used to have a picnic. Just the world and myself. What a lovely time it was, before the world became bloody …’

‘Point it out on the map,’ she’d said to him. ‘Tell me where you were so happy on that long ago holiday.’

He’d done so willingly, not noticing that she was memorising everything he said and every detail he pointed to. He trusted her completely and she trusted him. He wasn’t to know that the information would be retained and put to good use at a later date. Agnes forgot nothing.

She had left him to his reminiscences, a faraway look in his eyes as though he were trying to recapture what was past and lost.

Agnes had always had a good memory and Darius did not seem to care that he had divulged delicate information.