Of Irish Blood (47 page)

I talk about the logistics of running the hospital until even Paul’s bored. Carolyn’s taking notes.

“At least there’s nothing in the story to alarm the censors,” she says.

She tells me that both the French and British military authorities insist on reviewing all her dispatches.

“Annoying,” she says. “Won’t let me report on how terrible condition are at the front or the number of casualties. I’m going back up to Ypres. Supposed to be another battle there, though that’s secret.”

“Better watch yourself, Miss Wilson,” Paul says. “Not a good idea to blab such information.”

“You’re right,” she says. “The French and British see spies everywhere. I had to answer a lot of questions when I registered at the police station as a foreigner living in Paris,” she says.

“Margaret Kirk and I did too,” I say. “But when we told them we were nursing they became very gallant.”

Where is Margaret anyway?

“Paul,” I say, “see if you can hunt up Margaret Kirk and look around for Father Kevin and Maud.”

Not pleased to be sent away, is Paul. Afraid he’ll miss something. Father Kevin says that Paul knows we know he’s spying on us. Doesn’t expect us to say much in front of him. A kind of game.

“Probably makes up yarns to send to British Intelligence so they’ll let him stay at the hospital,” Father Kevin said. “And who can blame the poor fellow.”

I ask Carolyn if she’s interviewed Sylvia Beach or Gertrude Stein. All the
“femmes de Lesbos”
doing their bit—Gertrude back from Spain and driving an ambulance, and Sylvia nursing. Natalie Barney’s militantly pacifist.

“Yes, I have,” Carolyn begins just as Paul leads Maud, Father Kevin, and Margaret out to the tea table. Paul’s chatting away to Maud. Father Kevin’s warned her about him, of course, but Paul’s caught her up into that Irish dance of “Who do you know?”

For all his talk of “me mam and the humble cottage,” Paul’s able to pull out the names of a few Kildare families who were friends of Maud’s.

“Gentry, of course,” Paul says, “and not pals of mine exactly but we’re all horse-mad in Kildare, and I’ve spent time with them at the Punchtown races, which is where we should all be right now.”

“A racecourse is the one place all strands of Irish society meet and mingle,” Maud says.

“Plenty of foreigners, too,” Paul says. “I suppose you would have known loads of Germans, Mrs. MacBride.”

And I’m embarrassed for Paul, so obvious. I mean if he’s going to be a spy, let him be a good spy.

Maud laughs.

“Put this down, Paul—Miss Gonne refused to be drawn but did however launch into an impassioned denunciation of the war,” she says and turns to Carolyn.

“You see, Miss Wilson, I believe both sides in this struggle will end up defeated and weakened,” Maud says. “Art, music, literature—all the expressions of the soul that Europeans have developed over the last thousand years are carried in fragile human vessels. Now those bodies are being blown apart, riddled with shrapnel, and for what?”

Maud is in full swing when Barry Delaney comes walking toward us.

“Maud,” I say. She turns, sees Barry.

“What, what?” She gets up, goes to Barry. Maud asks, “Something wrong? I know, Seán’s sick.”

Barry shakes her head.

“Worse, he’s dead? My baby? Another one taken? How?” Maud clutches Barry’s arm.

“Not Seán,” Barry says. “A telegram came from your sister Kathleen. Her son Tom has been killed near Neuve-Chapelle.”

Maud slumps forward. Father Kevin and Paul are there, each take one of Maud’s arms, holding her up.

“No, no,” Maud says. “He’s only twenty-one. So charming, so handsome, so alive. Kathleen adores him. How will she bear this? It will kill her.”

“Here Maud, sit down,” I say. The men help her back into the chair.

“I’ll get some brandy,” Margaret says.

Carolyn holds her pencil above her notebook.

“What was his full name?” Carolyn asks.

Maud looks up at her.

“Thomas Percy Pilcher,” she says. “Lieutenant in the Second Battalion, Rifle Brigade, the Prince Consort’s Own.”

Maud turns to Paul.

“Put that in your report, Mr. O’Toole,” she says. “Now, leave us. Go.”

Paul pouts for days. Not speaking to me. When I lug the laundry basket past him, he turns his head.

Maud and Iseult have gone to the military hospital at Paris Pelage Pas-de-Calais, where Maud’s sister Kathleen is nursing. They’ll work there together.

“Only way to face death is to struggle for life,” Maud says to me before she goes.

No time to mourn, I think. These twelve- and fourteen-hour days exhaust all feeling. And then two weeks later, a letter comes from John Feeney. Shipped home and safe, I thought, hoped, but he managed to get himself back in the Dublin Fusiliers. Foolish boy, I think. Foolish. Foolish. I’m angry at John. Can’t help it. He was safe, one fellow I didn’t have to be afraid for.

Dear Nora,

Going to a place called Gallipoli, lovely sounding name, isn’t it? Were not supposed to know where we’re going, but the invasion has been reported in the London newspapers. So we won’t be surprising Johnny Turk. Just as well. I’m ready to fight a real battle. My angels have promised to surround us all. My best to your Connemara husband.

Your friend,

John Feeney

I find Paul.

“I know you’re mad at me, but you have to read this. John Feeney’s back in the war on his way to Gallipoli.”

Paul snatches the letter. He skims it.

“Eejit,” he says. “They’ll be landing on a beach, so a chance for both the army and the navy to make a balls of it.”

“Listen, Paul,” I start.

“No need to apologize,” he says.

“What? You’re the betrayer. What do I have to be sorry about?”

“You well know I’d never report anything really damaging about you or anyone. And for Mrs. MacBride, who I’ve admired for years, to accuse me like that, as if I wouldn’t respect her grief, I’m very offended.”

“You mean you didn’t send in a report on our meeting with Carolyn Wilson and Tom Pilcher’s death?”

“Now, Nora, of course I did. I had to. You were seen. Do you think I’m the only undercover fellow in this hospital? But you came out very well and the colonel’s interested in Carolyn Wilson. She could go observe some German troops, her being neutral and all. Then report to the colonel. Nice money in it for her. Would you ask her?”

“Shut up, Paul,” I say, and go to find Father Kevin.

“Listen to what Paul proposed,” I say, and tell him.

“Watch him, Nora,” Father Kevin says. “Not the
amadán
he pretends to be. Say nothing about Peter Keeley to him.”

“Of course not,” I say.

Father Kevin says, “Conscription’s surely coming to England. And the British government will try to draft Irishmen, too. Then Peter will be in the lion’s mouth. They’ll call keeping the Irish boys out of the British army treason, a capital crime, a hanging offense.”

O dear God. Please. I’m doing your work here. Please. Please. Protect Peter.

Almost the end of April when I see Carolyn again. Find her in the yard where the ambulances bring in casualties after taking them from the train station. Not the confident young woman of a few weeks before. Dr. Gros has called all of us nurses out to await a convoy coming from Ypres.

The battle Paul calls a “cock-up.”

Young Tony Hulman’s driving the first ambulance, moving very slowly for him. He usually roars up, slams on the brakes. Urgent no matter the condition of the patient. But now he parks, gets out, and waves Paul over.

“We’ll need you,” Tony says.

Paul and another orderly run forward with a stretcher. But Tony’s partner, Charlie Kinsolving, a young New Yorker, has already opened the back door and is helping the first soldier step out of the ambulance.

An Arab, I see, one of the French colonial troops. A white gauze bandage is tied around his head covering his eyes. Paul takes his arm, moves him forward to Dr. Gros, who carefully lifts the bandage and examines the soldier. Two more soldiers bandaged in the same way join the first. They stand very still.

“They’re all blind,” Carolyn says to me. “Gassed. The Germans shot canisters of chlorine gas into the trenches manned by these Algerian troops. Yellow clouds of the stuff fell down over the men. Some ran, some dived into the bottom of the trenches, but they couldn’t escape. Hundreds died within ten minutes. I saw the bodies. Survivors told me the gas burned their lungs. They couldn’t breathe. They lived or died depending on which way the wind was blowing.”

“How many killed?” I ask her.

“Thousands,” she says. “And many more blinded like these poor fellows.”

Ambulances continue to arrive. And over the next hour we admit almost two hundred patients. More Algerians and then a whole load of Canadians who Carolyn tells me held their position in the line during the gas attack.

“They stood firing back even while they were choking to death,” she says.

Dr. Gros tells us there is nothing we can do but wash the fellows down, burn their clothes, and try to make them comfortable.

Margaret starts a bucket brigade and we line up the troops, sponge them down with warm soapy water, and get them into clean nightshirts. Thank God, Mrs. Vanderbilt buys in big quantities.

The men fill every empty bed. We set up cots in the hallways and along the aisles of the ward. About half the soldiers are blind. All have burns on their faces and bodies as well as other wounds. Father Kevin moves from bed to bed hearing the confessions of the Catholics, anointing the fellows in the worst shape, and praying with the Moslems. Carolyn follows him. Some of the fellows are eager to tell her about how terrifying it was to be enveloped in a cloud of chlorine gas. Many thought the Germans had sent out a smokescreen to cover an infantry attack. But as soon as they breathed, they felt their throats close, their eyes burn, and saw the men around them collapse.

“Somehow they think gas is worse than artillery. One Canadian soldier told me, ‘It’s just not sporting,’” Carolyn says.

Paul brings Carolyn, Margaret, and me into his hidey-hole. Well after midnight as we drink tea braced with brandy. I think of what Maud said. The human body is a fragile vessel. I mean to die from breathing?

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” Carolyn says as she drains her tea. Paul pours straight brandy into her cup.

“Important for the world to know the truth about this war,” I say.

“It is. But nothing I write can really make what those fellows endure real. Those bodies. The faces. Lips pulled back, mouths open. They died screaming,” Carolyn says.

“I wish America would just come in and end this whole thing,” Margaret says. “As much as I hate to see our boys suffering, at least the war would be over.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Paul says. “Your country has a very small army and I’ve heard the British officers talking. Not much respect for your military. They say that American soldiers are a bunch of cowboys and immigrants. They can’t be trained to proper discipline. They won’t fight.”

“Discipline,” I say, “like standing in place while you are choking to death?”

“Listen, Nora,” Paul says. “Any normal man dropped onto the middle of a battlefield would run for his life when the guns started to go off. Military training tries to bury the survival instinct. Brainwashes soldiers to stand and fight.”

Carolyn shakes her head. “Sometimes there are more direct methods. I saw a British officer aim a pistol at a gassed French soldier and order him back in the line.”

“Well, there is that,” Paul says. “They shoot you if you run.”

“If our fellows come over here, they won’t run,” I say. But please, God: America will not go to war.

“Lots of Irish fellows among those Canadians,” Father Kevin says when he joins us an hour later. “Asking questions about the situation in Ireland. Would we ever get Home Rule? One very knowledgeable fellow. Said his family had been Fenians for generations.”

“Which one is that?” Paul wants to know.

“Now that’s enough, Paul,” Father Kevin says. “We tolerate your little games because no man should have to suffer the hell of the Western Front. But if you start bothering the patients…”

“Paul spies on us,” I tell Carolyn. “In fact he wants to recruit you. Dispatches from behind the German lines with a little extra for British Intelligence.”

“All a cod,” Paul says. “You know I’d never do you any real harm.”

I would like to meet the soldier who’s the Fenian. Odd if his grandfather helped my uncle Patrick invade Canada. Wonder if the fellow wishes his country had left the British Empire altogether and joined the United States. That had been Uncle Patrick’s idea. Then Canadian soldiers wouldn’t be lying in a hospital in Paris, blind from a gas attack. Please God, keep America out of this mess.

But only two weeks later, a German U-boat sinks the British liner
Lusitania
off the coast of Ireland. Over a thousand people drowned, a hundred and twenty-eight Americans among them.

“That’s it,” Paul says to me at the hospital two days after we get the news. “Yous’ll be in it now. Can’t let the Huns blow innocent souls into kingdom come especially if some of those souls are Americans.”

He lowers his voice. “Though the
Lusitania
was carrying weapons and ammunition for the British army, make no mistake about that. And to be fair, the Germans took out ads in the American newspapers warning people not to travel on her. But of course the Brits are always so cocky. Sure the
Lusitania
could outrun any U-boat, though I hear the company had closed down one furnace to save money so the ship wasn’t traveling at full speed.”

“How do you know these things?” I ask.

“I have my sources,” he says.

When the list of the victims comes out, I notice the name Vanderbilt. Some relation I suppose. So when I see Mrs. Vanderbilt in the ward the next week I stop and speak to her. “Sorry for your troubles,” I say, and realize I sound like I’m greeting a widow at a Bridgeport wake.

“Thank you,” she says.

Anne’s her first name. But I never call her anything but Mrs. Vanderbilt. William’s second wife, I know, and herself divorced. Plenty of fallen women around Paris I guess. Though I doubt this lady would ever let guilt stalk her or listen to the Fairy Woman’s voice.