Passions of War (19 page)

The CO looked at him for a moment, then he returned to his maps. ‘Yes, very well. I'll make the necessary arrangements.'

Thirteen

Leo hoped that when she and her little group reached Pristina they might find Mabel Stobart waiting for them with the rest of the convoy, but there was no sign of them. She asked everyone she could think of, from the mayor to the crowds of refugees flooding into the city, but no one had any news. With the Austrians pressing in from the north and the Bulgarians from the east, it was obvious that her colleagues would have been forced to join the general retreat, so Leo decided to wait as long as possible in the hopes that they would appear; but when three days passed without news she had to conclude that they had either gone on ahead or were taking a different route.

The city was in the grip of panic, besieged from all directions by refugees, and food was getting difficult to find. Leo became familiar with the word
nema
– there is none – as she combed the shops looking for bread and sugar. She became uncomfortably familiar, too, with a question. ‘Where are the English and the French? They are supposed to be our allies. When are they coming to help us?' There was a temporary flare of hope when the news arrived that allied contingents had landed at Salonika but it was short-lived. The Bulgarians were surrounding the city and the small allied force did not have the strength to break through. As the first remnants of the defeated Serb army started to appear in the city Leo decided that it would be irresponsible to wait longer. She stopped a cavalry officer and explained her dilemma.

‘If I were you, I should move out at once,' he said. ‘If the Bulgarians don't take the town in a day or two, the Austrians will.'

‘There's no chance of a rally, a fight back?' Leo said.

He shook his head. ‘There was talk of a last stand, at Kosovo Polje, but the generals decided against it.'

Leo was touched by the dejection on his face. She knew the significance of that place to the Serbs. It was the locus of every legend and every folk song; the place where in 1389 the Serbs had fought their decisive and ultimately doomed battle against the Turkish army. She knew how many of them would have preferred a gallant last stand on that historic spot to this abject retreat.

‘It is better that you should save yourselves and live to fight another day,' she said. ‘But where are you heading?'

‘Through the mountains. It's the only route left open to us. If we can reach the Adriatic at Durazzo perhaps the allies will send ships to take us off. But it will be a hard journey and the Albanians are not our friends. There will be many who do not survive.'

Leo watched him ride away with a growing sense of despair. It was December now, the worst time of the year to be heading into the mountains. She knew very little about Albania except that it was a poor country and the officer's comment that the Albanians were not their friends sent a chill through her heart. Even if they were disposed to help, how could they be expected to feed the multitude that was about to descend on them? What conditions would be like, up there, she could only guess. But there was nothing for it, they must join the exodus.

The rain was unrelenting and the roads were a sea of mud. Leo grew tired of pinning up the long strands of wet hair that fell around her shoulders, so she resorted to the expedient she had adopted at Chataldzha and hacked it off with a pair of surgical scissors. It occurred to her, in one of her quieter moments, that in her boots and breeches she must look very much as she had done when Sasha first mistook her for a boy. The thought sent a shaft of anguish through her. Where was Sasha now? He would have fought to the last, she was sure of that. Was he now part of this dejected rabble, heading for exile; or was he lying dead somewhere on the borders of the country he loved so much?

At a village outside Prizren, almost on the border of Albania, where they encamped one night, Stella Patterson came to Leo's tent.

‘I'm very concerned about Milan, the boy with the shattered foot. Gangrene has set in. If the foot is not amputated immediately he will probably die.'

Milan had been brought to them just before they left Pristina; his foot had been shattered by a shell blast. He was very young – sixteen or seventeen perhaps; he seemed unsure of his exact age.

Leo suspected that this was deliberate and he was actually younger still. He had endured the journey so far with the stoicism typical of these Serbian peasant soldiers and he seemed to her to exemplify the best and the worst of the war.

Leo ran her hand through her hair. The perpetual nagging headache and sore throat, to which she had become accustomed, were getting worse and she suspected that she was running a fever.

‘You can't carry out an amputation in these conditions, can you?'

‘No. We must find a house, somewhere reasonably clean, with a decent light and a bit of warmth – and a water supply.'

‘But we have to keep moving,' Leo said. ‘If we stay here we could be overrun by the Bulgarians.'

‘I can't help that. It's a risk we shall have to take. If I don't amputate that boy will die.'

Leo hauled herself to her feet. ‘Very well. I'll see if there is anyone in the village who will let us use their kitchen.'

She went straight to the home of the mayor, the largest house in the village, though even this consisted of just two rooms with floors of beaten earth. She found the mayor and his family loading their goods on to two mules. When she explained what she needed the response was rapid.

‘Use what you like. The house is yours. We are leaving at first light.'

She reported back to Stella. ‘There's a table we can scrub clean and enough wood for a fire and a well in the yard for water. But the only light is from candles. We can use our hurricane lamps, but even then you won't really be able to see well enough. Can it wait until morning?'

Reluctantly the doctor agreed that it would be best to wait until dawn. Leo passed a broken night and woke to a new sound. All night she had heard the noise of feet tramping past and the rattle of donkey carts as the refugees pressed doggedly on but this was different. A heavier tread, as of booted men, and the clank and rumble of heavier vehicles. Scrambling out of her tent she realized that the road was full of soldiers, not marching but plodding onwards, followed by horse-drawn limbers carrying guns. The retreating Serb army had overtaken them, which meant that the Bulgarians must be close behind.

The rest of the team were awake and gazing, dumbfounded, at the passing troops. Leo called them together. After a few dizzying seconds, during which she seemed unable to think at all, her mind had cleared and she was quite sure what she had to do.

‘I shall stay here with Dr Patterson to assist with the amputation, but the rest of you must go at once. We will follow as soon as Milan is able to travel.'

‘But we can't go and leave you behind!' one of the women exclaimed and the others agreed noisily.

‘Yes, you can,' Leo insisted. ‘You have a duty to the other patients. It is up to you to get them safely across the mountains. I'm sure Dr Patterson and I will be able to join up with another medical team and we will join you at Durazzo.'

‘But suppose the Bulgarians get here first,' someone said.

‘If that happens, I'm sure we shall be treated with perfect courtesy,' Leo said. ‘I have worked with the Bulgarians and I have always found them extremely chivalrous. Now, we don't have time to argue. The men must be given breakfast and dressings seen to and then you must inspan the oxen and be on your way, as soon as possible. Dr Patterson and I will do what needs to be done with Milan.'

They turned away, reluctantly, but training and discipline enforced her orders and within minutes the fire was alight, water was put on to boil and the nurses were bending over their patients. Watching them, Leo felt the confidence she had assumed ebbing away. It was true that the Bulgarian officers she had met had behaved impeccably, but that had been when Bulgaria and Serbia were allies. Now they were on opposite sides and there were old scores to settle. Besides which, it was likely that the first Bulgars they would encounter would be common soldiers, not high-ranking officers, and she had heard terrible stories of the way they had treated helpless civilians in the villages they had overrun.

She called two orderlies to carry Milan over to the mayor's house and found Stella Patterson already there, boiling up water over the fire and scrubbing the wooden table in the centre of the main room. Milan was laid on the mayor's bed and Leo went back to see off the rest of the convoy. The tents had been struck and the patients loaded into the ox-carts and the nurses gathered round Leo, some of them in tears. She hugged them all in turn.

‘Be brave! It's going to be a long, hard journey but we will get through – all of us. You are with the army, so you'll be safe enough. There will be plenty of men to help if you need it. Just keep going, that's all you have to do.'

The drivers and orderlies kissed her hands as she wished them God speed. ‘
Sbogom!
Goodbye! We'll meet again soon.'

The wagons creaked into motion but the road was so congested with men and vehicles that it was almost impossible to join it. It was not until an officer in charge of an artillery company saw their difficulty and halted his men that they were able to filter in. Leo watched them moving away until they disappeared into the curtain of rain that veiled the mountains. Then she turned and hurried back to the mayor's house.

Dr Patterson looked up from arranging her instruments. ‘Good, you're here. I'm ready to start. Help me to lift him on to the table.'

He was not a big man, fortunately, and short rations had reduced them all to skin and bone. Even so, Leo found it took all her strength to help the doctor heave him from the bed on to the table, which she had covered with a sheet from the small store of clean linen. Her head was pounding and her throat so sore that she had been unable to swallow the day-old bread which was all that was available for breakfast. Milan was semi-conscious, but when he saw the doctor advancing with the mask and the bottle of chloroform he began to struggle and tried to get up.

‘No, no! Not that, not that!'

Leo took him by the shoulders and pressed him back on to the table. Then she took hold of his hands and held them tightly. ‘Milan, listen to me! You are quite safe. The chloroform will send you to sleep for a while, that's all. The doctor has explained to you, she has to remove your foot or you will die. But if you are asleep you will feel no pain. I promise you! And when you wake up it will be all over.'

He looked up into her eyes. ‘
Maika
, you will stay with me?'

Maika
– it meant mother. Leo swallowed. ‘Yes, Milan, I will be here all the time. There's nothing to worry about.'

His eyes swivelled from her to Patterson, standing ready with the anaesthetic, and he nodded. She put the mask over his nose and mouth and dripped on the chloroform. For a moment he struggled against it, then Leo felt the grip on her hands relax.

‘Now, we must be as quick as we can,' Patterson said.

Leo had assisted at operations before, but never at an amputation and the sight, combined with the rotten/sweet smell of the gangrene, turned her stomach. Once or twice she was afraid that she was going to faint or vomit, but she managed to keep control and hand the necessary instruments when requested. Even her inexpert eyes could see that Patterson was good at her job and in a remarkably short time the wound was sutured and dressed and the gangrenous foot disposed of in the midden in the back yard. Leo leaned over Milan as he began to come round, stroking his face and murmuring reassuring words, ready with a bowl for the inevitable attack of vomiting.

‘
Maika
, when will it be over?' he whispered, when he could speak.

‘It is over, Milan,' she answered. ‘It is all done and now you will get well.'

When he had been put back to bed and the instruments cleaned and packed away Stella drew the big cauldron off the fire and poured water into two mugs.

‘You look as if you need a coffee,' she commented. ‘It's a pity there's no milk or sugar but at least it's hot.'

Leo became aware again of the endless tramp of feet past the door of the house. ‘When will he be able to travel?'

‘In an ideal world, not for several days. But as this is not an ideal world – tomorrow, at the earliest.'

There was nothing to do, then, but wait. Leo sat by the fire, lulled into a kind of stupor until another sound roused her. At first she thought it was a child crying. Then she realized it was the bleating of a goat. In the backyard she found a nanny goat tethered. It was a poor, thin creature but its udder was swollen with milk. Leo hurried back to the house and found a large bowl. She had never milked a goat, or a cow for that matter, and it took some time to master the technique but she was eventually rewarded with half a pint of milk. She had kept back a small amount of the dwindling supply of food which the convoy possessed, including a little bag of oats, and from those and the milk she concocted a thin gruel. They fed most of it to Milan when he woke, but she and Stella shared what was left and agreed that it was the best meal they had had in days.

By dawn the next morning the endless procession of soldiers and civilians had begun again. Leo stopped an officer and asked him how close the Bulgarian army was.

‘Not more than a day behind,' he said. ‘If I were you I should get on the road as fast as you can.'

Leo reported the conversation to Stella Patterson and they agreed that Milan would have to travel, weak as he was. While Stella attended to her patient, Leo stood by the road watching for some form of transport. She stopped several wagons but the answer was always the same. They were full, either with wounded men or with essential supplies. Eventually, about midday, she waved down a wagon marked with red crosses and pleaded with the driver to find room for them.