Somewhere in France: A Novel of the Great War (13 page)

Chapter 24

T
orture. Her presence at the 51st amounted to nothing short of torture for him.

When Lilly had first arrived, less than a month ago, he had smothered the protests of his better judgment and convinced himself that all would be well. He’d been wrong.

Since the day of her arrival, they’d not had a single conversation. He’d tried, at first, to speak with her when their paths crossed, but he never managed to do more than stammer a few quotidian platitudes about the weather or her health before Miss Evans would appear out of the blue, beg his pardon, and hustle her away.

After that, he’d tried to ignore her, or at least to put her out of his mind when she wasn’t standing directly in front of him. That, too, was unsuccessful. For Lilly was everywhere.

In the mess tent at the crack of dawn, laughing with her friends. In the reception marquee, encouraging the walking wounded to lean on her as she saw them safely to a cot or bench. In the ward tent nearly every evening, reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries or Walter Scott or Tennyson to the men, or helping them write their letters home. He couldn’t so much as step from one tent to the next without encountering her, and the sight of her and the sound of her voice never failed to affect him.

Even in the few hours he allowed himself for sleep she was with him. He dreamed of no one and nothing but her. Lilly laughing, Lilly whispering his name, Lilly standing before him, in the station, turning her face so his brotherly kiss might land on her lips and be transformed.

Only in the operating hut was he free of her. There, cocooned in his unlikely sanctuary, he could concentrate on the minutiae of surgery and put her tantalizing presence out of his mind. As the long hours he worked grew ever longer, his colleagues warned him to take care of himself, and Colonel Lewis began to make disagreeable noises about sending him on leave. Robbie ignored them all.

His one solace, a rather pathetic one, was the letters Lilly had sent him before her arrival at the 51st. He’d kept all of them, bundled together in a biscuit tin, and whenever he had a spare moment he would lie down on his cot and read one, just as if it had been delivered that day.

And then, early one morning, the idea came to him. He would write to Lilly, and he would ask her to write him back, just as they had done before.

It was risky; they would have to pass their correspondence to each other without anyone else noticing. And if anyone were to intercept a letter, and discover their friendship, then Lilly would certainly be sent home. She might well prefer not to take such a risk.

Yet he had to try.

13 August

Dear L,

I think I told you, some months ago, that reading your letters was one of the few pleasures left to me. Since your arrival I have had no letters from you, understandably enough, but your presence here in no way diminishes my longing for them. A glimpse of your face as you drive past, the sound of your voice as you read to the men in the ward tent. But never a chance to talk, to hear your thoughts and opinions, to laugh with you about the bad food and endless rain. It’s enough to drive me mad.

So it has come to this: either I write to you, and convince you to write back to me, or one of these days I am going to sit down at your table in the mess tent and begin to talk to you, in front of everyone, Miss Jeffries be damned.

I’m at my desk in the ward tent most evenings. It should be easy to leave your reply there.

R

He folded the single sheet of paper in three and stuffed it into an envelope, which, after a moment’s hesitation, he left blank. He’d told her where she might deliver her reply, but where could he leave this?

Slipping into her tent and leaving it on her cot, not that he had the faintest idea which one was Lilly’s, was too dangerous. Perhaps her ambulance? It was worth a look.

Dawn was approaching; he’d better be quick about it. He made his way across the compound, skidding once or twice on the dew-slicked duckboards thrown down over the muddy ground. He hesitated as he approached the row of ambulances next to the marquee tent. Lilly had parked her ambulance at the end of the row yesterday afternoon, when he had seen her last, but had she moved it since then?

He approached the vehicle: it looked exactly the same as its fellows, with nothing to distinguish it from any other American-made ambulance along the Western Front. He was about to turn away when he noticed the word that had been painted, in rather shaky script, on the bonnet.
Henrietta
.

She’d named the ambulance, he remembered. So this was the one. Now he only had to find a place to hide the envelope. Plucking at the seat cushion, he found it wasn’t affixed to the bench seat. He slipped the envelope underneath, patted the cushion in place, said a silent prayer, and walked away.

Instead of going back to his tent, he went to the ward tent to see how his surgery patients had fared overnight, then tackled the heaps of paperwork on his desk. The clock chimed six o’clock; a good time, he judged, to go to breakfast. He’d have time to eat his meal and perhaps even spend a few minutes in conversation with his colleagues before Lilly and the other WAACs arrived.

Robbie had been cradling a half-empty cup of coffee for a half hour before the first of the WAACs walked in. He made his way to the mess tent’s exit, standing aside so that Miss Evans might pass.

Lilly was just behind her. He stepped forward into the doorway and there was an awkward moment as each attempted to step aside. They exchanged murmured apologies and then, before she could move past, he bent his head and whispered in her ear.

“Look under the cushion on the driver’s seat of your ambulance.”

The look of astonishment on her face nearly made him laugh out loud. “Your ambulance. Under the seat,” he repeated. She nodded, but did she understand?

L
ILLY HAD BEEN
in and out of the reception marquee all day, but always at a distance, and always with her watchdog, Miss Evans, in close proximity.

It was the end of the afternoon; the marquee tent had cleared and Robbie was standing outside the operating hut, trying to clear his head before returning for one final surgery.

A movement, just at the periphery of his vision, caught his attention. It was Lilly, carrying a leather bucket full of soapy water. She looked tired and disheveled and was probably desperate for her supper. But first she and Miss Evans were going to wash out the ambulance, as he knew they did every day. It was an unpleasant task, yet she seemed oddly cheerful.

He almost called out to her, but before he could say anything, she looked at him, held his gaze for an endless moment, and then, as bold as any music-hall actress, she winked at him.

That evening she came to the ward tent, as was her habit, and read to the men for more than an hour. She walked by Robbie on her way out of the tent, her only greeting a soft hello as she passed. An envelope slipped from her hand onto his desk; he covered it swiftly with one of his files in case anyone should pass by.

Robbie surveyed the tent: of his colleagues, only Lawson was on duty, and he was preoccupied with his charts. The nurses were at their stations and the wounded were asleep or unconscious, leaving him, for a change, alone.

He used his penknife to open the envelope. Only one sheet of paper inside, but then, she wouldn’t have had much time to craft her reply.

13 August 1917

Dear R,

Thank you very much for your letter. I, too, have been feeling quite desperate about our lapse in correspondence, and not only because I miss receiving your letters. There is so much I want to tell you, for I know you will understand. I will send a longer response as soon as I am able. Until then, I remain,

Your devoted friend,

L

Chapter 25

T
he main thing, Lilly told herself, was to avoid sitting on her cot. That was the only way she would stay awake long enough to finish the letter.

She’d been at the 51st for six weeks now, and life had settled into something that resembled a routine. Awake at first light, breakfast, trip after trip to the ADS, a break for dinner, then back to the ADS, again and again, until it had been cleared.

Today had been no different. By noon, they had driven back and forth four times, working to empty the ADS of the scores of wounded men that had arrived in the wake of yet another Allied push on the Ypres salient. Four unspeakable journeys, punctuated by horrors that Lilly knew would be branded into her consciousness forever, no matter how commonplace they had become in this war of horrors.

A man so badly gutshot that his entrails were barely held in place by the field dressings that encircled his torso. Another, white-faced with shock, both legs shattered, pulling piteously at Lilly’s sleeve as his stretcher was carried past.

“Please, miss, don’t let them take me legs. Miss, please, you must tell them.”

Lilly had patted his arm reassuringly, murmured some anodyne platitude, and felt like the worst sort of fraud, because of course they were going to take off his legs. For that was the only way he would live. That was the future that awaited him, now that he had done his duty to King and Country.

It was seven o’clock; her friends, sensibly, had made for their respective beds as soon as supper was finished. Annie and Bridget were snoring away peacefully, but Constance was still awake as Lilly sat at the wobbly table and chair at the far end of their tent.

“Put that letter away and get to bed. You know we’ve an early start tomorrow. And it’s impossible to sleep properly with that lantern flickering away.”

“I’ve only the one letter. I’ll be done soon.”

Monday, 3 Sept. 1917

Here I am again. I had hoped to finish this last night, but the lantern in my tent ran out of kerosene and it was too late to fetch any more. No—that’s not precisely true. I was too tired to fetch any more. I was in my cot by a quarter to eight and slept so soundly that Constance had to shake me awake at dawn.

I blame the mud. I do not think it an exaggeration to say it is the chief torment of my life here. The route to the ADS is awash in it, although “awash” gives the unfortunate impression that it bears some resemblance to liquid. It’s more like molten wax, clinging to everything, making any kind of fluid movement impossible. But wax can be chipped away when it hardens, whereas this cursed stuff never dries. How can it? There’s no sunshine, no warmth—just rain and rain and more rain. Even my trusty Henrietta balks at it.

Yet how can I complain? I sleep in a tent that is dry, walk on duckboards that (mostly) keep the mud away, am able to wash my person and my uniform in clean (if not hot) water, and eat meals that are warm and nourishing. The wounded men who ride in my ambulance have been wet, cold, dirty, and hungry for what must seem like forever to them. And they never complain. Or, if they do, they manage to make a joke of it. What sort of world is this, where men learn to joke about rats and lice and dysentery?

They don’t joke about the men who drown. I believed this war held no fresh horrors for me, until I heard two men talking of what had happened to their friend at Langemarck last month. He was shot, but not badly enough to kill him outright. He fell into a shell hole, at least a yard deep, filled to the brim with mud and muck and gore, and they heard him drown. Heard him begging for help, but could do nothing.

When this war is over I want to go somewhere with no mud, a place where the people have never seen mud—where they have no word to describe it, even. Does such a place exist? In Arabia, perhaps, or the central plains of Asia? I’ve never been much of a traveler but I’m determined to go there one day.

Lilly peered at the tent’s ceiling, which had begun to sag near the corners. She tiptoed to Bridget’s cot and reached underneath it for the old broom handle her friend had managed to scavenge a few weeks ago, when the rain first began to seep through the tent’s worn canvas. Using the handle to push at several strategic spots, she heard the satisfying noise of water splashing harmlessly to the ground outside.

We just learned of the ceilidh that’s being planned. Would you believe Miss Jeffries has decided to relax her rules for the evening? Not only may we attend, but we may also dance with the men—providing, of course, that we ONLY dance. The slightest hint of anything more, and it’s back to quarters for all of us.

The other girls are very excited, naturally, and I suppose I am, too. Certainly there will be no shortage of dance partners for us all, even though I’m the only one who knows how to do the reels. I’ve promised to teach them the basics, if we have any time beforehand. I wonder if I’ll remember, for it’s at least fifteen years since Nanny Gee took me to a ceilidh on the estate.

Now it really is getting late, and I must finish this letter. Please don’t worry about replying straightaway—I know you will do so as soon as you have time. Until then, I remain,

Your devoted friend,

L

The letter, stretching to four closely penciled sheets of paper, was rather difficult to stuff into the envelope. Lilly tucked it into her jacket pocket, which she had kept on in deference to the chilly evening, tidied away her writing things in her locker, and extracted a book from its depths. She turned down the lantern and slipped outside, her footsteps hurried. Dusk had already begun to color the sky; the sun would set in less than an hour.

Matron was not on duty in the ward tent tonight. In her place, a younger woman sat at the nurses’ station. Nurse Greenhalgh. Not especially friendly, and fond of reminding the WAACs, whenever their paths crossed, that she had been “in the thick of it” since 1915. But she made no protest when Lilly entered. Perhaps she looked forward to an hour of
Sherlock Holmes
as much as her patients.

Ever since her arrival at the 51st, Lilly had made a point of spending her spare time, usually an hour or two after supper each evening, reading to patients in the ward tent. Some of the men were so badly injured that she couldn’t be certain if they even heard her voice. But most were grateful for the company, so much so that Lilly suspected she could have read from a telephone directory without complaint.

At the far end of the tent, well away from the men who were recovering from surgeries, was a group of patients who’d been at the 51st for several weeks; their injuries hadn’t allowed them to be moved on to Saint-Omer. The men—a wagon driver whose pelvis had been broken when a horse had fallen on him, and two Australians who had been burned by incendiary grenades—had evidently been waiting for her arrival. They smiled shyly, returning her “good evening” with soft-spoken hellos.

Lilly found a stool and placed it between the wagon driver’s cot and his neighbor’s. Then, opening her much-loved copy of
The Return of Sherlock Holmes,
she found the page where she’d stopped the night before, roughly halfway through “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.”

“When we left off yesterday evening,” she began, “Mr. Holmes had just told Dr. Watson that he meant to burgle Mr. Milverton’s house. Shall I reread a few paragraphs? Just to help us get back into the story?

“ ‘Watson, I mean to burgle Milverton’s house to-night.’

“I had a catching of the breath, and my skin went cold at the words, which were slowly uttered in a tone of concentrated resolution. As a flash of lightning in the night shows up in an instant every detail of a wild landscape, so at one glance I seemed to see every possible result of such an action—the detection, the capture, the honored career ending in irreparable failure and disgrace, my friend himself lying at the mercy of the odious Milverton.”

The ward tent was eerily quiet, the only sounds the scratch of the nurse’s pen, an occasional moan from one of the men, and the measured tones of Lilly’s voice. Quiet, and oddly peaceful.

She’d been reading for about a quarter of an hour when she heard footsteps, then the sound of someone sitting at the surgeons’ desk immediately behind her. She stifled the urge to turn, focusing instead on the page before her.

She lost her place, briefly, when the unseen doctor and Nurse Greenhalgh began to discuss some detail of a patient’s care. She knew, even before she heard his voice, that it would be Robbie.

When was the last time she’d seen him, heard him speak? Three days? Four? No matter. Soon she would finish the story, and then, only then, would she turn and look at him.

At last it was done: Milverton the blackmailer was dead, shot by one of his victims, and Mr. Holmes had refused to assist Inspector Lestrade in Scotland Yard’s efforts to find the murderer.

Wishing the men good night, she tidied away the stool and approached the desks that flanked the tent’s entrance. By a stroke of good luck, Nurse Greenhalgh was busy at the other end of the tent, conducting an inventory of the stores locker.

“Good evening, Captain Fraser.” Lilly pulled the letter from her jacket pocket and placed it on the desk, sliding it toward him without comment. He set down his pen and tucked the envelope under a pile of charts that lay before him.

“Good evening, Miss Ashford,” he answered, at last looking up at her. “I’m glad to hear that you and the other WAACs will be joining us at the ceilidh.”

“Everyone is very excited, Captain Fraser. These, ah, diversions come so rarely.”

What a ridiculous conversation; if only they—

“Captain Fraser? Could you assist me in lifting these crates at the top of the stores locker? We seem to have lost our orderlies.”

“I’ll be with you presently, Nurse Greenhalgh,” he replied. Then, in a whisper, “Promise to save me a dance?”

As he moved past her, she felt his fingers brush against hers. For an instant he held her hand, her pulse quickening at the warmth of his touch. And then it was over, and he was striding across the tent, coming to the aid of the nurse, and Lilly was walking away, too, out into the dying light of the setting sun.