The Diamond Waterfall (36 page)

She was able to be with him for his last evening. They went to a revival of
Floradora
at the Lyric.
“Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you?”
Her hand clutching his was chilled. Her lips kissing him good-bye, dry with anxiety.

She had volunteered for active service but did not know how long it would be before her turn came. Soon after Gib left, in May, Uncle Lionel sent a note to the hospital inviting her to dine with him. She thought mildly of letting bygones be bygones. And in the end went, but taking Marjorie with her. If he was surprised he did not show it. Marjorie thought him absolutely too fascinating—and yet another reason to envy and admire Alice.

Anxious days of the Gallipoli campaign. The long casualty lists. The relief that Gib had survived—so far. She wrote to him three or four times a week, however exhausted she was. She dreamed one night that they had run away together to be photographers. He told her he had a roving commission, and that was why they could not be married. They were among battlefields, not trenches, but some vast windy plain. Gib said,
“Here the ignorant armies clash by night.”
She grew suddenly afraid and knew she must not lose sight of him. But as he went about he did not look at her at all. She struggled with the heavy equipment, something like Roger Fenton had taken to the Crimea,
perhaps. Unwieldy, weighing her down. When she protested, pleaded, he spoke to her coldly. It was a Gib she had never seen before.

She woke shaking, dry-mouthed, terrified. A moment later the alarm bell went. As she lay quiet in the few minutes before getting up she knew for certain that even if she continued as a nurse, they must as soon as possible marry. All through the day the dream haunted her. She felt, with a cold fear, that it was a premonition of his death.

Not long after she heard from him that he was in hospital in Alexandria. He had had a fever and lost a lot of weight. But they must have patched him up because he was back with his regiment in September, having missed the August landings and battles.

That autumn she worked on a surgical ward on day duty. The sound of the gramophone was in counterpoint with the groans and shouts, often desperate, of men in pain.
“Oompah, oompah, put it up your joompah …”
Relentless beat. There was temporarily a Sister on the ward who wore a pained, harassed expression as she bustled about, finding fault. Her face relaxed only for the few seconds after she'd reprimanded someone. Suspected frivolity or a flirtatious manner, she was especially hard on. Alice she found difficult to fault. But then in the midst of the anxiety about Gib, when the news from the Dardanelles was very bad, “Nurse Firth,” she said one day, “Nurse Firth, please do try to
smile
more often. What do you think it is like for our boys, after all they've been through, to see a face such as yours?”

She was on night duty over Christmas and due for leave in the New Year, before almost certainly going abroad. She was in the ward making lampshades of red crinkled tissue when someone brought her the news that Gib, safely evacuated from Gallipoli, was back in England.

He had been brought out about the eighteenth, but was a sick man, weakened by dysentery and frostbite. He was for a while in hospital in First London General, so whenever she had a free day, she would spend as much of it as possible with him. Afterward he would have convalescent leave, and then surely in view of what he had been through, would not be sent abroad for a very long time?

She was shocked at his appearance, used as she was to such sights. But they had not been people she knew. This wasted body—dry-haired, dry yellow-tinged skin, eyes sunken—was Gib. Yet he had been worse before, he told her, when he had been on the hospital ship.

“I shall soon pick up,” he said, “so well looked after. All this milk, and rest, and good treatment. I shall soon be well.”

Hardly, she thought. It will take a little longer. But she said nothing. She found it difficult to talk to him. It was as if, with the lifting of her anxieties, there were some sort of vacuum. All made worse because they were never alone. She didn't think others in the ward eavesdropped—it was the possibility that they might. Once, snatching a hurried half hour with Gib, she coincided
with his uncle from Highgate. They politely discussed the present state of the conflict, and the ethics of gas warfare, across the dozing half-sitting Gib.

Marriage. Well, that was a little way off. First he must be out of hospital of course. They spoke of it a little, tentatively. She said, “What I wrote to you—what I said when you were out there, I would still like—it.”

“Of course,” he said, “just as soon as I'm well, and out of here. It's— what I wanted anyway. You know that.” His voice had the tired, patient, brought-from-a-distance quality she'd come to recognize among those she nursed from the same campaign.

“All right though, isn't it, that I should continue nursing? I could not just live at home. Waiting.”

“Of course,” he said.

She said that soon she would get leave—and if he were out of hospital, and better, or well enough, then …

“Of course.”

But there was to be no marriage for a while. Toward the end of January he seemed, she thought, a little improved. He told her that in three or four weeks he would be allowed home on convalescent leave. The news came too late to do either of them any good: her posting abroad had come through and she was to go to France after ten days' leave. She spent most of it with Gib. He was allowed some outings, an evening with his uncle. In some ways it was almost a happy time, walking slowly over an icy Hampstead Heath, holding his arm (his nurse, his mother). And he:

“You will be careful in France, Alice darling? Some of the hospitals— even base ones—there've been accidents.”

She would get leave in, at the very most, six months. It was most unlikely any board would pass him fit for overseas before then. In the meantime he would be safe, first at his home and then—somewhere in England. She liked to think of him in Flaxthorpe, visiting The Towers:

“The darkroom,” she said, “the little sitting room, all that's shut up, locked up now. I can't believe, can you, that we ever led such a life? That once we were to be—roving photographers. Now we see the world—but in what a different way.”

She remembered her dream then. Gooseflesh cold …

She crossed the Channel, together with Marjorie, who was in the same draft, one icy Tuesday night in early February. Delayed endlessly by fog. On the journey she was low-spirited and fearful, as if Gib were in danger rather than herself.

She and Marjorie were in a hospital near the village of Camiers, between Boulogne and the big base hospital at Étaples. The main railway line to Paris ran between them and the sea. The intensely cold weather, which even the
salt in the sea air could not seem to prevent, made it difficult to distinguish the landscape. The whole of the way from Boulogne to Étaples seemed to be made up of camps. Their hospital, like many others, was no more than a collection of huts with tents for wards. The nurses slept in bell tents. Crouching over an oil fire, or round a brazier in a hut, she thought she had never known such cold. And always the sound of the guns.

The same guns that she had heard fitfully in the south of England, in parts of East Anglia. A visiting professor had told Marjorie's father that the harsh weather now and the fitful summer just past could perhaps have been caused by the guns.

“All that vibration, he told Daddy, it changes the upper air, affects the climate, you see.”

The guns soon became part of their lives, so much so that a momentary lull could seem more noticeable than the sound itself. Sometimes there would be even a sort of vibration—an after-sound, as of ghost guns.

As the weeks wore on, she began to find Marjorie trying. She would like to have made other friends, but she seemed, whenever she had free time, doomed to her company. Marjorie admired and looked up to her. “You are wonderful,” she would say on every possible occasion. It seemed impossible to do or say anything to alter this opinion.
If she really knew,
Alice thought. Not admiring Marjorie herself, she found it difficult to feel warmed by this goggle-eyed worship. Oh, for a little acid in the mixture.

She wrote as often as ever to Gib. Perhaps they might begin to hope soon that something could be arranged. She expected leave at the end of June, perhaps a little later. He wrote that he had bought a motorcycle. A Douglas, complete with flapper bracket. She wrote back that she hoped he wasn't expecting her to be a passenger. Flapper, indeed! She asked him yet again if it was
all right
that she should stay on out here, nursing. “If you could see (but of course you already have) the suffering.”

There was little let-up in the number of casualties to be treated, even though, for the time being, there were no major offensives. Verdun, terrible as it was, belonged to the French. Rumored numbers of dead and wounded seemed to her scarcely credible. Surely, such a battle could not be repeated, death on such a scale happen again.

Out at sea there were brown-sailed fishing boats. Between the sea and the camp were the stretches of sand dunes, tufts here and there of coarse grass. As spring grew nearer the quality of the light on the water amazed her—a March wind blowing away sea mist to reveal watery greens and blues. Around the tents, the RAMC orderlies planted flowers, and sowed vegetables.

May, and Fräulein's letter. She sent it back to England, to Hal in Devon. It was more his concern, really. His friend suspected. A friend, if she remembered rightly, already eighteen months dead.

In June, expecting to get away before the end of the month, she learned that all leave had been canceled. Gib, stationed in the Midlands, had already arranged to come up to Flaxthorpe. Her letter telling him what had happened, and his with the good news, crossed.

There was to be a big offensive, a Push. The biggest yet. It was to have been Anglo-French, but the French were still tied up at Verdun, and would be able to man only some fifteen miles in the south. The Big Push was to be decisive. Draft upon draft of fresh troops arrived for the battle. The pick of Kitchener's army. Hal, thank God, not among them.

The German trenches were well defended—the barbed wire in front of them was yards deep. For the last week before the attack the British bombardment never halted—shell upon shell upon shell, aiming to breach the wire, and to terrify the enemy.

She and Marjorie were both sent to Le Havre during that last week. A real hospital this time, not a tent. Small, it had been made from the waiting room and the offices on the Quai d'Escale, where in happier days transatlantic liners had berthed.

On July the first, something, everything, went very wrong. Not only the battle itself, but the arrangements for the wounded. There were advance dressing stations the length of the line, while three empty hospital trains waited for the first wounded. Twenty more trains were on call—and soon needed. They were not sent for until too late. By nighttime thousands of wounded were still up the line: fortunately it was a warm night, since many were without shelter.

Over thirty-three thousand wounded came by train during the first few days. The base hospitals were overwhelmed. At Le Havre, where Alice waited, the trains ran straight onto the quay. Altogether, small as they were, their hospital took in some thousand wounded.

She thought she would never forget the plight, the sight of those wounded. Hastily applied field dressings, four days old. Wounds, worse even than any she'd yet seen. And as she worked, the smell of iodoform, ether, never out of her nostrils. All the time under the wards the trains rumbled, bringing wounded, returning to Rouen for more.

Gradually she learned what had gone wrong, that all the intense preliminary bombardment had not damaged the German trenches, so deep were they. Nor had the high shrapnel breached the wire. As the line advanced, wave after wave of men had been mown down.

Yet at home the headlines shrieked Success. Telegrams to relatives, not sent for nearly a week, delayed the truth. Only when the boats and trains in England began to unload these same incredible numbers of wounded did the truth dawn.

It was nothing to her now that her leave had been canceled. All thoughts of disappointment were crowded out. The windows of the ward open out onto
the balcony those hot July nights: out across the sea the white hospital boats arriving, departing, crossing each other, lights blazing. And on the quay the rows of stretchers, waiting. It was not time to think of marriage, just to be glad that Gib was safe in England—that Hal had not been sent out.

She lived intensely. She who had a lover, soon to be a husband, safe.
Safe.
She concentrated her energies into relieving pain, and when she could not do that, to consoling. Gentle hands, gentle voice … no longer sharp…. Reality, so peculiarly horrible, smell, sight, sound, was
what mattered
as nothing before had done. It would not do to grumble over happiness deferred. Later they will give us leave. A small sacrifice, no more. My, our, happiness, she thought, it is only postponed.

Honiton, Devon
27th May, 1916

Dear Miss Ibbotson,

Dear Olive,

Please don't tear this up without reading on. The letter enclosed with this is VERY IMPORTANT. I wasn't sure who to write to in the family and I thought you would be the least likely to destroy it without looking. I know my stepsister won't mind you having it. As you see, it's come a long way. It's a terrible letter really and I wasn't sure whether I should chance upsetting you more, raking everything up. Of course you can never have thought for a second Stephen had anything to do with that horrible business.
I want you to believe that I never did either.

I was very unhappy about it all when it happened and I know I was very silly to do what my family asked. But I don't expect you'll want to hear about it from me. It was just so sad when we were all such friends and then this horrible mix-up had to happen. I am very, very sorry about it. I don't see how this letter from Germany can make up for anything but it's only right you and your family should have it.