The Furies (17 page)

But surprisingly, at the sight of the prison orderlies' grief, Elspeth felt her spirits rise; she had come to like the Austrians, with their jokes and light-hearted manner. She saw the tender care they gave the wounded Serbian soldiers; to think that only a few weeks ago these men had been trying to kill and maim each other. It seemed absurd, and the futility of war made her angry. Good, she thought – better angry than depressed.

The funeral cortege passed through a wooden archway and the gate of the churchyard. The coffin was laid on a trestle beside the open grave, and Elspeth listened as the priest incanted the Serbian funeral rites in a gloomy monotone. Dr Soltau gave a brief eulogy before Dr Curcin stepped forward.

‘Dear Scottish ladies, I know I speak for all the people of Serbia when I say that our hearts are broken at the loss of your sister, who died as valiantly as any soldier sent into battle. You have travelled here from your homeland to help save the lives of our countrymen and women. Your sacrifice, and the ultimate sacrifice of your beloved sister, will not go unrecognised.'

He stepped back from the graveside and nodded at the four prison orderlies. They lifted the coffin from the trestle and, using tapes to support its weight, began to lower it into the grave. As the pine casket disappeared from view, the band began to play another melancholy lament, and the emotion of the moment brought a lump of sorrow to Elspeth's throat. She looked across at Vera – saw her swallowing hard, also trying to control her grief – then turned back to see the tapes pulled up as the coffin reached the bottom. The priest picked up a handful of earth and scattered it into the grave; and then an orderly line of soldiers, prisoners and nurses formed and began to pass by the burial hole, each person bending to pick up some soil and drop it on the coffin. Elspeth joined the queue and released her handful of black earth into the grave, and heard the dull, hollow sound as it struck the lid of the coffin.

As she walked away from the grave, she felt a hand touch her elbow and turned around.

‘I still can't believe that Louisa's dead,' whispered Sylvia, her voice quavering, her eyes bloodshot and puffy.

Elspeth knew that Sylvia had been strongly affected by the loss – the pair had worked closely together for the past month – and as they left the churchyard, she simply put an arm around Sylvia's shoulder, pulled her close, nodded her understanding. ‘I was upset about it at first,' Sylvia continued. ‘Now I'm just angry.'

‘But we mustn't forget that Louisa helped save Frances Wakefield's life,' Elspeth replied. In spite of wearing the calico uniforms and gloves, several of the women at the typhus hospital had caught the infection, including Dr Wakefield. However, she had survived, thanks to Louisa's and Sylvia's nursing skills. ‘You must look at the good that Louisa did during her life.'

‘I know, but still…it's hard to accept that she's gone.'

Elspeth gave Sylvia's shoulder a squeeze. ‘Let's get back to work. I've found that it's the best thing for clearing one's mind of grief or anger.'

‘Lieutenant Schwann requests that you come over to the stables immediately, Captain.'

‘What's the problem, Klaus?'

‘The lieutenant thinks we may have a case of typhus, sir.'

Gabriel, sitting on an upturned wooden box inside the surgical tent, sat bolt upright and then quickly put down his pen and closed the ledger he had been updating. As Klaus led him outside and across the paddock towards the stable block, Gabriel felt a steel finger of fear pierce his stomach; he had been worried about the possibility of typhus for some time now.

As he had predicted, their Serbian captors had turned the paddock and former aid station into a prisoner of war camp; rolls of barbed wire had been placed inside the hedgerow and watch towers were erected, while Serb guards patrolled the camp borders. As senior surgeon in the camp, Gabriel had organised the digging of latrines and then tried to find a covered sleeping spot for every man, either in the stables or one of the hospital tents; no easy task as there were now more than five hundred prisoners in the camp.

Gabriel had been summoned to meet with Major Dragas, the Serbian officer in command. Due to the atrocities committed by some Austrians during the invasions, there was a fear of retribution; that prisoners might be tortured or worse. But Gabriel had found Dragas to be a reasonable man: food was scarce for everybody – Serbians included – yet the prisoners' rations were no worse than those they had received from their own unreliable Supply Division. However, Dragas had removed all the aid station's surgical instruments – they could be used as weapons to aid escape, he had told Gabriel. Dragas was also unable to provide the camp with any medical supplies or cleaning materials, like soap or bleach.

Very soon, as Gabriel had feared, the lack of proper washing facilities meant that everybody was afflicted with lice.

And with lice came the possibility of typhus.

As he arrived at the stable block, Gabriel saw a large group of Austrian soldiers standing outside, while Peter Flieger lingered in the doorway, a worried expression on his bespectacled face. ‘I've evacuated the stables, but Lord knows where we're going to put all these men,' he said.

‘Where's Karl?' Gabriel asked.

‘He and Thomas are with the soldier in the stall at the far end.' He pointed along the length of the wooden building.

Inside the darkness of the stables, a musty smell of old hay and horses lingered in the air as Gabriel walked towards the last stall. Berger and Schwann were standing over a soldier lying in a lozenge of daylight that fell through the stall window onto the straw-covered floor. Schwann said nothing, but simply bent down and pulled away the thin blanket covering the soldier's body. The man was in the throes of a rigor – teeth clenched, body shaking, skin gleaming with sweat – but it was the sight of the rash that was like a slap in the face to Gabriel. He'd seen this distinctive mottling before, in cases of isolated, sporadic typhus in peasants from the poorer parts of Bosnia. But now, in the squalid conditions inside the camp, he knew that a case like this might herald the start of an outbreak of epidemic typhus.

Gabriel looked across at Schwann and gave a sombre nod. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I'm afraid that's typhus.'

***

Two weeks later, in the camp of five hundred men, more than three hundred had caught the infection and almost two hundred of them had died.

Gabriel had tried hard to prevent the epidemic. He had ordered the first patient to be nursed in isolation in a tent in one corner of the field. However, the next day a further three prisoners who had slept in the same stall presented with fever and skin rash, and again typhus was diagnosed.

The sick men were placed in the same isolation tent as the first case and a panicked Gabriel requested an urgent meeting with Dragas. But the major was unable to provide assistance – no lime or bleach or other disinfecting materials were available – and all that Gabriel could do was quarantine the stable block and arrange for the straw to be burnt. The following day a further seven men who had slept in the stables fell ill, as well as two others who had helped burn the straw. The day after that, another nineteen men presented with symptoms, among them some who had been sleeping in the tents, suggesting the disease had spread outside the stables. And then the men began to die: the first case, and then another seven of the next ten infected men. Gabriel established a second typhus tent, and then a third, quarantining them to one corner of the field, an area that grew bigger every day. But the outbreak continued and every day more cases were diagnosed; every day more men died. Gabriel was almost overwhelmed by the feeling of fear and helplessness, of being unable to do anything to stop the horror of the epidemic.

Initially they dug separate graves in a field outside the camp, but the number of men dying rose, such that every morning they had to dig a fresh pit to bury the bodies of men who had died overnight. The death rate was particularly high amongst the medical orderlies: eight caught the infection and all of them perished. Gabriel had insisted that the remaining orderlies inspect their clothes thrice daily for lice and kill them using a candle flame run along the seams. Schwann had also heard that a mixture of Vaseline and paraffin rubbed onto the skin might deter the lice, so every day they smeared the pungent mixture onto their bodies before starting their rounds.

However, these measures did not work and the doctors began to fall ill. The first was Thomas Berger.

Gabriel felt numb as he watched the young doctor struggle with the infection, unable to help except to administer what little aspirin they had left. After a week of rigors Berger fell into a coma. Gabriel was at his side, powerless to do anything as he sank deeper into a void from which he could not be retrieved. Of the thirteen original medical staff in the camp, only Gabriel, Schwann, Flieger and Klaus were still alive. Dear Lord, thought Gabriel, are we all going to die?

By the end of February – after eight harrowing weeks of the epidemic – Gabriel began to develop a curiously fatalistic attitude to the infection. He found that he had lost his fear of falling ill and instead had become intrigued to know whether – if he were to catch typhus – he could survive it or not. His rational brain told him this was a stupid notion, as every medical worker so far infected had died. But he did not fight the idea, because in some way it comforted him: before the war started he had never considered he might die young, had always had a strong sense of destiny about his life, which did not include dying from fever in a remote, muddy Serbian field. Yet now, with death a strong possibility, he realised that there were many more unpleasant ways to die than slipping into a fever-induced coma and drifting away in your sleep.

And then that morning, Schwann had presented with a fever. Initially there was no sign of a skin rash and Gabriel had hoped it might be some other infection, but during the afternoon a blotchy eruption appeared on Schwann's neck and chest and Flieger agreed it was likely to be early-stage typhus. Schwann had insisted he be isolated with the other sufferers in one of the typhus tents.

It was just after midnight as Gabriel approached the tent where Schwann had been taken. The glimmer of a candle was dimly visible through the canvas and Gabriel ducked his head through the entrance-flap to see Flieger asleep at a table, his head resting on the table-top, wax from a candle dripping perilously close to his hair.

‘Peter, wake up,' Gabriel said as he shook him. ‘You'll set yourself on fire.'

Flieger lifted his head with a start. ‘Oh, sorry, Gabriel,' he said, removing mud-stained glasses with one hand, rubbing his eyes with the other. ‘I must have drifted off.'

‘How's Karl?'

Flieger yawned as he put his glasses back on. ‘I examined him a few minutes ago. The rash is all over his torso now – it's definitely typhus.'

‘His temperature?'

‘Forty degrees an hour ago.'

‘Have we anything to bring it down?'

‘No. There's no aspirin or camphorated phenol left.'

Gabriel chewed his lower lip. ‘Where is he?'

Two lines of sleeping men lay on the floor of the tent, and Flieger pointed along the length of one of the rows. ‘That's him at the back – with Sparmacher.'

Following Flieger's finger, Gabriel saw Klaus kneeling by a man at the far end of the tent. He walked towards them, treading cautiously between the rows of sleeping men, careful to avoid stepping on a splayed arm or leg. Arriving at Schwann's side, Gabriel saw that the young physician was in the throes of a rigor, his body in spasms, his face a rictus grin as Klaus mopped his brow with a cloth. The tremors gradually settled and Schwann looked up at Gabriel, blinking several times before he recognised him.

‘Oh…Gabriel…I'm s-sorry,' Schwann said through teeth that still chattered from the rigor. ‘Peter and I th-th-think it's definitely t-typhus.'

Gabriel smiled encouragingly at him. ‘Don't worry, Karl. We'll get you something for the fever. You're going to be alright.' Schwann tried to smile back at Gabriel, a faint-hearted effort and more of a grimace as he was overtaken by the residua of the tremors. His face was taut, like a bed-sheet pulled tight, and there was a sallow look around his eyes that Gabriel had seen before – in Thomas Berger. He simply
had
to get some drugs for the fever or Karl would also die.

As he walked back to his own tent, Gabriel decided he would go and speak to Major Dragas at first light. But as that was several hours away, he would first try and catch a few hours' sleep.

***

A gentle breeze caressed the side of Gabriel's face and the heat of the sun on his back was strong as he stood on the shoreline of Worthersee Lake. The smell of pine resin was strong, and on the far side of the shimmering turquoise lake Gabriel recognised the forests near his hometown of Klagenfurt. He knew this place so well – had spent many a happy day here as a youth – and felt wonderfully warm and relaxed. On a floating wooden platform ahead of him a group of young men and women were sunbathing, some diving into the water with a splash and then laughing as they swam back to the shoreline.

He heard his name called, and, turning to look along the thin shingle strip by the edge of the lake, saw two figures sitting at a small café table. Facing him was Chief Fischer, smoking his pipe. Sitting opposite the chief was a woman in a long white dress, her head hidden by a summer parasol. On the table was a tiered wedding cake from which, with her free hand, the woman picked pieces of icing sugar and marzipan. The chief removed the stem of the pipe from his mouth and called again.

‘I said hello, young Gabriel,' he shouted. ‘Come and greet your bride.'

A café table on the shoreline? This made no sense…

‘Hurry, Gabriel,' the chief said. ‘Time waits for no man.'

Gabriel strode towards the figures, the shingle beneath his boots crunching with each footfall, his heart pounding as he approached. The woman slowly turned around and Gabriel saw with a shock that instead of a face, there was a bony skull: the grinning, empty face of death.

He woke from the dream with a jolt, breathing fast, his forehead damp with perspiration, the sensation of warmth already gone, replaced by cold discomfort in his back and legs. He levered himself off the hard ground and tried to confront the images from the nightmare, which – like water sieving through a colander – were already fading from his brain.

The dream had quite obviously about death, that much was clear. So far Gabriel had managed to suppress his fears – he would not have been able to function as a doctor if he hadn't. But the nightmare told him that fear still lurked inside him. The chief had wanted Gabriel's destiny to be marriage, but was it to be death instead?

The icy ground below his body disrupted his thoughts. He had taken to sleeping on the floor of the operating tent, as the doctor's sleeping tent was now filled with typhus cases, but even with a groundsheet underneath him, he was still chilled to the marrow. He stood and stretched – trying to ease the ache from his back and legs – then stepped carefully towards the entrance flap and went outside.

Dawn must have broken only a few minutes earlier, and in the early morning gloom he could just see the entrance gate on the eastern edge of the camp. Two guards were on duty; the smoke from their cigarettes intermingled with steam from their breath as they stood by the gate. It was devilishly cold, Gabriel thought, shivering as he drew the collar of his greatcoat tight underneath his chin and carefully made his way over the icily rutted ground towards the gate. In the early half-light it was difficult to see the undulations, and he trod cautiously, testing each step for firmness underfoot, his boots occasionally crunching through ice-filled puddles. The guards eyed him as he approached.

He told them he needed to speak to Major Dragas urgently, and watched as one of them walked to the farmhouse that had been requisitioned as the commandant's office. Gabriel waited, stamping his feet to keep warm, flexing his fingers and toes as he strove to drive away the cold that seemed lodged deep inside his bones. After a while the guard returned, accompanied by two other soldiers. The gate was opened and Gabriel motioned through. Walking him towards the farmhouse, the two escorting soldiers keep their distance from Gabriel, their rifle barrels pointed towards him in case he might accidently brush against them. The Serbs had stopped patrolling inside the camp several weeks ago and it was obvious to Gabriel that they were terrified of a disease that was a far more serious threat to them than the Austrian army had ever been.

His previous meetings with Dragas had always taken place indoors, but on this occasion Gabriel was asked to wait in the courtyard between the farmhouse and barn. Several minutes later the major came down the steps of the house, buttoning his greatcoat as he stopped two metres away from Gabriel.