The Furies (36 page)

‘Ah, a clear day,' he said as he stood and shook the snow from his greatcoat, grimacing as he stretched his back and swung his arms.

‘I'm starving,' said Vera, who had woken as Elspeth climbed out of the hole and begun to stamp her feet against the numbness in her toes. The ponies were tethered together under the overhang, their faces and manes pitifully tinged with frost: one of them had been limping yesterday and Elspeth went across to brush the frost away from the poor creature's head, then gave each of the animals a handful of their dwindling supply of hay.

It was too cold to stand around for long, and after a quick breakfast of stale maize bread and melted snow they set off again. Her morale lifted by the clear blue sky, Elspeth soon felt warm from the exertion of walking, and her spirits rose even more as the pathway became steeper and she could instinctively feel they were nearing the summit.

All the rest of that morning and into the early afternoon they toiled upwards and onwards, travelling further west, deeper into Montenegro.

Then finally, late that afternoon, the mountains on both flanks fell away.

And Elspeth saw they were now completely out in the open, a deep blue sky bright above their heads, the path no longer enclosed.

They had reached the top of the pass!

She spun around: now she could see from one horizon to the other; the long undulating column of refugees coming up behind her, the mountain pass dropping away to Albania in front.

The wind on the exposed summit was strong now the mountainsides no longer sheltered them and Elspeth shivered as a blast of freezing air sliced through her greatcoat. With the fading winter sun at her back she hurried forward – Vera slightly ahead of her – and saw that the pass was widening into a snow-filled plateau.

‘I can see a hut!' Vera shouted.

Looking past Vera, Elspeth saw a wood cabin standing on its own in the middle of the icy plateau. The building was very basic: little more than a timber-planked box with sloping roofs and smoke spiralling from a chimney. But it was a proper, man-made shelter, and from the delicious aroma blowing towards her, Elspeth knew that food was being cooked inside.

The breeze was whipping ice particles across the exposed escarpment into their faces as they hastened towards the cabin. Elspeth ducked behind the lee of one wall to escape the chill: tied to a row of metal rings she saw half a dozen exhausted pack ponies and mules, heads down as they scavenged for scraps of hay that might have dropped from their last feed. Only a few yards away lay the butchered remains of a horse, the snow stained with blood, the rib cage pointing upwards, bones stripped of all meat.

After tethering the ponies to one of the rings and giving them the last of the hay, Elspeth followed the others inside.

‘
Dobro vece!
' – Good evening! – said a ruddy-faced Serbian soldier standing just inside the door. Elspeth walked past him and was immediately greeted with a warmly acrid fug of tobacco smoke, wood smoke, and cooking, as well as the heady buzz and chatter of people happy to be indoors, away from the elements. On the far side of the cabin roared an open wood fire, the area before it packed with soldiers and civilians holding skewers of maize and horsemeat in the flames.

‘I know Dr Curcin said the cabin could hold thirty people,' Monica said to Elspeth as the soldier at the door directed them to a far corner of the room. ‘But there must be twice that number here.'

‘Well, we're out of the cold,' replied Elspeth, ‘and the greater the number of people, the warmer we'll all be.'

She sat down to remove her boots and then began to massage her feet, trying to restore her circulation and bring some feeling back to her toes.

‘The smell of roast meat is driving me mad,' Vera said, squatting on the earth floor next to Elspeth. She was eyeing a soldier standing in front of the fire, two skewers of meat in his hands. Elspeth saw him look in their direction and then smile at Vera; Vera smiled back as she rose and walked across to him. A moment later she was on her way back to Elspeth with both of the skewers, the wood shiny with melted fat, the charred horsemeat still smoking. She carefully slid the meat from the sticks and handed a chunk to each of the women, before popping a small portion into her own mouth.

‘Ohh…' Vera's eyes rolled back in ecstasy. ‘I'm in heaven…'

Elspeth blew on her piece of meat to cool it and then took a bite: apart from maize bread and cold boiled rice, it was the first proper food she had tasted in more than a week and it was utterly divine.

They shared several more skewers of meat; and now nothing in the hut – not the numbness in her toes, the smoke that made her eyes water, the smell of tobacco, or their unwashed neighbours – could mar Elspeth's contentment. That night, even though they were packed together so tight she could scarcely move, she had her first proper night's sleep for almost a week.

***

When Elspeth went outside the next morning, she saw that the pony that had been limping the previous day was kneeling in the snow: it was only with the greatest difficulty she managed to coax it to its feet. She called Curcin out and they watched the poor animal hobble for only a few yards before it knelt in the snow again: Curcin looked at her and grimly shook his head. He went back inside the hut, reappearing a moment later with the ruddy-faced soldier who already had his rifle unslung. Elspeth looked away and then flinched at the sharp crack of the rifle shot. When she turned back, the pony was lying on its side, a crimson stain spreading rapidly through the snow beside it. The soldier leant his rifle against the side of the hut and pulled a knife from his belt.

‘I've asked him to cut enough meat to last us three days,' Curcin said to Elspeth, as the soldier knelt beside the pony. ‘The rest he'll distribute to the other refugees.'

She said nothing, but looked away as the soldier began his grisly task.

***

Elspeth had expected the journey down the mountain to be easier, but the iciness of the path made it more treacherous than she had anticipated. It took them a full day and a half to walk out of the pass, but finally they reached the valley at the bottom of the mountain, where they rested for a while, Elspeth looking back at the tattered refugees stumbling out behind her. She knew they still had another forty miles to go before they reached the town of Scutari, but they had made it through the most difficult part of the journey and now it was just a question of keeping on moving west towards the coast.

The following day they arrived at Lake Scutari, where they were forced to sell their surviving pony to the ferry master for passage to the town on the far shore. They had been told that a British Army supply team would be waiting for them in Scutari, the town where Florence Nightingale had made her nursing reputation during the Crimean War sixty years earlier. But when they arrived at the refugee reception area outside the town hall, only one British liaison officer was there to meet them.

‘I'm sorry, but this is all we have to spare,' the young lieutenant said, handing the women several boxes of army biscuits and one of tea leaves. Elspeth saw that the labels on the biscuit boxes were stamped ‘1901'.

‘Yes, I'm afraid it's surplus hardtack from the last Boer war,' he said to her with an embarrassed smile. ‘But they're still edible. If you soak the biscuits in hot tea, the weevils will come out and float to the surface where you can skim them away.'

‘Where can we stay tonight?' Elspeth asked.

‘The town is full of refugees,' he replied, ‘but you can sleep in the vestry of the town's Catholic church. My advice to you is to leave first thing tomorrow and carry on walking to the port of San Giovanni di Medua on the Adriatic coast. There's a British destroyer waiting in the harbour there and it'll ferry you across to Italy.'

The next morning they began the final stage of their journey. It was only twenty miles to San Giovanni di Medua, but it had begun to sleet again and soon the road was covered in mud, which hindered their progress. However, they were determined to reach the coast that day and so they kept on walking late into the evening. Then the sleet stopped and the skies cleared, and shortly before midnight the road crested a rise.

And there, lying sleek and dark under the light of a crescent moon, was the Adriatic sea, the lights on a destroyer in the harbour twinkling below them.

They had made it.

Gabriel stood patiently in front of the ticket counter inside Bludenz railway station. The station supervisor sitting at the counter took his time to study the travel permit, periodically glancing over Gabriel's head to count the Scottish women, who stood together in the middle of the station hall. Eventually, he handed the permit back to Gabriel.

‘Your papers seem to be in order, Captain Bayer. You're not going with them, are you?'

‘No. My escort duties finish here. We only need fifteen tickets.'

The supervisor counted out the tickets and slid them through the window on the counter. ‘You can tell them that the next train for Zurich will arrive at the westbound platform in eight minutes,' he said.

Gabriel thanked him and walked back to the women. As they gathered around him, he saw their expectant looks.

‘Not long to go now, ladies,' he said, handing a ticket to each of them. ‘The train will be here in a few minutes.'

Their excitement was almost contagious, Gabriel thought, grinning at the expressions of glee that now enveloped him. He followed the women out onto the westbound platform and then stood for a moment by himself at the platform edge, looking along the railway line towards Switzerland. It was a clear day, and in the far distance the slopes of the Alps glistened with snow; the sky above the mountain peaks was a pure cobalt blue. It would be a good day to travel, Gabriel thought, glancing enviously at the women around him, all of them visibly delighted at the prospect of leaving the war zone for neutral territory.

A wave of regret swept through him: he would miss the women and their commitment to the sick and wounded, their willingness to put a patient's needs ahead of their own, regardless of that patient's nationality. By comparison, his own work as an army surgeon seemed tainted; for after he had seen the women safely onto the Zurich train, he would have to return to his unit on the Italian front and play his part in a war that seemed increasingly pointless.

Standing a few yards away from him, Dr Inglis was talking with Dr Chesney and Dr Wakefield, their battered leather holdalls resting by their feet. Further along the platform Sylvia was standing with Aurelia, and the image of the two women conjured a memory of Elspeth. The memory filled him with pain and so he forced it from his mind, instead proudly reflecting on the fact he had managed to safely escort the women this far.

Because their departure from Krusevac had not been without incident.

Gabriel had reserved a railway carriage for the first part of their journey to Belgrade, but they were forced to spend the night in the station hall when the onward train was cancelled at the last minute. And then – as Gabriel feared might happen – they came upon a company of rough-speaking German infantry also waiting in transit at the station.

Several of the men appeared to have been drinking and started to pester the women. However, the officer in command – an arrogant-looking major – had only laughed when Gabriel asked him to control his men.

‘Relax, Captain: my men are only having a little fun,' the major had said with a patronising smile.

But when the pestering turned to mocking and one of the infantrymen tried to touch one of the VADs, Gabriel had reacted furiously. ‘My orders are sanctioned by German High Command,' he had said angrily, ‘and if you do not control your soldiers, major, I will personally report you to Berlin.'

Reluctantly the major had called his men to order, but Gabriel had spent a restless night and was relieved when they were able to take the onward train early the next morning.

From Budapest they travelled to Vienna, where the women spent several days in a hotel on the Ringstrasse while Gabriel obtained the necessary documents for the next stage of their journey: a train to Innsbruck and then another to Bludenz, in the Austrian Alps.

Here – by order of the Swiss authorities – they were required to wait several days under typhus quarantine. Eventually, Gabriel received word they were clear to undertake the final stage of their journey: crossing the Swiss border to Zurich, and then to Le Havre, in France, where a ferry would convey them to Southampton.

Gabriel flipped open the lid of his pocket watch – only four minutes until the train was due. He was suddenly aware of Aurelia walking past him, and looking along the platform again he saw that Sylvia was standing by herself, staring towards the mountains, alone with her thoughts. He slipped the watch back inside his greatcoat and walked towards her.

‘They're magnificent, aren't they,' he said, as he arrived by her side.

She turned and smiled at him, the collar of her coat tucked high under her chin, her eyes green and steady below the fringe of blonde hair underneath her hat. In spite of her frayed uniform she looked beautiful, and the thought he might never see her again felt unexpectedly painful.

‘Yes, they are,' she replied. ‘But I shall be glad to leave the mountains behind.'

He nodded, and then took a deep breath. ‘Your train will be here in a minute…I just wanted to say thank you again for looking after me when I had typhus.'

‘Oh, that's quite alright.' She thought for a moment. ‘It seems such a long time ago now.'

‘Well, anyway…I wish you luck for the future.'

Her look became serious. ‘I'm sure we'll meet again, you know: someday, after the war is over.'

‘Whenever that will be,' he said, wryly.

‘Well one day it will end, and then we can all get back to our normal lives.'

A normal life: he could hardly remember what his had been like. ‘What will you do when you get back to England?' he asked.

She smiled. ‘I'll spend some time with my parents. It's been hard work, so I'll allow my mother to pamper me for a while. I also need to find Vera, of course, to let her know about…' She faltered, but then quickly recovered. ‘And then I'll come back to Serbia, if I can. The British and French in Salonika will retake Serbia next year, or the year after that. I would very much like to come back and finish what we started.'

He smiled at her confident expectation of an Allied victory, but then realised her certainty was probably justified: he could not see Austria and Germany winning this war.

‘I'm sure you will be back,' he said.

‘And what will you do?' she asked him.

‘Well…' He chewed his lip and shrugged. ‘I must go back to the Italian front. And if I survive—'

‘You will survive,' she said firmly, and he smiled at her optimism.

‘Alright –
after
I survive, after the war is over…well…' He paused. ‘I haven't thought that far. I don't know what I'll do. Find a job, somewhere in Vienna, I suppose.'

She smiled but said nothing in reply, and he stood before her in an awkward silence. Despite her confident prediction that they would meet again, he knew this might be the last time he ever saw her. Soon they would soon be separated by several hundred miles, several countries, her language, his culture. He suddenly wanted to open his heart to her, to tell her how she and Elspeth had changed his life, of how the brutality of the war had affected him, but the selfless humanity of the Scottish women had healed him—

A piercing blast of a steam whistle echoed along the rail track. He saw Sylvia's eyes light up with excitement as she looked east along the railway line: he turned, saw the approaching locomotive and realised that all he might have said to her, would have to stay unspoken.

‘Gather round, ladies,' Dr Inglis called across. ‘We must stick together; all try and get inside the same carriage.'

The other women had already picked up their bags and were walking towards Dr Inglis as the noise of the approaching train grew louder, and then it arrived with a screech of brakes and a cloud of coal smoke and steam. A guard dismounted the rear of the train as several carriage doors clattered open and a scattering of passengers climbed down onto the platform. Gabriel saw that most of the carriages were occupied, except for one near the front of the train, which was empty except for an old lady sitting by herself.

‘This carriage is free, Dr Inglis,' he called across.

Followed by the other women, Dr Inglis hurried towards him. There was a step below the carriage door, and Gabriel held his hand out to assist the women as they climbed up into the compartment.

The first was Dr Wakefield, who gave him a smile of thanks as she stepped inside. Next came Dr Inglis – who again expressed her gratitude for all his help – followed by Dr Chesney. Then Lydia, Aurelia, Monica and the other VADs and nurses, who wished him luck and hoped he would make it unscathed through the remainder of the war. And finally Sylvia: she took his hand like the others, but paused before going in.

‘Look after yourself, Gabriel,' she said and then leant forward to kiss him lightly on one cheek. He smiled self-consciously as she turned away and disappeared inside the carriage.

He heard a whistle blow and slammed the carriage door shut behind her, then stepped back onto the platform. The guard waved his flag at the driver, who was leaning out of the cab at the front of the locomotive, and the carriage jolted into motion. Loss gnawed strongly in the pit of Gabriel's stomach as he realised this was probably the last time he would ever see these women.

The train had travelled halfway down the platform and was slowly picking up speed, when the window in the door of the women's carriage slid down and Sylvia's face appeared. She shouted something, but Gabriel could not hear above the noise of the train and so he broke into a run, sprinting along the platform towards her. But the train was accelerating and the platform end approaching fast…

‘Haven't…address…' Gabriel could make out only a few fragments of Sylvia's speech before her words were scattered by the rush of air. He stopped running as he arrived at the end of the platform, then held up his hands and gave an exaggerated shrug to let her know he hadn't understood. He saw her shrug back at him and then she waved; he waved back, watching as she disappeared back through the window again, the train growing smaller as it headed west towards the Swiss Alps.