A stranger to herself, p.27
A Stranger to Herself, page 27
In her letter Sophie also gave the news that Pamela was well, as usual. Jo-Jo, now eight, had developed measles, but Pamela had not caught it. Food was difficult to obtain – ‘no sugar last week, no flour at all’. She thought that now the Americans had entered the war and there was such hope of victory Violet might, at last, contemplate coming home. Her own health, she said, was not very good and Caroline was making more frequent trips to London which she was sure did her good, but increased her own burdens a good deal. ‘The work you do is vitally important, I know, dear Violet, but surely you have done enough?’ she wrote. ‘I feel sure, too, that Frederick would be much reassured if he knew that you were safe, and playing your part in guarding the welfare of the family at home.’
Violet folded the letter and put it in her pocket. ‘Time to face men’s surgical again,’ she said to Mabel.
The staff nurse handed her a note which was lying on the ward table when they came in. ‘I hope you won’t make a practice of having your correspondence delivered here by the American army,’ she said, handing it to Violet, adding, ‘I’m glad to see you’ve solved the problem of the quarrel between your cap and your hair. It’s a radical solution, but it seems to work. Before you rush to the sluice to read your letter, I should like the dressings on this list dealt with punctiliously.’
As Mabel and Violet checked the trolley containing carbolic, surgical spirit, gauze, bandages, tweezers, scissors and pins, she told them, ‘Three lorry-loads of wounded, and two farm carts are on their way here from the dressing stations at the front. The lories will arrive this afternoon, the carts in the evening. No off-duty till further notice, I’m afraid. Though I think you two have had yours. Matron’s not pleased,’ she added.
‘Who told?’ Mabel demanded in an undertone as they went down the ward with the clattering trolley. ‘I bet it was that Holy Joe in bed eight. I’ll take his stitches out for him if I find out he ratted.’
‘He’ll suffer enough when he has to get up to make room for the others,’ said Violet, also in an undertone. ‘At least half of these men are going to have to be promoted to convalescence.’
‘Yes,’ said Mabel. ‘There’ll be about a hundred and fifty men coming in, and some’ll be very bad. Might be gas cases too. I’ll bet they put you back in the operating theatre again. No one likes to admit it, but you’re better than some of the trained nurses.’
‘I don’t like it there,’ said Violet, feeling a supporting warmth through her apron pocket where her letter from the American camp was lying.
‘Here it doesn’t matter what you like,’ said Mabel, stopping the trolley. ‘Well, Private Betterton, I hope you’ve produced a nice lot more pus for us today. We’re fed up with having nowt to do.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, nurse,’ said the private, a small Yorkshire pitman who had been blown up by a faulty detonator in a tunnel he was mining near the German lines, ‘I’m healing nicely, thank you very much.’
‘Thanks for the news,’ said Mabel, whipping back the bedclothes. ‘Of course, you’d know first, having undone your own bandages in the night.’
‘And so would you, if you knew it was the difference between them trying to send you back and not going.’
‘Going back, it looks like,’ said Mabel, bandaging.
‘Not me,’ he told her.
‘Oh, yes, you will,’ she said.
‘Oh, no I won’t.’
‘You’d better start getting headaches, then,’ she said. ‘Because you’ll be up today to make room for others, and after that it’ll be back in the lorry and off to do your bit again.’
‘Is that right?’ he asked.
‘As one good Yorkshireman to another, that’s the way of it,’ she told him. ‘So if you don’t want to go, headaches are the answer. You’d best start clutching your head and moaning.’
‘Why should he go, and leave a widow and five children?’ she said fiercely to Violet, but Violet wasn’t there. She’d abandoned the trolley while Mabel was bandaging, and was standing in the sluice-room by the big enamel sink, reading her note from Landry Thomas.
There’s been a cancellation of previous plans, so, dear Violet, can you meet me at the Cafe des Anges in St Luc this evening? I’ll be waiting from seven o’clock onwards.
Ever,
Landry
Violet’s heart was thudding. And she knew the chances of getting off duty that night, with lorry-loads of wounded coming in, was very slight. ‘Oh,’ she said aloud, in fury. ‘Oh.’
‘Violet,’ came Mabel’s voice from the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’ Violet thrust the note in her apron pocket. ‘Come on, Violet – you know perfectly well when we’ve done the temperatures, the bandages and medicine trolley we’re going to have to move everybody, and do all the transfer lists and change all the beds. If we get behind now it’ll be murder later on.’
From then on they were very busy, producing crutches and wheelchairs, loading the nearly recovered into lorries heading for the port, where they would be shipped home, and preparing the ward for the new patients. They had half an hour to bolt down a meal of sausages and mashed potatoes, and a cup of strong tea. They rallied themselves for the next emergency, as they had so often before. Violet often wondered how long they could all go on. By two thirty they were surveying a ward of thirty beds, containing only ten patients, all of whom had been warned by the staff nurse to cause as little trouble as possible. ‘All ready for the party to start, now,’ said Mabel.
At three the first lorry rolled in. After one look at the interior, Matron, a small, dark woman who, Mabel said, seemed to be worked by silent clockwork and springs, not flesh and blood, ordered a tent, with an operating table, to be set up on the grass opposite number one operating theatre, and told Violet to go to number one, so an experienced nurse, who could cope better with primitive arrangements, could be put in the tent to assist the surgeon there.
Five minutes later the surgeon at the number one theatre, Dr Swann, two nurses and Violet, were looking at the first man on the table. He was half-conscious and bleeding from a head wound, blood had soaked his tunic from his chest downwards. He could hardly breathe. ‘Gassed,’ said Dr Swann. ‘A whiff of ether and get an orderly to hold him down. Levine, you’ll have to clean up his head while we do the rest.’
One of the nurses cut the tunic and shirt from top to bottom, revealing five or six bullet wounds. ‘They’re still in there,’ said Swann. A nurse came up to where Violet was and put ether on a pad. ‘Not much,’ said. Swann. ‘He won’t be able to take it. You’d better come here and hold him,’ he told an orderly. ‘Hang on to his feet.’ He added, ‘Have any of the men you’re moving been anywhere near a dressing station?’
‘No, doctor,’ said the orderly. ‘My God,’ he said, as he cut back the soldier’s jacket and shirt, then made an incision in the man’s chest. The man moaned, and began to move about. The orderly had him by his shoulders, until he became unconscious.
Dr Swann dropped the last bullet on the floor. ‘We’ll need five minutes between patients, to clear up,’ he said to the senior nurse, ‘otherwise it’ll be an abattoir.’
She nodded. He found another bullet. Violet, holding pad after pad of gauze to the man’s head, said, ‘Doctor, his skull’s shattered. The bleeding won’t stop.’
‘Describe the wound, nurse,’ said one of the other nurses, holding the moaning man to the operating table.
‘Two inches of cranium over the left ear shot away,’ she said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything in the wound.’
‘Pack it, then,’ she said. ‘Then bandage.’
Violet, cutting away the man’s soaked hair, packing gauze into the hole in his skull, hoped she was right that there were no shrapnel fragments in his head. If there were, it looked as if they’d be staying there. Halfway through, his head stopped moving. He’d lost consciousness, or died. She went on. Swann, breathing hard, discovered another bullet and murmured, ‘Only one to go…’ Violet finished the packing of the man’s skull and began bandaging, knowing he must still be alive. But just after his chest had been sewn up, he died. Orderlies sped his body away as the nurses cleared the floor of pieces of uniform, gauze and bullets. Violet thrust all the pieces of bloodstained gauze round her feet into the bin, got a bucket, mopped the floor. Dr Swann, who had been examining the men on stretchers outside, where nurses were trying to get them ready to be operated on, came in a minute or two later, as they were still cleaning up, too busy even to speak to each other. ‘Ready?’ he asked. A nurse shook her head and went on cleaning the operating table with huge sweeps of her arm. Violet put the lid on the bin with a clang.
‘Quietly, Levine,’ said a nurse automatically, taking the instruments from the steriliser. ‘Ready now, Dr Swann.’
This man had had his boot removed and his trouser leg cut off, revealing a shattered knee and a pulped leg, where fragments of bone protruded. He lay there, staring at the ceiling, in his stained uniform. ‘Leg off above the knee. Ether,’ said Swann. As a nurse held the pad over the soldier’s nose, Swann said, ‘I’m sorry’ to the man, who had probably already lost consciousness. Picking up his scalpel he said, ‘The dressing stations can’t manage the number of wounded. One’s been completely knocked out by a shell. They’re loading them into vehicles just as they are. These men have come sixty miles today. It’s a miracle more aren’t dead.’
And so the afternoon went on. It became hotter, the smell of fouled uniforms, stiff with clotted blood, urine and faeces, of pus and fresh blood coming from the wounds, was more suffocating. Ether fumes were not leaving the room quickly enough, on this windless May day. ‘We can’t go on. We’ve got to stop,’ muttered one of the nurses. It was as she spoke that Swann, who had just sawed through the ankle bone of a boy of no more than sixteen – and Violet, dizzy, knew he was dead, and that he was her own dead brother, Frank – dropped to the floor.
‘Oh, my God,’ said one of the nurses. Violet, standing next to the doctor’s prone body, picked the scalpel from the bloody table and cut down to the table through the flesh and skin of the boy’s ankle. The foot, already red, swollen with infection, fell off the end of the table, on to the floor, on to her shoe, near Dr Swann. She stood staring at both. ‘Orderly!’ called the nurse opposite her. ‘Orderly!’ Her voice cracked but she began to stitch the stump. The orderly’s mouth dropped open when he saw Dr Swann on the floor. A second later he was dragging the doctor through the mess and out of the hut.
Outside, Violet and the orderly had laid him on the grass, near six soldiers, with blankets over them, on stretchers waiting for surgery. A nurse came out of the door of the tent opposite, dragging a bin overflowing with bloodstained gauze and bandages, saw the doctor lying there, said, ‘Criminy!’ left the bin and went back to the tent. Matron came up, summoned, it must have been, by instinct from inside a nearby ward where soldiers were being put to bed, and said to Violet, as if she were responsible, ‘What happened?’
‘He collapsed. Probably the ether,’ she said.
‘And the patient?’ asked the Matron.
‘He’d finished the operation – nearly.’
Matron went straight into the operating theatre, came out, and said, ‘Thank God you all kept your heads.’ Dr Swann was coming round, trying to remember what happened. The Matron bent over him and said, ‘You collapsed, doctor. The ether.’
‘The man …’ he said.
‘You finished the operation. The nurses put in stitches.’ She glared commandingly at Violet. Violet took a deep breath and said, ‘Yes, Dr Swann.’
Matron straightened up and said, ‘Well, these premises don’t ventilate properly. Go back inside, nurse, and clear up what you can. Then you’ll take an hour’s break, have a meal, go for a walk, or lie down. Back on duty in an hour. Clean uniforms.’
Violet went back to the hut. ‘And do not faint there,’ Matron’s voice came after her. Orderlies were carrying the unconscious boy out. Violet told the other nurses what Matron had said, adding, ‘She ordered us not to faint.’
‘Well, if those are the orders, we won’t,’ said one of the nurses muzzily.
After the meal Violet detached herself from the group, due back in the operating theatre in half an hour, and went to walk along the cliff beside the hospital. In the field beyond it she sat down. She was tired, and after another two hours of this gruelling day she would be more tired, but the bus into St Luc passed the hospital at eight, and she’d decided to be on it. They could sack her, send her home, afterwards, for all she cared. She was going to meet Landry, even if the whole army tried to stop her. When the farm carts with the wounded in them arrived, she thought, half the men would be dead anyway, and others might be gas cases, and wouldn’t need surgery. In any case, she was leaving No 53 hospital tonight and going to the village to meet Landry. That was that. She stood up, looked over the sea towards England, heard the gulls crying and the distant thudding of mortars and bombardment, brought by the wind. She went back to the canteen and found the others; then they walked through the huts and the wounded men sitting on the grass to continue the ordeal.
By seven, the light was fading outside and the heat of the afternoon had given way to a cool breeze from the sea. In number one operating theatre Violet and the other two nurses had felt they were too weary to go on handing instruments, stitching, bandaging and clearing the table of blood and the floor of shell fragments, old bandages and pieces of uniform and flesh – they had felt all this, and had for a time rallied, calling up more endurance from some source which, they all knew, did not exist. As Violet and an orderly were heaving a young Australian, whose back had been lacerated in ten places by shrapnel, on to a stretcher, a cheerful, ‘Bonsoir’ came from the doorway. Three nuns from the French military hospital, crisply coiffed with starched aprons over their black habits, had arrived. An appeal from the Matron to neighbouring hospitals had met with a response, though, as the nuns said, there having been a muddle over transport, they had all had to pedal to St Luc, with their fresh aprons and coifs in carpet-bags attached to the bicycle handles. ‘Matron says you’re off duty,’ said one of the nuns.
‘We’re off duty,’ said Violet, who was translating, to Dr Swann.
‘They didn’t send a surgeon on a bicycle, too, did they?’ asked Swann. His eyes were bloodshot and his face grey.
Orderlies carried out the Australian soldier and brought in a man in German uniform. ‘This one’s a Boche,’ a man said.
‘So we see,’ replied Swann, tiredly.
Violet thought only of the café in St Luc, as if meeting Landry would take the ache from her legs and feet, and wipe out the memory of the afternoon’s pain, mess and, in two instances, death. She stood very still with her arms by her sides, trying not to attract Dr Swann’s attention in case he decided she could be of use as a translator. Four men remained to be operated on. Another cart-load could come in before they had finished. But Swann thanked the nurses and sent them off.
Violet was washing her hair in the showers when she said to Mabel, who was being given a break, but would be needed on the ward again at two in the morning, ‘You’ll have to cover for me. I’m going to St Luc.’
‘They’ll kill you if they find out. All leave’s cancelled till further notice,’ said Mabel, leaning against the wooden wall of the showers with a stained apron dangling from her fingers by its tape.
‘That’s why you’ve got to tell them I’m here,’ said Violet.
‘What am I going to say? They’ll kill me too.’
‘Say I’m asleep,’ said Violet, ‘if anyone asks.’
‘That girl you share with, Helen, won’t.’
‘Oh, I don’t care,’ said Violet, putting on her camisole and, over it, a pink and green sprigged cotton dress.
Mabel made a face, seeing Violet out of uniform. ‘They’ll kill you.’
Violet tugged on her drawers, picked her shoes from the floor of the shower and said, ‘I’m off.’
‘No stockings?’ asked Mabel.
‘No,’ returned Violet, and walked out of the shower, through the field at the outskirts of the hospital, and squeezed through the hole in a hedge which bolder nurses, and sometimes patients, used to get in after the main gate was locked at night. She stood back against the hedge until the bus for St Luc came down the road, then hopped out and flagged it down. The bus drove slowly through winding roads, with trees and hedges on either side, and drew into the square at St Luc.
The Café des Anges was crowded with soldiers and girls. A few of the elderly patrons who had always gone there in the evenings, war or no war, and would do so until they died, or the cafe was bombed, sat at tables drinking their wine or cognac. Standing in the entrance Violet looked for Landry, and couldn’t see him. She even wondered wildly if she would be able to recognise him. Perhaps her memory of him – for she had been imagining his long, pale face and large, but very slightly slanted black eyes, throughout the day – was wrong. She had mostly seen him in the dark. It had been a consolation to be able to think of him as she’d gazed down at pained, sweating faces. There had been times, too, that day, when, tired and perhaps having inhaled too much ether, she wondered if she were to blame for all this suffering. Was that why she had to be there, at No 53 hospital, trying against all the odds to cure it? At such time the bright, healthy face of Landry Thomas, appearing before her, helped to obliterate the nightmare. But as she stared about in the thick atmosphere, she saw no one like the man she had been thinking about until a voice at her side said, ‘Violet? Mrs Levine?’ and she turned to see him standing beside her.
