Dead Man's Land (4 page)

The others laughed. ‘I bet that spooner Metcalf will be sleepin’ on silk, drinkin’ champagne,’ said Tugman. ‘With some tart pullin’ at his old man while we get tea and biscuits at the YMCA, if we’re lucky.’

‘Leave it out,’ said Farrar. ‘He’s aw reet.’

‘Aw reet? With his bloody little stick and his posh-nob accent,’ said Tugman. ‘He used to sell me penny bags o’nails in the shop at Crawford Street. And his old man refused my old man credit once when he was tryin’ to stop us roof leakin’ because the landlord wouldn’t. An’ now he’s all airs and graces, like.’

Moulton mimed playing a violin and Tugman cuffed him sharply around the ear. The boy yelped.

‘Oy,’ said Shipobottom. ‘Stop that. Now. Corporal Tugman. Apologize.’

The truculent corporal did as he was told, albeit with ill humour.

‘I think Metcalf’s the sort of officer who will lead from behind, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘I bet he’s got no guts.’

‘He’s one of us,’ said Shipobottom, unable to fathom the level of animosity Tugman felt to a local boy made good. ‘Leave him be. I’ve seen you nearly shittin’ your pants enough times.’ Tugman glared at him, violence in his face. Shipobottom gave a malicious grin back. With that enormous nose it made him look like a crazed Mr Punch. ‘Yeah, you wanna give me a clout, Corporal, see where that gets you?’

‘At least I haven’t been jumpin’ at my own shadow since some gypo crone read my palm.’

Shipobottom’s grin faded and he aimed his index finger at Tugman.

‘Here we go,’ said Platt loudly. The water in the billycan was now at a rolling boil and he tossed some black, powdery tea leaves in, then a handful of sugar and stirred. ‘Just take it easy now, fellas. Yous all a bit on edge, like, ’cause we’re nearly out of here. It’s the waiting that’s the hardest, innit? Like linin’ up to get on the ship at Alexandria under that bloody sun. I hated that. Let’s just get it over wit’ and get us selves torpedo’d, I thought in the end. Got t’be better than sweatin’ me bollocks off an’ eatin’ flies on the quayside. And here we are, waiting to get out of this shitheap before someone decides it’s time for another Big Push, or the Germans want to try out new trench mortar on our heads. Just the same as then. So pack it in, we’re all in the same boat.’

‘Blimey, Bernie, that’s more words than I heard you speak in ten year,’ said Farrar.

Both Tugman and Shipobottom smirked at the remark and the atmosphere warmed once more.

Platt poured the tea into five tin mugs, using a homemade strainer, fashioned from wire and muslin, to catch the leaves, which would be reused. ‘There you go.’

‘Let’s hurry that along,’ said Shipobottom. ‘We got rifles and face inspection later,’ he added, remembering what de Griffon had said. ‘An’ full kit tomorrow.’

‘Then, Joseph,’ said Platt to Tugman, ‘We’ll be off to see if we can find you a tart of your own.’

Farrar laughed. ‘Well, yours and fifty other blokes. He likes it with others watchin’, as I heard tell.’

Once again, the temperature dropped a notch in the funk hole and Tugman balled his fists. Moulton, too young to know what they were referring to, looked in puzzlement from one to another.

‘You still got that boil on your bum then?’ Tugman asked him. ‘Like a bloody beacon it were while you were tuppin’ that Frenchie. A reet chip off the old block you were. Y’re old man had a spotty arse’n’all.’

Farrar tensed, as if about to leap across the alcove at Tugman. ‘What you talkin’ about?’

‘Don’t tell me he didn’t tell you,’ laughed Tugman. ‘ “Cock of the Woods” Farrah?’

Shipobottom stood up, not quite to his full height. You were safer from snipers at the rear of the trench system, but it was a habit you kept up nevertheless. Otherwise, one day you might forget yourself in the wrong place. ‘Next man speaks out of turn gets my boot up his arse. And these are size thirteen. You’ll need a pick an’ a rope to get it out. Understand? Farrah? Tugman? Aye. You just keep quiet about all that. Faces and rifles,’ Shipobottom repeated. ‘Faces and rifles. And let’s try and get the fuck out of here in one piece.’

‘I see you have spent some time in the West Indies, Staff Nurse Jennings.’

The young nurse stopped her unloading of the blood transfusion kit and stared at the Royal Army Medical Corps major. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘And that your family were in sugar.’

She gave a small laugh of disbelief and put her hands on her hips. Her eyes widened, so they seemed almost too large for the delicate face. ‘How on earth can you know that?’

‘A parlour trick,’ said the major with a smile. ‘Forgive me.’

‘That hardly explains how you come to be familiar with my family history, Major Watson.’ She paused as a low rumble began, like thunder growling on some distant mountains. She put her head to one side and listened carefully. A curl of dark hair looped free from the headdress and she absent-mindedly tucked it away. ‘Their guns. Not ours. You soon learn the difference.’

He frowned as the bright nickel instruments he was laying out on the folding table rattled softly in their steel kidney bowls.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘we’re out of range here of all but the big ones, and they tend to be used on the towns and marshalling yards. Not the evacuation railheads.’ The Casualty Clearing Station was half a mile from such a railhead, accessed by special wheeled stretchers that ran on a narrow-gauge track. From these improvised tramways, the wounded were transferred to regular ambulance trains.

‘I’m not concerned,’ said Watson. ‘But I have demonstrations to give and samples to stockpile, and I was told this was a quiet sector.’

‘Quiet,’ she explained patiently, ‘means less than a hundred casualties a month. There is no such thing as a totally safe place out here. The guns can start anywhere, anytime.’

Although a relative novice to the front – it was little more than a week since his balloon ride – Watson knew what those falling shells meant. There would be wounded coming through. Casualty Clearing Stations always worked in pairs, and this one, the East Anglian, had been stood down for a few days to enable it to clear the backlog of cases, while another CCS in the same sector remained on alert. If that one, however, ran at or beyond its capacity, the East Anglian would come back into play.

‘And we hadn’t had a “hate session” from the enemy until three or four days ago,’ said Jennings, ‘when some foolish . . .’ She hesitated. Nurses were directed not to comment on anything but clinical matters, and even then, only if invited to.

‘Some foolish what?’

‘It’s nothing, Major.’ Jennings swiftly moved on, pursing her lips at her impetuousness. ‘They’ll be putting electric lights in here within a few days. About time.’

She looked down at the packing case and lifted out The Icehouse, a wooden and zinc box some twenty-four inches on each side. It had cost him sixty shillings of his own money at Army & Navy. ‘What do you intend to keep in here?’ she asked as she laid it on the floor of the tent.

‘Once the cavity is filled with iced water, it will be used to store citrated blood.’

Jennings looked puzzled. Her grey cape, edged with scarlet, told him she was, like most nurses servicing this collection of tented wards in the grounds of a former monastery, a member of the Territorial Force Nursing Service. It was very likely that these staff didn’t keep up with the latest developments, such as the ability to store unclotted blood outside the human body for days at a stretch. From what he understood, few this far forward – be they territorial, reservists, Queen Alexandras or doctors – had much time to read current issues of the
British Medical Journal
. His task, gained only after much inveigling of the RAMC – and that damned balloon ride – was to spread the gospel of the new methodology in hospitals and CCSs.

The RAMC’s hesitation in allowing him out here had been ridiculous. Apart from one knee that sometimes crackled and creaked and a
tendo Achillis
that ached after long walks, he was almost as fit as the young doctor who had been wounded at the Battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan. Although, he had to admit, he no longer had that man’s waistline.

‘Careful with the solution bottles, Staff Nurse,’ he warned, as she unwrapped a glass cylinder from its cocoon of corrugated cardboard and newspaper. ‘That’s our secret ingredient. Hand it here, please.’

There came a deeper rumble and for the first time, he felt the impact vibrate through the wooden floor and the soles of his feet. The canvas stirred and tugged against its ropes on one side of the tent and the roof rippled uneasily.

‘That was closer,’ said Jennings with a frown, just as the flap of the tent snapped back with a crack like a whiplash. Standing in the opening was the sister-in-charge, her face almost as crimson as the red cape that proclaimed her a full member of Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps. The two red stripes on her sleeve told of her rank within her service. The sound of the German guns was momentarily lost beneath her impressive bellow. ‘Major Watson!’

Watson carefully laid down the precious jar of sodium citrate solution on the tabletop before he turned to face her. ‘Sister? How may I be of assistance?’

‘What is the meaning of this?’ She pulled back the canvas further to reveal his two VADs, each holding an Empire medical kit. Standing behind them, and towering over the pair by almost a foot, was Brindle, his designated driver, batman and orderly. Brindle’s long, sorrowful face was even glummer than usual as he secured the entrance flap open with two press studs.

‘Experience dictates that travelling with one medical kit in a war situation is somewhat risky, Sister,’ Watson explained patiently. ‘I always pack a spare.’

Now the colour on her cheeks was a perfect match for the cape. She waved a rolled piece of flimsy pinkish paper at the two women, who were still holding the heavy medicine chests, stabbing at them with it, as if it were a short sword. ‘I am not referring to your
travelling
preferences, Major,’ she almost snarled. ‘You have brought VADs into my Casualty Clearing Station.
VADs!
’

She made it sound as if Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses were some kind of vermin. And besides, it wasn’t strictly speaking her CCS; it was Major Torrance’s. But he was at Hazebrouck for a meeting with one of the army’s specialists in gas warfare. ‘When I was at Bailleul hospital,’ Watson said calmly, ‘I requested some assistance during this tour of the clearing stations and field ambulances. The Senior Medical Officer in Charge suggested Nurses Gregson and—’

‘They are not
nurses
, Major Watson, as you well know. Not qualified nurses. They are auxiliaries. Orderlies. And the Matron-in-Chief herself has forbidden VADs to work this far forward—’

There came another explosion, short and sharp, that made everyone’s heads turn to the source. It had come from Mrs Gregson, the older of the VADs. Her companion, Miss Pippery, a tiny thing who looked to be barely out of her teens, took a small step backwards, as if retreating from a ticking bomb.

Mrs Gregson bent at the waist, put down the medical chest, and stepped over it, so that she stood eye to eye with the sister.

Mrs Gregson, Watson estimated, was thirty or thereabouts, with striking green eyes and, beneath the white VAD headdress, a crown of fiery red hair. The sister was probably two decades older, pipe-cleaner thin, with a mouth pinched by years of keeping her charges in line. Now the opening was reduced further, to a razor cut in a rather sallow face.

When Mrs Gregson spoke, it was with a quiet but stinging force. ‘Sister, I may not have your qualifications, but I have been out here for more than two years. I was running first-aid stations when the worst the men faced was a turned ankle from trying to march in hobnail boots on French and Belgian cobblestones. I drove for McMurdo’s Flying Ambulance Brigade at
Mons.
Perhaps you have heard of it? I have treated trench foot, venereal disease, lice infestations and lanced boils in men’s buttocks the size of macaroons. I have stuffed men’s entrails back in place and held the hands of boys who cried for their mothers, such was their pain, and of grown men weeping in fear at the thought of going back up the line. I have carried men’s mangled arms and legs to the lime pit, told a private he will never see again, watched men drown in their own fluids from gas, spent weeks wondering if I will ever smell anything in my nostrils other than the stench of gas gangrene. I have shown pretty fiancées what German flamethrowers have done to their future husbands’ faces. Then had to deliver the letter that tells them that they have lost those sweethearts. I have seen enough pus to last me a lifetime, Sister, and my hands are likely ruined for ever from all the scrubbings with carbolic and Eusol because, of course, only a
sister
can wear rubber gloves, and I do believe, no matter what your dear Matron-in-Chief thinks, that I have earned the right to go where my betters think I am needed in this war, and I also believe that Major Watson’s new method of blood transfusion will save the lives of many who have to this point died for want of fluid and warmth.’ She finally took a breath. ‘Of course, I am not a nurse, nor would I claim to be. I am a VAD and proud of it.’

Mrs Gregson’s short speech never increased in volume throughout its course, but somehow, like a great flywheel pressed into motion, gathered power and momentum as it went. Watson was about to object that is wasn’t strictly speaking
his
new method of blood transfusion, but decided to stay out of the contest. It would be like trying to separate two Siamese fighting fish.

The guns seemed even louder and much closer in the brittle silence that descended on the tent.

Sister took her time composing her reply. The heightened colour in her cheeks faded, but she twisted the piece of paper she held in her hands as if she were wringing Mrs Gregson’s neck. ‘I did not intend to impugn the service you have given. But there are few here who haven’t performed the same tasks. Isn’t that right, Staff Nurse Jennings?’

‘Yes, Sister,’ she agreed softly, eyes downcast. ‘Although I can’t drive—’