Flora's War (17 page)

It had become a tradition among the nurses to peer into the dark water of the Well of Bats before they left. That night, they all performed the ritual – Emily, Jean, Florence. No one ever said what they saw, if they saw anything.

I never bothered to look into the water. After all, I had no absent sweetheart.

What I did have, however, was mail. I began to receive letters from the Dardanelles. I stared at the first few, turning them over in my hands, confused. I didn’t remember these names. In the turmoil of the past two weeks I’d almost forgotten that I’d promised to write to soldiers who were going away. But the soldiers hadn’t forgotten. The letters came and came, several every day. I had to write back, I’d said I would, and I couldn’t disappoint the boys. But it was so hard, at the end of a long, hot, dusty day’s driving, to sit down and take out pen and paper.

One of the first I opened was from Alex Hendy. It was short and contained little news about the war. I supposed the censor would have cut that out, if Alex had included it. The letter said he was well and safe, and so were Ted and Stan.

They’re writing to you too,
Alex wrote.
Things are quiet here at the moment, so we plan to go down to the beach this afternoon and have a good wash in the sea. That will be a treat as water is short here and we have to save it to make tea.

I wrote that when Alex returned, I’d make him all the cups of tea he could drink at the rest and recreation centre.

Then I opened another letter, and another. These were from soldiers I didn’t know as well as Alex. What on earth was I going to write to them? I knew I had to make the letters different. It wouldn’t do if I wrote exactly the same letter to Alex and then to Ted and Stan. I had to force myself to push the pen along, writing several letters every night. Dear Tom, Dear Bill, Dear Bob, Dear Albert, yes, of course I remember meeting you at the rest and recreation centre in the Ezbekieh Gardens …

I wrote six letters the first night and left the others, planning to reply the next day. But the next day, another dozen letters arrived. Over the next few days, my desk piled up with letters and they were dropping onto the floor. I couldn’t possibly write to all these boys! But I knew I had to.

I didn’t remember most of them of course, but the boys wouldn’t know that. Dear Jim, Dear Fred, Dear George, Dear Charlie …

From the letters, I learned a little about the conditions in the Dardanelles. I was struck by the image of our boys crouching in the trenches, barely able to put their heads up.

Gwen was receiving letters as well, and we compared the news they contained.

‘They’re being fired on constantly,’ I said.

‘The food’s bad and boring, and they’re plagued by flies and lice,’ said Gwen.

‘The heat’s unbearable,’ I said.

But we weren’t getting this information from the soldiers’ complaints, never that. It was from their jokes.

‘This one says they’re having competitions to see who has the most flies drowning in their tea,’ I said.

‘They take bets on whether the flies can manage to drink a whole mug of tea before a man can lift it to his lips,’ Gwen read out.

‘This one’s made a pet of a rat and he’s training it to salute the sergeant,’ I said.

And then, a letter came and I did know the name, only too well. A letter from Jay.

His letter was very much like the others. He made light of the conditions, he talked about how wonderful his men were, how they got on with the job, didn’t grouse. ‘I lost a few in the first attack,’ his letter said. ‘I don’t know yet where they are, I trust they made it safely to a hospital. I’d ask you to enquire about them, but they may be on Lemnos or in a hospital in Alexandria, so I won’t waste your time, which I’m sure is limited. Are you still working hard on the excavation?’

The excavation? I hadn’t been there for weeks. The work would be piling up, but I was very busy elsewhere. Jay must have no conception of what was happening in Cairo. His letter ended, ‘I am thinking of you all the time, Flora. It is what gets me through the days here. I hope you are thinking of me, too, and thinking of something else, which of course we will talk about when I come back. I am, yours very truly –’ And, as it had been on the note he sent before he went away, the ‘very truly’ was heavily underlined.

Oh
dear
. It didn’t sound as if he was forgetting about becoming engaged. I had to reply, though. I dipped my pen in the ink again and took a fresh sheet of paper. Dear Jay …

…

Lydia came back to Cairo on leave for a few days. Gwen and I went to see her at the nurses’ home when she arrived and I was appalled at her appearance. She’d was very thin, her face was gaunt and she looked exhausted.

‘It’s so good to see you.’ I hugged her gently. I felt that if I hugged her heartily, as I wanted to, she might snap right in two. ‘Where have you been? Lemnos?’

‘No, I’ve been working on a hospital ship off Gallipoli, collecting wounded from the beaches and transporting them, sometimes to Lemnos, other times to Alexandria,’ she replied. ‘Look, I’m not being rude, but I just want to
sleep
. Can I come and see you in a day or so?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

Lydia came to the House of the Butcher and Blacksmith two days later. I sent a message to Gwen and she joined us on the roof.

‘Tell us what you’ve been doing,’ I demanded.

Lydia gratefully took a glass of iced lime juice from Mr Bilal. ‘Working,’ she said. ‘Oh, have we been working! Thirty-six hours at a stretch, sometimes, snatching an hour or two of sleep, and feeling guilty about it because there’s some boy not being cared for while you sleep.’

She looked out over the city, her eyes following the flying flocks of pigeons. The glass in her hand, I noticed, was shaking slightly.

‘We were off Gallipoli when our boys first went ashore,’ she said quietly. ‘When it got light enough, I could actually see them running up the beach. I could see them being shot down, as they dodged from cover to cover. Not that there was much cover. I could see them start to climb those awful cliffs. There were shells bursting and observation planes flying over.’

I tried to picture it.

Lydia barely paused for breath before continuing, ‘Then the wounded started to come. They came on barges and they were hoisted onto the decks in a sort of wooden cradle. They were laid in rows on the deck until a doctor could identify the most urgent cases.’ She didn’t look at us, she seemed almost to have forgotten we were there. ‘There were bullets actually hitting the deck. Catherine told me she was talking to a boy, and she’d just moved away when a bullet hit him in the leg. I wasn’t on deck, I’d been sent below.’

‘What were you doing there?’ Gwen asked quietly.

‘The hold was set up as a hospital. It was strange, the whole ship was vibrating from the cannon fire from the English and French warships. We were trying to work with a few electric lights that kept flickering. It was so hot we had the portholes open for air and a few electric fans, and they kept going on and off too. The surgeon was operating in a corner, on a mess table. And the wounds –’ She stopped and put her hands over her face for a moment. When she took them away she looked into our eyes. ‘Oh, the terrible wounds! I can’t tell you –’

‘You don’t need to,’ I said. ‘We’ve seen them.’ We told Lydia about the trains.

‘And that’s after they’ve had some treatment!’ she said. ‘But there just isn’t the time. The smaller wounds usually have the bullet still in them when the boys leave us; the surgeons are too busy with major procedures like amputations.’ Her hands were shaking more now. I took her glass, put it on the table, knelt before her, held her hands in mine. ‘The boys are dirty and they smell,’ she almost whispered. ‘I hate to see it.’

Gwen sat beside Lydia and gave her a small hug. ‘They make them comfortable here,’ she consoled her. Lydia smiled at us and removed her hands from mine. ‘Lydia, are you going back there?’ Gwen asked.

‘No,’ said Lydia. ‘I’ve been posted to Lemnos. We should be able to do much more for the boys; make them comfortable, instead of just doing the patch-up jobs that are all we can do on the ships.’

I handed her the glass of lime juice and she took a sip. ‘Lydia,’ I asked, ‘do you think – is it going to go on much longer?’

‘I’m no strategist,’ said Lydia. ‘But from what I’ve seen from the ship there are lines of Allied and Turkish trenches at the top of the hills. They’re so close together, with lots of firing back and forth. No one’s moving much either way.’

‘So you think …’

‘It could go on for ages,’ Lydia said.

Chapter 14

We worked throughout June and July as it became hotter and hotter. The wounded arrived in a steady stream. When a train of casualties arrived we worked until the train was cleared.

There was sometimes a special carriage on the train, its doors locked and the windows closed tight. These men were only unloaded after every other carriage had been cleared. Most didn’t seem to be badly wounded.

‘Why are they locked in?’ I asked an orderly.

‘We have to do it. A week or so back one jumped off the train between Alexandria and Cairo,’ he said.

‘Why would he do that?’

The orderly shrugged. ‘Who knows? Mental cases, these are.’

I looked again. Some of the soldiers sat quietly, but their eyes were locked in a horrified stare. One was picking incessantly at his sleeve. Another was trembling. I turned away. I didn’t want to gawp.

‘What happened to the poor man who jumped?’ I asked.

‘They found him just walking along the track. Goodness knows where he thought he was going.’

‘He wasn’t hurt?’

‘Not him. But now we lock them in. Look, I haven’t got time to talk. Are you taking these four to the hospital or not?’

I turned away from the carriage of mental cases, but I couldn’t forget them. The war, I’d found, could wound more than bodies.

When there were no trains, we transported wounded between hospitals, driving the less serious cases to convalescent hospitals. These were happy days, the boys were feeling better and looking forward to resting in a comfortable place. They laughed and joked, and teased Gwen and me about our driving.

On the rare days we weren’t called in, I went to the excavation. Most of the burial chamber had been cleared and Fa was working on cataloguing and drawing the things it had contained. Khnumhotep’s beautiful painted sarcophagus had been carefully removed and was in secure storage at the Egyptian Museum. It had been sealed with resin and would need careful handling to avoid damage when it was opened. Fa was waiting for advice from the British Museum on the best way to approach it.

I felt guilty about not helping him more with the cataloguing and drawing, but when the trains of wounded came I had to be there. Every car, every driver, made a difference in getting the boys to hospital quickly.

…

I was still receiving lots of letters. But now, the letters weren’t all coming from boys who’d asked me to write to them. Sometimes I’d receive a letter from a soldier I’d never heard from before to tell me that their mate Harry, or old Arthur, or Herbert, or Cliff, wouldn’t be writing to me anymore. ‘I’m sorry, but he’s bought it, miss.’ I hardly remembered the boys, but every one of those letters made me cry.

Sometimes a soldier who’d written to me half a dozen times or more, simply didn’t write anymore. I always kept all their letters together with carbon copies of my own letters, so I could remember what I’d written to each one, and after a while I’d notice that no new letter had come from George, or Bill, or Jack. I sadly put their letters away in a different box that was filling rapidly.

But sometimes, a letter came that made me happier for a while. A boy might write to say that his mate had been wounded and had been taken to a hospital ship. If he arrived in Cairo, and if I had the time, could I see if I could find him and let his mates know how he was getting on?

I enquired at the hospitals, and sometimes I found the soldier. I’d visit him and tell him his mates were anxious about him. The boys were always thrilled to think that someone was asking after them.

‘They’re worried about me? Ah, they don’t need to worry about
me
! In the lap of luxury I am, here,’ they’d say. ‘Here, is there any of that writing paper around? And a pencil? I’ll write to them straight away, let them know Johnny Turk doesn’t get rid of me that easily!’

If they couldn’t write themselves I’d write for them, and hope that their mates would still be there to receive the letter.

Often, I couldn’t find the soldier. It meant that he might be in a hospital on Lemnos, or in Alexandria. I would write and tell his mates that I was sure he was fine, he was probably in a hospital I couldn’t get to.

But in some cases, I found a name in the hospital records. Then I wrote back to his mates, as gently as I could, and told them what I knew. ‘I will visit his grave for you, if you like,’ I’d write. ‘I’ll leave some flowers. Would you like me to do that?’ A few wrote to say yes, they would, they’d appreciate that. So I made time to drive to the New British Protestant Cemetery where most of the Gallipoli dead had been buried, not far from the centre of Cairo. The new section was raw; no gardens, no flowers, just mound after mound of sand with a plain white wooden cross. A few had a white wooden Star of David. I walked the rows, a cemetery official guiding me, the sun beating down and my poor flowers wilting, until I found the one name I was looking for. There were so many graves.

Jay’s letters kept coming. Each time one arrived I took out the photograph he’d given me before he left and wondered whether all those young men were still alive. I gazed at Jay, smiling in the middle of them. Was he still smiling? His letters didn’t sound like it. He still wrote about how wonderful his men were, but he wrote more and more about how he must look after them, how he couldn’t let them down. How he’d do everything he must and it was the thought of someone waiting for him that was keeping him going. ‘Please keep writing, Flora,’ his letters always ended. ‘Please write often. Every day if you can.’

…