The Passing Bells (44 page)

“Hop to it, girl,” one of the sisters said in a taut voice.

She had been among the wounded before. All the
blessés
at Charters had been hit—but that had been weeks before they had arrived at number seven Hôpital Croix Rouge. She had seen them only as clean, well-bandaged men, aware, many of them, that further operations might be necessary. But “further operations” held no terror for them. Body casts and bandages might be uncomfortable, but their beds were clean, the food was wholesome, there were flowers in the wards.

“Arterial hemorrhage, Sister!” an orderly shouted out.

Alexandra saw a stream of blood pump upward from a sodden khaki bundle lying on a stretcher. The sister knelt quickly beside the groaning man and clamped off the flow. Alexandra could only stare as more and more men were brought into the large tent. Horror piled on horror. A man with his eyeballs blown out, dirty cotton stuffed into the sockets. Sheared-off legs and arms, the stumps wound with blood-caked bandage or soiled puttees. A man screaming and twisting like an animal in a trap, hands pressed against a bulge of intestines that were slipping through his fingers. Her legs shook and an icy chill clutched her head and made her scalp crawl. Corporal Hyde thrust a pair of scissors into her limp hand and whispered fiercely, “Come on, miss, don't stand about.”

She sank to her knees beside a stretcher, not from choice, her legs giving way beneath her. She stared down at a blackened muddy bandage covering the man's upper thigh and hip . . . dirty gray flesh beneath the slit trouser leg. As she cut hesitantly at the bandage, the man screamed and cursed and tried to sit up. Corporal Hyde held him down.

“Cut them bloody rags off, miss!”

She cut, her hand shaking so violently she almost dropped the scissors. Beneath the bandage lay a bloody puddle with bits of hipbone jutting up from the ooze. Vomit rose in her throat and she clamped her teeth to hold it back. The vomit scorched and choked her as she swallowed.

“Keep them moving along, for God's sake,” a sister called out in exasperation. “They're beginning to pile up outside.”

Nausea came in wave after wave. Her jaws ached and her throat was on fire. Sweat clung in cold beads to her pallid face. There seemed to be no end to the writhing, grunting, animal-like creatures who were laid in front of her by the stretcher bearers. The bucket of filthy bandages she had snipped away overflowed and another was quickly brought, then another and another. She did not become numb to the ghastliness revealed when each rag of a dressing was removed: splintered ends of bone, loops of gut, the red hollow where a lower jaw had been. Each revelation seemed worse than the last. The nightmare only deepened.

“Cameronian,” an orderly muttered to her as a mud-encrusted form was set down in front of her by the bearers. The orderly placed a dark brown bottle of chloroform and some cotton batting on the floor beside her. “Just douse the little bastards.”

It was a Cameronian sergeant, four days in a shell hole between the wire—four days of sun and rain. The letter T had been painted on his forehead with iodine. They had done that much for him at the aid post: antitetanus serum, no more than that. A self-applied dressing under his right armpit bulged over the festering wound beneath. She cut the dressing away with difficulty, dried blood holding the edges like tar. Pus flowed yellow green, and then, boiling up out of the suppurating depths of the shell-chewed cavity, a mass of living things, a churning, undulating ball of fat white maggots, creeping onto her fingers along the blades of the scissors, up her fingers, squirming blindly along the back of her hand.

She screamed and could not stop screaming. She screamed as she stumbled to her feet, kicking the bottle of chloroform. She screamed as she staggered, retching, toward the door. A sister grabbed her arms and then slapped her hard across the face, once, twice—stiff-fingered blows. She felt nothing, saw nothing as she slipped down into a misty, comforting darkness.

It was peaceful in the back of the ambulance. Around her in the blackness were silent forms, drugged, still as death. She pulled her warm cloak up to her chin. Someone out there in the inky night was calling her name. She could hear it softly . . . softly:
Alex . . . Alex . . .
She stared fixedly at the bottom of a stretcher laid on the brackets above her.

Alex . . . Alex . . .

The ambulance began to move, creaking and lurching slowly across the compound. Taking away the wounded. Yes, she thought dully. Taking them away. And she was one of them, just one of the wounded. Perhaps even one of the dead.

B
OOK
T
HREE

God knows 'twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down,

Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .

But I've a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When spring trips north again this year

—A
LAN
S
EEGER
(1888–1916)

14

The Most Honorable Winifred Sutton walked slowly up from Sloane Square, her Bedlington terrier no longer tugging at the leash but plodding wearily ahead, eyes half closed against the granulated snow that swept up from the pavement. It was a clear morning, but cold and blustery, the leafless trees in Cadogan Square swaying crazily. She had been walking for two hours or more through Chelsea and along the river on this December day of arctic winds and pale, heatless sun. The wind whined through the iron palings enclosing the strip of parkland flanking Sloane Street. No nursemaids pushing baby carriages along the paths today, only the wild trees and the sleet-scoured grass.

The dog perked up, sensing the nearness of home and its bed beside the kitchen fire, but Winifred approached her house with the usual feeling of dread. She hated London, but her father had donated Lulworth Manor to the Red Cross for the duration of the war. Life had always seemed less complicated in the country and problems more easily coped with. She knew for certain that her mother would have been better off there, less frenetic, more reconciled to the finality of death. The war was too pervasive in London—the daily newspapers with their endless stories of battles and lists of casualties, the soldiers everywhere, the infrequent but unnerving Zeppelin raids. She yearned for the quiet fields, the ordered landscape of Dorset.

She had hoped to avoid her mother's “group,” but the front door opened as she came up the steps and there they were, half of them reluctant to leave, still orbiting, keyed up and vocal, about the exotic figure of Madame Nestorli, Princess Pearl.

“Oh, Winifred,” the Duchess of Ascombe said, still dabbing at her tear-filled eyes with a lace handkerchief. “Oh, my dear, it was so wonderful today. Too marvelous for mere words to express.”

Winifred moved to one side, pulling the terrier closer to her leg to keep it from being stepped on as the ladies began to descend to the pavement, the Sutton family butler hurrying ahead of them to whistle for their cars, which were parked up and down the street. At last only Princess Pearl was left, talking to Lady Mary Sutton in the hall, her voice whisper-soft. A dozen gold bracelets jingled as she moved her hands to emphasize her words, words that Winifred had no interest in hearing. She wished it were possible for her to move past the two women and go up to her room unseen, but that was clearly not to be. Lady Mary blocked the way to the stairs, her bird-claw hands gripping the cold fur of her daughter's coat.

“I do so wish you had been here, Winifred. We made such a significant breakthrough. Both of my dear boys were in the room . . . and Clarissa's young George moved the counter to say he was content.”

She looked away from her mother's impassioned, gleaming eyes. The eyes of Princess Pearl were inscrutable stones. The most-sought-after medium in London reached into a pearl-encrusted bag and removed a gold and jade cigarette holder and a cigarette. A Capstan, Winifred noticed. Raising spirits for twenty pounds a corpse had made the woman rich, but she had not lost her plebeian tastes.

“We were successful, yes,” Madame Nestorli whispered in her odd, difficult-to-define accent (Romanian? Greek? Welsh, perhaps). “But no, we have not broken through the veil quite yet. We have not touched the outer reaches of the void.”

“But we shall . . . we shall!” Lady Mary cried. “I know you have reservations, Winifred, but had you only been with us today!”

She managed to break away and hurried up to the second floor; her terrier, trailing its leash, scampered down the corridor toward the kitchen stairs.

Her bedroom was a private refuge, and she shut the door, then leaned against it for a moment as though barring it from assault. Anger and bitterness choked her and it was a struggle to draw a deep breath. Her mother attended three or four séances a week, most of them in the mahogany-paneled dining room downstairs, a room that Madame Nestorli, the great Princess Pearl, had found unusually conducive to reaching her personal spirit, her envoy to the realm of the dead, a Nubian prince named Ram, who had been sealed alive in a wall at Thebes one thousand years to the day before Christ's birth. Ram spoke amazingly like Madame Nestorli, but no one seemed to question that in the least.

“Oh, God . . . such rot.” She removed her coat and tossed it over the back of a chair, then flopped on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Her rage slowly subsided into a dull pity for her mother and all the other pathetic women who tried so desperately to bring back their loved ones. Two of her brothers were dead. Andrew buried somewhere in France and Timothy in the family plot at Lulworth churchyard. She could understand to some degree her mother's refusal to accept the finality of Andrew's passing. She had not seen him die nor talked to anyone who had. A short letter from his colonel was all the proof she had. But Timothy was another matter. He had been hit in the throat by a shell fragment in June and, after being kept alive by rubber tubes inserted in the mangled cavity of his neck, had finally died in a London hospital in September. But then it wasn't the
body
that mattered, according to Madame Nestorli. The body was nothing, a mere shell of common clay containing the elusive spirit. The spirit never died. It was simply released when the body gave it up and could be enticed back from eternity if one knew how to go about it. It was merely a question of time, patience, fervent belief—and money.

There was a gentle knock on the inner door that led to her sitting room, and then the door opened a crack and one of the maids peeked in.

“I drew a nice warm bath for you, Miss Winifred.”

“Thank you, Daphne.”

There was nothing she could do about her mother's obsession. Her mother had always been inclined to the mystic, and the war had given this inclination impetus. She lay back in the warm tub and touched her heavy breasts with soapy hands. She was pleased with her body. Long, brisk walks, and a total abstinence from sweets, cakes, custards, and other fattening foods had slimmed her hips, flattened her tummy, and firmed her legs. Only her breasts left something to be desired. They were so big and round and pink-nippled. Perhaps Robert Herrick would have found them enchanting, she thought wryly, recalling the amorous poet's hymn to the nipples of his Julia:

Have ye beheld (with much delight)

A red rose peeping through a white?

But large breasts were out of fashion. Women flattened them now for the new styles coming out of Paris. She had found binding her breasts uncomfortable. Not that it did much good anyway.

She had dried herself and was slipping on a silk dressing gown when Daphne tapped on the door and said, “Colonel Wood-Lacy on the telephone, miss. Shall he ring back?”

She drew the robe around her body and fastened the cord. “Tell him I'm . . . indisposed and that . . . yes, he may ring back in half an hour.”

Fenton in London. She hadn't seen him since the war started—fifteen months. He had never taken a leave in England, but her brother John, who had enlisted in the Rifle Brigade, had told her that few regulars had been able to get back to England unless carried on a stretcher. He had written to her, once in a while.

She sat at her dressing table and idly brushed her hair, soft brown waves touching her shoulders. The slender stack of his letters was in her dressing-table drawer. They were letters that were suitable reading for the entire family. Informative letters:

“Today we moved up to the line and took over trenches recently held by the French. Quite messy, I'm afraid, with the wire in a shocking state of neglect. . . .”

Not love letters, by any means, and yet she had kept them neatly together as though they were. They all began with “Dear Winifred” and were signed “Affectionately, Fenton.” Like letters from an uncle who was traveling abroad.