A Mother's Love (47 page)

A prayer of thanks for timely deliverance. An arm, leg, or both legs gone, the speaker perhaps confined forever to a wheelchair, his thoughts were not on how he’d survive with no job for him – realisation of that would come later – but that he was going home, out of this bloody hell forever.

Cleaned up, patched up, half-dead or half-alive, lice-ridden, stinking of trench-foot, that distorted prayer of thanks would still be offered up for being out of it, for being still alive.

There were others, many, who cursed being alive, prayed even now for death: the blinded; the maimed, already visualising the fate that awaited them at home; the shell-shocked, who hardly knew where they were, much less had the faculty to offer up a prayer of deliverance.

Sara’s heart ached for them all; turned over in fear of Jonathan’s fate. A new British attack had begun several days before in an attempt to break the German right flank at Ypres. Was he in the thick of that? But there was no way of knowing.

The worst of the fighting was going on around a ruined village called Passchendaele. Sara could hear the heavy thud of artillery even from here, a place just east of St Omer, where she had managed to get herself on a VAD transport van to a small clearing station.

She did her best to keep out of the way of the snarls of overtaxed surgeons and the irritable tuts of harassed nurses, but the VADs were kind and appreciated her assistance with the mundane jobs she felt compelled to help with, seeing the conditions under which they had to work. It also gave her more chance to talk to the wounded. Whether she had developed a knack or naturally drew them to confide in her, she didn’t know. All she knew was that, as it had been at London Docks, the abject trust some of the men had in her to carry their stories back home humbled her. Perhaps it was this that allowed her to listen with more sympathy than she ever suspected she possessed.

In all this, how could she dare think only of herself, of this base quest for one man? Yet she couldn’t help herself, hate herself though she did. Above all else there was always the question on her lips, coming between other general questions:

‘Have you come across a Captain Jonathan Ward? He’s somewhere in this area, I’m sure.’

How easily he could have been here in her place, coming as a war correspondent instead of fighting. Mackenzie would have willingly sent him out.

Instead he had joined up blindly with no idea of what he was going into. Few had. She’d had no real idea of the confusion these men felt about what was happening to them until that first experience on the quayside at London Docks. Even being on a newspaper, the numbers of slain coming in daily, they had only been that – just numbers, by which to be horrified in the comfort of her daily life. Even the women and children in black, the endless sight of drawn curtains, had not truly brought it home to her. Now, it was all too stark: these broken men she spoke to, this smell around her, this chaos through which she moved. Real, too, were the desperate grins of some, the hopeless jokes, the whispered assurances that they would be all right now.

‘It’s only part of one leg, you see. They can never take me back to fight with only part of one leg, now can they?’

She held the hand of the fair-haired Welsh boy, the stump crudely bandaged. Nineteen, he told her. Had volunteered eighteen months ago, lying about his age.

A lot of them had lied about their age. A lot of them would never grow older: lay in the ground, their seventeen, eighteen or nineteen years decaying away to become part of the world’s billions-of-years-old soil. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …

Sara thought momentarily of Matthew, saw again the graveside, felt the return of a pang of an old vow, childishly made. She thought of Jonathan, who, without knowing what he did, had destroyed that vow, had made her his, though he didn’t know it. Would he ever know it now?

She forced herself not to think of that, to think only of this present moment. She smiled down at the boy.

‘Have you a family?’

‘Me mam an’ dad, miss.’ The accent was Welsh. ‘A couple of sisters as well.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Me mam’ll look after me. Me dad’s chesty, see. He’s a miner, you see. So she knows how to look after the sick well enough.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘Not as half as glad as I am, miss.’

A touch on her shoulder, a cultured voice, turned her attention from the lad.

‘Would you lend a hand here, my dear? I simply cannot make this poor man understand that I have to move him somewhere else.’

The woman was one whom she’d come to know well these past weeks. Lady Thurber-Smith was a woman in her early forties whose husband had something to do with the Admiralty, or so Sara gathered. In normal times she would no doubt have been at home to guests, elegant in a tea gown, hair elaborately dressed, face serene as her butler brought in a silver tray for her to pour tea graciously from a silver pot.

Here she wore a harsh dun-coloured drill tunic, her hair desperately scraped back into a tight bun, her face drawn and tired, her eyes alight with that unnatural alertness of the over-stressed.

‘The surgeon needs this bed, but the poor man is being quite wild and will not let me get him up. There is no one else about to help me with him.’

Sara laid a hand on the shoulder of the lad by way of apology, and hurried with the woman to a makeshift bed, a plank of wood covered by a groundsheet, a filthy pillow and a grey blanket, now in a turmoil where the man had thrashed around, resisting attempts to quieten him.

‘It is this shell shock thing. He ought to be given something to quieten him, but there is nothing we can do for these cases but hope they learn eventually to control themselves.’

Sara took one look at the twisting head, the twitching arms, the phenomenon denounced by many as cowardice, and felt her sympathies go out to this victim.

She knew something of the cruelty of being misjudged – saw again a child whose mother had stormed at her in a fury of loathing, accusing her of evil deeds; that same child forced to cope alone later when her mother grew drunkenly hysterical; the trembling feeling inside when it was over; the need to cry but feeling too shaken to do so; never knowing quite where to turn, feeling it must be her fault. She hoped she knew a little of what he was going through; could perhaps give him the calming words she had so often longed for but had never received, except for those Matthew had given her. And that too had proved not what it seemed.

Quickly she crouched beside the patient – not a boy, a man, maybe with a wife and children back home, yet his face was like the face of a child in terror, his brown eyes dark and wildly staring, his mouth working, twisting, his cheek muscles flinching.

Taking one of the palsied hands in hers, resisting its efforts to jerk away, she gently and continuously caressed the back of it until she felt it relax, all the while talking to him, not demanding he calm down, but with casual conversation as though she had just met him in the street.

‘I expect your family will be glad to see you home, won’t they?’

She hoped as she spoke that he had a family and she hadn’t made a tactless blunder. It could be so easily done. But at least he would be going home. Thurber-Smith, as she’d asked to be called, had said the man’s wounds weren’t too serious, an arm smashed by shrapnel – enough at least to get him home and patched up.

As she talked, the eyes became less staring, the face ceased its twisting. After a few minutes, he began to respond. His voice hoarse, his words broken and stuttering, he began talking jerkily of shells bursting around his head, of lying in the mud unable to move. His arm wouldn’t do what he wanted it to do, he said. They had come for him, picked him up and brought him here on a stretcher because his legs wouldn’t move either, though they had found nothing wrong with his legs. They’d gone away disgusted that he wouldn’t walk for himself. The voice rose suddenly.

‘But I c-couldn’t! I really couldn’t. I th-thought I’d lost ’em.’

The journalist in her had already begun to make mental notes of what she would write on this incident. Now she laid a quiet hand over the mouth that was beginning to work again.

‘It doesn’t really matter now. You can move them now, so it’s all right. It was only temporary, like when a leg goes to sleep.’

‘I suppose so.’ He calmed. ‘It was just the noise.’

‘I know. But it’s quiet now. Listen.’

He listened, then nodded. ‘I f-feel better now.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘I’ll be better, won’t I?’

‘I think so. It’ll be so much easier once you’re home.’

‘I will g-go home, won’t I?’

‘Yes, of course you will.’

Unable to help herself, now that he was calmer, she asked her inevitable question, full of self as she was.

‘Have you come upon anyone by the name of Captain Jonathan Ward?’

‘Ward?’ There was no stutter now, but she was interested only in the ring of certainty in the tone.

‘Captain Ward. He made me follow him. We went out from our trench. Walking pace. Couldn’t run. Mud weighed us down. Packs too. There was this house – farmhouse. Our artillery had been bombarding it. They started up again. Over our heads. Shouldn’t have done, with us going over the top. Should have stopped when we made our push …’

His breathing was beginning to grow rapid. ‘It was the n-noise. Never worried me before. I couldn’t make my legs move. Captain Ward said I’d be all right, he’d keep in front of me, shield me. He got me up over the top with him. The machine guns started up and … I don’t know w-what happened. I w-was underneath him … I was under …’

He began stammering again, but Sara couldn’t wait. She was so near and so afraid. Taking his shoulders, she shook him, the worst thing she could have done to a man in his state, but sense had taken leave of her. All she knew was that she had to know. After all these months of despairing, she was so near. So near. And so terrified.

‘Captain Ward. Where is he? What happened to him?’

‘I th-think he’s dead. He didn’t move … Oh, Christ … I w-want to go home. Don’t m-make me go back …’

‘Did you see if he was picked up?’ she demanded. ‘Where would they have taken him? How long ago was it? Do you know where at the front it was? Exactly where?’

‘Don’t know. The village – Passchendaele. Flattened. Just b-bits of stone … Sticking up. We c-could see it. Told to take it … I couldn’t move … It was all the n-noise.’

Her questions were terrifying him. He was beginning to rant and an alarmed nurse hurried to pull her away, reprimanding her for the harm she was doing, but Sara fought the clutching hands.

‘Captain Ward – did they leave him behind? Tell me – please!’

‘I d-d-don’t know! I c-couldn’t t-take the noise.’

‘This is no good, young lady!’ The nurse’s voice was incensed. ‘If you can’t help us, then kindly …’

But Sara was already racing off between the makeshift beds beneath the damp stretched canvas of the hospital tent, skirting around the stretchers, the men with bandaged limbs sitting on stools or standing apathetically about for their turn to be seen by overworked surgeons and nurses.

Outside, the rain had dropped to a drizzle, but had it still been pouring she would not have noticed. She made towards a small group of women standing beside two vehicles, one vehicle with a white bedsheet spread across its roof, anchored to its frame and painted with a red cross, the other looking like an ordinary civilian van that in England might have delivered bread or groceries. One girl was climbing up into the so-called ambulance with its red cross, hoisting her ankle-length drill skirt to give her more movement. Sara ran up to her.

‘Where are you going?’ she demanded of her.

The girl paused, looking down at her. She had a pleasant, merry face, a little begrimed now. ‘Are you volunteering then?’

‘Yes, if I know where you are going.’

‘Does it matter? It’s all the same out there.’

‘Can you go towards Ypres?’

‘I can go in that direction. Is there someone you want to see?’

‘I have to get to some village called Passchendaele,’ Sara evaded.

The girl smiled. ‘There’s a lot of fighting going on there. You can’t get near. They bring them in on stretchers as they find them and we load them aboard some way back from the front line. We’re only allowed to go within a mile’s distance. Even then General Haig isn’t keen on us …’

‘If you can make for Passchendaele,’ Sara cut in desperately, ‘I could scout around.’

‘You
are
looking for someone.’ The girl grinned, then nodded. ‘Hop aboard.’

The van had seen better days, having received a bit of a bashing over rutted roads and across fields.

‘Hope her springs don’t give out on me,’ said the girl who had given her name as Beatrice Heatherfield as they bumped along the few miles, the sound of gunfire growing louder, the air beginning to fill with the faint acrid tang of cordite. Sara felt her stomach going over with fear and a strange excitement, but mostly fear.

They pulled up some way behind the British lines, as was expected of them. Sara could see the shell bursts, the sound of their explosions arriving just afterwards across the distance. It all seemed so unreal, rather like watching pictures on a cinema screen. She thought of a film she’d seen – was it only the previous year?
The Birth of A Nation
, that was it. The battles of those times were so long ago as not to matter any more, and anyway, were only on celluloid, make-believe for an audience.

Here, each shell burst, each crump of gunfire, meant some life lost, flesh torn by shrapnel; each clatter of a machine gun meant a bullet in a soldier’s body. There was a strange smell like burnt earth, even this far away, it was enough to sting her nostrils.

The van drew to a halt. It was raining again. The August mid-morning could have been a January dusk, the sky was so overladen with drifting smoke and heavy rain clouds. The stretcher-bearers and orderlies, their gas capes shedding water in cascades, were already bringing their charges forward. The mud clung to Sara’s boots, making walking difficult and slippery, and causing a sucking sound with every step she took. From beneath the sou’wester Beatrice had handed her from the van, her hair hung from its bun like rat tails; water streamed from the mackintosh Beatrice had also given her.