Atonement (41 page)

As they
walked back toward Parliament Square Briony was light-headed and still weak in
the knees from laughing so hard. She wondered at herself, at how quickly her
mood could be transformed. Her worries did not disappear, but slipped back,
their emotional power temporarily exhausted. Arm in arm the girls walked across
Westminster Bridge. The tide was out, and in such strong light there was a
purple sheen on the mudbanks where thousands of wormcasts threw tiny sharp
shadows. As Briony and Fiona turned right onto Lambeth Palace Road they saw a
line of army lorries drawn up outside the main entrance. The girls groaned
good-humoredly at the prospect of more supplies to be unpacked and stowed.

Then they saw
the field ambulances among the lorries, and coming closer they saw the
stretchers, scores of them, set down haphazardly on the ground, and an expanse
of dirty green battle dress and stained bandages. There were also soldiers
standing in groups, dazed and immobile, and wrapped like the men on the ground
in filthy bandages. A medical orderly was gathering rifles from the back of a
lorry. A score of porters, nurses and doctors were moving through the crowd.
Five or six trolleys had been brought out to the front of the
hospital—clearly not enough. For a moment, Briony and Fiona stopped and
looked, and then, at the same moment, they began to run.

In less than
a minute they were down among the men. The brisk air of spring did not dispel
the stench of engine oil and festering wounds. The soldiers’ faces and
hands were black, and with their stubble and matted black hair, and their
tied-on labels from the casualty-receiving stations, they looked identical, a
wild race of men from a terrible world. The ones who were standing appeared to
be asleep. More nurses and doctors were pouring out of the entrance. A
consultant was taking charge and a rough triage system was in place. Some of
the urgent cases were being lifted onto the trolleys. For the first time in her
training, Briony found herself addressed by a doctor, a registrar she had never
seen before.

“You,
get on the end of this stretcher.”

The doctor
himself took the other end. She had never carried a stretcher before and the
weight of it surprised her. They were through the entrance and ten yards down
the corridor and she knew her left wrist could not hold up. She was at the feet
end. The soldier had a sergeant’s stripes. He was without his boots and
his bluish toes stank. His head was wrapped in a bandage soaked to crimson and
black. On his thigh his battle dress was mangled into a wound. She thought she
could see the white protuberance of bone. Each step they took gave him pain.
His eyes were shut tight, but he opened and closed his mouth in silent agony.
If her left hand failed, the stretcher would certainly tip. Her fingers were
loosening as they reached the lift, stepped inside and set the stretcher down.
While they slowly rose, the doctor felt the man’s pulse, and breathed in
sharply through his nose. He was oblivious to Briony’s presence. As the
second floor sank into their view, she thought only of the thirty yards of
corridor to the ward, and whether she would make it. It was her duty to tell
the doctor that she couldn’t. But his back was to her as he slammed the
lift gates apart, and told her to take her end. She willed more strength to her
left arm, and she willed the doctor to go faster. She would not bear the
disgrace if she were to fail. The black-faced man opened and closed his mouth
in a kind of chewing action. His tongue was covered in white spots. His black
Adam’s apple rose and fell, and she made herself stare at that. They
turned into the ward, and she was lucky that an emergency bed was ready by the
door. Her fingers were already slipping. A sister and a qualified nurse were
waiting. As the stretcher was maneuvered into position alongside the bed,
Briony’s fingers went slack, she had no control over them, and she
brought up her left knee in time to catch the weight. The wooden handle thumped
against her leg. The stretcher wobbled, and it was the sister who leaned in to
steady it. The wounded sergeant blew through his lips a sound of incredulity,
as though he had never guessed that pain could be so vast.

“For
God’s sake, girl,” the doctor muttered. They eased their patient
onto the bed.

Briony waited
to find out if she was needed. But now the three were busy and ignored her. The
nurse was removing the head bandage, and the sister was cutting away the
soldier’s trousers. The registrar turned away to the light to study the
notes scribbled on the label he had pulled away from the man’s shirt. Briony
cleared her throat softly and the sister looked round and was annoyed to find
her still there.

“Well
don’t just stand idle, Nurse Tallis. Get downstairs and help.”

She came away
humiliated, and felt a hollow sensation spreading in her stomach. The moment
the war touched her life, at the first moment of pressure, she had failed. If
she was made to carry another stretcher, she would not make it halfway to the
lift. But if she was told to, she would not dare refuse. If she dropped her end
she would simply leave, gather her things from her room into her suitcase, and
go to Scotland and work as a land girl. It would be better for everyone. As she
hurried along the ground-floor corridor she met Fiona coming the other way on
the front of a stretcher. She was a stronger girl than Briony. The face of the
man she was carrying was completely obliterated by dressings, with a dark oval
hole for his mouth. The girls’ eyes met and something passed between
them, shock, or shame that they had been laughing in the park when there was
this.

Briony went
outside and saw with relief the last of the stretchers being lifted onto extra
trolleys, and porters waiting to push them. A dozen qualified nurses were
standing to one side with their suitcases. She recognized some from her own
ward. There was no time to ask them where they were being sent. Something even
worse was happening elsewhere. The priority now was the walking wounded. There
were still more than two hundred of them. A sister told her to lead fifteen men
up to Beatrice ward. They followed her in single file back down the corridor,
like children in a school crocodile. Some had their arms in slings, others had
head or chest wounds. Three men walked on crutches. No one spoke. There was a
jam around the lifts with trolleys waiting to get to the operating theaters in
the basement, and others still trying to get up to the wards. She found a place
in an alcove for the men with crutches to sit, told them not to move, and took
the rest up by the stairs. Progress was slow and they paused on each landing.

“Not
far now,” she kept saying, but they did not seem to be aware of her.

When they
reached the ward, etiquette required her to report to the sister. She was not
in her office. Briony turned to her crocodile, which had bunched up behind her.
They did not look at her. They were staring past her, into the grand Victorian
space of the ward, the lofty pillars, the potted palms, the neatly ranged beds
and their pure, turned-down sheets.

“You
wait here,” she said. “The sister will find you all a bed.”

She walked
quickly to the far end where the sister and two nurses were attending a
patient. There were shuffling footsteps behind Briony. The soldiers were coming
down the ward.

Horrified,
she flapped her hands at them. “Go back, please go back and wait.”

But they were
fanning out now across the ward. Each man had seen the bed that was his.
Without being assigned, without removing their boots, without baths and
delousing and hospital pajamas, they were climbing onto the beds. Their filthy
hair, their blackened faces were on the pillows. The sister was coming at a
sharp pace from her end of the ward, her heels resounding in the venerable
space. Briony went to a bedside and plucked at the sleeve of a soldier who lay
faceup, cradling his arm which had slipped its sling. As he kicked his legs out
straight he made a scar of oil stain across his blanket. All her fault.

“You
must get up,” she said as the sister was upon her. She added feebly,
“There’s a procedure.”

“The
men need to sleep. The procedures are for later.” The voice was Irish.
The sister put a hand on Briony’s shoulder and turned her so that her
name badge could be read. “You’ll go back to your ward now, Nurse
Tallis. You’ll be needed there, I should think.”

With the
gentlest of shoves, Briony was sent about her business. The ward could do
without disciplinarians like her. The men around her were already asleep, and
again she had been proved an idiot. Of course they should sleep. She had only
wanted to do what she thought was expected. These weren’t her rules,
after all. They had been dinned into her these past few months, the thousand
details of a new admission. How was she to know they meant nothing in fact?
These indignant thoughts afflicted her until she was almost at her own ward
when she remembered the men with crutches downstairs, waiting to be brought up
in the lift. She hurried down the stairs. The alcove was empty, and there was
no sign of the men in corridors. She did not want to expose her ineptitude by
asking among the nurses or porters. Someone must have gathered the wounded men
up. In the days that followed, she never saw them again.

Her own ward
had been redesignated as an overflow to acute surgical, but the definitions
meant nothing at first. It could have been a clearing station on the front
line. Sisters and senior nurses had been drafted in to help, and five or six
doctors were working on the most urgent cases. There were two padres, one
sitting and talking to a man lying on his side, the other praying by a shape
under a blanket. All the nurses wore masks, and they and the doctors had rolled
up their sleeves. The sisters moved between the beds swiftly, giving
injections—probably morphine—or administering the transfusion
needles to connect the injured to the vacolitres of whole blood and the yellow
flasks of plasma that hung like exotic fruits from the tall mobile stands.
Probationers moved down the ward with piles of hot-water bottles. The soft echo
of voices, medical voices, filled the ward, and was pierced regularly by groans
and shouts of pain. Every bed was occupied, and new cases were left on the
stretchers and laid between the beds to take advantage of the transfusion
stands. Two orderlies were getting ready to take away the dead men. At many
beds, nurses were removing dirty dressings. Always a decision, to be gentle and
slow, or firm and quick and have it over with in one moment of pain. This ward
favored the latter, which accounted for some of the shouts. Everywhere, a soup
of smells—the sticky sour odor of fresh blood, and also filthy clothes,
sweat, oil, disinfectant, medical alcohol, and drifting above it all, the stink
of gangrene. Two cases going down to the theater turned out to be amputations.

With senior
nurses seconded to casualty-receiving hospitals further out in the
hospital’s sector, and more cases coming in, the qualified nurses gave
orders freely, and the probationers of Briony’s set were given new
responsibilities. A nurse sent Briony to remove the dressing and clean the leg
wound of a corporal lying on a stretcher near the door. She was not to dress it
again until one of the doctors had looked at it. The corporal was facedown, and
grimaced when she knelt to speak in his ear.

“Don’t
mind me if I scream,” he murmured. “Clean it up, Nurse. I
don’t want to lose it.”

The trouser
leg had been cut clear. The outer bandaging looked relatively new. She began to
unwind it, and when it was impossible to pass her hand under his leg, she used
scissors to cut the dressing away.

“They
did me up on the quayside at Dover.”

Now there was
only gauze, black with congealed blood, along the length of the wound which ran
from his knee to his ankle. The leg itself was hairless and black. She feared
the worst and breathed through her mouth.

“Now
how did you do a thing like that?” She made herself sound chirpy.

“Shell
comes over, knocks me back onto this fence of corrugated tin.”

“That
was bad luck. Now you know this dressing’s got to come off.”

She gently
lifted an edge and the corporal winced.

He said, “Count
me in, one two three like, and do it quick.”

The corporal
clenched his fists. She took the edge she had freed, gripped it hard between
forefinger and thumb, and pulled the dressing back in a sudden stroke. A memory
came to her from childhood, of seeing at an afternoon birthday party the famous
tablecloth trick. The dressing came away in one, with a gluey rasping sound.

The corporal
said, “I’m going to be sick.”

There was a
kidney bowl to hand. He retched, but produced nothing. In the folds of skin at
the back of his neck were beads of perspiration. The wound was eighteen inches
long, perhaps more, and curved behind his knee. The stitches were clumsy and
irregular. Here and there one edge of the ruptured skin rose over the other,
revealing its fatty layers, and little obtrusions like miniature bunches of red
grapes forced up from the fissure.

She said,
“Hold still. I’m going to clean round it, but I won’t touch
it.” She would not touch it yet. The leg was black and soft, like an
overripe banana. She soaked cotton wool in alcohol. Fearful that the skin would
simply come away, she made a gentle pass, around his calf, two inches above the
wound. Then she wiped again, with a little more pressure. The skin was firm, so
she pressed the cotton wool until he flinched. She took away her hand and saw
the swath of white skin she had revealed. The cotton wool was black. Not
gangrene. She couldn’t help her gasp of relief. She even felt her throat
constrict.