In Falling Snow (28 page)

We'd walked twice around the outside of the abbey and our pace was slowing now. “I saw my mother once,” Cicely said. “I found out where she was from my grandmother. It was an asylum in the country not far from my school, strangely enough. She'd loved beauty, but the light had gone out of her. She was wearing a stained nightdress with her breasts on show. She didn't know who I was.

“I can't help but think that there was something I didn't do that I should have. I used to go and sleep in her bed if she was scared, and I think sometimes if only I'd gone to her bed that night, I'd have stopped them coming, she might have been saved, mightn't she?”

I was naïve in the extreme, I see now, with no understanding of how guilt worms its way into a heart and festers there. “You can't blame yourself, Cicely,” I said stupidly. “You were young.” As if the reality of Cicely's youth or her poor mother's condition could possibly compete in Cicely's mind with her mother's warm body in the bed and her thirteen-year-old sense of responsibility for it. “Poor Cicely,” I would say now that I have lived my life. “What a cross to bear.”

For two weeks, we had a constant stream of wounded. I was working sixteen-hour shifts, having a four-hour break and then working again. At some stage, the ward sister told me to go off for eight hours and I went up to the room and fell into bed without changing or washing. The ambulances had been back and forth from Creil all through that day and the night that followed. I came to dread the sound of the porter's horn. It haunted my dreams. I'd wake thinking I'd heard it and fall back into a fitful sleep only to wake minutes later. No sooner did we clear the front hall of patients than another load arrived. I worried about Violet.

The stories the men told beggared belief. The shells had made deep holes in the trenches. The soldiers were living in mud up to their knees and now it was impossible to see where the deeper holes were. One man told me he fell up to his chest and waited five hours to be pulled out. Another man right next to him drowned. And we were all terrified by the new weapons of war, the horrid gas that poisoned eyes and lungs and for which we had no treatment. We watched them die in slow agony and any of us who had once thought the war was righteous knew that what was happening to these men and boys could never be related to justice. Now there wasn't a woman in Royaumont who spoke in support of war. No one thought the kaiser had done right, but when you saw the soldiers on both sides, for we treated German prisoners, you knew it should stop. All we could do though was keep treating them. We had no power to intervene in any other way.

The surgeons operated constantly through the first week of July. We set up a second theatre at one end of Blanche. The laboratory was working through the nights to keep up with the surgeons. Swabs were taken of wounds on admission and Dr. Dalyell had to sort those with gangrene from those without so that we could prioritise. Vera Collum had trained as a radiographer and now worked with Dr. Savill in the X-ray room. She and two others worked day and night too. Nearly 90 percent of the wounds we saw in those weeks were gangrenous, and the surgeons needed films in order to know what to excise. Mostly they didn't stop to look for shrapnel, just to clean or amputate to stop the gangrene spreading.

The Senegalese soldier I'd met on one of my first nights at Royaumont, the one who'd known the dying boy's village and had spoken the boy's language, returned to us, this time gravely wounded. He'd lost both of his brothers to the war and now he too would die. I stopped at his stretcher and said a prayer. Allah was the name of his God so I said it to Allah. “Take care of this poor man who will never go home,” I said. He opened his eyes and looked at me. I don't think he remembered me but I stayed with him as long as I could and I held his cold hand. I don't know why they'd bothered to move him from Creil. Dr. Henry came up behind me. “This one's dead, Iris,” she said. “Move on to the next.” I looked up at her and there were tears in my eyes but she failed to see them. “Come on, Iris. We don't have time to tarry.”

Later that day, a group of two hundred soldiers, underfed, tired to exhaustion, and ragged, walked by Royaumont. They asked if they could sit on the lawns for an hour or so. We did better, giving them fresh straw to sleep on overnight and a hot meal, and fixing what we could of their minor scrapes and dirty uniforms. Where were their officers? Where was their canteen? These poor boys hadn't eaten a meal for over a week, hadn't slept. What we could do for them, for any of them, was so meagre compared with what was happening across France.

After I finished on the ward again, I went up to my room and lay on my bed but couldn't sleep. I spent a long time staring up at the ceiling without thoughts, just wide awake. Finally I fell into a fitful sleep but woke after less than an hour feeling worse than when I lay down. I'd never felt so tired and yet I knew I had to go back to the ward. I dragged myself up, washed quickly, dressed, and went down.

Miss Ivens had operated for eighteen hours straight the day before and had had less rest than me, I was sure. There were no shifts for our surgeons. They just worked while we had urgent cases, and right now we had a constant stream of urgent cases. Miss Ivens was already back at work, according to an orderly I saw on the stairs. Violet had worked through the night too as more casualties poured in. I found her in the cloister and we shared a cigarette before she went off again to Creil to pick up another load. I'd worked hard to learn to smoke. It had taken time but finally I was as competent as Violet. I found it calmed my nerves.

Violet told me a patient had fallen from her ambulance in the night and she'd had to go back to get him. It shouldn't have been a reason for mirth but as she told it—she'd heard a thump, assumed it was a pothole, and had driven on, the other patients yelling at her to stop—we both started to giggle.

“The worst of it is,” Violet said, trying hard to suppress laughter, “I went on for half a mile before I realised what the din in the back was about.” And then she broke up altogether and I joined her, a picture in my head of little Violet, sitting up straight at the wheel of her ambulance in the way she did, leaning forward, peering ahead into the darkness, intent on getting her wounded to Royaumont, ignoring the noise in the back until she could no longer, then realising what she'd done, turning round, just as intent on getting back to the poor wounded man who'd fallen from the truck.

The man was ambulatory—a minor head injury—and he hadn't been further injured by the fall. All arrived safely at Royaumont half an hour later. But we couldn't stop laughing, and all I can say in our defence is that we were exhausted beyond all reason.

I had continued to worry about Violet's mental state. She was often in a black mood now and more against the war than any of us. I sometimes thought she might just quit and go home. She didn't seem to be able to find any good in what she was doing. I was glad we were laughing again, more than laughing, giggling like the young girls we were, as if the horrors all around us were nothing but stories.

“What's the joke?” Quoyle asked. Even if we could have got the words out amidst our laughter, I knew she wouldn't have understood.

Miss Ivens came out to the cloister then, looking exhausted. She ignored our laughter, which quickly sobered us. “Iris, I need you with me today. I'm meeting with the Croix-Rouge later and I must have you there. There's trouble again. They want us to open another ward. I can't see how we can.” Her eyes were wet with tiredness and just for a moment, I thought she might fall over or cry. I got up and, without thinking of the breakfast I hadn't eaten, followed her back through the abbey and out into the day.

There were a few women who weren't cut out for Royaumont—you had to be a certain sort, ready to do whatever was needed, ready to muck in, as Miss Ivens termed it. The hardest thing for those who weren't suited was admitting it to themselves. They so much wanted to be women of Royaumont, could see something worthy in it I suppose. Miss Ivens usually let them come to their own decision. Who am I to know their hearts? she would say to me. The first matron, Miss Todd, tried her best to fit in but was too steeped in the old ways. She didn't have the kind of flexibility we needed, not knowing from one day to the next how many wounded would come and how we'd cope. It wasn't always ordered and neat. The final blow had come when Violet was ill and Matron Todd had suggested sending up to Paris for a man. I really thought Miss Todd was for it. But Miss Ivens was kind, she let Miss Todd resign on her own terms and even wrote to Dr. Inglis later that while Miss Todd hadn't fitted in at Royaumont, “it's our fault for asking her to come out in the first place. She wouldn't want you to know that she cried when she resigned.” Strangely, after Miss Todd left, many of the nurses missed her. Later they spoke of her as their mother away from home. I didn't find her motherly, but perhaps that was because she saw me as one of Miss Ivens's crew and not one of hers.

The only person I remember Miss Ivens speaking to directly about leaving Royaumont was Dr. McCourt, who'd already come to her own decision so it hardly mattered. And I only mention her now because had Dr. McCourt not come to Royaumont, had she not awoken in me a feeling about myself I still don't quite understand, other than it had something to do with pride and perhaps wasn't my noblest feeling, had Dr. McCourt not done what she did, I probably would never have taken seriously Miss Ivens's suggestions to me and the future might have been different. I might have done what my father had told me to do and taken my brother home.

Dr. McCourt came to us highly recommended from one of the Serbian units. It's true she hadn't stayed long in any one hospital but when I raised this, Miss Ivens just said that Dr. McCourt might like change and this was hardly a reason to worry. I met Dr. McCourt on her first day. She ignored me and spoke to Miss Ivens as many doctors did. She was very sure of herself, I remember thinking.

There was an operative case, a head injury, and Miss Ivens had embarked on a particular course of action, successful with other such cases. War presents so much useful trauma, the same over and over again, and Miss Ivens or one of her colleagues had discovered or read somewhere that if you made a hole in the skull and inserted a drain, the fluid collecting around the brain after trauma would disperse, easing pressure and reducing the mental damage that would render a man useless.

When Dr. McCourt saw Miss Ivens drill the already damaged skull and insert a catheter drain into the injured man's head, she was horrified, I think, for she brought it up in the theatre, even though Miss Ivens was leading the procedure and she, Dr. McCourt, was assisting. “Whatever are you doing, Frances?” she said, despite the fact that Miss Ivens had just explained what she was doing. There was silence in the theatre, for our practice was that the lead surgeon—it wasn't always Miss Ivens but whoever it was—made the decisions and others followed and no one questioned the lead surgeon, not during an operation and especially not if it was the chief.

Miss Ivens was for the most part one of the gentlest souls I ever knew, but when you crossed her you were never in any doubt that you had done so. Miss Ivens looked up at Dr. McCourt over her mask, her big brown eyes and dark skin a band of energy across her face, and asked her to leave the theatre. Which of course she did.

On another occasion, not long after this altercation, Miss Ivens and I were doing her ward rounds. She asked me to irrigate a wound and change a complicated dressing, normally something a doctor would have done herself. Miss Ivens had often used me in this way, even in the operating theatre. The first time, it had been necessity. One of the young doctors, Dr. Henry I think now, collapsed in the middle of an operation. Exhaustion was the culprit. It was during that rush of July when everyone was working an extra share. Dr. Henry fainted and one of the orderlies stood down to help her but Miss Ivens had to continue and she needed a second surgeon but none was available. “Iris,” she said, picking me over more experienced operating theatre nurses. “I need you to help me.”