Shamrock Green (18 page)

‘Oh, God! Oh, my God!' the padre said.

The officer swayed in the doorway while two orderlies hovered behind him, trying vainly to persuade him to leave. When he lifted his head Becky saw that his eyes were swollen shut and guessed that all he could see of the operating room was bleary white light.

‘Gassed,' the officer shouted. ‘We've all been bloody gassed.' Then ripping away the sacking from his mouth, he roared out hoarsely, ‘Christ Jesus, will no one listen? Christ Jesus, is no one there?'

*   *   *

Becky ran along the brown corridors to the French doors in the dining-hall and out on to the broad stone steps that overlooked the lawn. Seven or eight trucks were drawn up on the grass. There were no orderlies with the men who crawled out from under the canvases, men who had probably been hoisted out of the sector and shipped to Saint-Emile just to get rid of them; somewhere back at base a scarlet major would be patting himself on the back for solving that little problem in logistics and morale.

Becky smoothed her apron and stepped on to the grass.

The soldiers who toppled from the trucks had indeed been gassed. They stumbled about the grounds, blind, terrified and choking. Becky looked for someone in authority to tell her where to begin. Cooks had emerged from the kitchen and on the steps of the main building a couple of surgeons, one clad in a blue silk dressing-gown, had appeared, together with nurses and walking wounded from the wards. Beds, Becky thought. Beds in the cloisters outside the old gymnasium – the gymnasium itself was being used as a temporary morgue – cots, blankets and wet dressings, oxygen tanks and masks. She had never dealt with gas cases before and her classes in the subject seemed so distant that she could hardly remember them.

She flinched when a soldier grabbed her arm. His mouth was wide open and green saliva coated his tongue. He shouted at her then burrowed his chin into her cheek and in a low, rasping voice begged for help.

Becky pushed him away. Chlorine or phosgene? He wouldn't be able to tell her. He was unintelligible, incomprehensible. Chlorine or phosgene or something worse? Lung irritants. Oedema, pulmonary lesions, asphyxia, death by drowning when fluid filled the lungs. How many dead already? Oh, God, why hadn't she been at Ypres last December when the Boche had first used gas? She spun like a skittle as one soldier after another blundered past her, weeping in the blind white darkness.

‘Nurse Tarrant, Nurse Tarrant?'

Captain Bracknell, still in his bloodstained surgical gown, was furious, his face as livid as the faces of the victims. ‘What is this? What the
hell
is this?'

‘I – I don't know, sir.'

The captain had specialised in treating female disorders in a hospital in Buckinghamshire. He was a surgeon and there was nothing here to put a knife to. ‘Where did they
come
from? Why have they just
appeared?
' he ranted. ‘Who
sent
them here?
We're
not equipped for gas. My God, are they
all
blind?'

Soldiers tottered on worn swards and paved pathways, pawing at the air and wailing or, falling, crawled about in miserable confusion. Becky put a hand to her brow and covered her eyes. She could not bear to see men so pitifully reduced.

‘Find out precisely what we're dealing with,' the captain told her. ‘Is it airborne gas or was the damned stuff delivered in shells?'

‘Beds…'

‘We don't
have
beds, woman. We must do what we can for them where they stand. Thank God it isn't raining.' He turned on his heel and stalked away.

Becky was no longer alone. Doctor Caufield, Mr Sanderson, Sister Congreve and four or five white-faced probationers were assembling oxygen tanks by the front steps. Ammonia sprays: fumes of ammonia, yes, that would help relieve milder cases of congestion. Trying hard to think straight, Becky walked through the rabble in search of someone sensible enough to answer the captain's question.

The sun had come out, a hazy wintry sun. The sky overhead had a strange blue tinge to it but no clouds, no depth. She headed for the trucks in the hope of finding a driver but the drivers had dispersed into the crowd.

Soldiers lay writhing and gasping on the grass; a corporal had toppled into a flowerbed and lay motionless, face down, as if the earth itself had soothing properties. And then she spotted a quiet, sensible-looking fellow seated against the wheel of the truck in the shade of a tarpaulin. His battledress was so caked with mud that she could not make out his regiment. He sat very still, legs stuck out, hands flat on the ground, breathing high in his chest, mouth open and head cocked as if he were listening to the beating of his heart.

She knelt by his side. ‘Can you speak?'

He nodded.

‘Are you in pain?'

He nodded again.

‘Can you see me?'

‘Not much of you.'

He was Irish, like most of the troops in the sector. She wondered where the priest was and glanced round for Father Coyle. The soldier touched her on the knee, lightly. He had lost his helmet and his hair was matted with the residue of the gas. On his forehead was a thin wound over which mud had congealed. His eyes were not shut, not completely, but they were horribly wet. Becky fished in the pocket of her apron, found a small embroidered handkerchief, her own, and carefully wiped his sticky lashes.

He flinched, and she said, ‘I'm sorry.'

He gave a wheezy little grunt. ‘Are you Scottish?'

‘I am,' Becky said. ‘Do you know where you are?'

‘France,' he said, wheezing. ‘Somewhere in France – I think.'

It was chilly in the shadow of the tarpaulin. She could feel the cold seeping through the ground. She should be elsewhere, should be up and doing. Sister Congreve would be hunting for her.

She wiped the soldier's eyes with the embroidered rag and listened to his congested laughter. She wondered if laughter was a sign of delirium, if she had picked the wrong man.

‘Tell me,' she said, ‘how was the gas delivered?'

‘Shells first, then a greenish mist. Smelled musty, like hay.'

‘Where did the attack take place?'

‘Fire-trenches. Our lines in the chalk-pits. Loos to Hulluch. Easterly breeze. Stiff. No chance to sack up.' He coughed. The fluid in his lungs seethed and bubbled. She held the handkerchief to his lips and caught a glimpse of brown eyes under the sticky lashes. ‘Inniskillings. Dublin Fusiliers. Us,' he said, panting again, ‘the Sperryhead Rifles.'

‘Can you walk?'

He nodded.

She tucked the little handkerchief into her pocket and clasped his hand. ‘Come along,' she said. ‘I'll see to it that something's done for you. It seems worse than perhaps it is.'

‘Sure,' the soldier said, ‘an' that's a comfort.' He allowed her to haul him to his feet. ‘What's your name, Sister?'

‘Tarrant. I'm only a staff nurse, by the way.'

‘An' I'm – I'm…'

She gave his hand an urgent tug. ‘Who? Who are you? Tell me.'

‘Gowry.'

‘Gowry?'

‘McCulloch. Gowry McCulloch.'

‘Well, Gowry McCulloch,' Becky said, ‘you'll soon be as right as rain.'

‘Sure an' I will,' he said cynically and let her lead him out of the shadow into the light of the wintry sun.

Chapter Ten

Gowry's first eight months of training in the barracks at Fermoy had been taken up with physical conditioning and rudimentary drills, for few of the officers were capable of teaching more sophisticated martial skills. He had not been unhappy there, though he missed Maeve and tried not to think of her too much. He had written five or six letters home but received no replies from either his wife or daughter and, bowing to their wishes, did not write to them again.

He chose not to go to Dublin on leaves and weekend passes. Instead he stayed in billets or jogged out on the train to Tipperary where Maggie picked him up in a pony-trap and took him back to her cottage. He had told Maggie most of what had taken place in Dublin, and Maurice and he had dug a great deep pit by the side of the manure heap in the paddock and buried the guns in it. It galled Maurice to have to bury thirty new rifles when the instructors on the Kilworth ranges were crying out for training weapons.

The company commanders were retired officers from the Irish militia or veterans from the Afghan wars and the majority of the recruits were nationalists. Gowry kept his mouth shut about his nationalist associations. He was afraid that Flanagan might seek compensation for the burning of the Benz or that Vaizey would pull him out of the army on a trumped-up charge but as weeks piled into months and spring followed winter, his anxiety and resentment faded.

After almost a year in training at Fermoy, the Rifles were shipped across to England and put into barracks near Aldershot to learn about the weird and cunning engines of war and become more proficient in musketry. In November the battalion was inspected by the Archbishop of Westminster, in December by Queen Mary, then, just before Christmas, each man was issued with an identity disc, field dressings and a Bible and they all entrained for France.

On Christmas Day a second lieutenant was shot dead by a stray bullet. He was the battalion's first fatality. The following morning, Boxing Day, the men of the 2nd Battalion were sent up to join a forward unit north-east of Melville to have their first taste of trench warfare.

At first Gowry was filled with a strange sense of elation. Finally shot of his old life in Dublin, he felt as if he had been born anew. Of course he hated the rats, the body lice, the cold and wet, the garbage stench of the dugouts and the carnage caused by shrapnel shelling but, even so, he remained confident, absolutely confident, that he would somehow survive the war.

In January the Rifles were transferred to a cushy bit of trench in the Hulluch sector where the enemy lines were held by Bavarian troops, an easy-going lot. When Prussians replaced them, however, the pace hotted up and the Boche, rehearsing for a large-scale attack, released a ‘whiff' of cylinder gas on the tail of the dawn shelling. The Rifles, dug in to windward, bore the brunt of it.

‘And here you are,' Rebecca said.

‘Here I am,' said Gowry. ‘Is that you?'

‘Who else would it be at this hour of the morning? Did I wake you?'

‘I wasn't asleep.'

‘Can't you sleep sitting up?'

‘I see things,' Gowry said. ‘Flashes, like lightning. Are we near the front? I can't hear the guns.'

‘We aren't near the front. Do you really not know where you are?'

‘Saint-Emile,' said Gowry. ‘Wherever that is.'

‘We're about ten miles from Heuvert.'

‘Heuvert?' Gowry said. ‘I've been there.'

‘A well-travelled man, I see,' Becky said. ‘When did they last change your dressings?'

‘Last night, I think.'

‘Will I change them for you now?'

‘No,' Gowry said.

‘Why not? Don't you trust me to do it properly?'

‘I'm sure you've better things to do than fuss with me. What time is it?'

‘About five,' Becky told him.

‘A fine morning, is it?'

‘It promises to be,' Becky said. ‘There isn't a cloud in the sky.'

‘I can smell grass,' Gowry said.

‘You're in a bed in the cloisters,' Becky said. ‘If you listen you'll hear birds singing. The playing fields are just outside.'

‘Playing fields?'

‘The Ecole de Saint-Emile was a school, quite posh, I think.'

Gowry heard the clink of porcelain and knew that she had brought the ice-cold fluid with her. They had washed his hair, washed his whole body in the icy liquid. It had burned like fire for hours.

Afterwards he had explored his face with his fingertips and found a ribbon wound on his brow that had been laved with a greasy substance but not stitched. His head ached and there was pain in his chest and he could not lie down properly. When he leaned over and coughed, he retched up great wads of stuff and the pain in his chest increased. Now he knew he wasn't going to die he had become afraid of the white darkness, sure that he'd be packed off home to grope and shuffle about the Shamrock while Hagarty laughed at his infirmity and made love to Sylvie behind his back.

The Scottish nurse sat on the bed beside him. He could feel her weight on the mattress. He wanted to hold her hand, but didn't dare.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Nothing,' she said. ‘Resting.'

‘Have you been on night duty?'

‘Longer than that, much longer.'

‘How are they, the boys?' Gowry said.

‘Oh, they're fine.'

‘Don't lie to me,' he said.

She hesitated, then said, ‘We lost eleven. Nothing we could do to save them. They were too far gone. Our padre is very upset. Three died on the operating table and he blames himself for giving them too much ether.'

‘He should be blamin' the Boche, not himself,' Gowry said, and coughed.

‘You shouldn't be talking so much.'

‘What – what about the others?'

‘Those who are badly wounded we keep here,' Becky said, ‘until they have recovered enough to survive the journey.'

‘Home to Blighty?'

‘Yes.'

‘What about me?' said Gowry.

He felt her weight shift and her hand on his brow above the dressing. Her hand had rough little calluses across the palm. He wondered what sort of nursing put calluses on a woman's hands. She wore no wedding ring.

‘Let me change your dressing.' Her voice was soft, even softer than Sylvie's. ‘Come on, Private McCulloch, big, brave chap like you. What would your wife think of you, scared of having your bandages changed?'

He did not deny that he had a wife, but he did not confirm it either.

To appease her, he said, ‘All right.'