Softly Grow the Poppies (24 page)

They were silent for several minutes as they watched Harry and Will larking about by the lake, Rose with astonishment, for was this the serious, self-contained soldier who had been brought back to her? He was laughing as the child clung to his leg, the dogs, excited by the rumpus, jumping up to snatch at the bag of crusts he held out of their reach, then, with a groan of pretended submission, falling to the ground with Will and the dogs leaping on him.

‘Dear God, does he not consider the wound he is supposed to be recovering from? If he goes on like this he could open it,’ she moaned but Alice squeezed the arm she held.

‘No, no, it is completely healed now,’ Alice told her. ‘I helped Staff Nurse Long to dress it and he is entirely recovered. You know that he has made a couple of rooms at the top of the house into living quarters for himself and is completely independent and—’ Then realising what she was saying she clamped her lips together since it seemed harsh to tell Rose that there was absolutely no physical reason why he and Rose should not resume their loving relationship. Rose had not been allowed to nurse him, for it needed detachment to attend a wounded soldier and the doctors knew that Rose was far from detached. They had heard of Rose and Harry’s feelings for one another. That in the past he had been home on leave and had shared her bed, and though as men of their era they could only disapprove, times had changed with the war and who could blame lovers for snatching at the chance when one or other of them could be dead within a week? Women nursed and drove ambulances in the front lines and were just as threatened as the soldiers they ministered to.

‘Harry thinks the war will end this year, Rose, now that the Americans are in it,’ Alice added hurriedly.

Rose turned sharply and stared at Alice. ‘He told you that?’

Alice nodded, saddened again because it seemed Harry did not speak much to Rose. What had happened to the virile young man they had all known before the war? What was happening to all the young men they had known before the war? Though they recovered from their wounds their spirits still bore the scars; their mind’s eye still gazed with compassion, with helplessness at the wholesale slaughter they had witnessed and which they never spoke of, except perhaps to one another. A brotherhood of badly damaged young men who jumped nervously at the banging of a door, shrank from the sound of a motor car backfiring and even, it was said, hid under their beds at night in fear of the dark.

‘He has raised a wall between us, Alice,’ Rose went on sadly, ‘and yet there is no one in this world who loves him more. I don’t know what to do. Shall I force him to share his thoughts with me or shall I leave it, as the doctor advises, and wait for him to take the first step? Does he even remember what there was between us? I could be bearing his child.’ Rose bowed her head. ‘I wish to God I was. I can’t bear his indifference to me and I—’

‘Don’t you think that that is an indication that you mean something to him, deep down? He treats us all as acquaintances, even Dolly who loves him because you do, but he avoids you.’

‘Does he?’ Rose was astonished and her bewilderment showed in her agonised face.

‘Yes, he does and I think he does it because he knows that you love him and he loves you but he cannot manage the feelings you arouse in him. He can’t cope with . . . I think he believes his wound has emasculated him in some way and he is terrified that if he took you to bed he would fail you.’

‘Oh, Alice, I wouldn’t care if he did.’

‘But
he
would. He loves Will but then Will demands nothing of him that he cannot give. You would and so he stays away from it. One of the nurses told me he used to ramble in his sleep. He cannot get out of his mind the moment he stepped on one of his own men in no-man’s-land, a dying man who was trying to hold his insides together. He had been struck in the stomach with shrapnel and Harry stumbled into the wound. What remained of the soldier’s stomach had adhered to Harry’s boot and he had nightmares about the blood and . . . and the rest, which he carries around with him. So he has two afflictions to contend with: the soldier he thinks he himself hurt and his fear of letting you down. His mind is not in the right place and until it is he will never recover.’

‘Oh, Alice, what am I to do?’ Rose began to weep but Alice made no attempt to comfort her. Even Rose’s distress did not seem to move her. She continued to watch Harry and Will, her face impassive. Then, as though it took a great deal of effort, she patted Rose’s arm, stood up and walked away.

Both Harry and Will stopped what they were doing and watched her go towards the gate that led through the field to Summer Place. Being an experienced nurse, though not officially recognised as one, most of her work was done at Summer Place where the worst of the injured were. Those who were recovering were moved to Beechworth which was considered to be a kind of convalescent hospital. Will waved to Rose and shouted something incomprehensible. Harry smiled at whatever Will had said and shrugged his shoulders and for a moment a thread of something warm moved between them, something of the past, some tiny acknowledgement that they were still Rose and Harry, a couple, then it was gone as Will raced away after the dogs and Harry followed.

She felt a glow somewhere beneath her ribs. It was the first time that Harry seemed to have recognised who she really was – or was she imagining it – and though it was too soon for him to re-form that special bond since his wounds, inward and external, she was certain, with a frail hope, that he was healing and at the same time moving back to her.

Her tears dried as though magically. She rose and with a lighter step turned towards the door that led into what had been the drawing room. There were soldiers there, officers, for in their wisdom the authorities still divided the ‘men’ from those who had commanded them. One of them who had lost a leg and would have a prosthetic limb fitted as soon as he was strong enough was stumbling down the centre of the ward on his crutches, a nurse solicitously by his side.

‘Watch what you’re doing, Major, or they’ll have you in the races at the Old Swan fête next week,’ she called out to him.

With that cheerful spirit that seemed to say that nothing much had happened to them though most of them had come close to death, he answered her with a blithe wave of his crutch which nearly had him over.

‘A three-legged race, Nurse, you can bet on it.’

The war dragged on. Names grew familiar to the British public through newspaper reports. Operation Marne was launched in July, beginning the Second Battle of the Marne, and marking the first successful Allied offensive of the war while in August 8,000 German prisoners were taken, so surely, they all said to one another, it would be over soon. Tanks were used at a place called Bapaume opening the Battle of Albert, the weary troops told they were to ‘break the enemy’s front’. The patients in the wards read the newspapers eagerly for they, of all the British public, knew what this meant. The Germans were falling back under the onslaught. In nearly four weeks of fighting since the beginning of August over 100,000 German prisoners were taken and what was known by the Germans themselves as ‘The Black Day of the German Army’ marked the beginning of the end.

Nevertheless in September the Germans continued to fight a strong rearguard action but were unsuccessful and news of Germany’s impending military defeat spread through the German armed forces and with American troops arriving at the front at the rate of 10,000 each day, Germany reluctantly moved towards peace.

Rose and Alice were at Summer Place giving a young soldier a bed bath, gently sponging what was left of him when the news filtered through. Bobby, he was called, Corporal Robert Ackroyd, who had served in the same battalion as Harry and Charlie and he had not been expected to survive since he had lost both legs to gangrene, and, perhaps worse than that, the will to live. He had volunteered joyously when he was eighteen and marched off in high hopes of a great adventure and having lived through nightmare after nightmare for four years at the age of twenty-two had cautiously believed he would get through it unscathed. He and his pal ‘Woody’ Woodbine had both stepped on the same land mine in the Allied attack on the Hindenburg Line in October. Woody – lucky bugger, Bobby cried piteously – had been killed instantly but Bobby had survived and his young face stared bitterly from his pillow at the two nurses who were so kind to him.

‘Not much ter wash, Nurse,’ he told Alice. ‘I don’t know why tha’ bloody bother. Never mind, a savin’ on soap, eeh. Me mam was allus sayin’ we was ’ard up so there’s summat ter be grateful for. Cut down expenses a bit.’

Both Alice and Rose were used to the bitterness that emanated from some of the men they nursed, particularly the very young ones, those who had often lied about their age to ‘get in on it’. Others were cheerful in the face of terrible wounds but Bobby wanted nothing but to do away with himself for he believed he was useless and had no future. A young VAD, pretty and shy, stopped to speak to a soldier in the bed opposite and Bobby followed her progress with hopeless eyes. He was a handsome lad, six feet tall or had been on two legs, with the most beautiful eyes, somewhere between blue and sea green surrounded by thick black eyelashes the same colour as his curly hair. He had been a great favourite with the girls before the war and when he was home on leave they had flocked to the street where his family lived, longing to give comfort to one of the heroes of this everlasting war.

But they would no longer flock, for who wanted a man short of his legs, a man who could neither walk nor do any of the things young men like to do. He had played football for his local team, cricket, and was a good dancer, his favourite the waltz since it gave him the chance to put an arm about a slim waist. Now he would be confined to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life which he prayed would be short.

The VAD moved slowly along the wall, speaking to the wounded in each bed and Bobby’s eyes followed her. He was not the only one, of course, but when she stopped at his bed she moved to the side of it and sat down on the chair put out for visitors. Bobby’s heartbroken mam came each day to sit with her son since she lived in Old Swan but not many of the others had a visitor as they came from all parts of the country.

Rose and Alice had moved to the next bed after carefully pulling up the covers over Bobby’s shattered body but they were aware, as Bobby was not, that the VAD, whose name was Dilys Morgan, seemed to have forged a link of some sort with the badly wounded young soldier. Bobby had given up all hope of living a normal life – or as near normal as a man missing his legs could attain – and even turned his head away as she smiled at him.

‘Is your mam coming today, Corporal?’ she asked shyly, the lilt of Wales in her speech, her pretty face pink with the effort, for her upbringing in a strict Welsh village had not encouraged young boys and girls to approach one another without the permission of their elders.

‘I s’pose so,’ he muttered.

‘You’re lucky to have a visitor, is it, Corporal. So many of these lads have none at all, see. Their families live so far away. I haven’t seen my mam for months, nor my brothers. I’ve five, you know, all in the trenches.’

He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her sad young face for it had not, in his own suffering, occurred to him that there were others who might need comfort. He knew, of course, of the horrific wounds many of them sustained. He had only to look around him at this ward in which he lay to see it all, but the nurses, the doctors who worked here, well out of the danger he had known, he had not considered.

‘Owen was wounded six months ago but he recovered enough to go back and my mam . . . she . . . I’m sorry, Corporal. You have enough to . . .’ She stood up and hurried to the entrance of the ward watched by every soldier from their beds, those who could see, for many of them had been blinded by the gas.

Rose and Alice followed her because there seemed to be some sort of commotion at the entrance to Summer Place and were in time to see Harry jump down the last few steps of the wide staircase, his face lit up for the first time in months.

‘It’s over, it’s over,’ he was shouting. ‘I heard it on the radio. I’m just going to telephone my friend at the War Office to confirm it, but an armistice has been signed, an armistice. What’s the bloody date? November 11th. It’s all over . . . Alice, oh Alice, Charlie will be coming home and we can all be together again.’

He took Alice round the waist and to the astonishment of the nurses and patients who were milling about the wide stone hallway, waltzed her down the length of it while Rose, whose heart was breaking once more, after watching them for several aching moments slipped into the garden where the November fog hid her. She ran down the length of the lawn, passing the amazed figure of Tom, who stared after her, and blundered into the summerhouse.

She cried until she was exhausted, unaware that Harry was running from room to room, from ward to ward looking for her, since his own heart had at last been unlocked, and into it had rushed the knowledge of how much she meant to him.

‘Have you seen Rose?’ he asked Staff Nurse Long who was doing her best to calm those patients who grew agitated at the slightest unusual activity. It was all she and the rest of the staff could do to stop them from screaming, jumping from their beds or chairs where they sat and running out into the garden to escape the bombardment.

‘Rose?’ she snapped, doing her best to coax Sergeant Johnson back from the sill where he was intent on jumping from the first-floor window.

‘Miss Beechworth,’ he snapped back, going to her aid with poor Sergeant Johnson who would spend what was left of his life in a constant state of terror.

‘No, I haven’t, Captain, and if you have nothing better to do than search for Miss Beechworth then I suggest—’

‘It’s over, Staff, the news just came through – the bloody war is over. An armistice is to be signed and all the men – my men – will be home.’ He wanted to weep with Staff Nurse Long as she dragged the poor jabbering sergeant into her arms to comfort his terrible distress and the sergeant, who seemed to understand at last what his captain was saying, put his arms round her and kissed her soundly.