Sunset Ridge (25 page)

Meet me at dawn tomorrow at the Presbyterian Church. I have spoken to the Reverend and he has agreed to marry us at first light. Should we not be joined by the time I ride northwards mid-morning tomorrow, I will assume that you do not feel as I do. In that case I miss you, I want to wish you a grand life.

Yours,

H

The letter was warm in Catherine's hand, the girl's eyes moist.

‘Is that all?' Corally whispered.

‘Yes.' Catherine refolded the letter.

Tears slid down the girl's cheeks. Picking up a stick she tossed it towards the river. The branch wavered in the sand before falling on its side.

‘Would ye like me to re-read it?' Catherine offered. Instead, the girl retrieved the note and tucked it into a skirt pocket. ‘How long have ye had the letter?' It dawned on Catherine that ‘tomorrow' had probably come and gone. ‘Corally?' The girl's right hand curled and uncurled itself.

‘Too long.' She gave a muffled sob.

‘Och, I am sorry.' What else could she say? It was bad enough kissing your lover goodbye and sending him off to war, but for a man to leave on such terms and for the girl who loved him to suffer so terribly . . . ‘Ye could write to him, Corally, care of the Australian Imperial Forces, and explain what happened. If he has enlisted the letter would find him eventually.'

‘How?' Corally sniffed. ‘I can't read and I can't write.'

A green-and-yellow bird settled in a branch above them. It tweeted prettily, causing both women to trace its movements among the foliage.

Catherine considered the young girl's plight. ‘I could help ye.'

The two women shared a conspiratorial smile.

 

 

 

 

 

Verdun, France
Late October 1916

Francois opened his eyes to a steel-grey sky and a blurred landscape of dark, uneven shapes. Movement caught his attention and he reached for the rifle by his side. His hand scrabbled air and he sucked in a painful breath. It was as if something were astride his chest, pushing his body downwards into the after-world. There was no rifle by his side, no bayonet, nothing. The thought of lying unarmed in the muddy debris of the battlefield filled him with dread. Saliva caught in his throat. He tried desperately to work it forward but even the muscles in his mouth were against him. He was so thirsty. His tongue felt overly large, too large to moisten his cracked lips. The pain struck at him as if a knife. Something wasn't right. Maybe it was him? Maybe his body was lying in two in the muck that was Verdun and his brain was yet to comprehend the inevitability of his destruction. Could he will death before comprehension came to him?

There it was again: the same flicker of movement. ‘Germans,' Francois mouthed, clenching his teeth against another rippling sting. They must be Germans approaching. He had heard that the Red Cross had access to the German hospitals; maybe he would be captured and sent for medical treatment behind enemy lines. It was the best he could hope for. He lay perfectly still. It was possible that the Germans would pass him by. It was possible that his own men would find him. He needed to scream. A terrible throbbing tore at his body causing his limbs to shudder and his brain to float into the ether. Images flickered like a kaleidoscope merging horror with snatches of life before the war; the trickling stream, the curl of smoke above the farmhouse, the broad shoulders of his father that he once rode as a child.

Breath wheezed in and out of his lungs. What had happened? Francois wondered. How did he come to be lying out here? He could only recall fragments: night, cold, the wet slick of water, or was it blood? There had been a burst of artillery and then he had fallen. His arms were outstretched to break the impact but instead he toppled over and over. He was a boy again, having tumbling competitions with Antoine. Over and over the two of them rolled, their parents sitting in the dappled light beneath the willow trees, laughing in delight.

The pain throbbed and pushed and pulled as if a living being.

Antoine. He had ventured out one more time to look for his brother. What had Francois been thinking, running out across no-man's land while the shells flew overhead? When the whistle sounded from the trench it was too late to turn back and so he had continued onwards, a lone man leading a futile attack.

Francois expected the Germans to be on him at any minute. He guessed that if it came to the worst he could still stab one of them with his dagger, if he could find it. He was cold now, very cold. Above, planes flew overhead, their engines threatening him with a growling whirr, and all around the noise of the shelling continued. When the pain came again he screamed.

‘Next.' The male voice was harassed yet firm.

A blur of people moved back and forth. Beyond them the flapping sides of a large marquee opened out onto lines of tents and rows of prone soldiers, and still the roar of battle hummed in his ears.

‘I really can't see the point of taking up valuable ambulance space with these cases. I'm sure the main dressing stations just don't want to deal with the dying.'

‘Shush up, Nurse, this one's conscious. And wipe that M off his forehead. He was one of the lucky ones to receive morphine. Most have to manage with opiates.'

As if a bystander, Francois watched as his muddy tunic was cut open and his chest was prodded. A man and a woman stood over him. One wore a Red Cross armband.

‘I don't think we'll be able to manage them all, Doctor, there are too many.'

‘Remember your training, Nurse. Assess the patient, label and then move on.'

‘But the shelling. I can't stand the shelling. It's too close.' The woman raised a hand to her nose, leaving a streak of blood on her pale skin as she passed the remnants of Francois' kit and uniform to a waiting orderly.

‘Anna, remember your position here.'

The nurse sniffed and began to cut at his rotting boots, before the scissors sliced away at his trousers.

‘He may make it,' the doctor deliberated, dressing the chest wound quickly. ‘Attach a chest label and – no don't. Look at his leg: gas gangrene. Mark him urgent.'

‘And the head wound?' the nurse asked as she pinned a label to Francois' chest bandage.

‘Superficial by the looks of it and . . . What on earth is that? Are those
teeth
marks on his shoulder?'

The nurse leaned over Francois. He felt her breath on him and smelled the sweet scent of her. Flowers, spring flowers; he had been saved by a woman who smelled of flowers.

The nurse shook her head. ‘I have seen others with this mark. The men talk of a dog rescuing them.' Her fingers traced the deep purple bruising that surrounded the bite mark.

The doctor raised an eyebrow, peering at the puncture marks. ‘The Red Cross uses dogs to find the fallen, and of course the German dogs are trained to locate the wounded. But I have not heard of the French having a dog that would drag a man to safety. No, no, there must be another explanation. Give him some brandy and then get some orderlies and clear this space.'

The nurse poured a measure of brandy into a tin cup and, lifting Francois' head, forced the burning liquid down his throat.

Francois swallowed. ‘Where am I?' he murmured.

‘A casualty clearing station, soldier. Next,' the doctor called.

Francois felt his body lift upwards. The tent opening revealed neat lines of bodies, some bandaged, some partially naked. Why had they been left out in the cold? He craned his head towards the scene outside, but his view was quickly obscured. A hard coldness seeped into him as feet pounded by his head. Black boots, brown boots, lace-ups, thick-heeled hiking boots, boots being dragged. He gazed into the glassy eyes of a soldier clutching at the stump where his arm should have been and watched as dollops of blood dripped onto the duckboards covering the earth beneath. Wounded were resting in every available space, both in cots and on the ground. When the familiar stab of pain coursed through his body, Francois began to weep.

‘Move him out of the way.'

The air rushed.

‘Have you seen all the ambulances?' The voice belonged to one of the men carrying him. The fair-skinned youngster's features moved in and out of focus. Francois squinted and tried to concentrate.

‘The brass have given the doctors two days,' the orderly continued. ‘Those who haven't been moved on to a base hospital by then will be dead.'

Nurses weaved to and fro between the wounded, as doctors yelled for assistance.

‘Those three are dead,' a nurse called out.

Francois felt a whoosh of air and then the grey of the sky pressed down on him. Overhead, planes buzzed and the firecracker zip of artillery fractured the atmosphere. A work detail of four men flicked cigarettes on the ground and picked up shovels leaning against munitions crates. A shell sped over the clearing hospital to land a mile away. The boom was deafening.

‘That was close,' the fair-skinned orderly commented. ‘I don't go much on working only nine miles from the front.'

‘Any further away, Andre,' his assistant at the other end of the stretcher commented, ‘and most of these poor men would already be dead.'

Francois felt the steady creep of hurt readying itself for attack. Why would they not give him anything for the pain? Orderlies rushed past carrying empty stretchers. They were in some form of queue; a woman was giving instructions. He stared at the boggy ground, at a single spray of greenery that edged its way up from beneath the wet soil. Further away, two men walked to the line of prone soldiers. They hesitated for a moment and then picked one up. The body sagged in the middle as the men carried the soldier away.

‘Nurse Valois is back,' the one called Andre said. ‘She arrived last night.'

‘She's too old for you, my friend, too much of a woman for you.'

‘Rubbish,' Andre retorted. ‘Age makes little difference to me. All that long brown hair and those dark eyes. We would be a good match.'

His friend laughed.

Francois felt the palpitations grow in his chest. They passed a row of tents fanning out in a circle and for a minute he thought he was to be laid with the dead. ‘Don't put me there with them. I'm alive, I'm still alive.' Did the words leave his lips? He couldn't be sure.

‘He's in shock,' Andre's friend explained. ‘Look how much he's shaking. You'll be all right,' the orderly said to Francois. ‘You're being sent to a base hospital. Bloody hell!' His attention returned to his friend. ‘Have you seen his shoulder? Look at it. Bite marks.'

The orderlies ducked their heads as they walked into another tent. Francois floated above occupied cots before being deposited on the floor. The jolt caused a shocking pain to ripple through his body and the tent went dark.

 

‘See that: those teeth have gone clean through his uniform.' The excitement was evident in Andre's voice. ‘That's the third I've seen. And that dead captain. He had marks on both shoulders. One lot appeared to be healed. I heard one of the field medics talking about a mongrel dog that rescued thirty wounded men during the night.'

‘That's enough nonsense.' Nurse Valois waited for the orderlies to move out of the way. With a strange calmness she wiped bloody hands on her apron. ‘You should be too busy for gossip.' Screams sounded outside the tent. ‘Well, go on, someone needs help.'

The orderlies stood to one side of the tent flap as more stretchers were carried in, the occupants deposited hurriedly on the floor.

‘All hell's broken loose in the marquee – there's a wild animal in there,' one of the orderlies told Nurse Valois as he placed a patient on the ground.

At the other end of the tent, which housed forty cots, a second nurse, Nurse Duval, suggested he concentrate on the task at hand.

Nurse Valois agreed, waving the young man away. ‘I've enough to contend with here,' she replied with obvious irritation as she washed her hands in a basin of bloody water. ‘Wild animals? Ridiculous.'

‘It's true,' a soldier with a bandaged head said croakily. ‘The dog's name is Roland.'

‘Delirious,' she muttered. Nurse Valois found those cases the hardest to deal with. The gaping wounds she could attend to, but the mad ranting caused by wound shock and a poor reaction to morphine – for those fortunate enough to receive it – bordered on the unbearable. Next to Francois' stretcher she set up a frame upon which hung a saline solution. ‘Now, let's see if we can't get this tube into one of those veins of yours,' she said softly, kneeling beside him. With the task completed, she began to clean the chest wound. The shrapnel appeared to have missed his heart, but the three crescent-shaped gashes were bleeding. Nurse Valois pressed a bandage to the injury and then turned to attend to three other patients. Two were the victims of machine-gun fire through their thighs. Amputation appeared unavoidable for both young men, while the third was already dead from a stomach wound. How was it possible, she wondered, for men to inflict such wounds on each other? How was it possible for human beings to sit behind polished desks and make decisions that led to such carnage?

‘Where are the ambulances?' she heard her voice cry out. ‘These men need to be moved immediately.'

Nurse Duval lifted her head from the man she was bandaging. ‘Are you all right?'

‘I'm fine, and you?'

The younger woman continued to stitch up a gash on an arm. Nurse Valois observed the precise way in which Duval drew the surgical cotton through the wound, her wrist giving a little flick as she tightened each stitch. They were like machines, she reasoned. Trained and then conditioned to the terrors of war, they were just one tiny cog in this great horror created by mankind. There was nothing to do but continue. When she swallowed, the acrid taste of bile rose unbidden. At twenty-eight she had witnessed far too much suffering. For two years she had served at the front; during the past twelve months she had been rotated through the casualty clearing stations eight times. Doctors praised her for the meticulous approach with which she went about her duties and for the display of steady nerves so vital when they carried out such bloody work under shell-fire. Few nurses could sustain such continued exposure to the horrors of war, particularly when they were working so close to the fighting.