The Passing Bells (39 page)

“That was very kind of him.”

“Well, today, he was telling me about a new branch of the ministry that's being formed. It will be known as NS Five and will deal with the testing and procurement of new equipment for the army. Major General Sir Thomas Haldane will head it and he's looking for bright men to staff it, preference going to officers who have seen the war at first hand and understand the army's needs. I thought of Charles right away.”

“Yes,” Hanna said, speaking slowly so as to keep any tremor of emotion from her voice, “he would certainly qualify, wouldn't he?”

“Of course. Not quite as much scientific background as General Haldane might like, but that obstacle can be overcome easily enough. Charles has a quick mind. He can learn anything if he has to.”

“Would he take such a job? Leave his regiment?”

“He would have no choice. Mr. Langham has given General Haldane top priority on this. He can order the transfer of any line officer he wishes to have.”

“It sounds like a satisfying and worthwhile task.”

“Very. The Prime Minister and Lord Kitchener are terribly enthusiastic about it. So much of the army's equipment and weapons is antiquated. Charles would be doing far more for his country in Whitehall than he could ever do in the trenches.”

Hanna felt faint as weeks of unending tension suddenly left her body. She was grateful for the brandy when it arrived and inhaled the heady fumes before taking a sip.

“To Charles,” she said. “And to you.”

Lydia smiled and reached across the table to touch Hanna lightly on the arm.

“Thank you, Lady Stanmore. I know everything will work out for the best. I shall make Charles a very good wife.”

“I'm sure you will, my dear,” Hanna said with the barest trace of a smile. “He's a fortunate young man.”

And she meant that from the very bottom of her heart.

13

Number 7 Red Cross Hospital at Chartres occupied a limestone château overlooking the River Eure. It had been conceived as a center for the convalescence and rehabilitation of severe fracture cases, but the heavy casualties in Artois during the spring offensives had flooded it with every imaginable type of injury. Wooden barracks had been erected in the once lovely gardens, and the stables and coach house had been turned into wards and living quarters for nurses. The expansion barely kept pace with the flow. Fortunately, there had been minimal activity on the Western Front during the summer, but the
médecin-chef
, Dr. Gilles Jary, had just received notice from Paris that he could expect a marked increase of patients by the third week in September. The notice had arrived by ordinary post and the contents infuriated him.

“Such stupidity!” he stormed, pacing his small, crowded, untidy office in what had once been a garret room for lackeys. “
Merde!
That is all I can say . . .
merde!”
He held the offending message between two fingers and then let it drift to the floor. His matron of nurses, a stout, middle-aged Englishwoman, watched him impassively.

“May I read it, Doctor?”

“Why not? Why should you be an exception?” He kicked at the paper. “But I shall save you the bother. We are to prepare for many casualties by the third week in September. Identical messages have no doubt been sent to every other hospital. Perhaps they also sent the message to Boche headquarters! ‘My dear Fritz, as you can see by the enclosed notice, we are preparing to attack you on or about the twenty-second day of next month. Cordially, Maréchal Joffre.' ”

The doctor lit a cigarette from the butt of another one smoldering between his lips.

“You shall set your beard alight one day,” the nurse said.

“Perhaps. It does not matter in the least.”

“Where do we put more wounded?”

“A question for which there is no answer, Matron—no answer at all. Clear beds, I suppose. Any
blessés
capable of standing must be moved out . . . sent down to Moulins . . . Lyons . . . Valence. I don't know. I will have to make inquiries as to available beds. Then there is the Hôtel Marcel in town. We could requisition it for the ambulatory.”

The nurse smiled faintly. “You see, Doctor, there are answers to everything.”

“I suppose,” he growled, running a hand through his shaggy hair. “Now then, what problems do
you
have for me this morning?”

“None . . . a small pleasure. Three VAD's have arrived from England, very eager to serve, anxiously awaiting their first meeting with the
médecin-chef.”

“All of them blonde and willowy?”

“Only one is blonde . . . and rather more
voluptueuse
than willowy, I would say.”

“Ah,” he sighed, “English girls. As aromatic as their tea. They stir the dead ashes of my youthful lechery.”

“How Gallic you are today, Doctor. Shall I send them up?”

“No . . . I shall meet them in Ward D. They can follow me on rounds.”

Alexandra Greville walked gravely behind Dr. Jary, the English matron, and a French nurse. The other two VAD's stood as close to the doctor as they could, both of them jotting down what he said in notebooks. Their eagerness pleased the doctor, and he complimented them extravagantly after the rounds of wards D and F had been completed. He then turned to face Alexandra.

“You do not keep notes, Miss . . . Miss . . . ?”

“Greville. No, I have a very retentive memory.”

“You seem, if you will pardon me, abstracted. Is anything the matter?”

“No, just a bit disappointed.”

Yes, Dr. Jary was thinking,
voluptueuse
was certainly the word to describe this blonde beauty. Most English girls he had known were virtually breastless and hipless. This one was superbly endowed in both respects. She reminded him of the opulent nudes of Ingres. It was quite easy to visualize her naked, and he felt a momentary regret at not being thirty years younger.

“Disappointed? With our little hospital?”

“Oh, no, Doctor,” she said quickly. “Not at all. It's just that I had hoped to be sent to Toulon . . . to the naval hospital there.”

He squinted at her through plumes of tobacco smoke. “Ah, you perhaps have a lover who is a wounded sailor. Is that it?”

“No,” she said, blushing hotly. “My brother—he was wounded at Gallipoli. The moment I found out where he was I volunteered for duty in France. I requested the Red Cross to send me to Toulon, but I ended up here.”

“Well, one must make the best of it, no?
C'est la guerre.
Come with me, child. We shall walk through Ward C together.”

Ward C was a fracture ward. Fifty men lay in rows of beds, their limbs in plaster casts, suspended by weights and wires.

“Half a hundred
blessés.
All of them, as you can see, gravely injured. All far from their loved ones.” He stopped by a bed. “Young Rialland here . . . nineteen years of age . . . wounded at Lens. He is a long way from his home in Bordeaux. Think of
him
as your brother.”

The young man on the bed was staring at Alexandra as though a vision had appeared before him.

“
Un bel ange
,” he whispered.

“
Merci
,” she murmured shyly.

“You see!” The doctor patted her affectionately on the shoulder. “You are an angel to him, and a pretty French nurse will be an angel to your brother. You will be happy here and we will certainly be happy to have you.”

She looked older. Only two weeks in France and yet, studying her face in the dressing-table mirror, she could discern subtle changes in her appearance. She had seen true suffering—that was reflected. And she had worked hard, harder than she had ever worked in her life. And done disagreeable, even repugnant tasks. That was reflected also.

“Yes,” she whispered, bending closer to the glass and running her fingers across her cheekbones. “The war is changing you.”

She felt a sense of pride in herself. She had stuck it out and had come through with flying colors. The hospital in Chartres was quite unlike the convalescent hospital for officers in England. Her duties there had been, looking back on it, quite laughable. A companion, no more than that. A sympathetic female. Someone to joke with the recuperating men, play cards with them, lead them into the garden for walks, perhaps push them in a wheelchair. The staff at Chartres expected a great deal more from their VAD girls. They were understaffed, and the trained nurses had enough to do without having to bathe the bedridden or cater to their bodily functions. Her first bedpan had made her retch. The second had made her gag. The third, fourth, and fifth had done no more than make her wrinkle her nose in disgust. Now the duty was commonplace and automatic. And she could bathe men now without feeling squeamish about touching their naked flesh with a soapy rag.

“I am altered,” she murmured. “I've become . . . a woman.”

It was as though she had suddenly walked through a door, crossing from one room to another, with no possibility of ever going back. She doubted if her mother and father would understand the change in her, and her letters to them were filled with the type of formal observations that had characterized her letters from boarding school:

. . . Chartres is a beautiful old town and the cathedral is quite magnificent, a purity of Gothic art. I have not been to visit it yet as we are quite busy, but hope to do so soon. However, one can see its towers rising above the trees. I am allowed one afternoon off a week—rather like being a housemaid!—and may request, and probably be refused, three days' “leave” a month. I am quite happy and the food is plentiful, although lentil soup can become quite tiresome.

She reserved her innermost thoughts for Lydia Foxe, filling page after page with a hasty scrawl, a tumultuous outpouring of intimate reflections. These letters were written in the room that she shared with four other girls, in the golden light between daylight and dusk, the sun sinking late in early September . . . sleep measured from sundown to dawn.

Dearest L.

The
blessés
never talk about their experiences. Why this is I do not know, but the fact remains that they are quite mute regarding the circumstances which brought about their injuries. Places may be mentioned, which draw nods of understanding from their fellows in adjacent beds, the names of villages, woods, crossroads, trenches, but never a word about the actual event that crippled them. They keep that awful moment secret, fearing perhaps that we gentle girls will be shocked by the description of it. I want so much to be able to comfort them, to understand thoroughly all of their agony, but when I ask them to tell me about the trenches they shake their heads and mutter that I would not comprehend it.

Oh, Lydia, I know now why God placed women on this earth. It is to be a comfort to men—a balm, a solace. Our cool touch on a fevered brow does more than all the medicines in the world! I yearn to give so much more of myself than I do, body and soul. I know I am capable of it. The silly schoolgirl that you knew, the child with visions of sugarplum fairies dancing in her head, has been changed utterly.

Her nightly letters to Lydia were never posted, because she did not wish to share her feelings with the censors, but putting her thoughts on paper made her feel in harmony with her friend. There was no one else she could confide in. The other VAD girls were not unfriendly, but they were drab, reserved little creatures, and Alexandra had the feeling that they resented her. She was friendly with one of the trained nurses, a woman from Normandy who had taken her training at Guy's Hospital in London, but the woman had no illusions about the art of nursing: “It is a business like any other. We are not angels of mercy, my pet; we are technicians pure and simple.”

Alexandra rejected that definition. The woman was quite wrong. She sensed the rightness of her own feelings every time she walked through the wards and the men murmured to her . . . their golden angel, who could comfort them with a touch, a smile, the merriness of her laugh. The
blessés
who could walk on crutches or with canes brought her flowers from the fields or apples from the orchard. And after supper, when the ambulatory sat on benches in the courtyard, they would argue good-naturedly as to who would have the privilege of playing a game of checkers with her. A tall ebony-faced Senegalese with great plaster casts on both of his arms followed her everywhere. Yes, she thought, I am loved, loved for what I am capable of giving. Loved—and the thought made her tingle with the awesome presumption of it—the way a saint is loved!

They all saw the aviator fall. It was on a Saturday morning and the airplane flew low over the hospital, its motor stuttering and making sharp barking sounds. The windowpanes rattled, and everyone who could move rushed out of doors to see the fragile machine clip the top of a tree and go spinning toward the ground like a bird with a broken wing.

“Well, he's dead, poor man,” Matron said.

Ambulance drivers, orderlies, and soldiers ran across the fields toward the wreckage and brought the aviator to the hospital on a stretcher. The man was unconscious from a blow to the head and both legs were twisted at unnatural angles, but he was very much alive, and Doctor Jary and an orthopedic surgeon went to work on him immediately.

“Young bones are a miracle,” Jary remarked as he emerged from the operating theater two hours later. Alexandra helped him remove his blood-specked apron and filled a basin with hot water. The
médecin-chef
lit a cigarette and then washed his hands. “Yes, Miss Greville, a miracle. Clean breaks . . . like good wood. No splinters to complicate matters.”

“Will he walk again, Doctor?”

“Walk? He will run . . . fly. A lucky young man, I might add. Clever of him to crash next to a hospital. But then you English are a clever race, no?”