A Question of Honor (8 page)

Behind me Sergeant Larimore spoke, his voice stark, cold. “Reverend or not, you don’t speak that way to Sister Crawford. Not in my presence.”

Gates went pale. “You can see how the Army protects its own,” he said in a low, tense voice. “I’ve proved my point, have I not?”

And he was gone, hurrying toward the ambulances collecting to take the most severely wounded to the base hospital. He didn’t look back.

Sergeant Larimore watched him go. “Are you all right, Bess?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Just—put out with his intransigence.”

“And who is he, when he’s at home?”

“He thinks the regiment covered a murder long ago. Or he’s afraid, if the man everyone thinks was the killer really and truly isn’t, then he’ll have to look closer to home.”

“Aye, he appears to be a man in torment. Where is this house he’s so bent on selling?”

“Just outside Petersfield, in Hampshire. His uncle inherited the house after the family there was killed.”

“Convenient, I’d say. Send me word if he gives you any more trouble. I’ve never knocked down a chaplain before. But that one would tempt me sorely.”

Someone was calling to me, and I turned to see Sister Milton beckoning me.

“I must go. Not to worry, Sergeant. I’ll be all right.”

“So you will,” he said without smiling. “I’ll pass the word.”

And with that he was gone. In the distance, when I could no longer see his tall, rangy figure, the call of the kookaburra came drifting back to me in a brief silence along the lines at the Front, one of those unexpected lulls that spell regrouping and respite.

Word reached me a few days later that the chaplain who had only recently passed through our aid station had collapsed and been sent back to England for care.

Had my presence here at the station precipitated his collapse? Seeing me here when he was already on the verge of breaking down?

On the whole, I thought not. He should never have been returned to duty. But I knew how it was. The doctors asked questions and evaluated the answers. If Gates had been afraid to admit just how ill he was, for fear of being forced to seek treatment, he could have collected himself well enough to lie to them. And the doctors, pressed to get as many walking wounded back to France as possible, might have turned a blind eye to shaking hands or strain around the mouth. Perhaps they had even thought he might be better off returning to France. So many wounded—so many Captain Barclays—had lied about their condition in the hope of being sent back to their men, where they felt desperately needed.

Captain Barclay, with a severe knee wound, had hounded the doctors, assuring them he was fit long before he truly was. When they relented and sent him to France at my father’s request, he’d learned that will wasn’t enough, however determined a man was to show he was fully healed.

Whatever had happened, I was just as glad not to have to keep an eye out for the chaplain. Breakdowns like his could turn violent. Most particularly, my father’s regiment was serving here in France, and whispers made the rounds far too quickly. . . .

We spent part of the next three hours working with wounded German prisoners.

They were not as cocky as they had been two years ago, when the war seemed to be going their way. Tired, dispirited, short on reinforcements, they fought with the same fierce tenacity, but I could see in their dark-ringed eyes how much it had cost.

One, a young private who couldn’t have been more than seventeen, slept nearly around the clock. The Lieutenant in charge of the prisoners looked in on him once or twice, but let him rest.

I happened by as the Lieutenant said to another Sister, “I’ve a brother about that age. Eager to fight, threatening to enlist, worrying my poor mother to the point of exhaustion. I just hope this damned war is over before he is eighteen.”

“When is his birthday?” Sister Milton asked.

“November. Twenty-six November.”

She shook her head. “I doubt we’ll see it ended by Christmas. Whatever the Yanks are saying.”

“Pray God you’re wrong,” the Lieutenant replied and went to look in on the more seriously wounded men. When the last of those was stable enough to be sent back for processing as prisoners, they were put into ambulances and lorries, with those able to walk bringing up the rear and often getting ahead of the vehicles lumbering through ruts and sliding toward holes. I found myself thinking they were well out of it, and would live to see the end of the war.

And what about our own men? More than one friend from before the war had been taken prisoner.

The shelling began again, and we were hard-pressed to keep up with the influx of wounded.

The attack that followed the shelling pushed the Germans back behind their own lines, and I was working with our only doctor, trying to stop bleeding in a leg wound.

An orderly came up on the run, breathless and covered in blood. “Sir? There’s a Lieutenant down in one of the German trenches. We’re not sure how long we can hold that sector, sir. He needs to be taken out as soon as may be.”

“I’m needed here, can’t you see that?” Dr. Reid snapped, his eyes on the leg he was trying to save. And then, satisfied that the bleeding was slowing down, he looked up. “Sister?” he said to me. “Are you game to go find a rat down a hole?”

“In the German trench, sir?” I asked, surprised. We’d never sent a Sister into the German lines. I thought briefly about Simon, who had been behind those very lines.

“Indeed.”

“What should I take?” I asked the orderly.

“It’s his arm and shoulder. Pinned under one of the bulwarks that hold up the trench walls. He was going down to be sure we’d routed all of them.” He hesitated. “We might have to take that arm off. Morphine for the pain, something to brace that shoulder, sticks for wrapping the arm . . .”

He was still making the list as I led him to where we kept what stores we had. We made a quick survey, chose only what was necessary, and set out.

I’d been caught close to the lines before when the sectors lost ground. I’d almost been overrun by German forces a time or two. The orderly had insisted that I remove my cap and cover my hair with the cleanest helmet he could find. I had visions of lice in my hair and down my back as he pulled an officer’s abandoned greatcoat over my uniform.

“It’s for the best,” he said as we hurried on. He was carrying the bundle in one hand and helping me over the rough, uneven ground toward the nearest trench on our side of the wire.

It was the most appalling sight. Mud, thick with unspeakable, mercifully unidentifiable bits and pieces. I thought I saw a boot with part of a foot still inside, and the body of a dead rat in a puddle of what smelled suspiciously like fresh urine. The walls were haphazardly shored up, sloping toward the top, and above my head was the barbed wire strung all along the top several feet out. What appeared to be caves dug out of the earth with flaps of burlap over them held the effects of officers in two I glimpsed, and in a third, a man bent over a field telephone, giving coordinates. I realized that he’d had to do it as quickly as possible or our own guns would be shelling our own men.

The smell was overwhelming on this warm afternoon. I’d smelled it before on the filthy bodies of wounded men and the orderlies who brought them in. A miasma of everything from stale cigarette smoke to the sweat of fear to urine and unwashed clothes, to something that I couldn’t quite identify, the sweetness of rotting things.

We came to a ladder, flat against the dirty wall.

“Can you manage that, do you think, Sister? I’ll look the other way.”

And before I could think about it too long, I climbed up on the firing step and scrambled up the ladder.

The barbed wire was flattened, had been for the attack, and I saw a landscape that was as bleak and destroyed as anything I’d ever set eyes on. One or two tree stumps were the only things to give it any sense of reality, and I glimpsed what might have been the foundation of a farm building where a shell had blasted the earth away. There were dead men in the shell craters and littering the ground, and my guide said, “Best not to look, Sister. There’s been no time to collect them.”

I walked on, not able to imagine what was sticking to my boots as I went, and some seventy yards away, we came to the first of the German trenches, a shallow one where a machine gun had been set up. The men manning it were dead. I’d heard that very few machine gunners or their crews from either side wound up as prisoners. I could believe it now.

We reached a second line of trenches, and my orderly, casting about, found a reasonably sturdy ladder leading down. The rolls of barbed wire on this side of No Man’s Land had already been pushed to the far side of the trench line, to protect against any surprise attack. But the Germans were quiet.

I was astonished by what I saw when I reached the end of the ladder and could look around.

It was so different from the British trenches that I could hardly take it in. It was as if ants had built a human-size world here, with trenches, latrines, rooms for men and officers, rough stairs down to even lower levels. A veritable city.

And the dead were here too, but not the mud, not the dead rats or bits of men. There were boards to walk on, doors into the cubbies, and down below were dormitories, mess rooms, planning rooms—I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. And below that, according to my guide, was the bunker, which protected the German soldiers from the shelling. Our men, standing in their open trenches, had nowhere to go. And it explained to me why so often an attack after heavy shelling could be met with such fierce resistance on the part of the Germans.

All this while the orderly was leading me down another set of stairs. I saw almost at once that one of the supporting beams had come down, bringing a part of the upper portion of the trench down with it, and under all the debris, hardly visible, was an English officer.

I knelt in the wood splinters and dust and torn earth and called out. “I’ve come to help,” I said just as someone on the far side of the debris field switched on a torch, followed by two more.

I could see him then, grateful that he wasn’t someone I knew. His face was lined with pain and streaked with sweat, which had plastered his fair hair against his forehead.

“If you take my arm, I’ll shoot myself,” he said raggedly. “I mean it.”

He moved his other hand, and I saw his service revolver, drawn and ready to use.

“I can hardly judge how bad it is, Lieutenant,” I said briskly. “Not from here. So we’ll have no threats at this stage.”

“Just so we understand each other,” he said through clenched teeth.

A disembodied voice, with the thick accent of the north of England, came from the other side of the debris. “He won’t let us give him morphine. He thinks it’s a trick.”

“Yes, well, he may soon regret that,” I replied, and began moving some of the smaller bits of wood in front of me.

“Careful, Sister,” someone shouted from the other side. “It’s like skittles, touch one and the lot goes down.”

I worked more slowly, but it was necessary to get close enough to deal with the wound. The orderly beside me said, “Here, let me,” and moved into my place, working with care.

“I was a miner once,” he said, just as a part of the flooring above came down over us, like a roof fallen in. “But this is the best we can do.”

I took his place again and slid as close as I could to the wounded man. It was then I could see what no one else had, a pointed shard of wood pinning the officer’s arm to the wall, for all the world like a spear.

“What’s your name?” I asked as I sat there judging what to do next.

“Graham,” he said, biting off the word.

The way the shard of wood was angled was making it hard for Lieutenant Graham to breathe, jamming that arm tight against his chest. And there was no room on his other side to escape from it.

“I’m going to work now,” I said calmly, more calmly than I felt. “Put down that revolver, Lieutenant, if you want any hope of salvaging your arm. I refuse to be shot by accident.”

He didn’t move at first, and then he cried out as he lowered his other arm, inadvertently pulling against his shoulders.

I thought,
If I can remove that shard—or have the orderly with me do it—there’s a good chance he’ll lose his arm with it. But if I can dig around the point, we might be able to pull out the Lieutenant and that spear with
him, and let a surgeon finish the task.

“
I need something sharp—a heavy spoon, an entrenching tool, something.”

The orderly scrambled away, and just as quickly he was back with a bayonet and a large steel spoon of the kind used to cook for great numbers of people.

“That should do the trick,” he said.

The spoon was too dull, the bayonet too heavy, but I managed to get it where I wanted it, and then began to dig.

The orderly touched my arm. “Clever, that. Let me.”

I moved away, holding the bayonet in place until he could take it. He went to work with a will, but Lieutenant Graham cried out with each stroke as it jarred the piece of wood and the arm sliced by it.

“I told you, you’re going to regret not taking the morphine,” I said.

“Shut up,” Lieutenant Graham answered rudely.

We worked for half an hour before we freed the point of the wood shard. And then we had to work around so that we could bring it and the Lieutenant out together.

We had just started that when someone up above shouted, “
Gas
.”

We dropped everything and dug in our pouches for our gas masks. I was able to reach the Lieutenant’s and hold it in place. He was breathing shallowly as it was, and I was relieved when another voice called, “
False alarm
.”

We had to take the risk of dismantling more of the jumble of wood supports, and as I was helping on my side, I caught a glimpse of one of the men on the far side, a brief one as he turned to fling part of the flooring from above out of the way.

I said nothing, looked quickly back at my patient, so that no one could read my expression.

One of the men who had been helping me all afternoon was Lieutenant Wade
.