‘Oh, terrible to look at, but that’s the usual thing, don’t you know? You’ll just be miserable if you let it worry you.’
‘It’s hard no’ tae worry, but.’
‘You’re a good sight better off here than in the line, that’s for sure.’
‘Wish I could be sure o’ that.’
They followed the M.O. from ward to ward, while he exchanged a few words with every casualty from their battalion who was able to talk. It was a deeply depressing tour, most of the cases being the result of foul conditions, infection and disease. For in the trenches, wounds usually took the form of head injuries, fatal or worse than fatal, and it was not surprising that many men longed for an attack, which increased the chances of escaping lightly with a Blighty wound.
Even advances in treatment could have their grim side. The doctors, with their vast experience of emergency surgery, were now keeping life, or a kind of life, in men who would have been despaired of in 1914. Looking at those helpless wrecks of men, many of whom would never be anything else, he could not quite bring himself to think that they would be better off dead. He himself would have clung to life on any terms whatever. But the sight left in him a dread which he found hard to define. It was only partly outrage, at what had been done to people like Private Morrison, for it was fused with the revulsion which healthy young men often feel towards the sick or the abnormal. So he left the hospital ashamed of himself, another torment added to those among which he lived.
But that was the beginning of a kind of friendship between Andrew and the M.O., when the latter discovered that the boy knew something of what the senior major termed ‘the Viennese loony-doctors’. But that became a little strained when the M.O., who had contacts, obtained an American intelligence test, one of the first, and Andrew’s scores were invariably off the upper end of the scale. The M.O. would never be convinced that Andrew had not obtained a copy somewhere, and practiced them. That was the sort of suspicion which association with Colin Campbell Ross let you in for.
For all the acuteness of Andrew’s memory, the few who hear of that French town can never extract from him its name. It was probably not as far south as Amiens, or as far from the front as St. Omer. Some say Hazebrouk, but it was probably bigger, and there are good reasons why it would have been in France, rather than Belgium.
The night of the working party at the hospital, some of the men were worn out or suffering badly from the cold. So Colonel Cameron announced that they were free until ten the following morning. He had motor transport for those who needed it, but the others were free to make their own way back to the camp, mostly via the estaminets of the town. Andrew, though, chose not to join them. He parted company with Ross at the beginning of an area of quiet residential streets, which would take him along the little stream that ran through the town. He needed to arrive back at the camp before the others, and light the coal fire to heat the old wash-room copper for a hot bath. But that left him with some time he badly needed, to be alone with his thoughts, and to savour the luxury of walking at his own pace, without rifle or pack.
As he rounded the corner which led to the riverside walk, he saw a succession of little public gardens between the red-brick houses which backed on the riverbank. These were planted with trees and shrubs, so that he could see very little of the river from the street. He walked into the first of these, and leant for a while on the cast-iron railing, looking down into the black water and weedbeds of the shallow stream. There was scarcely any lighting in the street across the river, but a bright three-quarters moon. The sky had cleared and the stars were out, and Andrew realised that he was very cold.
As he stepped back onto the street, Andrew saw something which he was not, he realised, meant to see. About fifty yards along the street, a well-dressed French lady was walking briskly towards him. He looked in the other direction for a moment, turned back, and she was gone.
He wondered, for a moment, if she had entered one of the houses. But he would have heard the door, and he did not think she had been close to one at the time. She must surely have been adjacent to the next riverside garden, but there had been something more purposeful in her stride, than in that of a person who would stop there on a winter’s evening. For a few minutes he conjectured, though he considered it none of his business. What could Sherlock Holmes have made of the incident?
Then he thought of suicide, though he realised that it would be difficult for anyone to do, in a river that could hardly be more than a foot and a half deep. Should he investigate? If the woman just wanted to be alone, as he had done, or was meeting a lover, she would surely resent his intrusion. But she could be caught in the freezing weeds and mud, to endure a far worse death than she could have planned for. Andrew walked slowly to the entrance of the next garden.
He stopped for a moment at the gate. The place was divided into shrubberies and arbours which would have given a pleasant shade and privacy on a sunny day. But now it was like a place of darkened caves, where he could make out very little. He could hear noises which puzzled him, but did not come from the water. There was a low thumping noise, and a muffled gasping, which struck him as for all the world like an asthmatic kitten trying to mew. He heard men’s voices muttering in French – with an ugly tone to them, as it might have been in an illicit card game where the play was suspect, but it still caused him some relief. That surely meant he did not have to get involved, so he started walking again.
Then there came a tearing of fabric, a curse and a female scream, which ended in an instant. Andrew turned on his heel and entered the garden. For a moment he heard nothing, but then a scuffling in one of the arbours caught his attention. Three men in French army uniform were holding a struggling woman on the ground, and one of them was twisting a piece of cloth which covered her face. Her blouse and camisole were torn open and her skirt raised around her waist, to reveal her pale breasts and threshing legs. She got a foot free and lashed out blindly, catching one of the men on the cheek. But his comrade struck her hard across her hooded face, and her motion stopped for a moment. Andrew unbuttoned his tunic where he would reach for his pistol, and stepped forward.
‘Messieurs…’ he stammered.
One of the men growled something quite unintelligible in French, and Andrew, strengthened by the knowledge that the Luger must come as a shock, remained impassive. One man’s organ stood taller and glistened more darkly than Andrew could have imagined, but it sagged as they saw his resolve.
‘Faisez comme vous devez,’ he said evenly. ‘Et moi aussi.’
He told himself that such an incident, among the millions of uniformed men in France, was hardly to be wondered at. Was it surprising that the horrors he knew should bring worn-down conscripts to an act like this, when punishment was unlikely to be worse than sending them up the line?
The soldiers spread out to left and right, and Andrew knew that if he let them surround him, no weapon ever made could save him. He might be overwhelmed by survivors if they panicked, even as it was, and with horrid imagination he imagined himself being found in the river the next day. But one of the men drew a fine-bladed little trench-knife, and that was Andrew’s cue to present the Luger at the man’s midriff, held close in by his body, with his left hand poised to impede any attempt to grab it or strike it away. He put off the safety with a sharp click, although he could have done it as silently as the grave, had he chosen.
The men grinned sheepishly, and tried to move away. One tried to pick up a greatcoat which lay on the ground, but Andrew motioned him away. The lady’s dark coat was nowhere to be seen, in the river perhaps, and he could not turn his back to search the shadows.
‘Madame en a besoin,’ he said, indicating the near-naked woman who lay on the ground glaring in fury at the men, her sobbing ceased. The owner of the coat swore softly, but moved away with the others. Andrew listened carefully to make sure their footsteps and curses died away in the proper way, then averted his eyes and offered the woman the coat.
‘Oh mon dieu, quel emmerdeur!’ she exclaimed. ‘Vous êtes anglais?‘
‘What, in these clothes? Not English, ma’am. I’m from Scotland’
‘Oh, pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Are they gone, you think?’ She spoke English confidently, with a strong but delightful accent, and it struck Andrew that she was a stronger person than he had expected. She reminded him of nothing so much as the first picture of Trilby in the Du Maurier novel, which he had always liked, although the coat wasbleu horizon, rather than the darker blue which men turned up while digging, sometimes. Her hair was blonde and curly, forming a halo-like mass, and he supposed that was what women did with curling tongs. It came to Andrew that the late thirties, as he supposed, were not really old, and that he was very dirty.
Leave a Reply