“Shock,” Wil said briefly, his face drawn under the smears of earth and blood. He shrugged. “Should be used to it,” he added, as if it were self-criticism, but his voice wavered.
She smiled at him, and said nothing. They knew each other well enough that he would understand, remember the words from the countless times they had done it all before.
They went back again and again all day, breaking only long enough to eat a little bread and a tin of Maconachie’s stew and hot tea out of a Dixie tin. It all tasted of oil and stale water, but they barely noticed.
By dusk, they were unloading wounded and helping to carry them into a makeshift operating theater in a tent somewhere in an open field. Everything was shrouded in rain. She could see a copse of trees about fifty yards away, but she had no idea which of the many woods it was. All that mattered was to get the men to some kind of help.
Inside the tent, medical orderlies were looking at the newcomers, trying to assess who to treat first, whose wounds could wait, and who was beyond saving anyway. The injured half-sat, half-lay, ashen faced, waiting with the terrible, hopeless patience of those who have looked at horror so often they can no longer struggle against it. They were trying to absorb the reality that their arms or legs were gone or their intestines spilling out into their blood-soaked hands.
Judith was half-carrying a man whose left leg was ripped open by shrapnel which they had bandaged as well as they could. His more important wound was his left arm, which was gone from the elbow down.
The surgeon came over to her. His coat was soaked with blood, his fair hair plastered back. His eyes were sunken and dark-ringed with exhaustion. She had worked with him countless times before.
“We’ve done what we can, Captain Cavan, but he was injured several hours ago,” she said. “He’s pretty cold and shaken up.” It was a magnificent understatement, but everyone dealt in understatement; it was a matter of honor. Ask any man how he was, and he would say, “Not too bad. Be all right in a while,” even if an hour later he was dead.
“Right.” Cavan acknowledged her with a brief smile, a momentary warmth to the eyes, then he moved to the other side of the man and supported him over to the corner inside the tent where he could lie until they could take him onto the table. “Come on, old son,” he said gently. The man was perhaps seventeen, his beard hardly grown. “We’ll have you sorted in a minute or two.”
“Don’t worry, sir,” the man responded hoarsely. “It’s not too bad. Actually I can’t feel it much. Leg hurts a bit.” He tried to smile. “Suppose I won’t be playing the violin now.”
Cavan’s face registered a sudden pity.
“Sorry, sir,” the man apologized. “I never played it anyway. Don’t like the piano much, either, but my mam made me practice.”
Cavan relaxed. “I expect she’ll let you off now,” he said drily. “Wait there and I’ll be with you in a minute.” He eased the man down gently, then turned back to Judith.
She read in his eyes the struggle to conquer the emotions that wrenched at him. There was no time, and they served no purpose. The only help was practical, always practical: clean, scrub, stitch, pack a wound, find something to take the edge off the pain, ease the fear, move to the next man. There was always a next man, and the one after, and a hundred after him.
Judith turned and went back to help Wil with the next casualty.
Ten minutes later a VAD nurse with a plain, sallow face handed her a mug of tea. It was sour and oily, but it was hot and someone had been thoughtful enough to lace it with about half a shot of rum. It loosened some of the knots inside her.
Another ambulance arrived and she helped them unload it. The men were badly wounded and the driver had caught a piece of shrapnel in the shoulder.
“You can’t go out there again,” he said, wincing as he tried to lift his arm. “Jerry’s putting up a hell of a barrage and we’re too close to the front here. They’ll probably have to evacuate this as it is. They’ll need us for that, after they’ve patched up the worst. It’s a bloody shambles. Thousands are dead, and God knows how many wounded.”
Judith walked back into the tent and over to the table where Cavan was stitching up a lacerated arm on a soldier with dark hair.
“Another lot, sir,” she said quietly. “Looks to be three bad ones, and the driver’s got a shrapnel tear in his right shoulder. He says it’s pretty grim out there, and Jerry’s coming this way, so we’ll probably get told to retreat. Do you want us to stay here and help if we have to go suddenly?”
“I’ve got men I can’t move,” he replied without looking up at her. His voice was very quiet. “We’d better see what we can do to defend ourselves. If it’s only the odd raiding party we’ll be all right.” He tied off the last knot. “Right, soldier. That’ll do. You’d better start making it back. That bandage’ll hold till you get to the hospital.”
The man eased himself off the table and Cavan put out his arm to steady him. “Go with MacFie over there. You can hold each other up. You’ll just about make a good man between the two of you.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” The man swayed, gritted his teeth and went gray-white. Then he steadied himself and, swaying a little again, made his way over to MacFie.
Cavan started with the next man. The one after that was beyond his help. Judith brought him a mug of tea. “If you survive it, it’ll make a new man of you,” she said wryly.
“Then you’d better get a river of it.” He took the mug out of her hands gently, his fingers over hers for an instant. “We’re going to need a whole new bloody army after this. God Almighty! Whose idea was this attack?”
“Haig’s, I imagine,” she replied.
“I’d like to get a scalpel to him sometime,” he responded, pulling his mouth into an expression of disgust as he swallowed the tea. “This really is vile! What the hell do they put in it? No, don’t tell me.”
“I could do it with a bayonet,” she replied bitterly.
“Make the tea?” he asked in surprise.
“No, sir, perform a little surgery on General Haig.”
He smiled and it softened his eyes. She could glimpse the man he would have been in peacetime, at home in the green fields and quiet hills of Hertfordshire. “Good with bayonets, are you, Miss Reavley?” he asked.
“I thought all you had to do was charge, shoulders down and your weight behind it,” she replied. “Isn’t it enthusiasm that counts rather than accuracy?”
This time he laughed and his fingers rested gently on her arm. It was just a brief contact, almost as if he had changed his mind before he completed the movement. Only his eyes betrayed the warmth within him. “Those guns sound closer. Perhaps you’d better start getting the wounded out of here and back to the first aid posts.”
“They’re no closer than before, sir,” she told him. She was as used to the sound of them as he was.
“That’s an order, Miss Reavley.”
She hesitated, wondering whether she dared defy him, or if she even wanted to. It had been the worst day’s casualties she had experienced so far, even worse than the first gassings two years ago, but leaving now would look so much like running away.
“Take those men back.” He still spoke sufficiently quietly that only she could hear. “Get them to the hospital now, while you can.”
“Yes, sir.” Reluctantly she turned, still feeling as if she were somehow deserting her duty, being less brave, less honorable than he was. She had gone only as far as the entrance flap of the tent when she heard the shots. This time there was no question that they were rifle fire and much closer than the German line. The next moment she saw them: a dozen German soldiers running toward her out of the gloom, rifles in front of them, bayonets fixed.
Wil Sloan dropped to the ground and she felt almost as if she had been hit herself. She stood frozen. A bullet tore into the canvas and she dived forward and ran to Wil, falling almost on top of him. It was idiotic to try to save him—they would all be dead in minutes—but still she grasped his shoulders to turn him over, needing to see where he was hit.
“Get off me, you fool!” he growled. “I need to get the gun up!”
She wanted to slap him out of sheer relief. “What gun?” she demanded furiously. “If you’ve got a gun, don’t bloody lie there, shoot someone!”
“I’m trying to! Let go of me!”
She obeyed immediately and he hunched up onto his elbows and knees. There was far more gunfire now. The other ambulance driver was firing back and there were more shots from the far side beyond the tent.
