In Distant Fields Read online

  ‘Course I don’t mind, Lady Partita,’ he grinned. ‘It’s not as if I didn’t volunteer, know what I mean? If I hadn’t bloomin’ well volunteered I mightn’t be quite so anxious to return to the fray, like, but I did and I tell you, I can’t wait to get back and have a go at the blighters what have done this to me – and to all my mates here, including Mad Mike.’

  ‘You’re not to call him that, Jack,’ Kitty scolded him.

  ‘I din’t, Nurse Kitty! It weren’t me that called him that, it was Mike his bloomin’ self!’

  ‘Yes, all right, Jack,’ Partita sighed. ‘But even so.’

  ‘I do love you, Lady Partita – and your “even so’s” and all. You’re a right angel, and I shall always remember you. I shall remember you all, and that’s a fact. What a cosy billet this has been, I can tell you – and I got the use of me Scotch eggs back, so I’m not grumbling.’

  ‘You will come back and see us, Jack?’ Kitty asked him as she gave him a last haircut. ‘When it’s all over, promise you’ll come and see us all here?’

  ‘You try and stop me. If I’m still in one piece, or even if some of the pieces is missing, I shall return!’

  ‘And what about you, Michael? I hope you’ll stay in touch?’

  Michael looked at Partita. ‘You know my conditions, Lady Tita,’ he replied gravely. ‘Only if you promise to marry me.’

  ‘And you know what I told you,’ Partita replied, equally straight-faced, this being by now an old routine. ‘I’m not the marrying type.’

  ‘Neither am I. That’s why we’re perfectly suited.’

  ‘Ask me again when the war is over, Michael,’ Partita replied, taking his hand and leading him to the door, outside of which the transport waited for those leaving. ‘Although I would bet a penny to a pound that by that time you will have been snapped up by the prettiest of girls.’

  ‘I’ll ask you to marry me every time I write,’ Michael promised her. Then looking at his feet, he said, ‘Thank you for all you’ve done, everyone. All of you. Every one of you.’

  ‘It’s us who should be thanking you,’ they all chorused, and turning went smartly back into the castle.

  It was a routine that Circe had devised.

  ‘Don’t want any lachrymose moments when they leave us; it will only weaken them. Lots of jokes, lots of cheery faces, that is what they must remember, before they go back to the party.’

  Valentine knew nothing about Almeric or, as it happened, anyone else in his group of friends who were missing. Cut off from all sources of information other than his immediate underground contacts and most importantly Nurse Cadell, he simply worked at playing the part at which he had supposed he might excel. So far he had been proved right inasmuch as he had not yet lost one of his ‘cast’, as he liked to call those in his charge. They had all been safely rerouted and delivered to the right location. What happened to them afterwards he could not know, nor did he make it his business to find out. That was something he had very soon learned.

  His role in the war had been his own idea, born out of a conversation with his father. Despairing of the European situation and holding out no hope for any war shared between chaotic Allies against a superbly organised enemy, Ralph Wynyard Errol had advised his son to stay uninvolved, at least until he saw how events were going to unfurl.

  It was difficult for Valentine to go against his father’s wishes, but he had finally protested, arguing that since all his friends were intending to volunteer, the very least he could be expected to do was to follow their example, and by doing so gain the respect, not only of them, but of his wife.

  ‘Dear boy, you will make a hopeless soldier.’

  ‘I must do something, Father,’ Valentine complained. ‘I can’t simply sit at home and do nothing.’

  ‘The theatre of war is very different from the theatre you and I know. Besides, we are keeping the home fires burning, making people laugh, making people cry in the theatre every night, cheering them on before they go back to the Front.’

  ‘That is your role, Father. For my part I want something better – a part that I would enjoy playing in the theatre – a part such as the Scarlet Pimpernel.’

  And that was precisely how father and son arrived at Valentine’s role in the war. By appearing to be little other than a theatrical dandy, he would in actuality be working to help soldiers trapped behind the lines to escape. He was given a brief training before being dispatched to Flanders where he was to work, among others, with Nurse Cadell. Since he had been in the habit of spending all his holidays in Europe and was bilingual in German, and French was second nature to him, Valentine proved to be an ideal choice. It was only when a close comrade was caught and shot that he started to hope that while his current role would continue to be a success, the run of the play in the particular theatre in which he now found himself might prove to be for a limited season.

  But against all his fervent hopes, the curtain still refused to fall.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Another Year Gone

  ‘It’s so hot!’ Partita collapsed into a kitchen chair. ‘It’s so hot I could almost long for winter.’ She stared dully at the iron bars that guarded the basement windows, iron bars placed there centuries ago to keep out, she suddenly wondered, what, or who? Certainly not bad news.

  ‘Winter was long enough without you wanting it back again,’ Kitty said crisply.

  ‘How can it still all be going on? How can it?’

  Kitty gritted her teeth. Much as she loved Partita, she had been saying precisely the same thing for the past week.

  ‘The butter’s all runny, the milk’s sour, and there are not enough clean bandages. We’ll have to wash some more out. Washing!’ Partita suddenly kicked the chair in front of her. ‘I hate washing. I hate washing worse than war.’

  ‘You might as well get used to washing, Partita, because everyone is needed upstairs. There are all too few of us now that half the nurses have a bug.’

  ‘Why did they all eat that gooseberry pie, and get ill?’

  ‘Probably because they were hungry.’

  ‘I swear I made it to the right recipe.’

  ‘Yes, but Cook’s writing being what it is, who knows that you read it right? Besides, it’s been around so long, people’s tummies have probably changed.’

  ‘People’s tummies don’t change, Kitty!’ Partita started to laugh, half hysterically, half genuinely. ‘People have the same stomachs as they have always had.’

  ‘They do not. We couldn’t eat what our ancestors ate, lark pie, and geese stuffed with seventeen different birds, and the like. We just couldn’t.’

  Partita stood up. ‘Tell you what, Kitty, let’s have a dance. Let’s have our own little servants’ ball down here.’

  They looked at each other, remembering the gaiety of the servants’ ball, the Duke leading out Mrs Coggle, all the fun of it.

  ‘After all,’ Partita went on, ‘we are the servants now – why shouldn’t we have our own ball?’

  Kitty turned away. ‘Maybe,’ she agreed. ‘We could ask the Duchess. Except it might make her sad, mightn’t it?’ She picked a newspaper off the kitchen floor and started to read it, and then another, and another, all old newspapers that were always put on the floor after it had been washed. ‘When you see what has happened this year, it seems hardly credible. Zeppelin raids, Jutland, Ireland, forty-five thousand lost at Loos, and now all this talk of the atrocities that the enemy are inflicting on the villages and towns, on civilians everywhere.’

  ‘Just more of our own propaganda. I wish they would stop. Why they think we will believe that in this day and age civilised nations would rape and plunder their way backwards and forwards instead of fighting fair and square, I don’t know.’

  ‘It hardly bears thinking about, if what they say is true.’

  ‘It’s not true, Kitty. Really, it can’t be.’

  Harry was on his way back from what was the last journey to the clearing station that day, the wounded ha
ving all been sent on to hospitals down the line, when he narrowly missed getting caught in a sudden barrage. Realising he must have lost his way to be that close to the action, he turned about and became even more lost.

  Finally finding what he thought was a road that would lead him back to the dressing station, yet again he found himself lost and disorientated, driving through countryside devastated by the guns and scarred beyond recognition, until he came to a village that, despite the rain and the mist, looked like nothing less than a ghost town.

  There were the all too familiar signs of occupation, but worse, more than anything there were what Harry understood at once to be the all too familiar signs of deliberate devastation.

  At first he could see no sign of anyone. The population had obviously been put to flight by the enemy when their little village had been overtaken. But the enemy, instead of being content with billeting themselves in the unoccupied houses, which would have been perfectly understandable, had deliberately savaged the place. Everything was burned, razed or ruined. The streets were littered with smashed beds, chairs, dressers, chests of drawers, sofas, broken with what looked like axes. Even the gardens and orchards had been savaged – centuries-old fruit trees cut down, gardens that had once been bright with vegetables and flowers hacked to pieces. What had once been vegetable or flower gardens, tended lovingly for centuries, now contained beds, lavatories, baths and basins, ripped out from the buildings and hurled through windows. Everywhere Harry looked there was clothing, filthy sheets and blankets thrown to the ground, soiled and violated, curtains and covers given the same vile treatment, and the clothing of the people, most of all of the women, spread along the muddy streets and pavements.

  Harry found himself searching everywhere for a sign of life but finding none he was about to leave when he heard the faintest of cries, which sounded like a child, or perhaps a baby.

  He found them in the ruined church, hiding under an altar that had been severed in two by a weapon that had then been plunged into the ancient oak of the pulpit. What he found was a mother and child, a baby that could have been born perhaps only twenty-four hours earlier, a tiny mite wrapped in a bloodstained altar cloth, in the arms of a young woman whose eyes were mad with terror.

  She said nothing to him, only stared in panic, her whole body trembling while her baby continued to cry. Harry stretched out both his hands to her, speaking to her quietly in French, assuring her he was her friend, that he had not come to harm her, and that he would take her to safety. For a long time she refused to move, shrinking away from him and trying to hide further and further under the altar until Harry was forced to his knees. Finally and all at once she seemed to give in and passed him the baby as she extricated herself.

  ‘Who are you?’ she whispered as she straightened up, and he handed her back her baby. ‘Why do you come?’

  ‘I’m an ambulance driver,’ Harry told her, taking her outside and pointing to his vehicle. ‘I drive the wounded to hospital. I’m going to take you there now, to hospital where you’ll be well looked after, I promise.’

  The woman shrank from him as Harry led her to the ambulance.

  ‘No harm will come to you, I promise,’ Harry kept repeating to her. ‘No one will harm you. You must come with me. If you don’t, I’m afraid your baby – and you – I don’t know what will happen to you, but I’d worry for your survival, There’s no food here, and you look – you look as though you’ve been hurt.’

  By now he had seen the blood and reckoned if he did not get her attended to very quickly, she might die. As it was, she was as pale as death itself, and with the amount of blood she seemed still to be losing, Harry knew that there was no time to be lost.

  ‘Please,’ he beseeched her. ‘You must trust me. Please?’

  She climbed into the back of the ambulance where again he had to plead with her, this time to let him try to dress her wounds. He had a supply of field dressings as well as some analgesics and morphine tablets that he always carried in the back of the vehicle. She was terrified, sitting as far away from him on the stretcher as she could, her baby child clasped tightly to her, all the time begging him not to come near, not to touch her. But the sincerity of his pleading eventually prevailed, so that he was able to dress her wounds, and ask her the way to the little village behind Loos where the clearing station still stood.

  It seemed that despite the odds he was somehow headed in the right direction. He drove as fast as he could along a road pitted with craters, a road so bad in places that it was barely passable, before at last he came to a relatively undamaged stretch where he could really push on, arriving at long last at the clearing station some forty minutes later.

  Both the woman and her child were still alive when, with the help of a bearer, he decanted them both onto a makeshift bed for which he managed to find some clean linen. He then went in search of his friend Dr Charles, whom he found taking a catnap, but who was only too willing to come and attend his new patients.

  ‘I don’t think she has much chance of survival,’ he told Harry who, alongside the doctor’s nurse, was attending him in the makeshift operating theatre. ‘She’s lost an enormous amount of blood and her resistance is all but gone.’

  ‘What could save her, doctor?’ Harry wondered. ‘More blood, obviously.’

  ‘More blood? Yes, very good, Harry, we do need more blood,’ Charles agreed, carefully suturing the worst of the young woman’s wounds. ‘As a matter of fact I was working on transfusion just before I came out here.’

  Dr Charles stopped stitching for a moment and looked at Harry.

  ‘The first thing that needs to be worked on is how to stop transfused blood from clotting. Appears the addition of sodium nitrate does the trick.’

  ‘So why aren’t we doing it?’

  ‘Question of keeping it fresh enough. They might manage that in first-class hospitals, but not so easy out here – in these sorts of conditions.’

  ‘What do you need to do to keep it fresh?’ Harry wondered. ‘Refrigerate it – of course!’

  ‘Need power to do that, Harry.’

  ‘Mmm, we would, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Good,’ Dr Charles stood back. ‘I think she’ll do.’

  The following day the young woman was sitting up in bed, taking nourishment, after which Harry volunteered to take her and the baby to the nearest hospital.

  A couple of days later found Dr Charles going in search of Harry.

  ‘I need your help, Harry,’ he said, as they sat smoking in a hut normally filled with stretchers bearing the wounded but for once happily empty of pain and suffering. ‘It’s not that you’re wasted driving ambulances, but I think we might make better use of you.’ He proffered him his brandy flask. ‘You have been nothing but an asset here, but we desperately need someone to get our field stations up to muster, bring them nearer to the dressing stations here. You are right. If we can do this we shall save even more lives than we do at the present time, besides alleviating a great deal of unnecessary suffering. You were also right to point out that the journeys the ambulances have to make are far too long and men are dying unnecessarily. Will you give the matter some thought? I’d be delighted if you would.’

  Harry gave the matter all the time it took to finish his cigarette.

  ‘I’d be delighted. As you know, I have all sorts of ideas about this. When would you like me to start?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning will be soon enough.’

  As soon as he’d caught up on his sleep and finished his letters home, Harry started to prepare the plan for moving the clearing stations nearer the line.

  One of Harry’s letters was to Kitty. It was on the subject of Almeric.

  I find myself so often saying of course we must continue without him, without our best friend, yet for the life of me I can’t see how. He was my friend since childhood and a better friend a boy and then a young man never could have. He was head and shoulders above the rest of us, and always fair. But what I loved most about him �
� and I mean loved – was his resolution. It takes enormous courage to be true to yourself – to honour your resolve above all things and to stand up and be counted, yet he was a man of such principle, good principles, high principles, the sort of principles that gave him the vision he had. You heard him talk about his plans for Bauders and the future of the estate – and by that he meant the futures of everyone who worked on the estate – and those plans were visionary. He would have been a grand duke.

  So when I think how are we meant to continue – how are we meant to make some sense out of our lives now that this man is gone – all I can hear is him saying that he expects us to pick ourselves up and continue to do what we were put on this earth to do – not to fight each other but to try and save humanity, and above all to love one another. When I witness the terrible carnage of this war, what men are capable of doing to their fellow men, I sometimes doubt my own resolve – but then I remember Al and I remember his resolution and I have to say I feel pretty ashamed of myself. So I wash my face, brush my hair, strop my razor sharp and prepare myself for another day – this is all sort of metaphysical, if you understand me, Kitty – it’s a bit like falling in the mud, then getting up, having a bath and putting on what my father always calls clean linen – and making a fresh start. That, I tell myself, is what Almeric would have wanted us to do. But then at night when the demons return, when it’s been one long and ghastly day driving the wounded and dying to the next post, then I wonder if I’m not using Al for my own philosophical purposes; if I’m not putting words in his mouth, particularly knowing that now he cannot answer me back. How do I know, how can I possibly know what he would want of us? He might have changed his mind completely, seeing what he saw, and he might want us all to convert to some Eastern religion of contemplation and take no further part in this terrible war. How do I know? How?