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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Paris, 1919. As the fragile negotiations of the International Peace Conference get underway, typist Stella Rutherford throws herself into her work and the mixture of glamour and devastation the City of Light reveals. She will do anything to escape the grief coming in waves for her beloved brother Jack, buried near Arras. Her sister Corran is about to put her academic career to use teaching the troops in France, a chance to see what the experience was like for countless men, including her fiancé Rob Campbell. Rob was part of the celebrated Scottish rugby team who were swept up in war fever and mown down in battle. He has been profoundly marked by his time as a surgeon on the front line, devastated by the incessant grind of the injured, dying and dead. The Paris Peacemakers follows three Scots as they attempt to pick up the pieces of their lives while the fabric of Europe is stitched together for good or ill.
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3
THE PARIS PEACEMAKERS
FLORA JOHNSTON
4
5For Elizabeth and Alastair, with love.6
7There is probably no finer school for the development of courage and endurance than the Rugby football field; and consequently no finer set of men to be obtained elsewhere, in the present emergency, by the Army. It is certain that there will be a splendid answer from the players to the call of the country.
The Scotsman, 5th August 1914
Here we are at last in Paris and I can hardly realise it. We’ve landed in a place like the Ritz.
Mildred Keith, typist at the Paris Peace Conference,15th December 1918
There has come upon us a great disillusionment. We thought that the great Peace Conference was travailing to the birth of Peace, and it has brough forth an abortive pandemonium. Millions who gave up their all in a frenzy of self-sacrifice during the war are asking themselves bitterly what they gave it for. What’s the good? And who’s to gain?
Food for the Fed-Up, G. A. Studdert Kennedy, 1921
Contents
Characters
* indicates fictional character
* The Rutherford family
Corran, lecturer
Alex, naval officer
Jack, student
Stella, typist
Alison, their mother
* Rob Campbell, surgeon
Alexander ‘Gus’ Angus, Scottish rugby player
Miss Bingham, superintendent of female staff on the British Empire Delegation
Stanley Blunt, English chaplain in Paris
Sir Henry Brooke, the chief, educationalist
* Arthur Callaghan, lecturer
Constance Hoster, owner of typing school
John MacCallum, Scottish rugby player
David Lloyd George, Prime Minister
Roland Gordon, Scottish rugby player
* Anne-Marie Harrison, typist
* Lady Mabel Lees, typist
* Grace MacCallum, nurse 10
* Archie Macdonald, patient
Sir William Macewen, surgeon
* Hugh Mortimer, civil servant
* Freddie Shepherd, member of the South African delegation
* Lily Sheridan, typist
Frances Stevenson, private secretary to David Lloyd George
Philippe Struxiano, French rugby player
G. A. Studdert Kennedy, chaplain and poet
Charlie Usher, Scottish rugby player
Jock Wemyss, Scottish rugby player
Madame de Witt-Schlumberger, French suffragette
Poppy Wyndham, previously known as Elsie Mackay, actress and aviatrix
Dennis Wyndham, actor
BEFORE
The Last Rugby Match
The only tiny mercy is that none of them knew.12
21st March 1914
Inverleith, Edinburgh
Corran pulled her scarf tightly around herself against the wind. The day had looked promising through her guesthouse windows earlier: how could she have forgotten the penetrating chill of a bright Edinburgh spring day? Now, as she hunched against the north wind that swept this bleak rugby field, she thought wistfully of the blossom-laden tree outside her college window in Cambridge.
What on earth am I doing here?
She looked to her left, where her youngest brother, Jack, sat beside her on the wooden bench. As usual he was sketching the scene before him.
‘I don’t know how you can even hold the pencil.’
He grinned at her, his eyes dancing below his untidy fringe. ‘You’ve gone soft in the south,’ he said. ‘This is nothing to home.’
That was true. Home was Thurso, the harbour town perched on the exposed northern edge of mainland Scotland, where the skies were vast and the elements unforgiving. Yet that was a different sort of cold altogether from this grainy wind that picked up the dust of the setts and funnelled between the sooty Edinburgh chimneys. She had grown up with a fresh, cleansing 14cold, straight from the ever-moving sea. She could almost taste the salt in the air as she thought of that austere grey house where their sister, Stella, was chafing her way through her final months of school with only their mother, Alison, for company.
When the summer days stretched out at both ends, they would return, maybe even Alex too, and the house would come alive with laughter and warmth once more.
She turned her attention to the scene that Jack was sketching. Young pipers from Dr Guthrie’s school entertained eager spectators who had squeezed into every space around the Inverleith playing field. The pipers came to a halt right in front of her. A pause, and a new tune: ‘John Peel’. A roar rose around her from the enormous crowd, and men in white jerseys sprinted onto the pitch. They formed a line and jumped up and down, stretching and bending their legs. The tune changed again, ‘Scotland the Brave’ this time, and it was the turn of the men in navy blue. Corran leant forward to see between the heads in front of her, mouth suddenly dry. At first she couldn’t spot him: they all looked remarkably similar, these men, tall and strong with their short haircuts. But then they formed a semi-circle and there he was. Rob.
Rugby football was his passion but she had never before seen him dressed in the navy shirt with its white thistle proudly sewn on by his own hand two years ago. If I can stitch a wound, I can surely stitch a thistle, he had written to her. Rob the surgeon she knew a little; Rob the student she had known well. But Rob the Scotland rugby player? She wasn’t sure who he was at all, but this weekend she might find out. She watched him take up his position with his teammates, waiting for the whistle to blow. He had told her once that these men were his greatest friends, the brothers he had never known in a sparse and solitary Edinburgh childhood. 15
An English player punted the leather ball down the field, beginning the game. For Corran, with little interest in sport and a head full of drifting fragments of ancient poetry, the shocking physical onslaught brought thoughts of Achaeans and Trojans, of men setting their faces to battle.
‘They say this might be the biggest crowd ever at a Scotland rugger match,’ said Jack, as he turned to a fresh page and began a rapid sketch of the match in progress. ‘Must be twenty or twenty-five thousand here. It’s quite something really, considering how poorly the Scots have been playing and the slating they’ve had in the papers. There are more English supporters here than I expected too.’
‘I think they were all on my train north,’ Corran said dryly, remembering her cramped journey up from Cambridge the day before, hemmed in by noisy English fans.
‘It was grand of Rob to invite us.’
Corran couldn’t quite share her little brother’s enthusiasm. She had never watched a whole rugby match before, but when she had written to tell Rob she was coming north for a job interview, he had offered to set aside tickets to the Calcutta Cup match. She had agreed a little uncertainly, knowing Jack would love to come. It was good to see her little brother here in the city, where he seemed to be finding his feet at university and even growing into a man. The need to travel south from Thurso to pursue their futures had created its own independence in each of the Rutherford family.
‘Oh, go on, go on!’ Jack was on his feet, as was much of the crowd. But then an enormous groan resonated through the stand, and the energy slid into disappointment.
‘What’s happening?’
‘George Will was nearly over there, but he had a foot in touch. And Pender knocked it on just before. They’re doing so well but 16they have to take their chances. England won’t give them this amount of field position for long.’
Corran didn’t really understand a word he said, but she could see Rob running back up the pitch. Jack had told her that Rob was a forward and his main role seemed to involve crouching down in the muddy ground and pushing with Herculean effort alongside his teammates while the English tried to push in the other direction. Gaining territory inch by inch. She found she was watching Rob rather than watching the action, and so she was startled when Jack leapt to his feet once more, this time shouting and waving his sketchpad in delight.
‘Did we score?’
‘Didn’t you see? It was Will again, an absolute peach of a pass from Turner. Now Turner will kick for points. What a player he is, I tell you, he’s going to be around for many years to come.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘Ach, he’s missed it. Never mind, this is good, this is so much better than I expected. England don’t know what’s hit them!’
There was certainly a lot of hitting going on. Not fighting exactly, but as man after man was slammed into the ground, Corran wondered how this could be anyone’s idea of pleasure. Meanwhile the pitch, already soggy after yesterday’s rain, was rapidly losing any semblance of green, and it was becoming harder to tell Scotsman from Englishman, so covered in mud were they all. Rob was one of the worst. Where now was the smart young man who had come down to visit her a few times in Cambridge?
It was easy for her mind to drift away from the match and settle on Rob’s last visit. They had shared an unsatisfactory lunch in a stuffy hotel, hampered as always by the strict Cambridge University rules, which prevented Corran as a female student from even walking between classes with a man, never mind 17entertaining him in the college. Everything had been much more relaxed when they both lived here in Edinburgh, Rob studying medicine and Corran studying classics. But after graduating top of her class, she had won a scholarship to Cambridge to continue her studies. Her three years there were nearly complete, and she really wasn’t sure how she felt about that at all.
There would be no repeat of her Edinburgh graduation, no matter how well she performed: women were not awarded qualifications at Cambridge, and were not allowed to graduate. The unfairness disturbed her, but right now the question of what she was going to do next disturbed her more. Dusty volumes containing the stories of mythical heroes, the beauty and logic and resonance of ancient languages – these had been her world for almost as long as she could remember. At the age of twelve she had told her headmaster she wanted to learn Latin and Greek. Of course not. You are a girl, my dear, and the female brain was not designed for the classics. Encouraged by her parents, she proved them all wrong and loved every minute of it, but now long years of studying were coming to an end. What lay ahead for a woman who had been educated in a subject that her mother’s friends were quick to point out was of no use to man nor beast? The only possible answer was teaching, and so she found herself in Edinburgh, preparing to be interviewed for a lecturer’s post that she wasn’t sure she wanted, and wondering if this man sliding through the mud might offer a simpler future.
The battle had paused.
‘Half time,’ said Jack. The players huddled together in two groups, some bent double to catch their breath. ‘It’s a shame England scored that one before the break. We’ve had the best of the play, but we had the wind behind us. It will be hard going in the second half.’ 18
An older man on Jack’s other side leant in towards them. ‘Aye, lad, we’re missing Wattie Suddie,’ he said. ‘Huggan’s no bad for a first cap, but these muckle English bastards widnae match Suddie’s speed.’
‘Why is he not playing?’ Corran asked, laughing at her little brother’s consternation.
‘Injured, hen. Hurt his ankle agin Wales. Typical Scots luck, to lose oor best wing three quarter. I’m a Hawick man, ye ken. Watched the laddie grow up. Watched him win every sprint championship. The sooner he’s back wi his brothers in airms, the better.’
‘Here we go,’ Jack said as the men jogged back to their positions. ‘Come on, Scotland. Can we pull off another shock like two years ago?’
‘What happened two years ago?’
‘The English came up sure they would win easily, but our captain, John MacCallum, led from the front. It was a famous victory. That was your Rob’s first cap, wasn’t it? MacCallum was magnificent. He’s not playing any more, but with the likes of Turner coming through we have every chance. Let’s go!’
Your Rob?
She shrugged it aside and they turned back to the action. To Corran, the match seemed interminable. To Jack it was clearly a delight. He was in danger of crushing his sketch between his fingers with excitement, so handed the sketchpad to Corran for safekeeping. As England took control, a sense of resigned despair began to run through the Scottish crowd.
‘Poulton is just too good,’ Jack groaned. He had taken to addressing many of his remarks to the Hawick man, receiving a better response there than from his older sister, although he still provided her with a brief summary of events. But then, just when 19all seemed lost, the Scots rallied. First one man kicked for the posts – ‘drop goal from Bowie’ – and then another ran the length of the field. ‘Will again. Terrific!’ And then, not far from where they were sitting, an alarming shriek of pain rose above the general noise. Corran, Jack and those around them all leant forward. The casualty lay face down, his leg at an ugly angle. Amid the mud and the men who surrounded him, Corran couldn’t see who it was. Not Rob? No, that shirt had once been white, and here was Rob now, sprinting at full speed across the field and dropping to his knees beside the injured man. The others made way for him.
It all took a terribly long time.
‘Pillman. English hooker. Looks like a broken leg,’ was the word being passed around the crowd. Eventually the wounded warrior was carried from the field to a round of applause. Rob accompanied him to the edge of the touchline and then jogged back.
Jack pulled out his watch. ‘There can’t be long to go. I just hope the referee adds on time for the injury. Come on, Scotland, one point in it. You can do this!’
There was a tension around the ground now and even Corran, who had longed for the end to come, felt herself drawn in. Her eyes were on Rob when the match ended. He was sprinting back, but as the final whistle sounded he pulled up, and she watched the hope and purpose leak from his battered, filthy body. For just a moment she could see his bleak despair and was unsettled to realise just how much this mattered to him. He bent double, hands on his knees, his face hidden from view. When he straightened up his shoulders went back, and he walked towards the nearest Englishman, hand outstretched and a congratulatory smile on his face.
The rugby was over. 20
Corran followed Jack down to the pitch and they waited at the edge as people milled around. Seeing them, Rob finished his conversation with another player and sauntered over. He might have been bathing in mud.
‘Sorry we couldn’t pull off a win for you.’
‘It was close!’ said Jack. ‘You were terrific, Rob, and we nearly had them. We’ll do it next year at Twickenham.’
‘Aye.’ Rob looked directly at Corran. ‘Enjoy it?’
She had the uneasy sense of speaking to a stranger, plastered in the claggy ground as he was.
‘It was … more exciting than I imagined,’ she said. ‘Thank you for getting the tickets. Jack, you must show Rob your sketch.’
Jack held it out along with his pencil. ‘I wondered if you would sign it, actually,’ he asked, suddenly bashful.
Rob rather pointlessly wiped his hands on his filthy shorts and took the pad, holding it by the edges. The sketch was a panorama of the pitch, posts at either end and action taking place.
‘Jack, this is top-hole!’ he said, scrawling his name across the bottom. ‘I had no idea you were such a good artist. Here, I can get you some more. Gus – Gus! Charlie!’
He beckoned over two Scottish players who were standing nearby, one much taller than the other, arms around each other’s shoulders.
‘That’s bloody good,’ the smaller man said to Jack. ‘Get yourself a job with the papers, son,’ and he too added his name.
Then Jack’s sketchpad was somehow being passed around the field, as men from both teams admired his work and added their signatures. By the time Rob brought it back it was grubby and crumpled, and he looked a bit rueful.
‘Sorry, we’ve rather ruined it.’
But Jack’s eyes were shining. He took the pad and closed the 21cover over, holding it tightly against his chest as if it were his passport to the future.
‘Anyway,’ Rob said. ‘Must go. There are no baths here at Inverleith, would you believe, so we have to go back to the hotel in this state. I’ll get cleaned up for dinner, and I might head round to the hospital and see how poor Cherry Pillman’s doing. But we’ll meet for our walk on Arthur’s Seat tomorrow afternoon, Corran, as we said?’ There was a slight hesitation in his eyes as he looked at her, and relief coursed through her. There he was, beneath the filthy layers of male strength and forcefulness: there was the intelligent and sensitive man who just might be part of her future.
‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said.
The low winter sun was disappearing behind the blackened houses as they left the rugby field in March 1914, those young men from two nations, arms slung around each other, laughing, jostling and joking all the way. Splattered with mud and nursing their wounds, eager for hot baths, a slap-up dinner and a beer.
The only tiny mercy is that none of them knew.22
PART ONE
War
October 1918 to November 191824
Chapter One
London
Stella hurried down the stairs to the narrow street below. She had arranged to meet Corran in a tearoom near St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s modelled on Lyons but not nearly as good, she had written. But it’s handy for Hoster’s and I don’t get long for lunch. She rather expected her older sister to be late as usual, but when she turned the corner she was pleasantly surprised to find Corran there before her. How different she looked, dressed in her smart YMCA uniform rather than her usual haphazard mix of dowdy clothes. Corran looked round, saw Stella and came towards her.
Stella felt the ground shift beneath her feet and she inhaled the thick London air, trying to steady herself. She hadn’t seen Corran since those awful days last Christmas when they’d been trying to work out how to be a family together without Jack. Just a glimpse of her sister risked sending waves of horror crashing over her head. But she returned Corran’s brief embrace.
‘Come on inside,’ said Stella, and she was glad the words came out at a normal pitch. ‘I can only stay half an hour.’
She led the way, weaving around long queues at sparse counters in the food hall and upstairs to the first-floor restaurant. 26A waitress dressed in black and white took their coats and hats, and led them to a table by a window that was so grimy they could barely see out.
Stella ordered for them both and then leant back, conscious of the amusement in Corran’s eyes. ‘What?’
‘You! When did you become so grown up? London suits you.’
Stella pushed down the sense of irritation. ‘I’m twenty-three, but I suppose we’ve hardly seen each other these past few years.’ But that was skating dangerously close to the chasm of the last time they had been together. She changed the subject. ‘I like London, but what about you – going to France! How did it come about?’
‘Sheer luck,’ Corran said, adjusting her cuffs. ‘I was about to start my new job at St Hilda’s when my old principal from Newcastle told me about the YMCA education scheme for the troops in France. Its purpose is to stimulate the mind and provide opportunities the men have missed out on at home. He asked if I’d like to take part and I jumped at the chance. Oxford agreed to postpone my appointment.’
‘When do you leave?’
‘Soon, I hope. There’s been one delay after another. At the moment I’m cooped up in a hostel in Islington with a load of other women waiting to go out. There’s everyone from an ex-music hall star who’s off to join a Lena Ashwell party to a chaplain’s wife who does rescue work – though I pity any poor soul rescued by her! She disapproves of me entirely and thinks Latin and Greek are completely unsuitable subjects for a female. Although I don’t expect much call for the classics out there. I’ll be teaching English and other arts subjects.’
Stella sipped her tea. ‘You are lucky,’ she said. ‘To get to France. To see …’ She stumbled, as Jack’s shadow brushed between them.
‘I know. But we’ll be well behind the lines, you know, teaching 27base troops and men on leave.’ Stella felt her sister’s scrutiny and knew Corran had noticed the dark circles under her eyes that she couldn’t quite conceal with powder. ‘Tell me how you are, Stella. Does London live up to your hopes?’
Her hopes.
Was it even possible to fashion new hopes from the rubble of the last four years? She looked across at her sister, smart in her unfamiliar uniform. Somehow Corran had always known what she wanted and how to achieve it. Even the war hadn’t stopped her. Seven years younger and trailing along in her wake, Stella knew only that the war had robbed her of every single opportunity that these years should have offered. In 1914 she had travelled down to Edinburgh University full of anticipation just as the men began to depart. None of them, men or women, would ever have believed that this nightmare could still be dragging on four years later. Her university years had come and gone, and now she was in London to learn typing and shorthand.
Anything to secure a future that would not be played out in Thurso.
Some days she was angry about all she had lost, and some days she was determined to seize it back. But mostly she shuffled through the darkened London streets like everyone else, war-weary and a little bit hungry. She lifted the sorry-looking sandwich from her plate and took a bite.
‘I’m happy in London,’ she said. ‘The course feels easy after my degree and the girls are fun. Mrs Hoster says there are more and more opportunities for well-trained girls to work in the big banks and offices and in government, so once the war is over I mean to find a job that will let me travel.’
Her sister replaced her cup carefully. ‘I think Mother was a little disappointed that you didn’t come home in the summer.’ 28
‘How could I?’ Stella asked, and was immediately conscious that her defensive tone stripped away the years. ‘I had just arrived in London. You know yourself how long it takes to travel home, and the expense too.’ She brushed some crumbs from her fingers with her napkin as the waitress removed her plate. ‘Don’t you just long for proper bread again? I might come home for a short while at Christmas, although my friend Lily has invited me to her house in Ireland.’
‘Please do try. Mother is on her own so much and she misses Jack. And Alex is likely still to be somewhere in the Mediterranean on his ship.’
Jack. Stella swallowed. They had always been two pairs: Corran and Alex, Jack and Stella.
‘She’s kept busy providing lodgings for the officers from Scapa naval base.’
‘It’s hardly the same.’
It was a well-worn argument. Thurso was home to Corran in a way it never would be again to Stella. She knew her sister couldn’t bear to go more than a few months at a time without the sight of the sea and the sound of the waves crashing on the cliffs. Corran’s university career provided her ideal balance – term-time immersed in academic life and long holidays back home in the north. She failed to appreciate that others might feel differently.
Stella decided to close the door on talk of family. ‘Will you see Rob when you’re in France?’
‘That’s not very likely. I don’t expect it’s easy for him to get away. He …’
She was still talking, but Stella had stopped listening. She had been vaguely aware of repeated coughing at a nearby table, but now there was some kind of disturbance, with people crowding round a young woman who had been taken unwell. Stella had 29lived in London long enough to react quickly. She pulled out her handkerchief and covered her face while signalling to her startled sister to do likewise. Leaving some money on the table, she grabbed their coats and hats amid a flurry of people doing the same and ushered Corran from the restaurant. Only once they were on the street outside did she lower her handkerchief.
‘It’s this awful flu,’ she said. ‘Lots of girls from Hoster’s have gone down with it, and two died.’
‘Well, I had heard about it, of course,’ said Corran, ruffled by their abrupt exit. ‘I read in The Times yesterday that Mr Lloyd George is so ill with it that they have rerouted the trams to avoid disturbing his rest. But it’s just flu, surely.’
Stella shook her head. ‘This flu is different and there’s real panic in London. You need to be careful, Corran, staying in that hostel. Here, I’ve got mint lozenges. Lily swears they keep it away. Take some.’
‘You keep them and I’ll buy some for myself. But don’t worry. I rarely catch anything – it’s the sea air, I’m sure.’ Corran glanced at her watch. ‘I should go and brave my vaccinations for France. There’s absolutely no way I’m using the Underground so I’ll need to find a bus.’
Stella laughed. Corran might have courage enough to cross the sea to France alone, but she had always abhorred any confined space. ‘Send me an address once you’re settled in France,’ she said. ‘If only I could come with you – but no one would want me as a lecturer.’
‘I’m not too sure they’ll want me, but I’ll take the chance!’ Then Corran was gone, engulfed by the London crowds. Stella watched her go, taking with her the slightly caustic taste of home. She and Corran were bound together by so much, not least their brothers, but the orbits of their lives rarely intersected. 30A relationship conducted by letter could mask a great deal. She turned back towards Hoster’s. It was true what she had told Corran – the typing and shorthand courses were easy enough, if not particularly interesting. She thought again about that question – Does London live up to your hopes? As a child Stella had dreamt of following Alex into the Royal Navy. Maybe it was the natural result of a childhood spent down on the shore, watching boats come and go and picturing the opportunities that lay over that horizon. She remembered clearly the day sixteen-year-old Alex had left for Dartmouth naval college. She had been ten and had run from the house in tears, furious not because he was leaving but because as a girl she would never be allowed to follow him. Later, Jack had found her down on the shore and brought her out of her rage, as he always could, chasing her up to the ruins of the old castle.
Jack.
There were not words enough in her head or her heart to begin to express the swirling, suffocating horror of Jack’s death. Corran wanted her to spend more time at home with their mother, but Stella knew instinctively that if she returned to Thurso she would never be able to breathe again. What’s more, she was pretty sure their mother understood. Even here in London she often had to steady herself against the tide of panic that crashed about her at unexpected moments. Someone with his build on the front seat of the bus; someone calling out his name in a park. Someone sitting on a bench, head bent over a pad, sketching. Oh God, sketching.
A threadbare rug littered with screwed-up balls of paper, and a keening sound she had never heard before.
Stella reached the entrance to Hoster’s. There was no way she could go back to the Thurso she had shared with Jack for anything 31other than the shortest visit. Instead here she was, equipping herself for the kind of career that was emerging for the modern independent woman. Why, they said the Prime Minister himself even had a woman for his private secretary! She pushed open the door and climbed the steep stairs to rows of typewriters. Her generation had been cheated. The future that should have been hers, and Jack’s even more, had been stripped from them when they were eighteen and nineteen, robbed by this awful war, which showed little prospect of ever being over. Her university years had passed in a female-dominated fog of anxiety and food shortages. Somehow, amid the grief, she had to reach for something that might eventually take her away from drab little Britain to the spice-laden, warmer lands she had imagined as a child.
Hoster’s was her ticket to board.
Chapter Two
61 Casualty Clearing Station, France
Rob stretched out his long legs below the table in the officers’ mess, rolling a cigarette between his fingers. It was unusual to be alone. He lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and rested his pounding head in his hands, trying to ignore the latest sounds that easily penetrated the canvas walls. Not the constant rumble of the guns – he barely noticed that. A new orderly had come down to them yesterday, just a young lad, and he’d kept glancing uneasily over his shoulder at the sound of the guns.
‘Hear that noise, sir?’ he asked repeatedly.
Rob ignored him. Noise? You call that noise? he wanted to ask, but he didn’t. It wouldn’t help. Pray God the lad never had to find out.
But the CCS was of necessity positioned beside a railway line, and that was where the more immediate sounds proceeded from. The shriek of brakes, the slam of doors, orders shouted, answering groans and screams of pain. Another ambulance train had arrived from the devastated wastelands near Amiens, the next load of poor buggers ripped to shreds out there, sent to him to be patched or dispatched.
The orderlies, sisters and VADs would be among them now, 33transferring the stumbling wounded and the stretcher cases to the reception marquee. Rob still found it strange to be working as part of a team in this small tented town that bore at least some relation to a hospital. Until just a few weeks ago he had been medical officer to his battalion, operating almost alone and following the men into battle, his aid post hastily set up wherever he could find rudimentary shelter from the shelling. He took a final gulp of tea, which was laced with whisky to steady his hands. Aye, this was a different landscape altogether, but at least with a team he could remain in the mess for another precious few minutes, smoke his cigarette and drain his tin mug before walking into the rest of this day, which would contain nothing but sewing, sawing and cutting away what was wasted, discarding what was beyond repair. Another and another and another.
By the end of the day there would be buckets of precious limbs, rotting flesh and a line of fresh corpses for the growing cemetery outside.
He jammed the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and rose slowly to his feet. God, his head hurt. Made his way along the slippery duckboards to the entrance to the tent. As ever, it was the stench that reached him first, before he even pulled aside the flap. Many of these mangled blighters had shat themselves or vomited in their terror and pain, and that was before the smell of rancid mud, burnt flesh and, worse, the putrid stink of rotting meat from those who’d lain a day or two. He inhaled one last time and dropped the cigarette to the ground, grinding it with his heel, then ducked into the tent. Sister Haines, at her efficient best, had already begun to sort them. He walked slowly among them, men huddled under blankets or filthy greatcoats, men lying out, barely moving, men rocking to and fro, men reaching out with imploring hands. Most had a label round their necks, hastily 34scrawled at the dressing station with name, rank and nature of injury.
He assessed them coolly. ‘Resuss tent for him, Nurse.’ ‘Move him to pre-op.’ ‘Pre-op for this one.’
A young lad dressed in the grey of the German forces was coughing blood and gasping for breath, his skin tinged with blue.
Rob stopped, looked at Sister Haines. ‘This is an influenza case. Are there many?’
She was flustered. ‘The ones we identified were directed straight to the infection zone as you instructed, Captain. This one must have slipped through.’
‘Move him.’ Infection zone was stretching it, he thought – a sheet rigged up across the back of the evacuation tent, where those they couldn’t help were sent to await death or the train to the base hospital, whichever came first. But the spread of this deadly influenza had been desperately rapid, particularly among the German troops it seemed, and at least his sheet made him feel he was doing something about it.
The next was a stretcher case rolled in a blanket, motionless, the sheen of death already on his thin face.
‘Catastrophic abdomen injuries,’ said the young orderly, reading his label.
‘Evac tent. Make him as comfortable as you can.’ He was about to move on. What made him stop? The smear of mud, and blood, on a cheekbone? The hair, filthy and plastered to his head? He stooped, lifted the label. ‘Major Roland Gordon.’
Oh fuck.
He was on his haunches then, gently pulling the blanket aside to reveal blood-soaked, stinking bandages barely holding together a gaping mess. Catastrophic all right. Fuck. Gordon. The man groaned, but was insensible. For one unhinged moment Rob 35wanted to rush him straight into the operating tent, somehow pile the severed intestines and bowel back inside him, patch him up … but every bit of experience of the last four years told him that death was very near. His duty was to find those among the wounded who could be sewn together and tossed back to the guns once more. Harshly he turned to the orderly, the same teenage lad.
‘This man’s name is Roland Gordon. Make him comfortable, and stay with him till the end. Till the end, you hear me?’ Then he stooped once more, placed his long skilful fingers gently on the clammy forehead. ‘Bloody fantastic try, Gordon.’
Five hours later he was spent, poured out, empty, and his aching head rattled with machine-gun fire. But Gordon, he was told, was somehow still alive. So when the others left the ops tent to wash, to eat and drink, to rest, he followed the duckboard path round to the evacuation tent at the rear. Dusk had fallen, and though the roar of the guns continued from afar, spawning a whole new set of casualties for coming days, somewhere a blackbird sang a long song. He entered the dimly lit tent, his palms clammy and his tiredness like a cloak dragging at his shoulders. He thanked the boy who still sat there, obedient, and dismissed him. As he took his place on the flimsy camp chair the boy asked, ‘How d’you know him, sir?’
‘We played rugby together,’ said Rob. ‘For Scotland. Now bugger off and get your rations.’ His voice softened. ‘Thank you.’
He turned his attention to the patient. Roland’s dark eyes were lucid now, and searched his face.
Rob took the thin hand in his own. ‘Bloody fantastic try,’ he said again.
There was recognition in the eyes; the cracked lips twitched 36into a half smile. Roland tried to speak, but no sound came out. Rob’s fingers were on the weak pulse, and something tightened in his throat.
‘Your first cap, wasn’t it?’ he carried on. ‘Parc des Princes in ’13. The one where we had to escort the ref from the field or the French crowd would have strung him up. But I still remember your sidestep, Gordon, your try.’
The hand moved weakly under his. His friend lifted two fingers. Rob swallowed, and laughed.
‘Aye, right, two tries right enough. Glory days, Gordon. And what a night we had in Paris afterwards. Those French dancers, oh my.’
Roland’s breathing was shallow and harsh. The cracked lips opened once more.
Rob leant close, the smell of death filling his nostrils. ‘What’s that?’
‘Scot – land.’
And he understood. Roland didn’t want to think about France, however delightful the memories might be. Here in France they had been stripped of all that life had promised on that grand Paris day in 1913. So Rob spoke instead of Scotland, of Edinburgh, of the fierce matches and cramped changing rooms they’d known at Inverleith, of a group of young men far closer than brothers who went swinging from bar to bar in Rose Street, and—
The hand quivered beneath his fingers, and then Roland’s whole body jerked as he began to cough convulsively, blood projecting from his mouth across the bed. A fresh stain was spreading across his bandaged stomach and he gripped Rob’s hand frantically, his eyes wide with terror as he coughed and choked and the blood continued to come, gargling up out of him. Drowning him in its scarlet fountain. 37
And then, at last, the eyes were empty and the thin hand was still.
The heart that pumped so fast and the lungs that filled to bursting as Roland Gordon charged up the touchline for his wonder try, they were finished. His beautiful young male body had been utterly ruined by the carnage of this vicious, endless war.
Rob sat there for a long time. Around him, nurses came and went, seeing to the patients on nearby camp beds, but no one spoke to him. The darkness had fallen completely, and the only light came now from the flickering lanterns around the tent. The other patients swore and moaned and sobbed. Still, Rob sat there. This tiredness and this pain, it wasn’t a temporary thing, it was a part of him now, taking full possession of his body, blood, his bones. He lowered his pounding head onto his dead teammate’s bloodstained chest, and closed his eyes. So tired.
Freddie Turner. George Will. Puss Milroy. French boys, English, Welsh and Irish boys too. Each one who died embedded him deeper into this living hell. So many of them, and now Gordon.
His team. His family.
All gone.
Chapter Three
Dieppe
Southampton was a very long way from Thurso, but at least it was the sea. Three weeks of delay in London, all streets and no sky, had been more than enough for Corran. How her heart surged as she caught her first glimpse of the English Channel, for all that the water and sky merged into one mass of gunmetal grey on this dull October day.
They would not sail until night-time, under cover of darkness, and with a naval destroyer patrolling nearby. Her confidence was hardly improved by the clerk checking tickets, who asked for details of her next of kin ‘in case the ship goes down’. But as she stepped onto the gangway leading to the steamer, her thoughts were full of Alex on his naval ship in the Mediterranean somewhere. Together they had survived shipwrecks and pirate raids all along the Thurso coastline. Tonight they would both be on the waves, and danger lurked beneath.
A short time later she stood on the deck and leant over the rail, looking into the darkness as they eased away from England. She would go inside for dinner in a minute or two, but she wanted to breathe in the cold air and listen to the surge of the 39waves against the creaking sides of this old steamer first. Her frozen fingers gripped the rail as she gazed down towards the black waters. She supposed there might even now be a German submarine prowling about, yet the fears that whispered most loudly were for tomorrow, not today. She felt again that familiar mix of trepidation and excitement that had accompanied every step of a career that she had never really intended to be so pioneering. What on earth had she signed up for this time? She had spent the last four years in Newcastle, teaching ever-diminishing classes the beauties of Greek and Latin, and had unexpectedly discovered that she was good at it. But now she would be teaching in a very different context. Did she really think she could communicate anything worthwhile to a roomful of uneducated, rough soldiers? Would they listen to her, or would they just laugh at her? How would they respond to being taught by a woman?
And yet, she had known from the moment the principal asked, ‘How would you like to go out to France?’ that there was nothing she wanted more. A flurry of letters had followed – to the War Office, seeking appointment; to Oxford, seeking a postponement; to Mother, seeking a blessing. Even to Rob, seeking nothing, but eagerly sharing her news. At this her thoughts faltered. In his reply he made no mention of her news until a postscript at the end. Grammar for Tommy – whatever will they think of next! She folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope, placing it beside the scrawls of four years and firmly closing the drawer on any unreasonable doubts.
Rob. She could barely remember what he looked like, but she could still feel his strong hand on the back of her neck as he pulled her into a long kiss in the sunlit glory of a Thurso evening in July 1914. It had been a golden week, the 40family at home and Rob in the guestroom. She had finished at Cambridge, achieving the highest marks in her year yet leaving with nothing to show for it. She had thought she was prepared for that injustice until it became a reality. It had been a relief to leave the narrow confines of Cambridge behind and return to Thurso to be replenished.
That week they all stood on the threshold of the future. She and Rob with their long walks on the shore, fingers loosely intertwined; Stella and Jack with their eager plans for term-time when Stella would join Jack at Edinburgh University; Alex home for a rare spell of leave. Quietly elated to have all her children home at once, their mother, Alison, took every opportunity to feed them their favourite meals and to encourage them in their dreams. Building up body and soul.
There was a bitter taste in Corran’s mouth, and it was more than salt spray. The future they had imagined then was a delusion, long since tossed away on the northern breeze. Jack had been cruelly ripped from them. The last time she and Stella had been together in Thurso was Christmas 1917, just weeks after the telegram. Their mother had shrunk into herself with the loss of her son, and Stella had huddled in the corner of the sofa, dark eyes in a stunned white face. For once Corran was relieved when term started and she was able to pack up her sorrow and bring it back to her lodgings in Newcastle, where mourning was already a familiar companion. Now as she wiped the tears from her face, taking a last look down into the sinister depths before returning below deck, she whispered a line from Homer’s Odyssey.
‘Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure … For already have I suffered full much.’
In the end, Corran passed the night safely in her berth in the 41bowels of the ship and was welcomed into her first morning in France with a quickfire volley of questions that immediately tested her French, before being released for the last leg of her journey. A train carried her through the rolling farmlands of Normandy, and how hard it was to believe in the war at all, with newly harvested fields and orchards pretty with fruit-laden trees. At Dieppe station she climbed down, took possession of her trunk, and looked around. She had been told that someone would meet the train and escort her to the school. All around her those dismounting seemed to know exactly where they were going. She noticed a tall man dressed in greatcoat and cap who was scanning the crowds and took a hopeful step towards him, but his gaze passed quickly over her, searching for someone else. As the passengers dispersed, any lingering surge of excitement stilled to a stagnant puddle. She had been travelling continuously now for more than twenty-four hours and, eyeing her trunk, knew she could not walk another step. She wanted a place to sit down, a pot of tea and above all a bathroom. She glanced across at the man, who was now making his way back along the platform, hands in his pockets. He had a YMCA badge on his cap, and might perhaps give her a lift.
‘Excuse me?’
He stopped and turned. The first thing she noticed was the vivid crimson scar slashed down one side of his face. Reddish hair was visible below his cap, and his striking green eyes contrasted with that shocking scar.
‘May I help you, ma’am?’
His voice told of roots in northern England, but was not the Geordie accent she knew so well. Manchester maybe.
‘I’d be very grateful,’ she said, suddenly conscious of just how 42grimy and travelworn she must look. ‘I expected someone to meet me but no one has arrived. I have no idea how to get myself and my luggage to wherever I am meant to be.’
There was a light of laughter in his eyes. ‘And do you know where you are meant to be?’
‘I’m looking for the YMCA School of Education. You don’t know where it is, do you?’
‘Well, rather! As it happens I …’ He stopped, and those green eyes narrowed. He glanced down at her trunk, and then met her eyes once more. ‘Now hold on a minute. May I ask your name, ma’am?’
‘Miss Rutherford,’ she said a little stiffly, sensing the ground between them shifting but not sure why.
‘Oh my great aunt. Someone has well and truly messed up.’ He laughed aloud, and shook his head. ‘Never mind, we’ll sort all that at the base. Here, let me take your luggage for you. I have the car, just along here. Come along now!’ He summoned a porter to carry her trunk. Corran was a little indignant at the sense he was laughing at her, but there seemed nothing to do but accompany him. He was tall but walked with an uneven gait, so that she found she had to slow her pace slightly to match his.
They reached the car and he held open the door of the rear seat for her and then climbed into the front. He himself was the driver it seemed. Seated behind him, it was difficult to engage in conversation so she contented herself with leaning back against the scuffed leather and watching as narrow streets opened up into a broad road along the seafront. On one side grand houses and hotels, and on the other a vast white shingle beach and the clearest green waters stretching out. A green she had seen just a moment before in the colour of his eyes, she thought, surprising herself. He called out comments to her once or twice, indicating 43this or that building, but she couldn’t catch his words and was happy just to rest during this interlude before whatever awaited at her destination. Along the end of the seafront, a turn to the left, and he pulled up outside a red-gabled house, which nestled under the steep chalky overhang of the cliffs and looked out across the sea towards England. He stepped out, and came and opened her door, helping her out.
‘Here we are,’ he said cheerfully.
Corran stood and looked around her. As the fumes from the car dispersed she tasted the salty sea air, softer than any sea air in Scotland could ever be. It was so much more than she could have hoped for.
‘It’s lovely.’
‘Isn’t it just? Well, let’s get you inside. I’ll come back for your luggage but we really must find the chief and sort this out.’
‘Sort what out?’ she asked. ‘I don’t understand – I am expected, am I not? I have all the paperwork.’
‘Oh, you’re expected all right,’ he said, trying and failing to hide his amusement. ‘It’s just – ah well, never mind. Here we are.’ He pushed open the heavy wooden door, and led her through a cool hallway into a sitting room with broad windows overlooking that glorious sea. The walls were hung with tapestries, and the furnishings were ornately carved. ‘Rather fine, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The artist Jacques-Émile Blanche has lent this place to us. He’s in Paris for the duration. But I’ll go and – ah no, here he is. Sir.’
A grey-haired, kind-looking man had entered the room, and across his face spread a similar cloud of confusion as she had seen with her as-yet-unidentified companion. She began to understand. It would not be the first time.
‘You were expecting a man,’ she said flatly. 44
It was rather funny to see them both look discomfited. The older man recovered himself first. ‘My dear, how lovely to welcome you. Sit down, sit down, do. You must be wearied after the journey.’
‘You’ve nailed it, though,’ said his younger companion with a grin. He clearly thought the whole situation was the most tremendous joke.
‘You see, we had a list sent out to us from England, and today we expected’ – the chief consulted the piece of paper in his hand – ‘Corran Rutherford, Lecturer in Greek and Latin, able to teach up to university standard in English, French and other arts subjects. We rather expected …’
‘… a man,’ she finished. ‘It’s that wretched name of mine, wished on me by my parents in some moment of sentimental madness in honour of the ferry on which they met. I’m just grateful they didn’t use the Ballachulish crossing. And of course, many people still don’t realise that a woman is as capable as a man of teaching classics. Don’t worry. It has happened to me before.’ She paused. ‘I feel like Anne of Green Gables, though,’ she said with a smile, not really expecting them to understand the reference to the story Stella had devoured. ‘Do put my mind at ease – will you keep me, even though I’m not a boy?’
They fell over themselves to reassure her, the older one concerned, the younger one full of enthusiasm.
‘We will need to make some arrangements, though,’ said the senior. ‘And how rude I am, Miss Rutherford. I do apologise. My name is Sir Henry Brooke, and this is Captain Callaghan. Your accommodation, you see … it won’t do for a lady, won’t do at all. We shall find you some suitable digs – Captain, see to it, would you? And then come back and escort Miss Rutherford and her luggage. Meantime, my dear, you must be tired. Is there anything I can do for you?’ 45
Corran looked up at him. The kindness and warmth in his tone, coming as it did after her long journey and bewildering arrival, nearly undid her composure. She blinked away the threat of tears, determined not to show weakness before these men. ‘I should like to find the bathroom, if I may,’ she said. ‘And then, perhaps, a cup of tea?’
My dear Stella,
The school feels like home already. We’re a strange old crowd, quite ordinary really, yet each is an expert in one field or another, and everyone is keen to share that expertise with the men who’ve had to give up so much in the way of education and opportunities through these years. Now that they’ve got over the shock of my being a woman, the men here seem quite willing to accept me as one of themselves.
The male members of staff sleep on the top floor of the school, while the other two women and I have lodgings with French families in town. I have a simple little attic room and I love it already, with its polished floorboards and painted shutters, which open to show me the central square here in Dieppe. Every morning I rise early and hurry through the deserted streets to the school for breakfast. Meals are a hit or a miss here. We have one French cook, Henriette, and she either produces nothing to eat but Maconochie, or a table full of pheasants and butter and splendid things that one of her many nephews has brought our way. Feast or famine.
The most glorious thing about life in France is that one never quite knows what will happen next. College life at home is always so regulated, so predictable. It couldn’t be more different here. The teaching itself is marvellously varied. Yesterday morning I 46was teaching English literature to a lorryload of troopers. Now they and I both knew that the only reason they had signed up to come was to avoid a particularly tough physical exercise parade. Many of them had read nothing since their schooldays other than the racing columns of the yellow press, but when I gave them the plot of Beowulf they lapped it up. Then in the afternoon I had a one-to-one session of Greek New Testament with the shyest young officer you can possibly imagine. He was converted by the war and has ambitions for the clergy, but he might have to learn to speak to a woman without blushing first, poor lad. You would have laughed.
And the teaching is not the half of it. I’ve only been here a few weeks, and already I’ve been asked to help out in the kitchen, to play piano at a frightfully evangelistic sort of prayer meeting, and even to give marital advice while doling out mugs of tea in the canteen. Me! And it’s the strangest thing, but while I would hate to do any of those things at home, here in France it’s somehow different. The endless codes and rituals of proper behaviour that govern us at home, they mean nothing at all in France.
There are rumours of peace. We can hardly imagine that it will really happen, and have no idea what it will mean for our work if it does come. I think we will be here for a while yet. Sometime soon I believe Captain Callaghan and I will motor to a remount camp nearby and spend a week there, offering lectures to the men and to the horses too I shouldn’t wonder! Camp life – it’s the part of this role that daunted me most before I came out, and now I simply can’t wait. The chief has warned me to wear my strongest shoes. I gather there’s rather a lot of mud about. I’ll let you know!
With much love from Corran
Chapter Four
Northern France
Any colour had long since leached out of the godforsaken landscape that spread out on either side of the rutted road. This sector was now firmly back under Allied control, but evidence of the enormous cost was everywhere. As the car jolted along, Rob’s gaze ranged over the charred remains of buildings and the blasted stumps of trees, the tangled mess of barbed wire and the gaping oily craters containing hidden horrors in their depths. Here and there were groups of wooden crosses, hastily assembled, already sliding drunkenly into the mud.
They had passed a camp a couple of miles back but now on this stretch of road there was no sign of life. It was therefore unfortunate that the car, which had been creaking and straining for some time, chose this particular location to give a loud groan and come to a juddering halt. The driver swore. Rob leant across.
‘Out of petrol?’
The driver, Bryce, was already getting out and Rob climbed out too.
‘No, sir, plenty of petrol. I reckon I know what it will be. You 48just sit comfortable, sir, and I’ll have her back on the road in a jiffy.’
‘Comfortable’ was not the word Rob would have chosen for this boneshaker. Glad to stretch his muscles, he twisted his back from one side to the other and then stood for a moment or two watching Bryce delve into the innards of the engine. His offer of help was rebuffed and so he turned aside and looked about him. It was strange to be alone in this emptiness: one feature of life in France was the continual press of other men. Something caught his eye a little way beyond the road, tucked behind the shattered remains of a copse. He glanced back: no sign of Bryce emerging from the engine yet. He crossed the road and made his way over a muddy expanse towards the small cemetery that lay a short distance away.
He stopped at the edge, unexpectedly moved.
