“Lovely to meet you all,” the woman in the Red Cross uniform said kindly. “Lord, I’m glad to see you—come in, come in—and Mary, I must talk to you about ether—we’ve enough for the time being, but—” The two women went through the front door together.
“Well, come on,” said the doctor to Laura and Pim. “Let me get a look at you. It isn’t as though I had enough work.”
Laura, the world going a little hazy, found herself in a foyer, floored in cracked black and white. Grimy walls, once seafoam green, were festooned with wires for the lights and the telephone.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Laura. “I’ve just got a touch of—”
“Pneumonia, yes, I have ears, it sounds like you are trying to breathe underwater,” said Jones. “Not particularly all right if you ask me.” His eyes had fallen on her hands.
Jones turned to snap orders to someone out of sight. She heard a voice speaking, low, somewhere ahead: “The wounded are going to come down on us like three tons of bricks, Mary; you couldn’t have come back at a better moment.” Her voice dropped lower. “The men—at night—anxious—” Then Laura lost the thread of speech.
“Get some rest, Iven,” called Mary. “I’ll need you back on your feet.”
“Well, you’re not getting her tonight,” muttered Jones.
YPRES TO BRANDHOEK, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
November 1917
Freddie and Winter slept throughthe day and woke up at dusk, alone in a greasy cellar whose low ceiling shook with shellfire. A welter of empty bottles rolled and clinked on the floor amid broken glass, and there was a smell of damp earth. Had Freddie actually thought it was grand? Gothic? Full of untouched wine? Christ, he’d been off his head.
Faland was gone. They might have imagined him too. Except that a single candle had been left burning, a guttering stub, the only thing that kept the darkness from swallowing them. Winter sat up stiffly, tipped his head back against slimy brick.
“He’s gone,” said Freddie.
“I’m glad.” Winter didn’t open his eyes.
“He helped us.” Freddie heard the edge of bewildered protest in his voice. It was as though Faland had taken that otherworldly cellar with him. In the damp chill, both seemed equally unlikely: the civilian with his listening silences, and the safe place, set apart, where they’d spent the day.
“I don’t—” Winter’s eyes were glassy and his lips cracking with fever. “I don’t think it was for kindness.”
Freddie thought,Why else? We’ve nothing he could want.But he said nothing. He picked up their damp, filthy shirts. “We ought to go ourselves,” he said. He could wonder about Faland later. When Winter was safe at last.
· · ·
A gray river of wounded stumbled toward the back area, mingling with troops coming up, the world shrouded in renewed darkness, stabbed through with electric light. Winter and Freddie walked with their heads down, in the margin of the road. No one looked at them. No man had an eye for anything beyond his footing in the slime, or an ear for anything but incoming shells.
Freddie and Winter were past caring about shellfire. Either they’d cop it here or they wouldn’t. Winter walked as though in a dream, and despite the ambient noise, Freddie fancied he kept hearing the dead man’s splashing footsteps.
“Has he gone?” Winter asked once. The night held them close in an icy hand. “I don’t think he’s gone.”
“Gone?” Freddie was imagining those footsteps. Hewas.
Winter answered himself, “No, he’s not gone. The dark country’s empty now. All the devils are here.”
“A little further,” said Freddie. “A little further.”
It wasn’t far from Ypres to Brandhoek. Not in miles. But their way stretched on and on, slowed by the limping press of wounded, and every puddle had to be tested to make sure it wasn’t a shell hole ten feet deep. They had not gone half the distance before Winter was weaving drunkenly, his face set in determination. Freddie, supporting him, had the impression that if they stopped, Winter wouldn’t be able to go on again.
But Winter did go on, on and on, his eyes staring blind and raindrops running down his jaw, brilliant as sequins in the intermittent light. Freddie stayed with him, and he kept his eyes only on Winter,so he’d not try to make out the dead man’s face in every human wreck that came alongside.
They came, still alive, to Brandhoek when the night was at its darkest, when the road was at its most chaotic. The hospital was no shining beacon in the storm, it was merely a series of sheds and marquees, grimy white, lit by the lanterns of its quick-moving staff. Freddie saw the place in slices. The ammunition dump. Triage tent, toolshed, flagpole.
The men.
Acres of wounded men, lying out in the rain, while nurses in mackintoshes went from stretcher to stretcher. There was no room inside.
But Freddie was too tired to worry, too tired, almost, to understand what he was seeing. The only question in his head was how to find Laura in the frenzied darkness. His eyes darted from place to place; his only thought wasWhere.
