Tell him everything,Freddie thought.And forget it ever happened.He’d never again wake up choking, afraid of the dark.He’d never remember why heoughtto be afraid.
But Winter had been there in the dark. There was no way to separate the horror from the memory of Winter’s voice, his courage. He could not bring himself to let that memory go. It seemed wrong, disrespectful to the thing they’d shared, to let it go.
“I told you a story,” said Freddie.
· · ·
The next time Freddie woke, his hours on the Ridge were gone. He remembered getting their orders, then nothing before the pillbox. He felt lighter, but also unsteady. As though he’d chopped off a diseased section of limb, and now there was no limb at all, some essential balance lost.
I should tell the rest. About the pillbox, and escaping, and the shell hole,he thought.Why keep it? It’s not as though I’ll ever see Winter again.
However, that night, he told Faland of the dead man in the breastworks near Arras, whose hand they shook for luck as they went up.
One night followed another, and each night, Freddie flung his worst memories at Faland: bad days in trenches, mates in hospital, the day he told his mother he was enlisting and she sobbed on his shoulder. But he didn’t tell Faland of the pillbox. He didn’t say a word about Winter.
Faland listened, as always, in silence.
Then, in one of the unmarked hours, when the hotel was hushed and somber, Freddie’s candle went out and he woke again in the dark, screaming Winter’s name.
Only silence answered. Silence, and then a voice. But not the one he longed for.
“Why keep it so close?” said Faland in his ear, silky. He hadn’tcome with a light this time. He sat on the edge of Freddie’s bed, smelling of wine and rosin and old flowers, reached out as though he could see in the dark, slid a hand over Freddie’s hair, took hold of the back of his neck. Freddie bowed his head, hating the way he turned helplessly to the warmth.
“Tell me what you remember,” said Faland. “Tell me of the dark, and yourself, and that German. That’s what I want to know. That’s what I’ve always wanted to know.”
Freddie didn’t speak. He’d never see Winter again. What good was memory? But he didn’t speak. He held his silence and held it until finally Faland got up and left, taking the candle with him.
MENDINGHEM CASUALTY CLEARING STATION, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
April 1918
In her years in fieldhospitals Head Sister Kate White had been Laura’s mentor and her friend. Kate knew everyone, every medic, every nurse, every orderly in the back area. If anyone, at any hospital, had seen Wilfred Iven, treated Wilfred Iven, buried Wilfred Iven, Kate could find out.
Chaos found Laura quickly, on the road running northwest from Couthove. It was thick with mules and munitions and marching men. Bicycles, motorbikes, high-booted officers on horseback. She felt the percussion of the guns in the bones of her face as she threw herself into traffic, weaving doggedly. By the time she got to Mendinghem, her headache was a spike, right between the eyes, from the fierce concentration it took to ride the motorcycle. She threw the gear out and killed the motor, left it by the gate, and walked in.
Like all casualty clearing stations, it was a collection of sheds and long tents, sharply familiar even though she’d never served in this one. Stretchers everywhere, men being moved, nurses withsyringes. And then a familiar figure appeared between two tents, her eyes lit in welcome.
Laura’s first sight of the forbidden zone had come in ’15, when she was sent up the line to her first CCS. Head Sister White had met her at the train station in Poperinghe. Beatrice Hoppel, who’d got off the train with her, had whispered, awed, “There she is. She was in South Africa, I heard. Alegend.”
Laura had watched Kate White cross the main square. She’d expected austerity, a proud bearing. Iron-gray hair, perhaps, and the disposition of a mother superior. Nursing had a nunnish history, after all.
Laura hadnotexpected a stout, cheerful, pink-cheeked woman, with broken blood vessels about her nose, and eyes that missed nothing. “Welcome to Pop,” she’d said, “where the ratio of men to women is something in the nature of a hundred thousand to one. I warn you now that all hundred thousand of them, give or take, would like to bring you to bed.”
Beatrice gave an indignant huff. There was a sly warmth to Kate’s clever gaze, as it swung between them.
“How unfortunate for them,” said Laura, and Kate laughed.
Bea didn’t stick it; she married a flier six months later and he widowed her, pregnant, three months after that. But Laura and Kate found kinship. It was Kate’s voice that had berated them all to keep going the first time they got gas casualties, with orderlies turning away in fear, nurses weeping as they worked, boys choking as they died, on and on until she collapsed. Then Laura had taken charge of the wards, organized the nursing, seventy-two hours without sleep. It was Kate who had stood shoulder to shoulder with Laura for their first mustard gas cases, when they’d discovered together that the gas lingered in men’s clothes, on their skin and hair, burning the nurses’ eyes and palms and lungs.
It was Kate’s voice that had snarled at Laura to hold on, with her leg drenched in blood.
It was Kate now, crossing the space between them, older than onthat square in Poperinghe back in ’15, the lines carved more starkly around her eyes. But those eyes were the same.
Heads were turning and Laura recognized some of them. Word went round,Iven, that’s Laura Iven,and then the staff were coming up to her, eager, while questions like whizz-bangs came at her from all sides:you’re alive, where’d you come from, how’s the leg, we heard about Halifax, why’d you come back.Laura was smiling with helpless pleasure.
“Christ,” she said, when she could speak. “I’m glad to see you. But this war’s on the brink, that’s certain—half the British Isles are out there going up the line. And here you all are shirking.”
That prompted a chorus of laughter, then Kate’s incisive voice cut in. “Off you go, all of you. Iven’s alive, and working with that strange lot at Couthove, and you may pester her when we are not about to be overrun. Off you go.”
