Page 72 of Two Wars and a Wedding

I’m just going to go on writing to you until you write back, you know. I’m back in Athens, but only for a few days. We had to pack up our hospital at Vólos when the Turks broke through the lines. They were very complimentary about our work and even offered us positions with the Red Crescent—as if any of us would! But even though we had to evacuate, we remain undaunted, and by “we” I mean both the nursing staff and the army. This is just a minor setback and I’m sure we’ll still prevail in the end. One can’t imagine the Greeks losing to the Turks. The Greeks always defeat the Turks in the end.

All right, maybe not always. There was that long occupation. And I suppose I’m thinking of the Persians rather than the Turks. But if you’d met the soldiers I’ve met and bandaged their wounds and mopped their brows, you would understand my faith in them. It’s like that song about the British tar being a soaring soul, except instead of “British tar” put “Greek infantryman.”

In three days I’m off to my next post. Dr. Kalopothakes personally recommended me for the new Red Cross hospital in Lamia, if you can believe it. She’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but fundamentally a good sort. She reminds me a bit of you.

If Dr. Kalopothakes can forgive me that disaster of an exam, can’t you forgive me too? I’ve been making up for it as hard as I can. You’d know if you saw my hands. Calluses upon calluses and boiled red with carbolic!

Can’t you just see Miss Swenson pointing with her ruler and intoning, “These are not the hands of a lady”?

Write to me, please.

All my love,

Betsy

—Miss Betsy Hayes ’96 to Ava Saltonstall ’96

Athens, Greece

May 1897

After Betsy’s weeks on the front, the normalcy of Athens was dizzying.

Carts and carriages careened around her. In the cafés, men were sitting and drinking coffee and reading papers as if men weren’t fleeing and dying on the front. Women shopped in the boutiques on Ermou Street, giving great consideration to their next hat, and children ran and shouted and got underfoot.

It was, in short, life as usual, except it wasn’t usual, any of it.

She’d gone from the hospital ship Albania straight to the house on Academy Street to find the knocker off the door and covers over the furniture. Aikaterini was not at home. She’d gone off to take the waters at a wonder-working spa somewhere in one of those small German places that invariably began with Bad-something-or-other.

Of course, she hadn’t known Betsy would be back. Betsy hadn’t known Betsy would be back. The servants assured her it wasn’t the least bit of trouble. Despoinída Elisavet’s room was always ready, and her bicycle had been kept at a high polish by Herakles, who Betsy suspected had been polishing the seat, as well, and good for him if he’d mastered it. She would offer him a lesson, if she weren’t afraid it would spoil his fun.

The servants had run about heating water for tea and whisking the protective sheets off the drawing room furniture, while Betsy had wandered up to her room feeling entirely disoriented. All her things were still in the wardrobe, those fantastical, frivolous dresses she had worn to balls and routs and teas. It had been only three weeks, but they felt like they belonged to another lifetime. Betsy peeled off her Red Cross uniform hesitantly; it felt like it had grown into her, like a second skin.

It felt almost obscene to bathe in the heavenly deep tub Aikaterini’s servants filled with scented water, to rinse the dirt and stench of the Albania out of her hair, to put on a tea gown and be served little cakes in the empty drawing room. They were too rich; they turned her stomach, although she would never have told the cook so.

She tried to write Ava—she’d decided she was just going to go on writing Ava until she wrote her back—but she found her pen didn’t want to shape any of the words that mattered. She couldn’t make herself tell Ava the truth of it, only the enthusiastic platitudes the old Betsy might have written. It felt a bit like playing a part, mimicking the person she had been a month ago.

Betsy didn’t sleep much that night back at Academy Street. It wasn’t just that her bed was too soft or the covers too thick or the room too quiet.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw them. The refugees, fleeing the Turkish advance. All those people who had thought themselves safe behind the Greek lines until there was no line anymore, nothing to protect them from the Turkish army pressing forward, ever forward, reportedly capable of the most unspeakable atrocities. The children, so many children, hungry, bewildered, stumbling after donkeys loaded with their families’ possessions, waiting to be loaded into ships to take them somewhere, anywhere. The sound of battle, so close, the pounding of the guns and the cry of the Turkish bugles.

But the Turks had been—well, not kind, that wasn’t the word for it; war wasn’t kind. They had been civilized. The nurses had been warned that the Ottomans hadn’t signed the Red Cross accord and might not respect neutral parties. But they had. They’d offered them work with the Red Crescent and, when the nurses refused, let them leave in peace.

No, they had been gentlemen. That wasn’t where the horror lay.

It was in the Albania, the hospital ship chartered by a British newspaper, sponsored by a British member of Parliament, hastily laden with the Greek wounded. So hastily that the ship’s crew hadn’t time to wait for necessary hospital supplies. The chief medical officer refused all advice. This was his ship, and he didn’t need a bunch of Red Cross nurses telling him what to do. He locked their supplies in the hold. They wouldn’t need them anyway, he said; he had his own people.

None of the staff on board spoke Greek. They wouldn’t even let Betsy translate. Her work was done, the medical officer had told her, puffing out his chest at her. She was to leave it to them now.

Yes, leave it to them to kill her patients.

They’d packed the men in like sardines on the deck, exposed to the elements, and those who wouldn’t fit on the deck they’d shoved onto wooden shelves next to the stench and heat of the engines. One man, who’d been out of his mind with fever, they’d locked in the hold, to shut him up. They left him there. Without care. Without food or water.

All that night, all that long, terrible night on the Albania, Betsy had heard the priest moving from man to man, offering the last rites. Offering the last rites to men who by rights oughtn’t have died. If they’d had their supplies . . . if they’d been allowed to care for their patients . . . if the medical officer hadn’t been such an arrogant ass . . .

They lost six men. Six men who didn’t need to die. Betsy could see them still, every single one. Every man she had bathed and bandaged and jollied.

One of them had flung himself from the mast. He’d been mad with fear of the Turks; he’d thought he was escaping them. If she had been with him—if she had been allowed to be with him—