In Falling Snow (14 page)

While we had been accredited as a field hospital, we would not receive patients without approval from the head of the
gare régulatrice
at Creil, Dr. Couserges, who made a point of ensuring that all the hospitals in his zone—northeast to Soissons, Reims, and Noyon—were up to his standard. He had told the Croix-Rouge, in no uncertain terms, that they could accredit whomever they wished but he wouldn't be sending patients to Royaumont until he'd come to have a look for himself. So it seemed we were to be inspected once again. We waited.

Violet and I took the opportunity to explore the Lys forest. We found a quiet road that ran to Chantilly past a few little villages. I liked mornings best, the soft sunlight shining through any lingering mist. We visited the tiny villages of Baillon, Boran, and Lamorlaye, all three mostly spared from the war so far. We walked miles and miles each day and longed to start finally as a hospital.

On January 10, tired of waiting, Miss Ivens thought to send one of our ambulances to Creil so that Dr. Couserges could see how well prepared we were. Violet and I went with Dr. Savill. Creil was a journey of twelve miles and the road, still in fair condition in those early days, wound through forests, now lightly covered in snow. From the crossroads, we climbed steeply for a few miles to a glade of leafless poplars, the sun shining through the branches of the trees and glistening on the snow, and drove down into the valley in which the
gare
had been established on a bend of the Oise River. Violet did marvellously well driving in the snow. Although we had a few tricky moments when we slid around, she kept her head and got us safely through. The bridge across the river had been destroyed when the Germans were approaching and so we were forced to take a wooden bridge which had been put up hastily after the Germans retreated. It was quite rickety and made Dr. Savill sick. We passed another car near the bridge and arrived at the
gare
only to discover that Dr. Couserges had already set off for Royaumont; the car we'd passed on the road. So we turned around and went back, getting home just as Miss Ivens was showing Dr. Couserges our Blanche ward. She was doing very well—the beauty of the abbey spoke for itself—but was relieved when I came back to translate for her. Dr. Couserges was perfectly happy with the hospital's wards and said he'd soon be sending patients. Mostly the sick, he said, until he'd been back to observe our surgeons at work.

Again we waited. And then, on the evening of January 13, Marjorie Starr called out that a car was coming up the drive—it must be
blessés
, she said—and those of us up in the wards rushed down to see, putting on coats and veils on the way, just in case. Before long, everyone in the abbey was awake and down in the hall where our electric lamps were doing their best to illuminate the large space. We were all accustomed to low levels of light—we'd only recently given up our oil lamps—but to these first patients, it must have seemed strange for a hospital to be so dimly lit. Soon I spied the small group of men shuffling along the cloister towards us. As they came closer, I saw their faces, grubby, some still blood- or mud-spattered, all walking, no stretcher cases among them. They stopped when they reached the abbey entrance, sitting on the long bench or collapsing to the floor, not speaking, looking around furtively. They were ragged and filthy and exhausted. And they looked afraid. They spoke not a word as the doctors and we nurses moved around them, checking their papers and injuries. Orderlies were dispatched to bring hot soup and bread. The ambulance driver from Creil, a bright-eyed young Frenchman, looked as doubtful as the men themselves that they'd arrived at a hospital.

“It's all right,” Miss Ivens said in English as she strode out to greet them, smiling broadly. “We are going to help you.” I translated for her and soon, with more reassuring smiles from doctors and nurses, the men began to smile and speak themselves. Those first half dozen were soon bathed, dressed in pyjamas, and put to bed in Blanche.

I assisted one of them—he looked too old to be fighting—who was sick with a fever and a cough that might turn bad in his chest. His uniform was full of fleas and stinking of mud. Bathed and dressed in hospital pyjamas, he saw the beautiful ward, warmed by the stove and lit by lamps. I gave him more soup and bread. He climbed into bed between clean sheets and said he was sure he'd come to heaven and I was an angel. When I replied in his native tongue that I was no angel, merely a nurse, he said then nurses must be angels and French angels at that. He was soon asleep.

The ambulance driver came himself to see the wards—insisted in fact—and looked pleasantly surprised to find his charges now comfortably resting in bed. He explained to me that by the time they reached a hospital, the men had often undergone long painful journeys. They were collected by ambulance from the field and taken to the nearest railhead. From there, they travelled by train to the
gare régulatrice
at Creil where they were assessed and given basic treatment before being evacuated to surrounding hospitals. The patients dreaded going to an unknown hospital—and they'd heard this was a hospital run by English women—and while he'd tried to reassure them, he himself didn't know us and couldn't give them much information. “But now I have seen for myself, I will be able to let them know.” I don't know what he imagined we might have been planning to do to his charges but I hoped he'd take this experience of us back to Dr. Couserges to convince him that the Scottish women really were all right after all so that we might be entrusted with more seriously injured patients.

We quickly realised that the soldiers who came to us needed much more than medical care. The French army didn't replace worn or torn clothing, so the men's uniforms were not only stinking and pestilent, they were often at the end of their useful life. Initially the bagged clothes were taken up the stairs to the top floor for storage until the soldier left us, but within a week we made an arrangement with a washerwoman from Asnières, who fired up her boilers while we packed the pile of stinking uniforms into ticking mattress cases and transported them to her for laundering. We cleaned and aired coats and boots. A woman from Viarmes, a Madame Fox, took on responsibility for mending. She was quite ingenious at getting the best from a pair of trousers or a jacket that really ought to have been retired. The Royaumont
vêtements département
, as we named our service, was unique in French hospitals, we learned. We fed the soldiers as well as we could in the time they were with us—albeit English food, which would continue to bother the Croix-Rouge—and we gave them toothbrushes when they left. We would quickly become coveted as a destination for French soldiers who, returning to the front, would be better dressed, better fed, and cleaner than their compatriots.

For another two weeks, Dr. Couserges continued to send us only sick patients and those with minor wounds, until he came back to Royaumont—by arrangement this time—and watched Miss Ivens perform an operation, an appendectomy as it happened, and said he was now comfortable with our surgical capacity. Finally, he would send us wounded. During those two weeks he also agreed that our drivers could collect patients from the
gare
rather than using his own ambulances—Miss Ivens had been right about our women being allowed to drive in a war zone—and Violet had been to Creil several times to pick up patients. The two men who'd been sent over specially from Edinburgh to drive for us—just in case—had been sent home. Miss Ivens was adamant we shouldn't keep the men on our staff although some in Edinburgh had thought we should. Miss Ivens wrote to the committee that when Croix-Rouge officers visited and saw two young men of military age doing very little, it was “awkward and humiliating, as if England is not doing its utmost. And worse, it looks terrible for us to call ourselves a women's hospital and yet have men here.”

Initially Creil would telephone to let us know
blessés
were ready for collection and the ambulances would be dispatched. But this system was cumbersome, so by the end of their first week, we agreed that our drivers would go to Creil each evening at six to take evacuees to the
gare
for return to their units and pick up new patients for Royaumont. Also in that first week, we developed the system for receiving patients that would last for the duration of the war. The hall porter—the orderlies shared this responsibility to provide twenty-four-hour cover—would blow her horn as soon as she saw the ambulances coming up the drive from the road, the number of blows indicating the number of cars so we'd have an idea of how many wounded were en route. One nurse and all the orderlies from each ward would go down to assist with triage and stretcher duties, leaving only a sister.

The day we saw our first badly wounded soldiers had dawned crisp and clear. You'd never have believed a war was all around us. I'd been in Blanche the evening before. Miss Ivens had told me that although eventually I would be full-time as her assistant, for the moment, until we had our full contingent of staff, I would continue nursing in the wards. I was due to go off duty but when I heard the porter's horn blow three times I rushed down to meet the ambulances with the rest.

As I descended the stairs, I thought I might faint just from the smell. There was the foul mud I was already becoming used to, but under that the reek of rotting flesh. I pinched myself hard on the arms. Violet, who'd been to Creil, had tried to prepare me—“Iris, it's more terrible than you can imagine; how can they do this to each other?”—but nothing could prepare a person for this. There were two dozen, mostly on stretchers, most quiet, some moaning softly, one blinded boy screaming who would not be quelled, at least half of them black as night and calling out in neither French nor English. These were niggers, Dr. Courthald told us, from the French colonies of Algeria and Senegal. I'd never seen skin so dark, not even among the blacks in Australia, with such white teeth and eyes by contrast. To a man, they looked terrified.

I looked across the flagged floor. The state of their ragged frozen clothes, their young smashed bodies, beggared belief. How did an army let this happen to its men? The nurses and doctors hardly spoke, except to point out urgent cases. We were all in shock. Closer up, I saw that the wounds were awful, some without even a field dressing, I couldn't help but think of Tom. I'd made what inquiries I could through the drivers who went to Creil or Chantilly or Soissons. No one had heard anything thus far. In truth, I hadn't looked terribly hard; I'd been too busy and, if I was honest, too happy at Royaumont to worry about Tom.

I triaged my first patient, a young Senegalese soldier with an obviously infected wound in his right arm up near the shoulder, and chest wounds awaiting X-rays, as well as wounds to his face. He understood neither French nor English. I took swabs as best I could—frustratingly, I couldn't tell him what I was doing—and sent them up to the laboratory for testing. The X-rays were soon done and the boy went off to theatre. As I was leaving him, he grabbed my hand with his left hand, his right the more badly injured. I smiled with what I hoped was reassurance. “It's all right,” I said. “We're going to make you well.”

After the patients were allocated to wards or theatre, and operations were almost done, I worked with Miss Ivens in the office to clear the mounting correspondence and check the equipment orders. I had a two-hour break during which I slept solidly, and then I was on duty in the ward again.

My Senegalese boy from the morning had come down from the theatre. Miss Ivens had worked to save his left arm but had had to amputate the right and then discovered that his chest wounds were more serious than they looked. At first I thought he might need further surgery but the chest was too severe, they'd realised, and we would not save him. I found myself dreadfully upset that we couldn't help this boy, this otherwise healthy boy, to survive. I knew I should be strong. I was a nurse. It wasn't as if I was unaccustomed to death. But this boy, it occurred to me, was dying for nothing. Perhaps he knew himself he was dying, for the fear in his eyes was almost unbearable. He wanted his arm back, he signalled to me, his severed arm, in the bed with him, as far as I could make out. We couldn't agree to that, of course. Perhaps he wanted his arm to take across to the other side with him. Perhaps it was his religion. I have no idea but wish I'd simply found a limb and put it in his bed. Matron told me I was to care for him. I sat by his bed and did the best I could, his eyes following me wherever I went.

Another African soldier who'd had a minor wound in his thigh was on the ward. He spoke French as well as the boy's language and he told me the boy was from a village not far from his own. “His father has given him to France to spare the rest of his family,” the soldier said. “He is the second son.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The French cannot get enough of us to fight their war, so they make arrangements with village chiefs. In my village, twenty young men, in this boy's village twenty young men. The chief must find the young men or be penalised. The men don't want to go. They know they are going to die a long way from home.”

The boy looked at his countryman suddenly and said something I didn't understand.

“He says he wants to go home, to see the sea once more from his beautiful country.” The boy's eyes closed again then.

“You didn't have a choice?” I said, horrified.

“We have not had a choice for many years,” he said. “Most of my countrymen don't even know why France is at war. They come here to save their families, not the French.” The boy opened his eyes again and the soldier spoke to him in his language.

“I am the son of a chief,” the soldier said after the boy had slipped off again. “My father did not want me to come to France to fight. He told me to run for the hills like the other boys in my village. But my father is a warrior and the son of a warrior. I was disgusted to see the young men of my village flee when the French came. I decided to volunteer so that those who ran would know that men in our family are warriors and proud to fight. My brothers did the same.