The casualty clearing station was a chaos of stretchers piled in haphazard rows on the ground, in the rain. Patients died before they could be assessed. It had been a large-scale bombardment, almost an offensive, and the casualties covered an entire wheat field. Hugh had woken up in a familiar ambulance to find he was not badly hurt. It was Archie and Bill’s ambulance, and Archie had cheerfully cracked jokes about holiday trips to the seaside as he taped up a couple of broken ribs and patched a nasty cut on Hugh’s head. He could do nothing about the infernal ringing in Hugh’s ears. He had kept his boots in the blast, but somehow lost his trousers, and been laid seminaked on the stretcher. Archie had covered him with a blanket and made ribald comments. Now he sat on a box outside the clearing station and tried to clear his head enough to either offer his help or search the field of stretchers for his cousin and the others.
“Here’s a pair of trousers and a cuppa,” said Archie. “We have to go now, guvnor. Taking a load to the train station.”
“Did you see my cousin? Did they pull any others out of my hole?” he asked. He drank the scalding tea and felt the burn of it in his throat.
“Can’t say for sure,” said the ambulance driver.
“I never imagined angels would look so ugly, but you were a sight for sore eyes,” said Hugh. “Thank you.”
“Who you calling ugly?” said Archie. “Must’ve damaged an eyeball, sir.”
Hugh held a hand to his painful ribs and walked as swiftly as he could bear up and down the rows of stretchers and clusters of wounded men sitting on the grassy field. He knew he had only a few minutes to search before someone would stop him, or before he would feel bound to step in and help the wounded. It was selfish to look for his cousin when so many other cousins, brothers, and sons were bleeding and screaming, but he felt the urgency to find Daniel as a drumming in his head. He was driven along the rows by a horror that he must find him or never be able to face going home.
A loose tourniquet on a stranger stopped him at last. A soldier called out for help for his neighbor, and Hugh, seeing the spurt of an artery, ran to tighten the leather belt on the injured man’s thigh and secure the dressing on his wound with strips torn from his own handkerchief.
“Thanks, sir, he was a goner,” said the soldier who had called out. When Hugh turned to speak to him, the soldier was already dead, eyes empty and a large bloody stain still spreading from a wound to his lower abdomen. Hugh closed his eyes and placed the man’s arms across his chest. He wished there was a cloth to cover his face, but he had to make do with placing the soldier’s cap on top of his hands. In place of a prayer he made a decision to help Daniel by doing his duty to all the wounded.
“Where are the operating tents?” he asked a passing orderly. “I’m a surgeon.”
He worked for ten or twelve hours, standing at a makeshift operating table and moving almost mechanically to stanch, stem, and close whatever wounds appeared before him. His ribs hurt so much he sometimes had to stop and wait for a surge of nausea to pass, but he refused morphine in case it dulled his abilities. The orderlies could hardly boil instruments quickly enough to keep up with the flow of patients, and Hugh, looking up from pushing a lower intestine back through a gaping shrapnel hole, saw with a start that the nurse was not the same one from when he started. He had been unaware of them changing shifts and had just continued to hold out his hand for instruments and slap them back into a waiting palm when he was finished.
It was deep into the night when the flow of the injured finally slowed and Hugh, shaking his head to clear his vision, knew that he was no longer thinking straight. The deep ache in his ribs now brought tears to his eyes. His head throbbed, and his fingers felt numb from the hours of prodding and sewing. He spoke to the nurse and left the tent. He washed his face and hands with strong carbolic soap and freezing water. He took a thick ham sandwich and a cup of tea from a woman running a canteen from the back of a grocer’s van. He was handed a fresh pair of socks and put them on, almost crying with pleasure at the feel of warm, dry wool against his feet. He requisitioned a blanket, and though he was tired almost to collapse, he set out with a kerosene lantern. He walked with the hunched gait of an old man, shuffling through the serried rows of men laid out in tents and in the field, their white bandages bright in the frosty moonlight. He looked in their dirty, broken faces and thought them all his brothers and cousins. And though he asked God to watch over his cousin Daniel, it was enough to be here among Daniel’s fellow soldiers and to have done his best to help them all.
—
In a field containing hundreds of sleeping, or softly groaning, wounded, Hugh found them by the sound of Harry Wheaton loudly calling for a nurse to bring him a bottle of burgundy and a dozen oysters.
“The service in this establishment is perfectly rotten,” said Wheaton as the nurse hurried away. “My friend will have the lobster.” Wheaton was objecting to the mug of oxtail soup and hunk of bread she had left him. He was propped up on a cot, his arm in a sling and his legs covered by a rubber tarp.
“Harry!” said Hugh. “I’ve been looking for you all.”
“You’ve found us, what’s left,” said Harry. “Wake up, Bookham, your cousin is here.” Daniel was lying barely conscious on the next cot, his head heavily bandaged. “They told me to keep him awake,” added Harry. “But he’s always been incurably lazy, haven’t you, Bookham? Always looking for a nap.”
“Daniel, can you hear me?” asked Hugh. He crouched beside Daniel’s cot and felt for his pulse. It was weak but steady.
Daniel’s eyes flickered, and he licked his lips. “Hugh, is that you?” he asked. “I thought you were dead.”
“How do you feel?” asked Hugh. “Can you move?”
“Listen to me, Hugh,” said Daniel. He raised a hand, and Hugh grasped it. “You must get the boy home. Please promise me you’ll get the boy home.”
“He means young Sidley,” said Harry. He nodded across the aisle, and Hugh went to peer at the boy, who was bandaged across the chest and breathing in irregular gasps. “Got a piece of shrapnel in a lung, they said.”
“Snout, can you hear me?” asked Hugh. The boy opened his eyes and looked at Hugh for a long moment. Then he gave a small smile and closed his eyes again. Hugh hurried back to Daniel.
“I heard the doctors talking,” said Harry in a whisper. “Those who can survive the trip get put on a list for the ambulance trains to the coast. Those that are too weak do not.”
“It’s a new system,” said Hugh. “It keeps the most people alive and saves the very ill from additional pain that will do them no good.”
“Daniel and young Snout are not on the list,” said Harry. “If you have any authority, you had better do something fast.”
“Where are the others?” asked Hugh. “Your father? Lord North?”
“Dead,” said Harry. He turned his head aside to hide any emotion. “My father is gone, Hugh.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Hugh.
“We are the only survivors,” said Harry. “As I told them—such a shame when the court-martial had just found the boy innocent and we were about to leave.”
“Thank you,” said Hugh. He clasped Harry by the arm.
“Of course your cousin had to go and add that the Brigadier threw himself on the lad as the shell was coming in,” said Harry. “Always the weaver of stories. Now Lord North may become a national hero.”
—
The doctor in charge of the casualty station was inclined to be helpful.
“You did sterling work for us today, Lieutenant,” he said. “I will add your cousin to the transport list and give you a pass to go with him to the coast.”