Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, And all the little emptiness of love!
RUPERT BROOKE, “1914 War Sonnets 1: Peace”
The cigarette did not seem to help the shaking in his hands, but Hugh persisted in trying to force the acrid smoke into his lungs in the hope that it would at least clear out the stink of dried blood and iodine from his nose, his throat, and every pore of his skin. He knew he should wash and get to the officers’ mess for his dinner, but exhaustion made it pleasant just to sit in the lee of the hospital’s sun-warmed doorway and smoke the cigarette passed to him by the stretcher bearers as they headed out again for the long trip to the front.
The base hospital, to which he had been assigned since landing in northern France the previous autumn, was in a small village a few miles from the coast. It occupied an old winery, itself adapted from a medieval abbey. The ancient stone seemed to gather and radiate cold as the winter deepened, and the few windows let in little light, but at least the thick walls muffled the echoes of the big guns, which could be heard faintly to the east. Hugh had quickly found he hated playing the surgeon, making the morning rounds of the rows of the injured and indicating, with a crook of his finger, which cases he would take for the day. After a few weeks he had instructed his nurses that he would choose only three head trauma cases a day. For the rest of his shift he was to be sent any case considered most pressing.
Hugh often lost track of his hours as he stood on a brick floor slick with blood and worked through an endless train of stretchers heaved on and off his operating table. He rubbed his hands together slowly, his fingers dry and sore from hot water, carbolic soap, and the brush with which he cleaned his hands between patients. He never skimped on his hand washing, even when the nurses were holding together ripped arteries, even when he could hear the patients breathing blood. He was deliberate in his movements, moderate in the tone of his commands, and calm in the face of the most appalling injuries. This had earned him notice from his superiors such as he had long sought in his medical school years, but he took no interest in their praise now. The dream of acclaim and fortune as a surgeon, with a prosperous practice and a tall house in Harley Street, had been rendered insignificant and empty in the face of the daily carnage. His calm was merely a numbness that saved him from insanity.
He drew one last drag from the cigarette, feeling it burn to his fingertips, and resisted the urge to let the flesh burn. He dropped the butt and ground it under his boot, which was caked in blood, dirt, and great purple streaks of iodine. He stood up and stretched, moving his shoulders to slough off the twelve hours of hunching over wounded flesh in the shadows made by poor lamplight. The air was cold this early evening in late February, but at least it was not raining. It seemed to be always raining in France, a particularly spiteful gift from providence, never fierce enough to stop the fighting but damp enough to make every day painful.
“Good night, Dr. Grange.” A pair of nurses, swathed in long wool cloaks and thick boots, passed out of the doorway. He found his throat too dry to answer so he merely waved and watched their starched linen caps bobbing down the road like two white doves, incongruous against the bleak, muddy landscape. They had surprised him, the nurses, with their quiet endurance. It was harder for the women. Not because they were weaker, but because the patients, seeing a woman’s face, that halo frill of a cap, would so often clutch for a hand and beg a momentary word of comfort—a plea for pity that no man would impose on him, the doctor. The job was hard enough encased in numbness and ticked off on medical charts. How much harder must it be to have that veil of professional ice pierced many times a day by a dying man whispering a message to his mother?
“Mr. Grange, I mean Lieutenant, sir?” The voice was familiar. “Is that you, Mr. Grange, sir?” The skinny private buried in the collar of an oversized wool trench coat was leading a rickety civilian cart, pulled by a gray wolfhound with one ear. The small cart was overloaded, its cargo securely roped under a canvas tarp. It could not have looked less like a proper military shipment if it had been covered by a circus tent. The boy pushed back his cap, and Hugh’s tired brain slowly registered the angles of the face and the sharp eyes.
“Why, Snout, is that really you?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m in the war, same as you, sir,” said Snout, grinning.
“I mean what are you doing here?” said Hugh, stepping forward into the road to shake his hand. “I thought Colonel Wheaton’s outfit was up north?”
“We were brought down to fill in some holes about twenty miles east of here,” said Snout. “We’ve been a bit in the thick of things, sir.”
“Is my cousin with you?” asked Hugh, trying to appear casual but gripped about the heart by the sudden fear of a bad answer.
“Yes, sir, he’s fine,” said Snout. “They laugh at him for writing his poems while they’re waiting to go over the top, but he’s always first over when the signal comes.”
“And Harry Wheaton?”
“Got a piece of shrapnel in his arm and got promoted to captain,” said Snout. “Confined to camp, but he’s still giving orders, and I’m his batman; so here I am tramping the entire countryside on his say-so.”
“What’s in the cart?” asked Hugh.
“Colonel Wheaton’s after giving a regimental supper, and Captain Wheaton sent me out to procure the necessary fancy stuff, like ham and champagne and tins of something called ‘foyes grass,’?” said Snout.
“Foie gras?” said Hugh. “You do not have foie gras on that miserable-looking cart!”
“I don’t know as I do, sir,” said Snout. “On account of I can’t read the foreign writing on the tins. But the man I got it off swore it was, and Captain Wheaton’ll have to make do. There’s a war on.”
“Will you come back to my quarters and have some tea, Snout?” said Hugh. Snout hesitated, and Hugh added, “Look, I know it’s against regulations, but I’m so happy to see a face from home, and I have some biscuits I’ve been saving for just such a special occasion.”
“Come on, Wolfie, there’s biscuits for us,” Snout said, tugging at the dog’s harness. As Hugh fell in alongside the rather foul-smelling Wolfie, Snout turned to Hugh and broke into a large smile that showed he was still just a boy. “Well, Mr. Hugh,” he said. “People seem to think they can ask an old Gypsy like me to go round the regs all the time. But no one ever invited us for tea, did they, Wolfie old boy?”
Hugh smiled back, suddenly ashamed. In the back of his mind he had planned to ask Snout to carry a note to Daniel, also against regulations. He had assumed like everyone else.
“I think I have some potted meat too,” said Hugh. “If the wolf doesn’t mind partridge.”
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