“But doesn’t it get cold? So many windows? The men do hate a draft, Mrs. DeForest.”
Mrs. DeForest set down her fork and steepled her fingers over her plate. She ate eggs and fruit for breakfast—always fresh, no toast—after an hour of morning calisthenics. She had gone to college, you know, and was all up-to-date. She was the first woman I knew who cut her hair short, though pretty soon we were all doing it, bobbing our hair. But she was the first. She said that short hair saved her an hour a day, at least. Her husband was older, and they had never had children. Maybe that accounted for her skin, which was so untroubled and resilient, as she leaned forward over the de Créouville porcelain, that you could have bounced a tennis ball from her cheek, if you wanted to. (Not that I wanted to! It’s only an illustration.) Her fingers were equally young and strong, linked together now at the middle joints, though she must have been forty-one, by my own calculation. “As for warmth,” she said, “you’ll notice two rather spacious hearths, one on each end of the hall, which provide a great deal of heat. Nice, dry heat, Captain, in this awful damp.”
“An inestimable virtue at this time of year.”
My dish was full. I went to my usual chair, to the left of Corporal Pritchard, two seats down. Four nurses sat at the other end of the table, hunched over their plates, eating swiftly, each movement straining with suppressed excitement. The other nurses, I supposed, were on duty in the ward. Mrs. DeForest had worked out a careful system of shifts, based on scientific principles of human efficiency.
“I understand your patients are housed in a barn, Captain?” she said.
Corporal Pritchard set down his fork, lifted his head, and answered for his captain. “Indeed they are, ma’am. A regular French barnyard. Smells like the devil.”
Mrs. DeForest turned to me. “Is this true, Miss Fortescue?”
“I think the corporal—that is, the building was a barn. Before the war. But it’s perfectly clean now, just like a regular kind of hospital. Everything sanitary, as far as I could see.”
Corporal Pritchard shook his head, very mournful. He was a thin, hollow-cheeked man with an oversized nose and a gaze of perpetual hunger, and mournfulness just about hung on his face as if he’d given birth to it, millimeter by millimeter, through his nostrils. I thought he was around thirty years old, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe the war made boys look older, and he was really eighteen. “It’s the summer that’s the trouble, miss. Them pigs running about. But we don’t like to complain.”
At the word pigs, I pressed my coffee cup to my lips and glanced at Captain Fitzwilliam, who concentrated on his toast. The clock ticked, the air yawned. The soft thump of busy feet approached and receded. Mrs. DeForest looked at me, at Captain Fitzwilliam. At Corporal Pritchard.
“Pigs, Corporal?”
“Just in summer.”
“Hmm.” The fingertips tapped. The brow furrowed. The gaze returned to Captain Fitzwilliam, but not the head itself. She had a way of doing that, looking at you sideways. “A barn,” she said.
The captain spoke cheerfully. “You see, Mrs. DeForest, the Royal Army Medical Corps established this particular clearing station in the early days, when we were dashing about digging trenches, and nobody had the least idea we’d still be churning over the same ground two years later. There wasn’t time to build any of your fine modern compounds of huts and wards, according to all those marvelous diagrams prepared beforehand by our diligent staff. Luckily—well, for the men, at least—it’s only temporary accommodation. Until they’re well enough to go back up the line, you know, or else bad enough to continue on to the base hospitals, or even Blighty itself. Well, the really fortunate blokes, anyway, too ripped up to be any use to Haig.”
Mrs. DeForest smacked the table with the flat of her palm. “There. Do you see, Miss Fortescue? This is why we came to France. This makes it all worthwhile. Barns! Barns, if you will!”
I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t why I came to France, not really. That the barn wasn’t all that bad, and the British Army seemed, after two and a half years of war, to be taking care of its wounded in a pretty resourceful manner, given the circumstances. I thought of Captain Fitzwilliam’s keen face, and the competent way he shot an order in its proper direction, hitting the mark bang on the nose, before turning to me and smiling, smiling, as if he’d been playing at darts. But how could you say that to Mrs. DeForest, the president of the Eighth New York Chapter of the American Red Cross, who never got out of bed except to rescue some lesser creature from an awful fate? How could you admit to a variety of motives, not all of them noble?
Captain Fitzwilliam saved me. “You’re an angel of mercy, Mrs. DeForest, and on behalf of the entire British nation, I thank you for your service. That’s a splendid cut of ham, by the way. Splendid.”
She snatched his plate, darted to the sideboard, and heaped on the slices of pink French ham, one after another. How she came by the ham in the middle of the beleaguered Western Front, I never understood. She was just that kind of person. She could pluck priceless haunches of jambon from thin air. She set the plate back before the captain and resumed her seat.
“So you’ll be sending more? Patients?”
“As many as we possibly can.”
“And you’ll tell your colonel how well we’ve cared for your men, isn’t that right? The many advantages of the chateau?” She lifted the coffeepot and dangled the spout above his cup. “More coffee?”
He nudged the saucer forward.
“My dear Mrs. DeForest. Advantages it is.”
In fact, as I walked down the ward on my way to the entrance, I thought the men were maybe a little too well cared for. The zeal of eight Red Cross nurses had left them cocooned in immaculate white sheets, immobile, a little stunned, like flies in the web of an especially greedy spider. The sisters were serving hot breakfast by the spoonful—whether or not the patient was capable of lifting a spoon—and as each man opened his mouth he seemed to be uttering a silent cry for escape.
“It’s a bleeding palace,” muttered Corporal Pritchard, who walked at my side. If you looked carefully, you could actually see the bulge in his stomach where the breakfast lay. Like a massive, self-satisfied tumor hanging from his ribs.
“A chateau.”
“Like that what them staff officers got.” At either end of the hall, just as Mrs. DeForest promised, two fires burned up the DeForest fortune at a magisterial rate of combustion. A wind-up gramophone played tinny Mozart between the two central windows.