Chapter 30: And to the Woman Were Given Two Wings

MENDINGHEM CASUALTY CLEARING STATION, FLANDERS, BELGIUM

April 1918

In her years in field hospitals Head Sister Kate White had been Laura’s mentor and her friend. Kate knew everyone, every medic, every nurse, every orderly in the back area. If anyone, at any hospital, had seen Wilfred Iven, treated Wilfred Iven, buried Wilfred Iven, Kate could find out.

Chaos found Laura quickly, on the road running northwest from Couthove. It was thick with mules and munitions and marching men. Bicycles, motorbikes, high-booted officers on horseback. She felt the percussion of the guns in the bones of her face as she threw herself into traffic, weaving doggedly. By the time she got to Mendinghem, her headache was a spike, right between the eyes, from the fierce concentration it took to ride the motorcycle. She threw the gear out and killed the motor, left it by the gate, and walked in.

Like all casualty clearing stations, it was a collection of sheds and long tents, sharply familiar even though she’d never served in this one. Stretchers everywhere, men being moved, nurses with syringes. And then a familiar figure appeared between two tents, her eyes lit in welcome.

Laura’s first sight of the forbidden zone had come in ’15, when she was sent up the line to her first CCS. Head Sister White had met her at the train station in Poperinghe. Beatrice Hoppel, who’d got off the train with her, had whispered, awed, “There she is. She was in South Africa, I heard. A legend.”

Laura had watched Kate White cross the main square. She’d expected austerity, a proud bearing. Iron-gray hair, perhaps, and the disposition of a mother superior. Nursing had a nunnish history, after all.

Laura had not expected a stout, cheerful, pink-cheeked woman, with broken blood vessels about her nose, and eyes that missed nothing. “Welcome to Pop,” she’d said, “where the ratio of men to women is something in the nature of a hundred thousand to one. I warn you now that all hundred thousand of them, give or take, would like to bring you to bed.”

Beatrice gave an indignant huff. There was a sly warmth to Kate’s clever gaze, as it swung between them.

“How unfortunate for them,” said Laura, and Kate laughed.

Bea didn’t stick it; she married a flier six months later and he widowed her, pregnant, three months after that. But Laura and Kate found kinship. It was Kate’s voice that had berated them all to keep going the first time they got gas casualties, with orderlies turning away in fear, nurses weeping as they worked, boys choking as they died, on and on until she collapsed. Then Laura had taken charge of the wards, organized the nursing, seventy-two hours without sleep. It was Kate who had stood shoulder to shoulder with Laura for their first mustard gas cases, when they’d discovered together that the gas lingered in men’s clothes, on their skin and hair, burning the nurses’ eyes and palms and lungs.

It was Kate’s voice that had snarled at Laura to hold on, with her leg drenched in blood.

It was Kate now, crossing the space between them, older than on that square in Poperinghe back in ’15, the lines carved more starkly around her eyes. But those eyes were the same.

Heads were turning and Laura recognized some of them. Word went round, Iven, that’s Laura Iven, and then the staff were coming up to her, eager, while questions like whizz-bangs came at her from all sides: you’re alive, where’d you come from, how’s the leg, we heard about Halifax, why’d you come back. Laura was smiling with helpless pleasure.

“Christ,” she said, when she could speak. “I’m glad to see you. But this war’s on the brink, that’s certain—half the British Isles are out there going up the line. And here you all are shirking.”

That prompted a chorus of laughter, then Kate’s incisive voice cut in. “Off you go, all of you. Iven’s alive, and working with that strange lot at Couthove, and you may pester her when we are not about to be overrun. Off you go.”

They scattered, with backward glances.

Laura said, “Overrun?”

“Lord, yes,” said Kate, the smile fading. “They’ve been evacuating field hospitals down south, and leaving behind the men who can’t be moved. It’ll be us next. They’re even saying we’re going to withdraw from the Ridge, as it’s indefensible.” She shook her head.

“Withdraw from the Ridge?” demanded Laura. “That how many men died taking? What was it all for if they’re just going to—” She swallowed the rest.

Kate looked startled at her vehemence. “Don’t think that way, Iven, you’ll run mad. Come. I’d take you to supper if I could, but I only have half an hour, I’m afraid. Although it’s poor hospitality for your pains.” She cast an assessing eye on Laura’s gait. “Healed all right, did you?”

“Never mind my leg,” said Laura.

Kate passed into the sterilization marquee. “No? A blighty wound, back home with honors, and now you’re here again?”

Laura must have been silent an instant too long. Or perhaps something showed on her face. Kate knew her very well. “Oh—Christ—we saw about Halifax in the papers. But you didn’t say anything in your letters. Did—” Kate read the answer on Laura’s face. She looked older suddenly. “Laura, your people, did they—”

Laura said with a dryness she did not feel, “Pitiful, I know, but you will perhaps understand now why I am so very interested in the fate of my brother.”

“Laura, I—” Kate read Laura’s face again, and shut her mouth. “As you say. But—” She fell silent, frowning.

Laura went to get tea, and take a moment to collect herself. She found the tea-things without trouble, added sugar and tinned milk, brought the two cups back. Then she sat and without preamble said, “I got a telegram in Halifax, from the Red Cross. It said Freddie was missing, presumed dead. But if he’s missing, then they can’t have sent his things along, could they? And they did. I have his tags. Both of them.” Laura pulled them out from where she wore them strung around her neck. “I couldn’t make sense of it. So I came back.”

Something moved through Kate’s eyes, like a flicker of recognition.

“Kate,” said Laura.

Kate said, “I didn’t think you’d come back. I didn’t dare say anything in a letter. And now that you’re here, I still don’t—” She stopped, began again. “It happened just after you were wounded, after they took you away. It was such chaos, that day.”

Laura grew very aware of her pulse, beating at neck and wrists. “I remember.”

Her friend’s expression was reluctant. “I—don’t want to put you in danger.”

Laura’s only answer was a disbelieving snort.

Kate looked angry. “Yes, I know you don’t care, you daft girl. But you’re running reckless as a man on a trench raid. Do you think I can’t see it?”

“Surely that’s my own business.”

“It’s mine too. And every other person’s who loves you, prickly wretch. Do you think I want to tell you something that makes you go charging off, get yourself arrested, or killed?”

Laura stared. “All that? Kate, tell me.”

Kate said, “You were gone.” She sounded almost incensed, that Laura had got herself injured. Laura could understand. The worst night of all their lives, and Kate’s indefatigable deputy, her ward sister, had been gone. Just like that. “It couldn’t have been more than a day or two after we’d sent you off to base hospital. I could hardly tell which way was up by then, or what I said to whom. I didn’t think you’d live. I grieved. I was so tired. And I can’t remember things properly anymore.” She shook her head. “But I remember that a young man came into the hospital. He was so dirty, like all the men off the Ridge. And he’d that look about him, shell-shocked.”

Laura knew that look well. Glassy-eyed, the thousand-yard stare.

“But he wasn’t wounded,” said Kate slowly. “He was—he was strange. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure, afterward, that he wasn’t a ghost. He asked about you. I don’t remember what I answered. ‘She’s gone,’ I think I said. And I told him to wait. There were fifteen emergencies on my hands, and I went to deal with the worst of them. When I happened back, he was still there. He told me there was a man, a German prisoner, wounded, whom he’d found carrying the jacket and the tags of a Wilfred Iven.”

Laura hardly dared to move, lest she interrupt.

“Of course, for your sake, I went to see. The German was delirious, nearly dead of exhaustion, had a wound in his shoulder gone bad. But he did have your brother’s jacket. Was clutching it to himself, with the tags in his hand. I asked him what had happened to the owner of the jacket, but he was too far gone in fever to hear me. So, I had him brought in at once, and broke a hundred rules to get him a bed, and to get his arm off in time…I was thinking of you, how you’d loved your brother, and that if you lived, you’d want to know what happened to him. And that the German might be the only one that knew.”

“What happened to the other soldier—the one who came and got you?” asked Laura. “What did he look like?”

“I could hardly tell, with the night and the rain and the dirt. I never got his name. He vanished. Duty done. Maybe the German saved him, and he was trying to do right by him.”

“Did he live? The German?”

“Oh, yes. Had his arm off at the shoulder joint. I kept him with me; he was at death’s door with fever for—weeks? More? But he lived.”

“Did he say how he came to have Freddie’s things?”

“He hardly talked at all, at first. His eyes were— He had that look they get after combat—looked straight through you. But I did my best for him, made a point of doing his dressings myself. He came through his fever eventually. Was it Christmas? After? We’d had the news from Halifax by then, so after. January perhaps. Up until then, he’d only spoken in his fever, and that only in German. One of the nurses had a little German, she said he must be some odd form of Protestant, he spoke so much of the devil.”

“Never mind that. What did he know? Where is he now?” There was something strange in her friend’s face. “What, Kate?”

Kate said, “He ran.”

One arm. Young said their spy…Oh, surely not.“Did they catch him?”

“No, they haven’t.”

“What did the German know about Freddie?”

Her friend hesitated. “I asked him about Freddie. Again and again. For a long time he wouldn’t answer. But finally one night, he told me that he and your brother had been trapped in an overturned pillbox, that they’d clawed their way out together. But your brother died in a shell hole, he said, and he took Freddie’s things away with him. And after that, the German said, he had been taken prisoner.”

Well, that explained it all. The arrival of the box, the mixed messages. Laura had built it up in her mind into some unknowable mystery and all along it was…She burst out, “Why in God’s name did you send me cryptic letters, then? Why not just tell me? I’d not have come if…” She shouldn’t have come. She had told herself she didn’t hope that Freddie was alive, so why did it hurt so much?

Kate said, “No, of course— I’d never…Laura, the German said something else.”

“What did he say?”

“It was late. I’m not sure he knew it was me. He’d had morphine. I was changing his dressing, he was still in a good deal of pain. He was speaking German, and the good lord knows I’ve picked up enough of it, nursing prisoners. The German said, He’s not dead.

“And I said, Who?”

“Iven, he said. I promised him.

“Promised him what? I asked.

“That I’d save him, he said. I promised. He didn’t say anything else. In the morning, I convinced myself it was all delirium. But—then—a few weeks later, once the German had more strength, he ran.”

“That’s all?” Laura saw the answer on her friend’s face. “You believed him, didn’t you? You believed that German. You think he lied the first time, when he said Freddie died in a shell hole.”

“It’s so hard to know what to believe sometimes,” said Kate. “Even when you see something with your own eyes, or hear it with your own ears, you think, well, I was mortally tired, or I’d had a few at dinner. A man once told me, in great earnest, how he saw his brother, dead three years, in his dugout, leading him away just before the heavy came down. Ghosts have warm hands, he kept telling me, as though it were the greatest secret in the world. I remember nodding like a ninny. Still, now, whenever I touch a man’s cold fingers, I catch myself thinking, Well, he’s not a ghost yet.” Kate spread her hands. “So yes, Laura. Somehow, I believed him. The German lived. He healed. He ran. They’re still searching for him. They haven’t found him. And, rightly or wrongly, I think he left the hospital to go and look for Wilfred Iven, whom he believed was alive.” She paused. “He might have been a madman. But I’ve seen enough madmen, out here. And I—I don’t think he was. There was something in his face.”

“What did he look like?”

“The German? A fine-looking man,” said Kate. “Pale blue eyes. Crisp, you know. Intelligent. A little older—mid-thirties, I’d say. Polite.”

“And one arm,” said Laura. “Do you remember his name?”

Kate sighed. “Winter. He was called Winter.”

---

· · ·Poperinghe had gone to seed: a town of prosperous burghers turned gimcrack, where the only industries had necessarily to do with war or the entertaining of soldiers. Cafés and bars abounded, and souvenir shops, and brothels.

But it had a life, did Poperinghe. The main square teemed with men, talking and milling, drinking and laughing. Pop was as good as Paris, the soldiers said. Shell-scarred, but alive. You could get a drink there. Take a room and sleep in a bed. Not like Ypres to the east, which was fit for no one but ghosts.

After she left Mendinghem, Laura took the motorcycle to Pop. She’d arranged to meet Freddie’s officer, a man called Whiting, over an early supper. She arrived covered in spring mud and nervous sweat, but she’d managed to preserve herself and everyone around her despite the motorcycle’s best efforts.

She didn’t know what to make of Kate’s story, and she didn’t yet have time to think about it.

Whiting was the lean, lantern-jawed sort, with the slightly blank stare, fixed in the middle distance, that many men acquired after combat, and a touch of neurasthenia: a tremor in his hands. He also had a vile cold, but there was hardly a man serving who didn’t. He ordered some of the one-franc wine for them both and drank his off fast.

“Your brother died quick, Miss Iven,” said Whiting straight off. “No pain.” He sneezed. He wore an expression of wary forbearance: a man doing his duty by a dead comrade. He probably was expecting tears and pleading.

Laura put down her glass. “I am not here to cry on your shoulder, sir. I simply wish to know, in as much detail as you can, what happened to my brother.” She left her hand flat on the tabletop.

His eye wandered to it, back to her face. “Better not to know, Sister,” he said.

In an even voice, Laura replied, “Nothing you have to tell me is worse than what I have imagined, sir.”

Whiting visibly steeled himself. In a new voice, quite toneless, he said, “It was raining. We were ordered to take the Passchendaele Ridge. Bad ground—I’ve never seen worse. Mud hip-deep, and Fritz well dug in—pillboxes and machine gun nests.”

Laura knew it was an ugly thing she was doing, making him relive it. But she didn’t ask him to stop.

“There was a pillbox, had us in its sights. Machine gun inside, clawing us bad. We had to take it. Your brother—Iven—he charged, with a grenade. Brave lad. I didn’t see what happened, exactly. The light was bad, it was pouring so you couldn’t tell earth from air, with the mud so thick. I don’t know if his grenade went off, because right as he hit the doorway, a heavy hit the pillbox. It—it flipped. Happens sometimes, especially with the ones Fritz put up too quick.”

“Flipped, sir?” said Laura.

Whiting looked reluctant. “Yes—unlucky—turned door-down, don’t you know. No way out but the door and the concrete’s thicker than three men standing. Anyone in there—they weren’t coming out.”

Kate said the German was trapped with my brother in a pillbox. But he said they got out.“And my brother was in there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Whiting. “But don’t worry. I’m sure he was dead before it went over.”

“And if he wasn’t?”

Whiting looked down into his glass, with an expression of steady remote pity. “Well,” he said. “He’s dead now, ma’am.” He dashed some cognac into his empty wine glass and took a hearty swig. “He was a brave boy. Lot of brave boys gone that day. A damned shame. A damned shame.”

“Yes,” said Laura, in a voice strange even to her own ears. “Thank you for telling me.”

Whiting hesitated. “There was one more thing. I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but you’re a sensible woman, that’s plain, and you won’t read much into it, except to know that he’s not forgotten among us.”

Laura wasn’t feeling remotely sensible just then.

Whiting said, “Bowles, my servant, he says he saw Iven’s ghost.”

Laura wanted several more drinks. “Did he? Where?”

“At dinner in GHQ. It was quite an occasion. Christmas. They even had a goose. I was pals with one of the boys on the staff, that’s why they invited me. They’d hired a violinist—Christ, he was good, I remember, servants blubbering like babies in the corners—anyway, Bowles was helping with the serving, and he’s just at the window, with the soup tureen, and he goes white as a sheet and drops it. And when I ask him what the devil’s the matter, he says he’s just seen Iven’s ghost.”

Laura had no notion what to say. “What was…the ghost…doing?” she asked, after a pause.

Whiting looked troubled. “Just staring. Staring in the window.”

Not sure she was joking, Laura said, “Seems a long way for a ghost to come—down off the Ridge—just to haunt headquarters.”

“Those bastards, carving their goose, congratulating each other on a good season of campaigning,” said Whiting with abrupt, concentrated venom. “I hope he haunts them all.” He poured himself more white wine, drank it fast again. Ducking his head he added, in his ordinary voice, “Apologies, Sister. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Thank you, then,” Laura said. She left the café soon after. She could see from Whiting’s face that he was eager to get down to some hard, steady drinking, and that he didn’t want her around for it.