The battle for Ypres, the town that both sides of the conflict looked upon as the gateway to the sea ports, was still raging throughout October. The unit worked day after day fetching the wounded from the battlefronts, but still the journey to get back to the dressing station was too far; many died on the way or, in need of first-aid treatment much sooner, suffered or died unnecessarily.
‘I know that we can’t move the whole unit close, but surely we could establish an advanced first-aid post much nearer to the front lines,’ Pips said for the umpteenth time to Giles.
‘I agree with you. I had two patients yesterday who, if only they’d had even basic medical attention hours earlier, I might have managed to save. As it was . . .’ His voice faded away and for a moment his face was bleak. Pips touched his arm, but could find no words of comfort; there were none.
‘I’m sure Dr Hazelwood meant us to be nearer the front,’ she said at last. ‘That’s why he called us a flying ambulance corps. We should be within a mile of the firing line. Some of the RAMC advanced dressing stations are positioned between the field artillery and the trenches. That’s where we should be.’
‘Let’s talk to Robert. But first, there’s a lull in the arrival of wounded and there’s no sound of shelling. I know it’s a bit cold, but let’s go for a walk.’
‘We’d better tell someone.’ Pips smiled. ‘We don’t want to be in trouble for disappearing.’
‘You really wouldn’t think there was a war on,’ Giles said as they stood arm in arm beneath the shelter of a copse. ‘The land here is hardly touched and there are even a few birds about.’
‘D’you know, that’s the first thing I noticed when we were near the trenches. Even when the guns fell silent, there was no birdsong. It was eerie.’
‘They’ve more sense than to stay in such a place. More sense than we have.’
‘How long’s it going to go on, d’you think?’
‘There’s no chance of it being over by Christmas like they all said. I’m sorry to say that neither side seems to be making any real headway. And now winter’s almost here, both sides are digging in where they are. We’ll reach a sort of stalemate, so it could go on for years.’
They walked a little further beneath the trees until Pips said reluctantly, ‘We’d better go back.’
As they turned to retrace their steps, Giles took her hands in his and gently turned her to face him. ‘Pips, I know this isn’t the time or the place, but I have to say it. Well, just in case . . .’
‘Go on,’ she prompted.
‘You must know I’ve fallen in love with you.’
Pips chuckled softly. ‘A girl doesn’t like to presume.’
‘Well, I have. Dare I hope that – that you could feel the same one day?’
‘I already do, Giles. I think I’ve loved you from the moment Robert first brought you to meet us. But don’t you dare tell my mother.’
His arms slipped around her waist and he drew her close but, just as he was about to kiss her for the first time, they heard the distant shelling begin again.
He took her hand. ‘Come, we’d better go back. They’ll be worried.’
As they ran, Giles panted, ‘Darling Pips, say you’ll marry me when all this is over.’
‘Of course I will.’
And amidst the sound of enemy gunfire, they couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the incongruity of it all.
Back at the post, they joined in the preparations for receiving more wounded. When everything was ready, Pips said, ‘Right, William, you drive my father’s car this time. There are bound to be walking wounded. You’ll be able to transport five or six in that, I should think. I’ll take the motor ambulance. Alice – you come with me. Let’s go.’
‘Where exactly are we going?’
‘Haven’t a clue, but we’ll just head towards where the gunfire is.’
A shell exploded nearby and rocked the vehicle.
‘I think you ought to stop here, Miss Pips,’ Alice said, trying to keep the fear from her voice. ‘Look.’ She pointed ahead of them. ‘They’re carrying the wounded out of the trenches. We can pick them up from here.’
Pips halted the vehicle and leapt down. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, but, above the noise, the stretcher bearers couldn’t hear her. With a wry smile, remembering how much trouble she’d been in with her mother when Henrietta had got to know that Pips had learned to do it, she stuck two fingers in her mouth and gave a shrill whistle. The four stretcher bearers carrying a casualty towards her looked up and then glanced at each other.
Pips beckoned them towards her, pointing at the ambulance. As they reached her, one said, ‘Was that you whistling, nurse?’
Pips nodded. ‘I shouted, but you didn’t hear me.’
‘For God’s sake, woman,’ one of the other men said. ‘Don’t whistle around here. That’s the signal to go over the top. You’ll have even more casualties than we’ve already got if they don’t realize it’s a false alarm.’
Pips was at once contrite. ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’
‘Aye well, happen you weren’t to know.’ The man was slightly mollified, but he was still serious as he added, ‘but take my word for it. Right, lads, let’s get him in the back. Where’s your driver, nurse?’
‘Er, that’s me. I brought the ambulance and William has driven the car here.’ She turned to gesture towards the vehicle that had just pulled up. ‘We thought there might be less serious cases we could take in that. I think it’ll take five or maybe six.’
‘By heck! That’s a beauty. Shame to have it out here. It’ll end up ruined. Who owns it? Some bigwig in the army?’
‘No, it was my father’s.’
The man pulled a face. ‘Well off, is he?’
‘He’s a doctor. He couldn’t come out here himself, so he felt this was a contribution he could make.’
‘He’s a generous man, then.’ The soldier looked her up and down, insolently. ‘Letting both his prize possessions come into this hellhole.’
Despite the incongruity of their surroundings, Pips threw back her head and laughed aloud. ‘Believe me, soldier, I’m nobody’s possession, I assure you. Now, get this poor lad on board my ambulance and fetch me three more.’
‘Right, m’lady.’ The man touched his forelock, but did as she bade.
When the first casualty was settled in the ambulance, the four stretcher bearers headed back towards the trench system.
‘Don’t mind old Bob,’ one of the others said in a low voice. ‘Being a bit brusque is his way of coping. We’re all real glad to see you, nurse.’
Pips nodded. ‘I know.’ She turned and raised her voice. ‘Alice, you stay here with the wounded. William, we’ll go and see if we can bring some of those who can walk to the car.’
When both vehicles held as many as they could take, they turned and set off back to the first-aid post.
‘This is awful,’ Pips muttered as she leaned forward over the steering wheel, trying to negotiate the deep ruts and shell holes in the road. From the rear of the vehicle, she could hear the screams of her patients as each bump in the road caused them greater pain, but she could not slow down. There were just over five miles to travel before they would reach the unit, but it felt like twenty-five and she doubted that all the wounded soldiers she was carrying would survive the journey. She’d never thought to see such wounds. The first-aid training course, though thorough, had not prepared them for the horrific injuries that the new weapons of war were inflicting; ripped flesh that bled profusely, shattered bones, shrapnel buried deep within torn bodies and wounds infected by dirt. One soldier had had his lower jaw shattered and it was already infected. If only medical aid was even closer to the trenches. And then she was obliged to halt as a line of horse-drawn gun carriages, heading to the battlefront, passed them. Pips swallowed hard as she saw the filthy condition of the horses. Their coats were matted with mud and they trudged along, stumbling into shell holes, and yet they were still whipped by their drivers to go ever faster. Pips felt a surge of anger; she empathized with the wounded soldiers – of course she did – but at least they were here by choice, the animals certainly were not. She blinked rapidly and brushed the back of her hand across her eyes as she tried not to compare these sad creatures with her own beautiful Midnight. As soon as the convoy had passed, she moved on, but then the screams of pain began again.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ Pips ranted to Giles when the wounded had been carried into the tents and Brigitta and Leonore were assessing the needs of each patient. To add to her distress, one of the soldiers, who’d had a dreadful stomach wound, had not survived the journey and she felt his loss keenly as if, somehow, it had been her fault because she had failed to transport him to safety. ‘Our unit should be so much closer to the front line. If it had been, I might have saved him.’
‘I must go,’ Giles said. ‘I’m needed to help Robert. There are at least three of those you’ve just brought in needing immediate surgery. We’ll talk again about this, but you look exhausted, Pips. You should rest.’
She shook her head. ‘No, I must go back. There are more to bring.’
‘There’ll always be more to bring, but you have to rest sometime. You’ll be no good to anyone if you make yourself ill.’
Pips smiled weakly. ‘One more trip, Giles, and then I’ll stop.’
But she was not able to keep her promise. She made three more trips before even she was forced to admit that she could do no more, but it wrenched at her heart to remember the silent pleading in the eyes of those who still awaited rescue.
‘I’ll go back,’ William said, as Pips swayed on her feet with weariness. ‘You must get a drink and something to eat, Pips. Perhaps Brigitta could come with me. I’ll ask the sister.’
‘Of course,’ Leonore agreed at once when William explained. ‘Alice and I can manage here now.’
As he drove back towards the battleground with the petite nurse beside him, William worried that he should not have asked her. If she should be injured, he fretted, he would never forgive himself. But Brigitta sat beside him, remarkably composed as she looked out upon the devastation of her homeland and saw the refugees – her compatriots – traipsing along the road, carrying pathetically small bundles of their belongings, their tired and bedraggled children trailing in their wake.
‘Where can they all go?’ she murmured. ‘How will they find safety from all this carnage?’
‘I wish we could help them all – especially the little ones – but our duty is to the wounded,’ William said.
‘I know.’
‘Are your family safe? I don’t know where you live.’
‘My parents are both dead. I was brought up by my maternal grandparents. They live just outside Lijssenthoek, near Poperinghe.’
‘D’you know if they are safe?’
For a brief moment, Brigitta’s face crumpled, but then she steadied herself. ‘I – don’t know. I wish I did, but I don’t.’
‘Then we must try to find out for you. Perhaps,’ William added, feeling that he was being greatly daring, ‘if we could get some time off together we could visit them and find out if they are all right. It can’t be far away from us. At least, not if we could borrow a vehicle.’
‘It isn’t.’ Brigitta turned her lovely blue eyes towards him and, briefly, as he risked a glance at her, he saw the unshed tears shining in them. ‘You’d do that for me?’
‘Of course,’ he said huskily. There was so much more he’d have liked to say to her, but now was not the time and certainly not the place.
Although they were committed to the wounded in their own immediate vicinity, the team were aware of what was happening not far away.
At the very end of October, Robert told them all, ‘There’s a dreadful battle going on to the north of here. The Belgians have opened the sluice gates and flooded the land between Nieuwpoort and Diksmuide to halt the German advance.’
They stared at him with solemn faces. ‘That must have been an awful decision to have to make,’ Pips murmured. ‘It’d be like breaking down our sea defences and flooding half of Lincolnshire. Can you imagine what devastation it must have caused?’
No one answered her as their hearts went out to all the poor Belgians who must have been affected.
‘I expect,’ Giles said reasonably at last, ‘they felt it preferable to their land being occupied by the enemy.’
‘But you know what might happen now, don’t you?’ Robert said. ‘The fighting might well be pushed further south towards us. The battle for Ypres will intensify. If the town falls, it leaves the way to the coast wide open and the Allies will fight to the bitter end to make sure that doesn’t happen.’
The weeks passed, each one much the same as the last as the battle for the town continued. The weather was now damp and cold and, on some days, there was snow. The members of the team were weary with the constant stream of wounded that passed through their hands. And still it irked all of them that if only some of the wounds they saw could have been dressed much sooner, there would have been a much higher rate of recovery, even survival.
‘Where is the heavy fighting?’ Pips asked, ‘because that’s where we ought to be.’
‘Hugh and Peter have set out towards a village called Zillebeke, just to the south-east of Ypres. We’ve heard there’s intense action there. Our forces are being pushed back, though in other places, we’re advancing. It’s all a bit mad, really.’
‘Then that’s where we should set up an advanced first-aid post. Alice and I will go.’
‘Not on your own,’ Giles said sharply. He turned to Robert. ‘Can you manage with Sister Leonore and Brigitta if I go with William, Pips and Alice?’
Robert frowned, but something in Giles’s eyes told him there had been a shift in the relationship between him and Pips. Ever sensitive where his sister was concerned, Robert nodded. ‘It’d be even better if there’s a doctor in a forward post. I’m sure we can manage here. But I think it’d be good if Brigitta went instead of Alice – if she’s willing. That way you’d have a trained nurse too.’
‘Yes, I can see the logic of that.’
The four of them set out to follow the route which Hugh and Peter had taken earlier, William driving the motor ambulance. On the road they passed more refugees fleeing from the fighting, rickety carts loaded with their few possessions pulled by scrawny, tired horses. Amongst them came horse-drawn ambulances carrying wounded men.
‘There’s Hugh and Peter’s vehicle coming back,’ William said suddenly, drawing to a halt. Peter stopped alongside them.
‘There’s a field about two miles ahead of you, just behind the fighting where they’ve started digging a network of trenches,’ he shouted. ‘You can set up the tents there, mate. It should be behind the shelling, but near enough for the wounded to get treated more quickly.’
Peter was a burly London bus driver in his forties, tall, broad and amazingly strong with a craggy face that broke into ready smiles. His brother was shorter, stockier but equally as strong. He was quieter than the ebullient Peter, but just as friendly. They’d left wives and families at home to come.
‘We’re too old to enlist,’ Peter had explained, ‘but we want to do our bit.’
They both spoke pure cockney, and often used the famous rhyming slang, which mystified Leonore and Brigitta until the two brothers laughingly translated. To everyone’s amusement, Brigitta was soon talking about soldiers having been wounded in their ‘boat race’ and their ‘plates of meat’ being affected by trench foot. It sounded so comical in her engaging accent. Peter and Hugh loved it and roared with laughter, making it their mission to teach her a new saying every day.
‘No rude ones, boys,’ she told them coyly. But it brought fun and laughter not only to the members of the unit, but also to the wounded in an otherwise sorry situation.
But now as the two ambulances passed each other on the shell-pitted road, sadly there was no time for levity.
‘We’ll be back . . .’ Peter promised as the two vehicles pulled away from each other.