CHAPTER 11
After that leave I returned to Boulogne but only stayed there until April 1917. I was then reposted to a casualty clearing station near Ypres in Belgium – very close to the front-line trenches, and a really grim experience.
The clearing station was a small tented hospital behind which were several smaller tents for the hospital kitchen, messing and sleeping quarters for the staff. As the troops advanced or fell back so did the clearing station. The theatre, used only for emergencies, was a small and primitive adjunct to the ward area, separated from it by walls made of hessian dipped in cement. The operating table had been scrubbed so often that the wood was white. Basins, bowls, kidney dishes and instruments, sterilised in a copper-like structure, were piled on field tables and covered with sheeting.
One day in September 1917, I received a further posting order. I was being sent to one of the big military hospitals in Calais. I was delighted; I couldn’t wait to get away from the devastating scenes that surrounded the clearing station. That day had been slow. Only one urgent operation in the morning: a soldier whose stomach was ripped open by machine-gun fire, which was common enough. The remainder of the patients were being treated for illness (bronchitis, trench foot, rat bites and so on). Most would soon be back in the line.
The respite was welcome because we’d been through some gruelling times. After an action, we sometimes had up to five hundred soldiers pass through within twenty-four hours. Those badly burned or blinded by gas, together with other badly wounded, we sent by train to the rear for long-term hospitalisation. To the critically wounded, those beyond medical help, we gave morphine, and someone sat beside their beds, holding their hands, trying to comfort them. We tried to never let them die alone.
In September 1917 the Third Battle of Ypres was well underway; much of the action taking place along the Menin Road and around the village of Passchendaele. The clearing station was near enough to the front for the ground under it to shake regularly from exploding shells, and the smell of cordite entrapped in the bleak and heavy atmosphere permeated the hospital surrounds. I wondered whether I would ever forget the most heart-wrenching scenes: figures blurred in grey mist and smoke; figures stumbling towards us crying out for assistance as acid burnt through uniforms or gas wreathed into their nostrils and seared lung tissue. Always grey, always damp and muddy, this low-lying Belgian countryside, now bare of trees, was without doubt the most depressing place in which I had ever served.
How much longer? That’s what we all asked, again and again. The Americans had joined in at last, but they were inexperienced raw recruits. How were they coping in the trenches when pitted against the seasoned Hun?
But what was of most concern to me was how was Madeleine coping. I remember Madeleine returning to Boulogne in January 1917, two weeks after I did. And I remember her in late March. I recall her joy as she raced into the sisters’ sitting room waving the latest letter from Charles.
‘He’s going home for Easter and – listen to this, Genevieve.’ Madeleine read from Charles’s letter:
As you know, my darling, I’ve been in France and Belgium since the beginning. The CO now says that it’s about time I went home. There’s a job going as instructor at the School of Infantry down near Salisbury. I can’t describe my feelings, Maddy darling. I can’t believe I’ve survived and will be out of it within a month. Every day until I see you again will seem like a year.
Better get home as soon as you can, sweetheart, and book
the church.
‘There’s an awful lot more, of course,’ Madeleine had said, hugging the letter to her bosom, ‘but that’s sort of private. So, Genevieve, you’ll have to get back to England for the wedding.’
‘I’m afraid I’ll miss it, Madeleine. I’ve been posted, too. I’m going to Belgium.’
*
I kept in touch with Madeleine; we had become close friends. She left her ambulance duties near Boulogne and returned to London at the beginning of April. While she waited for Charles’s arrival she worked with the FANY there doing administration jobs and meeting, with cups of tea and buns, troop-carrying ships arriving at various ports in southern England.
Then Charles’s mother turned up at Eaton Square with the dreaded telegram. It was only a week before he was due back. The telegram was brief and impersonal. It said that Captain Phillips was missing presumed killed.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Madeleine said in her letter to me. I could tell that was pure bravado; her letter was covered with blotches, tears falling on to ink making her words almost indecipherable. Again and again she wrote: ‘I don’t believe it. Nobody saw him die. He wasn’t involved in a raid or an assault. His commanding officer said he simply disappeared. He’s a prisoner of war somewhere, and he’s safe – I just know it – and soon I’ll hear from the Red Cross.’
Madeleine left England, and by June 1917 she was back in Calais. We met again that September when I finished my stint in Belgium. It was an emotional meeting; nothing had been heard of Charles. I remember hugging her tightly, tears ran down our faces. I was convinced that Charles had been killed months before. How could I comfort her?
‘I still don’t believe it. When this bloody war is over, he’ll come back to me.’
Gently I tried to dissuade her; pointing out that it had been five months and she would have been notified by now if he was in a prisoner of war camp.
‘Not necessarily. There are plenty of stories of maladministration in the camps. I tell you, Genevieve, Charlie is alive. I just know it, and nothing will convince me otherwise.’