course you do. You always have. You’ve only had eyes for one another for as long as I can remember,” Angus replied a touch bitterly.
Gavin gave him a surprised glance. “Jealous?”
“Of you two? Of course not.” Angus shook his head. “You’re meant for one another. I never stood a chance. She’s very fond of me. As a cousin and friend, that is.”
“Well, if anything happens to me, I suppose you’d better take care of her for me. Can’t have her going to some stranger.” Gavin spoke with a flippancy he was far from feeling, and scanned the trench once more. Deciding where to position his men, he ducked as the firing grew suddenly louder and a flare nearly grazed his head. “What in hell’s name’s going on? I know we’re in the middle of a bloody offensive, but it’s too damn close for comfort and I’ve not received any direct orders from H.Q. I hope the telephone lines aren’t down.” He raised his head aboveground.
“Don’t, you fool, you’ll get yourself killed.” Parker yanked him back.
“We need to know what’s happening.” Gavin jumped back down into the squelching mud and took charge. “Summers, stand to.” He ordered. “Marshall, keep the end bay covered.” He shouted orders as the noise increased and the men hastened as best they could, taking up their positions.
Then an eerie hum approached. Too late he realized what was about to happen. “Move,” he shouted, pushing Angus down into the mud in the split second before the explosion. Then pain tore through him. His body jerked up before it was thrown into a tangled mass of torn limbs, ripped flesh and horrifying screams.
For a while, he thought he was dead. Then, gradually, consciousness returned and he heard cries, smelled the bitter, acrid smoke. He tried to move but pain shot through his hip and thigh; he tried to open his eyes but they stung. Everything was hazy. He felt about him in a daze, all at once aware that the soft, wet substance he was touching must be flesh, and choked, as horror, gas and blood filled his lungs and he tried vainly to move.
Little by little he extracted his left hand from the sticky warmth below, gripped by nausea when he realized he was lying on Jonathan Parker’s dead body. He gasped, trying to catch his breath. Trying to think. He was alive. He had to stay alive. But where was Angus? Making a superhuman effort, he heaved the mangled pile of blood-soaked remains that lay across him, hearing the sound they made as they sank into the mud. The effort left him exhausted. But he focused now, and the rush of relief when he saw Angus staring down at him, apparently unharmed, was overwhelming. Thank God. He tried desperately to speak, but his lips wouldn’t move. To motion, but his arm wouldn’t budge.
Angus stared at him, expression detached. Gavin shouted but no sound emerged. Couldn’t Angus see him, damn it? He closed his eyes against a whiff of gas. When he was able to open them once more, Angus’s face still loomed impassively over him, an expressionless mask. Why didn’t he pull him out of here instead of just standing there? “Angus,” his mind screamed. “Help me, for Christ’s sake!”
But Angus made no gesture, no motion. Instead, he crouched beside him, wearing the cold, half-amused, disinterested gaze of a spectator. Desperately, Gavin reached his left arm toward his brother in a frantic effort, daggers searing through his hip and upper body as he grasped the gold chain and cross swinging from his twin’s neck, clutching it.
But Angus made no move and the chain gave way. Gavin reeled back, collapsing once more in the mire of blood, mud and misery. As his head sank into Jonathan Parker’s open guts and everything went black, his last conscious image was of Angus, watching calmly as he sank into oblivion.
3
Etaples, France, 1917
“Nurse, we need to vacate the facility immediately. There’s a new convoy coming in from the front lines. They’re bringing in the wounded as we speak.”
“Yes, Sister.” Flora hurried around the ward, which she and Ana, another V.A.D., ran with virtually no assistance, and helped the patients who could walk to other wards. Once they’d all been shifted to the next building, Flora hurried back to prepare beds and blankets for the new arrivals. As she tucked in the last sheet, she heard the ambulances drawing up and sighed, realizing it would be another long night. Every spare hand was needed and getting to the wounds before they festered and required amputation had become a grilling challenge.
She dumped the dirty laundry in a corner and prepared for the onslaught, forcing herself to stay calm, pushing away the fear that each new batch of arrivals brought. Inevitably she searched each incoming stretcher for his face, praying it wouldn’t be there. Flora sighed again. She’d had less news in the two months she’d been here than all the time back home.
She pulled herself together as the wounded began pouring in, and the usual frenzy of dressing wounds, injecting morphine and preparing the dying began. There were plenty of those today, she realized, horrified.
The doctor approached, face exhausted and eyes bloodshot, his white coat splattered with muted bloodstains that no amount of washing erased. He looked at the wound. “Better to put a bullet through the poor bugger,” he muttered angrily before setting to work. The priest and the chaplain stood nearby; they had long since stopped bothering about denominations, instead simply murmuring prayers in a desperate effort to bring solace to those last remaining moments, leaning close to catch final messages whispered from barely moving lips.
Flora worked nonstop. There would be countless letters to write to the soldiers’ families, she thought sadly. It was the only tribute she could pay to the young men who’d died so valiantly in her arms. At least she could give their loved ones the treasure of their last words. When there were none, she took it upon herself to invent them, sure that what mattered most was that a parent or a wife be given something to cling to.
“Pass the morphine, Nurse. I’m afraid we’ll have to amputate,” the doctor said above the moans and agitation. Flora glanced at him, his young face prematurely lined, marked by three years of battling disease, death and devastation.
She handed him the bottle as a young orderly came up to her. “Nurse, we have a bad case of shell shock. Where should we put him?”
“Oh my goodness. Is he wounded?” she asked distractedly, preparing for the operation that was about to take place.
“No.”
“Then put him in number ten and I’ll get to him whenever I can. I’m afraid I can’t do anything about it at the moment.” He nodded and left, and Flora prepared the patient for amputation, trying to overcome the nauseous smell and increasing heat in the ward. The hospital back home had seemed bad, but here life was hell. There was none of the priggish, ordered behavior of regular hospital life, with the petty rules and hierarchies of the matron. All of that was forgotten in a common effort to save as many lives as they could.
Getting to a wound in time had become an obsession, with heroes and enemy treated alike. And so it should be, Flora reflected, throwing out the slops and taking more bandages back into the ward, for how could you feel rancor toward young men as vulnerable and damaged as any of their own? It was tragic and intolerable to see a generation—whether German, British or any other—condemned to die, drowned in mud-filled trenches, buried under the rich earth of northern France that for over a thousand years had claimed her victims relentlessly. For an instant, she wondered what had happened to the Europe of before the war that all had believed would be over by the time the leaves fell, but that was more than three years old.
It
