Another bed, and she is frightened. A man has her body laid out upon his own, a piece of cloth on his pattern. She faces outward, staring at the ceiling. The man, her husband, covers her mouth with his hand, the air so hot and wet she has trouble breathing. He tramples over every memory of their marriage, and yet the curtains at the window do not move; the electric lamps still burn. Her husband plays her body with fat fingers. He touches every part of her he thinks he owns. She has children in another room, a letter on a table. She will not wake the children. She will not send the letter.
He tears the cotton of her blouse. Lust, that beautiful hunger, turns ugly in his hands. Love has never been in that house, and he is mad with rage—this violent act unique.
Her husband uses his innocent daughter to destroy the reputation of his rival, that younger brother from years ago, and causes him to risk his life in France. The trenches are awash with a mixture of flesh and muck. Great bursts of shrapnel tear bodies into pieces. The soldiers, with their guns and boots, destroy every living thing. A face is gone, a spine. The limbs pile up in buckets. The man her husband sent to France drives an ambulance, a pacifist at war. She tries to find him to make amends.
If she locates the man her husband sent to France, will he know her face, its features contorted by terror and by guilt?
Wherever she is billeted, she inquires about the man from America. Records are imperfect; they are often lost in shelling. He might be one mile from her or sixty. Sentries stand guard outside the tents, alert to guns and gas. She is covered with blood and worse each morning. Her mind is injured. Whose is not?
Camiers, November 1915
On a gray day, the world seems of a piece: a mechanized earthworks that blows bodies into the air, tosses them into the mud, ferries them to the field hospitals, and then deposits them on stretchers in tents, to be cut open by steel scalpels. On sunny days, fleeting memories of past pleasures are pointedly out of sync. Today is such a day, the blue sky and the distant Channel frightening.
A surgeon replaces a portion of a man’s skull with silver plate. Etna Bliss, nurse’s aide, stands at attention, delivering instruments, taking the fouled ones from the nurse to be cleaned and boiled, stepping up when ordered to mop blood from a wound. Dr. Eliot, like many of his colleagues, works in silence, though all around them there is chaos.
Conversation is reduced to nouns—verbs and adjectives having been shelled away. “A thermometer, if you please.” “From the front, sir, with blisters.”
Etna has been at Camiers with the Royal Army Medical Corps for ten weeks, from early September, 1915, to this day, which, if they were in America, would be Thanksgiving. There will be no holiday on the French coast.
That Etna has children in New Hampshire sounds a low, dark note in her womb, a sinking sensation similar to the ones she experienced while giving birth to Clara and to Nicky. That she has left them hits her anew each time, the truth rendering her momentarily paralyzed.
“You will not be granted custody,” a fatuous lawyer warned her in New Hampshire in a tone of voice that suggested dark punishments if she tried to contest this. “Your husband is dean of the college and has deep financial resources. It was not he who wanted a divorce. It was not he who had a secret cottage.”
The law supports a man who raped his wife and corrupted his child, but will not help a woman who wants only to be the mother of her children.
She will make her way back to her children regardless of the contract she has signed, of the distance that separates her from them, of the urgency of her work. How she will do this, she cannot yet imagine.
The ward nurse, a nun, orders Etna to remove a dressing that holds a soldier’s entrails inside his body. When Etna protests that such an action will kill the man, who looks more like a boy, the sister becomes insistent. Because the soldier will die before the day is over, the sister wants the procedure done as soon as possible so that she can use the bed for a man worth saving. Etna is certain that such a request—to kill a man by means of medical intervention—is unethical, even if the man will die anyway. Where exactly did medical procedure break down? A man cannot survive a wound to the entrails. The young British soldier ought to have been left outside the medical tent and put in the area where the dying are made as comfortable as possible. Bad luck for this soldier, because now he must be treated.
When she is nearly finished, the soldier comes awake, unaware that half of him is in an enamel basin below the cot. He stares at her, and she smiles, knowing that hers is likely to be the last face he will ever see.
All this in a canvas tent full of abysmal smells and screams. The screams of the injured, yes, Etna expected those. But she was not prepared for the startled gusts from the unseasoned nurse’s aides. Or from a doctor, yelling in frustration at a succession of deaths despite heroic efforts. Or from a ward sister, exhausted to the breaking point, demanding, in a shrill voice, that the stretcher bearer move it.
Phillip Asher, with his dual citizenship, is, according to her husband, who was taunting her at the time, an ambulance driver with the British Red Cross in France. He left the ruination of his life as he knew it in America.
Everywhere Etna goes, she asks for Phillip Asher. She queries nurses, ambulance drivers, orderlies, even the wounded.
When people ask her why this man, Phillip Asher, is so important, she answers simply that she owes him.
Etna makes a request for dismissal.
“Are you ill?” asks Captain Richardson of the RAMC.
“No.”
“Are you suffering from hysteria?”
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
“I have children.”
“We all have children.”
“Yes, but—”
“I don’t see any mention of children here on your application.”
“Well, no, I was—”
Richardson interrupts her even as he is reading the papers in front of him. “You wanted to appear to be single to get to France, and then when you got here, you changed your mind.”
Etna remains silent. He will not understand her story.
“Back to your post at once, Nurse, and do not bother us with future requests. Morale is terribly important, you must know that.”
“Yes, sir.”
Next time, when asked if she suffers from hysteria, Etna will answer in the affirmative. She might even go to her superiors with her own diagnosis. It is hysteria, is it not? A perfectly reasonable response to her recent past? To her current surroundings?
If she were to insist on going home, who would stop her? She is technically under the auspices of the Royal Army Medical Corps, but really she is just an American volunteer. She will be regarded as a disappointment, but that hardly matters now. She may be required to pay back the cost of her passage, and she will somehow do that.
But if she does leave, where will she go, and how will she get back to New Hampshire? She can probably talk her way across the Channel, but what will happen once she disembarks? She knows no one in England except for the one man she cannot ask for help—Samuel Asher, her childhood lover, seconded to the Royal Navy from Toronto. She will have barely two pounds sterling in her pocket, and that only if she is paid for time served. She must find a job in England and work at it long enough to accrue the money for passage across the Atlantic. To do that might take many months. Would it not be better, then, to see her contract through and be sent back as promised when her year has ended? she asks herself as she cleans bedpans and holds the hands of the wounded.
She soaks bandages in ice-cold water and knows precisely how thick with red the water should be before removing the bloody mass of cotton. She rinses, and rinses again, until the bandages are pale pink, after which she will bleach them. There are no gloves for nurse’s aides, only tongs. Her hands redden, as if by the blood itself. After the bleaching, the bandages will be boiled.
In December, the ward sister orders Etna to appear in the matron’s office. Captain Richardso
n, who once refused her request to be dismissed, leans against the front of the matron’s desk, his arms folded over his chest.
“Nurse Bliss,” he says. “I like your age. Your maturity, I should say. You have demonstrated maturity on the wards.”
“Thank you.”
“We won’t discuss your bizarre request for dismissal.”
“No.”
“Requisitions needs an ambulance driver immediately. You wrote on your application that you can ‘drive a large car.’ Is that true?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It would be a truck with a rough transmission.”
Etna nods, never having dealt with a rough transmission. The Cadillac Landaulet required only the push of a button to start.
“Three of our drivers were killed when a convoy was shelled last night.”
“I am very sorry to hear that,” she says, deciding instantly not to imagine the shelling.
“Matron has been kind enough to let us borrow you from time to time,” the officer explains, and Etna guesses that Matron cannot have done this happily.
The RAMC gives her a kit of a heavy woolen skirt, a woolen shirt, a fur-lined jacket, a pair of gloves, a belt, goggles, binoculars, a gas mask, a canteen, and a sturdy hat with a brim, around which she ties a long white scarf made from a bedsheet.
The wood-paneled truck has red crosses on each side and on the roof. Inside, three stretchers hold the wounded. The bus can accommodate seven men if they are sitting.
Etna no longer has room in her head for contemplation. Her world consists of stretchers and dressings, of long splints, short splints, legs, and arms. Her universe smells of iodine, of sweaty surgeons in dirty white coats, of the engine exhaust used to heat the ambulances. She sees herself from a new angle when she sees herself at all: two-thirds nurse’s aide, one-third ambulance driver, used at will by the powers that be. She finds tremendous relief in doing and not knowing.
The scheduled three-month leaves are canceled due to heavy shelling. No word is given as to when they might be rescheduled. She imagines the world she came from as stopped in time, preserved, one that will start up again when she returns. She clings to this construct as the wounded do to hope.
At ten o’clock on a February morning in 1916, the sleet outside her tent pinging off the metal poles, Etna starts to remove her heavy jacket so that she can sleep her allotted hours. The attack began at dawn. Etna and a man named Wilson were ordered to be in place at the Regimental Aid Post before the shelling began. She knows she will never be able to talk about the war when it ends—especially the way the officers send men into battle with preparations already in place for their death and wounding, a machine anticipating a high percentage of breakdowns.
A benefit of Etna’s dual responsibilities is that she now has her own bell tent. Because of her irregular schedule, it will not do to be awakened during her four or six hours of sleep or to wake another who might be exhausted.
A nurse’s aide pokes her head between the flaps. “You’re wanted outside,” she says.
“By whom?” Etna asks, about to explain that she has just finished her shift.
“A man.”
“A man?”
“He says he knows you.”
“Did he give his name?”
“I understand you’ve been looking for me,” Phillip Asher says when Etna emerges from the canvas.
Etna doubles over as if from a blow. She always thought it would be she who found him, not the other way around. His presence seems too tangible, even though she has been hoping for it for months. She feels a hand on her arm, helping her upright. When she sees his face, she covers her mouth.
“Are you all right?” Phillip asks.
“I came here to find you,” she blurts out as a greeting.
She examines her friend—the water dripping off his cap, the lively gray eyes, the dark blond mustache, the half smile on his face—pleased that he has surprised her, even more tickled, she thinks, by her masculine uniform.
“Phillip,” she manages, believing and not believing. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here is the better question.”
“I drive an ambulance. I’m a nurse’s aide.” She tries to tuck her hair back up into the knot that has come partially undone.
“At the same time?”
“More or less, wherever I am needed.”
“It’s filthy weather.”
“Let’s stand in here.”
Something inside her flickering to life, Etna leads Phillip into the marquee where operations are performed. “I’ve been searching for you,” she repeats.
“Why?”
She cannot give him, here and at this hour, her apology. He is soaked through and shivering. On the other hand, she worries that he might go off and not return. “I came to find you to make amends for what my family did to you,” she says and thinks, no, that is wrong. “For what my husband did to you. I also hoped to persuade you to return to America. My daughter would then have a chance to recant her false testimony that you…that you…touched her. She could save your good name, and you could forgive her.”
“There’s no need,” Phillip says, bewildered.
“Yes, there is. What happened to you at his hands was…” She searches for the right word. “Vile.”
They both smell of wet wool and petrol. “I never forgave your daughter because there was nothing to forgive. It was clear she was manipulated. I hope you will one day tell her that. I am not returning to America.”
“Will you think about it?”
He smiles to appease her. “I’m stationed at Étaples,” Phillip says. “Just down the coast. I had to see if what one of the other drivers said was true—that you were asking for me. When I got to the Regimental Aid Post, an orderly said a woman was looking for me.”
“How wonderful.” She, too, is shivering inside her wool jacket, but not from the cold. “You’re all right? You’re not hurt?”
“Not a scratch.”
In the brief silence between them, she can hear men gasping, choking. “Gassed,” she says.
“I know the symptoms.”
“Those are the worst cases. It’s horrible.”
He examines her with curiosity. “There’s a village not far from here, maybe two and a half miles, with a café. Do you have any time now? I have a few hours before I have to get the truck back.”
She thinks of her allotted six hours of sleep before her nursing shift begins. “I’ll just have to change my clothes. Go back up the road and park at the stone barn. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Etna puts on a civilian dress she has hidden in her trunk—a plain gray wool. She peers into a small mirror on a table. She can make out her face and hair but cannot take in the whole of her dress. She slips her regulation cloak over it.
Having her own tent is ideal for an escape. Walking out with a man, even if he were her brother, is cause for serious reprimand and possible punishment. There are a hundred ways in which the head sister can make a misery of a VAD’s life. Etna enters into the thick, dark woods along a well-worn path and emerges onto a dirt road not far from the stone barn. Phillip drives an ambulance that, unlike hers, has been painted white, a target if ever she saw one—though the men she works with believe the opposite: at least the red cross indicates a vehicle that should not be bombed, they argue. She runs the rest of the way, opens the passenger door, and climbs up. He puts the truck in gear.
“You really drive an ambulance?” he asks as they bump along the road toward the village.
“I do,” she says, smiling. She loves the sensation of fleeing, of escaping. She has always loved it.
“You used to drive a car in Thrupp,” he says.
“I did.”
“I remember your wild hats and the scarves trailing behind.”
“I remember you in the cottage, your hand raised up high under the chandelier, as if you were about to dance,” she adds, and immediately wishes she had not. Sh
e has strayed too close to the heart of the matter, as if she had said a line too soon in a play. Clara was often in the cottage when Phillip visited.
“How can you see?” she asks after a time, watching the ice build up on the windshield.
“I can’t. I’m just hoping there’s no one out walking.”
“I wouldn’t think so in this,” she says as she sits up tall to see over the ice.
“To think that you are here…”
“Does it upset you? Does it remind you?”
“Your presence vastly outweighs any bad memories.”
Phillip drives expertly, but then again, so does she. Eighteen runs since she began, according to her private logbook. She will not ask him what his various missions have been like, because she already knows.
When they park on the village street, Café Allard presents itself the way the other shops do: watchful, waiting, invisible unless you know. In the warming temperatures, the sleet has turned to driving rain that has soaked the bottom of her cloak, her shoes. When she returns to her tent, she will clean the shoes and stuff bandages into the toes so that they will retain their shape.
Phillip bangs on a wooden door that has an etched glass window. The design is of a city: Paris, she imagines.
A thin middle-aged man in an apron opens the door.
Phillip asks, in seemingly decent French, if they might have a meal.