第1章 The Warren Road

The road to the Warren was four miles of broken chalk, and Millicent Passmore drove it the way she drove everything else: slowly where the ruts ran deep, quickly where the guns were near, and always with one eye on the failing light. She was twenty-four, a farmer's daughter from the far west of England, and she had come out to France in the spring with a driving licence, a pair of boots that had once belonged to her brother, and the stubborn notion that the war would be bearable if she could be useful in some corner of it. The Marlefield Volunteer Ambulance Column had taken her because it was short of women who could coax a Ford through bad petrol and change a wheel without a lamp. Commandant Ashwell had read her papers, looked at her hands as though they were a tool being offered for inspection, and said, "You will do." That had been the whole of the interview. The column lived in a courtyard behind a requisitioned tannery at Marlefield, six ambulances to eleven drivers, with a mechanic called Oswald Marchbanks who treated the vehicles more tenderly than he treated any human being alive. There were lorries grinding along the coast road and horse-drawn wagons swaying up from the railhead, and the column's work lay in the short, ugly middle of the chain, the stretch where a broken man was most likely to finish dying before anyone had written down his name. Milly had learned the chain in her first week. At the very front, in the trenches, a stretcher-bearer tied a scrap of card to a man's tunic and started him walking or carried him back. At the Regimental Aid Post, a doctor gave morphia and a rough label. At the dressing station, they sorted the flood into three streams, and the stream that concerned her was the one marked for the clearing station behind the line, where surgeons waited and beds could be found. Between those two places ran four miles of open ground, and across that ground the column drove. The Ford she had been given was old before the war and had been old in the war for two years. Its springs were tired, its lamps unreliable, and its engine had a way of missing on the third hill that none of Marchbanks's tinkering had ever cured. She had grown fond of it the way one grows fond of a difficult animal. On the seat beside her she kept a tin of petrol, a spare inner tube, a spanner, and a small ruled notebook wrapped in oilcloth. That notebook was hers, not the Army's. It had begun as a private discipline in her second week, when she had carried four men from the same battalion and could not afterward remember the name of the third. The forgetting had frightened her more than the shells did. So she had made herself a rule, and the rule was simple: every man who came up into her ambulance had his name put down, his number, his battalion, where he had been lifted, where he had been set down, and the hour of each. When she did not know a man's name, she wrote what she knew, and left a line for the name to arrive in later. She had told no one. It was not a record anyone had asked her to keep. It was, she had decided, the least the war could be made to owe a man. Ted's boots were on her feet that evening, and Ted was somewhere up the line and had been missing since the first week of the summer push. She did not write Ted's name in the notebook. She had tried once, in a blank margin, and then had torn the leaf out, because the notebook was for men she had carried and he was a man she had not, and because she could not bear to see his name sitting in a list with a line left beside it. At dusk she came to the Warren, which was a dressing station cut into the side of the old chalk quarry, canvas over timber, one lamp burning behind a screen. The wounded lay along both walls on stretchers and on groundsheets, waiting their turn for the road. The air held the smell she had come to think of as the smell of her whole war: wet chalk, cigarette smoke, blood, and beneath it the sweet chemical reek of iodoform. Hilda Fairhurst was already there with the second ambulance, standing by the tailgate with her cap pushed back and her hands black to the wrist. "You're late," Hilda said, without heat. "They've been coming down since four. There's a bad lot in the far corner. Abdominals. Two of them won't see Argentonne, if you ask me." "I don't ask you," Milly said. "I ask the doctor." "That's why they like you," Hilda said. "You've still got manners." There was no doctor to ask. The medical officer had gone forward with the last stretcher party, and the sergeant who was minding the station waved them at the wounded with the flat weariness of a man who had done sums he could not make add up. Milly took the first two stretchers that were pointed at her and set about her work. She opened her notebook and wrote the hour. The first man was a boy from a Lancashire battalion with a shoulder wound and a face grey as paper. He gave his name and number easily, the way a man does when he still believes he will be asked for them again. The second was worse. He was unconscious, and his field card was smeared with rain and blood until the writing stood half gone. She held the card up to the lamp. Under the name, in another hand, a line had been struck through and a fresh name written over it, hard enough to tear the paper. She looked at the two names, the dead one and the living one, laid on top of each other like two men in one coat. Then the stretcher-bearers put the man into her ambulance and the card went with him, and there was nothing to do but drive. By then she had carried more men than she could have named if a stranger had stopped her in the street, and that was the whole reason the notebook existed. She was not sentimental about it. She was exact. The pages had grown grubby with use and rain, and some entries had been made in the dark, blind, one hand flat on the roof of the cab while the pencil found the line by touch. She had begun to sort the names by battalion without meaning to, the way a farmer sorts sheep by the fold, and she could tell a man's regiment from the cut of his tunic and from the way he spoke the name of his own county before he spoke anything else. The column had its own rules, and none of them were written down. You did not leave a man in the road. You did not stop for a shell unless the engine stopped first. You did not ask a stretcher-bearer whether a man would live, because the stretcher-bearer did not know and the asking made him slow. And you did not, at the end of a run, sit down in the yard, because a leg that has sat down remembers everything, and a leg that remembers will not find the pedals again. It was Hilda who taught her the rules, on her second night, over a mess tin of stew that tasted of nothing at all. Hilda had come out in 1915 and had driven the salient through the winter, and she carried a calm that Milly first mistook for indifference and later understood to be its opposite. "There are two sorts of drivers," Hilda had said. "The ones who count the men they save, and the ones who count the men they lose. The first sort lasts longer. The second sort are better company." Milly had never settled which sort she was. On the bad nights she feared she was the second, and she kept the notebook partly to prove that the counting mattered, and partly because a farmer's daughter is raised to believe that a thing becomes true the moment it has been written down. Milly wrote down the living name, and beneath it, in the narrow space she kept for doubts, she wrote the dead one too. ---