Nina showed her how to close the soldier’s eyes by putting a tiny piece of gauze under the eyelids, then how to bandage his ankles and hands together, as well as his jaws.
‘You must make sure to close the mouth straight away before rigor mortis sets in,’ Nina explained. ‘But quite honestly you only need to go to a lot of trouble if the family wants to see the body.’ She sighed. ‘We do what we can, but we must preserve our efforts for the living. You mustn’t dwell on things too much, Rose. It stops you from working effectively. And there’s far too much work to be done.’
After a day laying out bodies, Louisa was deemed competent enough to perform the ritual on her own. For she saw it as a ritual, a small and sacred thing she could offer – the only thing she could offer: carefully washing the body, stopping up the rectum and other orifices with cotton wool, covering the genitals with gauze, then sewing the body into the canvas burial shroud. Finally, she would place the Union Jack flag over the stretcher and stand back to watch the orderlies solemnly carry it out, while all those patients who could do so got to their feet and stood to attention.
On her first precious afternoon off Louisa sought permission to attend one of the funeral services that took place almost daily. The nurses, she learned, attended as often as they could – the doctors too, along with the comrades of the deceased, in uniform, even in their wheelchairs. And there was always a group of local French women at every funeral, dressed in black, making sure the young men who’d come to deliver their country in its hour of need had plenty of mourners. Quite often the families of the dead men made the journey over to France, too.
As the army chaplain spoke and the Last Post sounded, Louisa looked out at the rows of wooden crosses that stretched as far as the eye could see and thought of a little white cottage and tall white cliffs, one hundred miles and one hundred years away, and could no longer choke back her tears.
By the time her next afternoon off came around, Flora told Louisa that she looked deathly and that they were going to cycle into Amiens together whether she liked it or not. It was the first real sunny day since she’d arrived in France, and although it was still unusually cold for the time of year, there was at last the promise of change in the air. Besides, America had declared war on Germany, and that seemed reason enough to allow herself a break.
The hospital lay outside the city. She and Flora borrowed bicycles and ventured down the potholed pavé roads, stopping often to let the constant stream of soldiers and military traffic pass by. They crossed endless flat fields of wheat and sugar beet, with woods and copses jutting up out of them like islands in an endless ocean and rows of poplar trees standing sentinel on the horizon. Scattering hens as they went by, they cycled through little hamlets of brick and flint dwellings with tall, rectangular shutters, and brightly coloured, half-timbered houses with beehives and dovecots. They passed low ancient churches and farms with flocks of geese honking outside, their necks swaying like banks of lilies.
‘Isn’t it simply glorious?’ Flora called back. ‘Just smell that air! Isn’t it splendid?’
Louisa filled her lungs, and it felt as if the air were prising open her mind, as well as her body. And as the smells of gas gangrene and ether blew away, she saw how lovely the Somme was. The roadsides were speckled with bluebells, primroses and violets, and daffodils with yellow centres and cream-coloured petals, like eggs frying cheerfully in the open air; their bright colours seemed so much more vivid here in the past than they did in 2017. The hawthorn bushes were coming into flower, and the air was filled with birdsong and the sound of woodpeckers drumming. Spring had come and she’d barely noticed.
She’d been far too busy – but that was no bad thing. The endless work meant, at least, that there was no time to think. Or for anyone to ask too many questions about Rose Ashby. Questions to which she had no answers. After the gruelling fourteen-hour shifts, none of them wanted to do much more than fall into bed. If anyone did ask questions, she was vague and reserved – which had the result that her fellow VADs assumed she was just a private and reticent sort of person. It was commented upon that she neither received nor wrote letters, and it reached her ears that someone had even speculated there was a broken engagement in her recent past which had driven her to escape abroad.
A bird of prey hovered above a field, its wings as motionless as if it had been pinned through the breast to the sky. Robert would know what kind of bird it was, she thought, and what these clusters of tiny bright-blue flowers everywhere were too. He would feel the beauty here even more profoundly than she did.
Where are you Robert, where are you?
She’d sent a second letter to his regiment, just to be sure, but again there’d been no response.
They reached Amiens. The pavements teemed with people – men in cloth caps and short coats, or Homburg hats and canes; young girls with low-brimmed hats and white pinafores under thick coats; and working women in shawls, aprons and solid boots. Everywhere you could see the khaki of British uniforms and the bright blue of the French poilus.
Shops with bright awnings crowded the pavements, displaying their wares in tightly packed windows: Tabac, Boulangerie, Charcuterie, Chaussures sur Mesure. The red, white and blue of the French tricolore and the Union Jack hung from every building and lamppost. She longed to stop and stare. It felt like a dream, but at the same time everything was so bright and intense, it was as if she was more awake and alert than she’d ever been. Had she ever really noticed the world before – appreciated the contrast between brass and wood, the red and white of a striped awning against brick, the way light fell across a horse’s flank?
Was this how Robert saw it? He must have passed through Amiens. Was this the way he’d come? Past this old man with a handcart, selling macaroons, and this woman with a tray of tin whistles, and peg dolls with cheeks as pink as her own, buffeted by the cold?
They went past a café with elaborate globe lampshades and white tablecloths, the interior all polished wood, brass and mirrors. Two British officers sat in the window reading newspapers, their caps, gloves and canes stowed beside them on the windowsill. A waiter poured steaming coffee from a tall silver pot.
It was a cacophony: engines, horns, bicycle bells, hawkers shouting out their wares, barking dogs, the creak of carriages and wagons, and the ring of horseshoes and hobnailed boots on cobblestones. The air smelled of petrol and gas fumes, chimney smoke, fried food, drains and horse dung. There were horses everywhere she looked, their harnesses jangling, pulling painted wagons and carriages of every description filled with coal, refuse or bricks – or waiting at the side of the street, snorting, grinding their bits, eating grain from nosebags, while pigeons and sparrows fought on the ground beneath to peck up what had fallen.
Down a side street, Louisa glimpsed a man pumping water into a tin bucket and wiping the back of his neck with a cloth. Beyond, a woman and three young children picked through rubbish, throwing whatever was of value to them into a small handcart. Louisa realised, stunned, that the children were all barefoot, despite the awful weather.