Centaine pressed Nuage as hard as before on the ride back and let him in his stall. As she entered the courtyard, she saw that there were three more ambulances parked Igo in the yard; the drivers unloading their cargoes of wounded and dying men. She hurried past them into the house carrying a heavy kitbag over her shoulder, and paused at the door of the salon in amazement.
All the mattresses were full, and other wounded men were lying on the bare floor, or propped against the panelled walls.
Bobby Clarke had lit every branch of the silver candelabra in the centre of the massive ormolu dinner table and was operating by candlelight.
He looked up and saw Centaine. Did you bring the chloroform? he called across to her.
For a moment she could not reply and she hesitated at the tall double doors, for the salon already stank. The cloying odour of blood mingled with the reek of the bodies and clothing of men who had come from the mud of the trenches, mud in which the dead had been buried and had decomposed to the same soupy consistency, men with the acrid sweat of fear and pain still upon them.
Did you get it? he repeated impatiently, and she forced herself to go forward. They do not have anyone to help you. You'll have to do it. Here, stand on this side of me, he ordered. Now hold this.
For Centaine it all became a blur of horrors and blood and labour that exhausted her both physically and nervously.
There was no time to rest, barely time to snatch a hasty mug of coffee and one of the sandwiches which Anna turned out in the kitchen. just when she believed that she had seen and experienced so much that nothing else could shock her, then there would be something even more harrowing.
She stood beside Bobby Clarke as he cut down through Igi the muscles of a man's thigh, tying off each blood vessel as he came to it. When he exposed the white bone of the femur and took up the gleaming silver bone-saw, she thought she would faint with the sound it made, like a carpenter sawing a hard-wood plank.
Take it away! Bobby ordered, and she had to force herself to touch the disembodied limb. She exclaimed and jerked back when it twitched under her fingers.
Don't waste time, Bobby snapped, and she took it in her hands; it was still warm and surprisingly weighty.
Now there is nothing that I will not dare to do, she realized as she carried it away.
At last she reached the stage of exhaustion when even Bobby realized that she could not stay on her feet.
Go and lie down somewhere, he ordered, but instead she went to sit beside a young private on one of the mattresses. She held his hand, and he called her motherand spoke disjointedly of a day at the seaside long ago.
At the end she sat helplessly and listened to his breathing change, panting to stay alive, and his grip tightened as he felt the darkness coming on. The skin of his hand turned clammy with sweat and his eyes opened very wide and he called out, Oh Mother, save me! and then relaxed, and she wanted to cry for him, but she did not have the tears. So she closed those staring eyes as she had seen Bobby Clarke do and stood up and went to the next man.
He was a sergeant, a heavily built fellow almost her father's age, with a broad, pleasant face covered with grey stubble, and a hole in his chest through which each breath puffed in a froth of pink bubbles. She had to put her ear almost to his lips to hear his request, and then she looked round quickly and saw the silver Louis X! soup tureen on the sideboard. She brought it to him and unfastened his breeches and held the tureen for him, and he kept whispering, I'm sorry, please forgive me, a young lady like you. It isn't proper. So they worked on through the night, and when Centaine went down to find fresh candles to replace those that were guttering in the holders of the candelabra, she had just reached the kitchen floor when she was seized by sudden compelling nausea, and she stumbled to the servants toilet and knelt over the noisome bucket. She finished, pale and trembling, and went to wash her face at the kitchen tap. Anna was waiting for her.
You cannot go on like this, she scolded.
Just look at YOU, you are killing yourself, I she almost added child, but caught herself. You must rest. Have a bowl of soup and sit by me for a while. It never ends, Anna, there are always more of them. By now the wounded had overflowed the salon and were lying on the landing of the staircase and down the passageways, so that the orderlies bringing out the dead on the canvas stretchers had to step over their recumbent bodies. They laid the dead on the cobbles at the side of the stables, each wrapped in a grey blanket, and the row grew longer every hour.
Centaine! Bobby Clarke shouted from the head of the stairs.
He is familiar, he should call you Mademoiselle, Anna huffed indignantly, but Centaine leapt up and ran up the stairs, dodging the bodies that sprawled upon them.
Can you get through to the village again? We need more chloroform and iodine. Bobby was haggard and unshaven, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, and his bare arms caked with drying blood.
It's almost light outside, Centaine nodded.
Go past the crossroads, he said. Find out if the road is clearing, we have to begin moving some of these. Centaine had to turn Nuage back twice from the crowded roads and find a short cut across the fields, so by the time she reached the hospital at Mort Homme, it was almost full daylight.
She saw at once that they were evacuating the hospital.
Equipment and patients were being loaded into a mongrel convoy of ambulances and animal-drawn vehicles, and those wounded who could walk were being assembled into groups and led out into the road to begin to trek southwards.
Major Sinclair was bellowing instructions to the ambulance-drivers. By God, man, be careful, that chap has a bullet through his lung- but he looked up at Centaine as she rode up on the big stallion.
You again! Damn it all, I'd forgotten about you. Where is Bobby Clarke? Still at the chateau, he sent me to ask- How many wounded has he got there? the major interrupted.
I do not know. Dash it all, girl, is it fifty or a hundred, or more?
Perhaps fifty or a few more. We have to get them out, the Germans have broken through at Haut Pornmier. He paused and examined her critically, noting the purple weals under her eyes and the almost translucent sheen of her skin. At the end of her tether, he decided, and then saw that she still held her head up and that there was light in her eyes, and he changed his estimate. She's made of good stuff, he thought. She can still go on. When will the Germans get here?
Centaine asked.
He shook his head. I don't know, soon I think. We are digging in just beyond the village, but we may not even be able to hold them there. We have to get out, you, too, young lady. Tell Bobby Clarke I'll send him as many vehicles as I can. He must get back to Arras. You can ride with the ambulances. Good. She turned Nuage's head. I will wait for them at the crossroads and guide them to the chateau. Good girl, he called after her as she galloped out of the yard and swung the stallion into the vineyard on the eastern side of the village.
Beyond the wall of the vineyard she reached the path that led up to her knoll above the forest. Then she gave Nuage his head and they went flying up the slope and came out on the crest. It was her favourite lookout, and she had a fine view northward to the ridges and over the fields and woods surrounding the village. The early sun was shining, the air bright and clean.
Instinctively she looked first to the orchard at the base of the T-shaped forest, picking out the open strip of turf that served as the airstrip for Michael's squadron.
The tents were gone, the edge of the orchard where the brightly painted SE5as were usually drawn up was now deserted, there was no sign of life, the squadron had moved out during the night, gone like gypsies and Centaine's spirits lurched and sank. While they had been there it was as though something of Michael also remained, but now they had gone and they had left an empty hole in her existence.