Charles Todd - An Unmarked Grave

I could hear the ambulance horn sounding now. I’d been here longer than I’d expected.

“I wonder if his son could have confused Sister Burrows with someone else,” I suggested, for Matron’s sake. I didn’t want her to be too curious about this Colonel Prescott and find herself his next victim. “Wounded men are so often in and out of consciousness-”

“I should have thought of that myself. It makes sense. Take care, Sister Crawford,” she said. “Don’t work yourself into a relapse.”

“I promise.”

And I was racing back to the ambulance, slipping quickly into my seat almost as the driver let in the clutch, and we were off.

This was the second appearance of “Colonel Prescott.” I needed to pass the information along to Simon or my father. But it wasn’t the sort of thing I could trust to the censors. He and my father had access to the military pouch on occasion, but I didn’t.

I couldn’t ask for leave. With the warming weather the influenza epidemic seemed to be waning, for we were beginning to see more wounded than feverish patients. Still, we were working around the clock, and nurses couldn’t be spared.

But what to make of this visit from Colonel Prescott, whoever he was?

When I reached the forward aid station I was told I wasn’t on call for six hours. And I was grateful-I could feel every mile in that ambulance in the stiffness of my body from clinging to my seat. But instead of sleeping, I found myself lying there, mulling over what to do. Simon had assured me that there was no Colonel Prescott presently on the rolls. He was seldom wrong about such things. The fact that there were rumors that Major Carson had deserted explained why his own commanding officer hadn’t written to Julia. Why had a Colonel Prescott? And why had this same Colonel Prescott come looking for Sister Burrows? Had she seen him later that night when I’d been taken ill? Spoken to him?

I was finally drifting off into sleep when I remembered the orderly carrying a mop and pail.

Hadn’t Sister Burrows promised to speak to him when he came by again, to ask him to bring a basket of clean linens to our ward? And if I’d come asking questions, she might have remembered that, especially if he’d never brought them. She could have described the man, surely.

But why had he risked coming openly to speak to Matron?

Because she would have no way of connecting him to that night.

The next thing I knew, someone was shaking my arm, trying to wake me out of a deep sleep.

I said, “Is it six o’clock already?” For it was still very dark outside as far as I could tell.

“Dr. Hicks wants you at once,” Sister Hanby told me. “Hurry, it’s an emergency.”

I dragged myself out of bed and into my clothes before I was fully awake, running across to the tent where emergencies were dealt with. Dr. Hicks was standing in the doorway, waiting for me.

“There’s a patient here who claims he knows you. You’d better come quickly, he’s in a bad way.”

My first thought was the Australian sergeant, wounded again. But when I saw the face of the man on the stretcher, his uniform cut off and dark blood pulsing from the wound on his shoulder in spite of what the nursing sister could do, I felt the world spin around me and thought for a moment I was going to faint.

STEADYING MYSELF BY an effort of will, I crossed to the stretcher and looked down into the dark, pain-filled eyes of Simon Brandon.

I could see him relax as he recognized me.

“Be glad the Hun is a damned poor shot,” he said quickly, and then lost consciousness.

I took over the pressure bandage as Dr. Hicks prepared to operate, saying as he worked, “The bullet is still in there. That’s the trouble. Keep the pressure just there while Sister Evans prepares him.” He hadn’t even asked me how I knew the man lying in front of him or why he had demanded to see me.

We worked for an hour or more, but Dr. Hicks was good at what he did-he’d had long years of practice-and he managed to remove the bullet and find the tiny bit of uniform that had gone into the wound with it, probing carefully without adding to the damage already there. For the shot had clipped a corner of Simon’s lung, and we were fearful that it had clipped an artery as well. But the bleeding stopped as we began to close the wound, and his color was better.

Next would come the fight against deadly infection, although we had cleaned the wound as thoroughly as we could.

What was he doing here, wounded by a German bullet?

I was just putting the final touches to the bandage that covered his chest and shoulder when Simon opened his eyes. They were dazed and confused at first, and then as the ether continued to wear off, he quickly regained his senses.

“Hello,” he said hoarsely, recognizing me again. “I thought I’d dreamed you.”

“Not likely. How did you come to be shot? I thought when I saw you last that you were on your way to Dover.”

“A convenient lie,” he murmured.

I knew better than to press for more, but thinking through where our aid station was located-how close to the firing it was-and where in this particular sector we were, it suddenly occurred to me that Simon had gone behind enemy lines. It was the only explanation for his getting shot. I felt cold. If the Germans had captured him, he would have faced a firing squad. Simon would consider that a lesser problem than being caught by some of the tribes of the Northwest Frontier in India, but he would have been just as dead, although not as quickly.

The Gurkhas, the fiercely trained and ferocious little men of the King of Nepal’s Army, were often sent behind the lines, because they could move in the night like the wind, barely heard and always unseen.

If they had brought him here, they had not waited to see how he fared. And that was not unexpected either.

Simon knew the Gurkha officers-always English, not Nepalese-and there could well have been a mission that required someone of Simon’s experience and skill to accompany the native soldiers-or to guide them-wherever it was they had had to go. There were whispers about their prowess. I’d heard a few myself. That they brought back German officers for interrogation. That they took out snipers or machine-gun nests that couldn’t be reached any other way, even that they crawled to the lip of the German trenches and listened to the conversation of the unsuspecting occupants. If only half the stories were true, they were remarkable.

Almost as if he’d followed my thinking, Simon added, “Get me to England, fast as you can.”

“You’ve just had very serious surgery. You can’t be moved.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

I knew that he would find a way somehow, whether I helped him or not. That’s when I gave him something without his knowledge that made him sleep for five hours. My conscience was clear. Whatever it was Simon knew or had learned, it could wait. His life was more precious to me than his service to England. And for a Colonel’s daughter, brought up to put the regiment first, above all else, even one’s own feelings, this was tantamount to treason.

My ancestress at Waterloo would have been appalled. My mother would have understood completely.

It was several days before we could move Simon, and his fever fluctuated enough that we were afraid to do so even then. In addition to my own duties, I kept the bandages clean, kept the wound itself as antiseptic as I could, and saw to it that he slept as much as possible. It wasn’t until the third day that he realized I’d been giving him something to keep him asleep.

He was absolutely furious with me, insisting that his information was critical, but I let his anger wash over me without answering him, and when he had exhausted himself I told him that I had sent word straightaway to the Colonel Sahib, telling him-obliquely-what had transpired.