Charles Todd - An Unmarked Grave

Where, I thought, lying there, was the “cousin” who had been sent to keep me safe?

Wherever he was, he’d nearly been too late.

Another search was made at first light, but there was no sign of my attacker. Dr. Hicks excused me from my morning shift, but I went to him and asked him to let me work. As frightening as the experience had been, I knew that I was safer and less likely to dwell on what had happened if I kept busy.

Everyone was sympathetic, and I noticed that someone was always within call, wherever I went.

But what to tell my father? And if Simon got any inkling of what had occurred, he’d be in France before the day was out, still bleeding or not.

In the end, I decided to say nothing to them. For all I knew, it had indeed been an attempt at rape, not murder.

I was walking across to my quarters that night when I heard Dr. Hicks just behind me say sharply, “Who the devil are you?”

I turned to see him challenging someone who was only a black silhouette against the faint light of the distant shelling.

“The new orderly,” the voice said. “I walked up. There wasn’t any transportation.”

“Then you’ll damned well stay there until I can take a good look at your orders.”

I knew that voice, didn’t I? But I couldn’t quite place it, for coming out of the darkness, half muffled by the big guns, I couldn’t quite make the connection. I needed more to jog my memory.

“I’ll wait until you have sorted him out,” I told Dr. Hicks, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man’s face as they repaired to the small tent where the doctors kept their paperwork and whatever medicines we had under lock and key.

But he said, “No. Wiser to go inside and leave me to deal with this.”

Nodding, I did as I was told, and as soon as I was safely in my quarters, he was gone.

The next morning Sister Clery said, “Have you met the new orderly?”

“A glimpse, nothing more.”

“Well, I can tell you he isn’t like the rest. Wait until you see for yourself.”

“More to the point, is he good at his work?”

“Wasted,” she said firmly. “Remember that hand that we thought might be turning septic? We had to take it off this morning, and Corporal Dugan was fighting us for all he was worth. Barclay held him for us until we could get the ether mask over his face-”

I didn’t hear the rest. I had placed the voice now, as well as the way the man had been standing as he spoke to Dr. Hicks.

What was Captain Barclay doing in France at a British aid station masquerading as an orderly?

I SAW HIM coming out of the canteen, a cup of tea in his hand, grimacing as he drank it without sugar or milk.

I called, “You’re the new man, are you? Barclay?”

“I’m never going to learn to like tea,” he said plaintively, approaching me.

“Sorry. It’s all we have. There’s a shortage.”

“So I’ve heard.” He glanced around, then said swiftly, “Bess. You don’t know me.” With that, he walked off.

But wherever I was, it seemed that Captain Barclay-Barclay the orderly-was somewhere close by. He seemed oddly out of place to me in his khaki orderly’s tunic with the red cross on his sleeve. I’d seen him in his own uniform, and he wore it with an air that suited his rank. Still, everyone else took him in stride, and his attempts at rank-and-file humility were successful, although sometimes I caught a gleam in his eyes that belied them. Working with the wounded, to his credit he did the most menial task from emptying bloody basins to carrying away an amputated limb with the grim stoicism of a seasoned orderly. He’d been in the trenches, of course, he’d seen and dealt with worse, but it was not something anyone grew accustomed to, however hard the shell put up to keep one’s sanity in the face of such horrors.

I couldn’t help but think in the dark hours of the night that he’d appeared right on the heels of the attack on me. And then I’d remind myself that the Colonel Sahib had sent him, and the Colonel Sahib was seldom wrong in his judgment of a man’s character.

I could also see Dr. Gaines’s fine hand in all this. Captain Barclay had been pressing to return to his men, ready or not. This would be a lesson in a different kind of humility-forcing him to listen to his doctors.

In a way his presence was comforting. In the first place it freed me to work without looking over my shoulder. In the second, I’d been concerned about someone hovering, in my way at every turn. But apparently he’d been ordered to keep his distance, close enough to protect me but without being underfoot. I’d have given much to discover why my parents had turned to Captain Barclay as the safest choice to watch over me. He was, as I knew only too well, a very persuasive man. Still, his wound helped him carry off his charade. That must have carried some weight.

What little I learned about his “story” came in bits and pieces from others.

He was Canadian, had joined the British Army because he had been living in Britain when war was declared, but he was rejected because of a leg injury that refused to heal properly-hence his limp-and so he’d become an orderly instead. (His time in the clinic had given him a good background to make that believable. He talked about his duties there with the ease of experience.) He wasn’t married (this from Sister Clery), and his father was in the merchant marine-which was close enough to the truth. I asked where he lived, and I was told he’d been an orderly at Longleigh House in Somerset, had served in Dover, on several patient transport ships (which had aggravated his bad leg), and was now with us.

Dr. Gaines again, I thought. And he’d also been responsible for my own return to France.

Several evenings later, Dr. Hicks sent me to the Base Hospital for supplies-we’d been running short for three days, but he hadn’t been able to spare anyone. With a brief respite in the fighting-the guns were silent and lines of fresh troops were making their way to the Front to relieve those who’d endured a week of heavy shelling-we had only a trickle of new patients.

We took with us three badly wounded men who were due to be sent back for more treatment, and Barclay was assigned to drive.

It was a more or less uneventful journey, although once a nervous company of raw troops fired on us from a distance before their sergeant got them under control again, shouting at them in a Glaswegian accent that made half of what he was saying unintelligible.

We delivered our patients and saw to it the instructions accompanying them were duly signed for, then collected the list of desperately needed medicines, bandages, needles, sutures, and so on that Dr. Hicks had requested. An hour later, the ambulance carefully stocked, I got into the seat beside Captain Barclay after he’d turned the crank.

“Wait until we’re out of sight,” he said in a low voice, turning out of the racetrack and picking up the road to the Front.

And so I waited. Last night the sun had set in a blaze of gold and red, sliding behind a bank of deep purple clouds. Now it was pitch-dark without the flickering light of the shelling, and the only way we could be certain we were on what passed as a road were the wide swaths of deep ruts left behind by the lorries. Our blacked-out headlamps were woefully inadequate, casting shadows that only made it harder to judge anything in time to avoid another bone-wrenching jolt. About two miles out we spotted the single chimney and broken wall of a farmhouse. It had become a marker of sorts, and we all knew to watch for it. The rest of the village was little more than rubble, with no way of judging where the streets had been, much less the houses or shops that once had lined them. How this single chimney and wall had survived God alone knew.