Charles Todd - An Impartial Witness

But Scotland Yard never answered. Not even to thank me for helping them with their inquiries.

Finally I WROTE to Simon Brandon.

He had been my father's batman, his friend even though he was less than half my father's age, and eventually his RMS, his regimental sergeant-major, a position of some responsibility as well as prestige. If anyone could find the answer to my question without involving the police or causing a stir, it was Simon. His contacts were myriad, and they had long memories of service together.

I knew my father well enough to be sure he'd find the answer to my question, and then want to know why I had asked it. The Colonel Sahib, as we called him behind his back, was accustomed to commanding troops in battle. Raising a daughter would-he'd thought-be as simple as taking a seasoned company on maneuvers. He could do it blindfolded. Hands behind his back.

By the time I was walking, he was in full retreat from that position. "She'll be running the British Army before she's ten!" he'd warned my mother. It wasn't long before all the servants and half the men in his command were enlisted in a conspiracy to keep me safe. Not to mention our Indian staff and all their relatives.

The Army has a code of its own. I had been well taught not to air its dirty linens in public, and in India my father would have made short work of finding out who had been involved with Lieutenant Evanson's wife, and seeing to it that he was disciplined. Or learning how Captain Fordham had shot himself. It would have gone no further, been dealt with quietly and appropriately. We weren't in India now, but the same circumspection was still there, inbred in us.

A letter came back faster than I'd expected. It occurred to me that Simon had somehow arranged to have it sent with dispatches. The post where I was presently stationed was notoriously slow. And sent with dispatches, the letter wouldn't pass through the hands of the military censors.

I opened it quickly, eager to see what he had discovered. Bess. It's been hushed up. I can't discover why. What's this about? Do you know this man?

Before I could answer Simon, we were moved again, this time to the tiny village of La Fleurette, so destroyed by war and armies that I could find nothing to show me what it might have looked like, once upon a time.

There was a pitted street, half buried in piles of rubble, only the west wall of the little church still forlornly standing, and miraculously, a stone barn that had somehow escaped damage. It was whole, even its roof intact.

"Praise God," Sister Benning said, looking up at it. "Now to see if we can do anything about the inside."

The lane into the barn's forecourt was no more than a muddy and rutted track. The barnyard was already jammed with lorries and ambulances jostling for room, and we had orderlies clearing up the interior as fast as they could, so that we had a space in which to work.

The walking wounded were already sitting on benches, shoulders drooping, bloody bandaging around heads, torsos, or limbs. Sometimes all three. Stretchers with the worst cases were being set across frames made from mangers, and a surgeon was already at work, calling for us to hurry and bring him what he needed. The first of the dead had been taken away, out of sight in what had been the milking shed.

It was chaos, and we were accustomed to it, having packed in such a fashion that we could find anything we wanted immediately.

Ambulances were coming in now in twos and threes, and I was meeting them, trying to sort the wounded into those who could wait, those who needed immediate attention, and sometimes, offering up a brief prayer as I came across a soldier who had died on the way to us.

We worked almost thirty-six hours without respite on one broken body after another. Someone had managed to brew tea, and we drank gallons of it without milk or sugar, to stay awake. I took my turn at the tables where Dr. Buckley was operating, my eyes on his hands and the wound. Ellen Benning, on the other side, was constantly mopping his brow, and as I looked up, I realized he was flushed, perspiration rolling down his face, and I wondered if he were ill. At a break while the patients were being shifted, I led him outside and asked, "Sir, what's wrong?"

He looked at me, his eyes so tired that they seemed sunk in his head, lined and puffy with lack of sleep.

"I'm well," he told me irritably. "Don't hover."

I said nothing more, letting him go back to work without protest.

And then as suddenly as the flood had begun, it started to taper off.

I saw Dr. Buckley huddled with one of the ambulance drivers, their faces grim.

We had reached a point where we could actually catch our collective breath when Dr. Buckley began to load the wounded, ambulatory and stretcher cases, into whatever vehicles we had, sending them back down the line. The empty vehicles were returning for their next load when I quietly asked what was happening.

"The Germans are about to break through along the Front. We're moving out as quickly as possible. The Army is trying to hold them, but I don't think there's much of a chance now. Best to be prepared."

It was the story of this war-a few yards gained at horrendous cost, then lost again with even more casualties from trying to hold on against all odds. A retreat today, an advance tomorrow, and then retreat again before the next advance, like a bloody tug of war.

I nodded, and went about helping him, smiling and offering comfort where I could, assuring the soldiers we'd just patched up that this was too exposed a location and they'd be better off in one of the trench hospitals down the line.

One of the Scots officers agreed. "This wasn't supposed to happen. We'd won the ground, HQ told us we could hold on to it. But their intelligence was wrong."

We were down to the last half dozen walking wounded, who were being handed into ambulances, and the staff was packing one with what was left of our stock of supplies. A lorry was filled with the dead.

I looked around in the pale morning light, feeling rather exposed here in this shattered place. I'd been too busy to notice before this. Still, I was tired enough to sink to the ground and sleep where I was.

Dr. Buckley had come out of the barn to supervise the last of the stretcher cases, those he had waited as long as possible before moving. I was just about to go and help when I heard a faint new sound in the distance.

Almost in the same instant, I recognized what I was hearing above the rumble of the German guns down the line. It was an aircraft, and it was coming closer.

Searching the sky for it, I felt my heart rate rise. I don't know why, but something, some instinct born of working so near war at its worst, warned me. Why was an aircraft heading this way? The British aerodromes were west of here. Was it in trouble? And then I saw it, coming low and fast. The shape was distinctive-the two wings and the different body of an Albatross. I had only a second to wonder how a German pilot could have flown this far behind our lines, and then remembered that our lines were collapsing. I was already running, pointing, shouting to everyone to take cover, one eye still to the sky.

The orderlies, patients, and nurses clustered around the great doors of the barn probably couldn't see what I did, but my alarm was all too apparent. They glanced up, then heard the aircraft's motor, and dashed for the security of the barn.

The German flier, perhaps on a simple reconnaissance mission to see how the wavering front was holding, had seen us as well, and he veered in our direction, one of the Spandau machine guns already stuttering angrily, ripping up the earth and tracing a line across the bonnet of one of the ambulances. It burst into flames as the orderly who had taken cover behind it flung himself to one side. I could see the bullets coming my way and dove behind one of the horse troughs, and then he was gone, only to swoop past and swing around to bear down on the barn itself.