The First of July(70)

My friend. Where is my friend?

Tu est un petit poisson …

sous un petit bateau… .

The smell. The smell. The bellies of dead fish are around like stepping stones, and the eels are fat with meat.

“Don’t worry, Jean, when the river returns to its proper place, it will have left a gift of black earth and we shall have the fattest onions you’ve ever seen. Tarte à l’oignons.”

Oignons, rognons.

Comme ça comme ça.

Don’t worry, little Jean.

For some, silence.

“He’s mute,” the lady doctor said to Vignon. “Fusilier. Casualty from Verdun. Came to us in February. Flesh wounds to the legs, shrapnel to the chest. Right-side pneumothorax. Bladder tear, one kidney ruptured. Has done surprisingly well, given how ill he was when he arrived. But mute. We thought at first he simply couldn’t understand us, but most of us speak passable French and the other invalids manage.”

Her accent was, Captain Vignon thought, truly extraordinary.

“He’s not deaf,” the lady doctor said. “Indeed, he’s very easily startled, but he certainly can’t—or won’t, poor man—speak. Not a word.”

She pushed her wire glasses up her nose. A thin strip of dressing gauze knotted their two arms around the back of her head. On the right woman it might, just, have looked attractive, bohemian. She was not the right woman.

She was perhaps only forty, but her chin was downy; her thick sandy hair, streaked with gray, was lifeless, her body under its stained white coat shapeless. As a doctor Vignon could imagine it, but as a man he preferred not to try. These women who took on men’s jobs must throw away their chances of ever knowing a man’s loving vigor, he thought, although it was impossible to feel sorry for them: there was a kind of magnificence in their masculine inflexibility.

“Will he return to his regiment?” Vignon asked as they moved on to see three other cases, but in his heart was a sliver of fear.

“The fusilier? Perhaps. I don’t know. He shouldn’t. I doubt he’d survive another injury. But he probably will. You medical officers come and check the casualties, always convinced that as women we have soft female hearts and might hold on to them once they’re relatively fit.” She shrugged. “As if we had room for even half-fit men. And one case of typhoid can destroy all our work.”

“But he’s mute, you said?” and was ashamed at his need to confirm it. “Are you treating him?”

“We don’t have mind doctors here,” she said.

He wondered whether her feminine heart heard the pain and madness echoing around her any more. All military hospitals smelled and sounded the same, but here the cries ricocheted off arches and vaults that had once amplified the voices of monks praising God. If God was still listening, Vignon hoped he shared the capacity to suffer that he’d bestowed so freely on his children.

Captain Vignon, Surgeon-Militaire, had volunteered to come to the hospital at Royaumont to consider cases for transfer so felt himself implicated in the brutality with which sick men were returned to service. No doubt she intended it to be so.

He looked across at the iron bed. He had not been sure at first; the face had changed, but as the boy opened his eyes there was no doubt. Vignon’s heart beat a little faster.

Vignon had been curious to see this hospital run entirely by women. It seemed entirely unnatural; but despite himself, he had to admit that they had made a good showing in this ancient and unsuitable building. Some patients were being nursed in the cloisters, most of them oblivious to the fresh summer air. Unlike the lady doctor, some of the nurses, he observed, were not unaware of a handsome French officer in uniform. Nor were their crumpled and straining aprons unappealing, and he had always liked to see a curl escaping from a woman’s pinned hair. Were they Scotswomen too? He had never met a person from Scotland before, and he feared for their menfolk.

“I’ll leave you with our administrator to look at the patients,” she said. “Do you speak English? Miss McAdam’s French is not yet fully honed.”

He was shaking his head. “Small,” he said in her own language. “A very small English.”

“Ah well,” she said and for some reason looked amused; “where there’s a will.”

What did she mean? It meant nothing. Where was there a will?

His gaze was shifting back to the bed a few yards away, set in the shade of a stone arch, when she turned round again, hands thrust in her pockets.

“You don’t speak German, do you?”

He was already saying that he regretted that he did not, when she said, “We have this young soldier, no more than fifteen or sixteen, we’ve no idea of his name. We get them from time to time—prisoners. Occasionally one of the ladies can speak German, and I suspect one or two of your soldiers do, but of course they hate the Germans so can’t be trusted, although we had a French surgeon visit, much traveled, and he was quite proficient. But currently—not a soul speaks more than an Auf wiedersehen. Which hardly seems appropriate here.”