Arise the Dead I by Elizabeth Langridge

Author:Elizabeth Langridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771832823
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Published: 2018-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Two days later, he and Frank, Stanley Watts, and a few others from his hut were put on a hospital train bound for Boulogne. As they were carried out on stretchers, Jim looked up at the grey sky, the blustery clouds, enjoying the wind on his face.

Each stage in this journey on the soil of France was a step closer to the ship that would take him home. In the weeks that he had been in France, all sense of idealism had been whittled away so that only a basic striving for physical and mental survival was left now that he was less than whole.

“The MO told me I’m almost certain to get a blighty.” Stanley imparted the news to Jim as they were put down in their stretchers side by side on a platform beside the train. “What about you, Jim?”

Jim put out his good hand to Stanley. “Don’t know yet,” he said. “Don’t want to take it for granted in case it doesn’t happen.”

The military General Hospital in Boulogne proved to be a former monastery, a solid, large, majestic red brick building situated part way up a hill, surrounded by trees.

Things are looking up, Jim thought, as he was carried into a spacious, light and airy open ward, where several nurses came to meet them. The medical orderlies transferred him to a bed near the door, then handed his papers to a nurse. “Don’t forget to address the nurses as ‘sister’,” the orderly instructed him quietly. “They are all trained here.”

“How are you, Private Langridge?” the nurse asked him.

“Not too bad, sister.”

“This is a medical ward,” she said. “The doctors are concerned about your fever, even though you also have a wound. You’ll get more rest here, not so many comings and goings as on a surgical ward.”

She was very pretty, tall and stately, rather “posh,” he thought. “Thank you, sister.”

“One of the MOs will be along to see you soon, and I’ll be changing your dressings then so that he can see the wounds at the same time. A belated lunch for you first, I think, my man.”

This was paradise. It had been a long time since anyone had called him “my man.” It was a proper bed, more than a few inches off the ground, with pristine sheets. Beside it was a locker of his own, into which the orderly had shoved his filthy kit, and there was a tall window across from him through which he could see evergreen trees. Someone had put a few flowers in a vase on his locker, with a small card: “Merci, cher soldat.”

It occurred to him that he must certainly be in a bad way mentally, for those three simple words, which he understood, brought such a cascade of emotion that it took all his powers of control to keep his face from falling into that mask of grief of which he knew himself to be capable. Other men were all around him; there were comings and goings.

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