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By Root 2230 0

1915: the women moved briefly to Wimereux and then back to London, where they opened a successful, much larger hospital in Endell Street. There were still ambulances and a field hospital, paid for by women’s colleges and run by crews of women. Dorothy and Griselda had elected to stay. Dorothy believed that if men’s wounds were dressed as well, and as promptly, as possible, there was a greater chance of their survival, and of the survival of damaged hands and feet, arms, legs and other parts. Griselda continued to talk to the wounded prisoners. One evening, when they were sitting in their shelter over a cup of cocoa—a thick taste and texture that recalled the quiet studies, the library and the rose garden of Newnham as surely as Proust’s madeleine recalled his childhood at Cambrai—she said, casually, that this tent of prisoners were Bavarians from Prince Rupprecht’s Army Group. One of them, she said lightly to Dorothy, claimed to have seen Wolfgang Stern, alive, and as well as he could be, a month ago. Dorothy said “Do you ask all of them that question?” Griselda said “No, not all, of course not. Only the ones who might know.”

“I never knew how much you cared for Wolfgang?”

“It is so far away. And there is all this killing. I think I—did care for him. I sometimes thought he … Oh, what does it matter, when we are trying to kill him in all this mud.” She laughed sharply. “It’s hard to be half-German. My mother is having a bad time. She sent an odd letter after Charles/Karl went missing, saying she was going to look for his wife in Dungeness.”

“His wife?”

“That’s what the letter said. Mama didn’t elaborate. I ask about him, too, but get no answers. The men don’t hate each other, mostly. The walking wounded help each other. Once it’s clear they don’t have to kill each other. It’s all mad. Mad and muddy and bad and bloody. I don’t know if it’s better to stop hoping about Karl. And Wolfgang.”

They were about to go to bed when a new contingent of wounded men and stretcher-bearers plodded slowly, and painfully, towards the ambulance. The nights were rarely quiet: the long snakes of men and animals moved into the dark and were hurt in the dark as the shells fell and found them. On the stretcher this time was a man almost invisible in a case or coffin of thick clay, which was drying onto him. The stretcher-bearers said he had gone right under. A shell burst, quite close, and sent up a lot of the stuff and damaged the duckboards. This man had been carrying a large pack on his back and had lost his footing when the shell came down, and he had gone sideways into the mud, and under. His pals pulled him out. There’s orders not to pull men out, if they get in, because they mostly can’t be saved. And they hold up the line of night-workers. Men were swearing behind, and shouting, leave the bugger, excuse my language, ma’am. We was passing by, on the track we come back on, and the man we was carrying died as we went. So we had just dumped him when this one got pulled out, lucky for him. He lost his trousers, they was sucked off of him. They wanted to save his pack, o’ course. It was hot rations. He’s breathing. Shell-shocked, seemingly. They did get the pack. With mud in it and over it, but the hot food was still in it and still hot, we hoped. I hope you ladies can take him, we need to get back out there.

So the clay-cased man was rolled off the stretcher, on to a temporary bed in the hospital. Dorothy looked round for nurses. They were all busy. She found a bucket and began to pick off the mud, which came off in bloody hunks, at first. Griselda helped. The face was the face of a golem: the ambulance men had made breathing holes and eye holes but the hair was caked solid and the eyebrows were worms of mud, and the lips were thick and brown. Dorothy picked and wiped. Griselda said “He’s got shrapnel down here, where his trousers were, I’ve got his pants off, it doesn’t look nice.”

The man trembled. Dorothy said “There’s a lot in his back, as well.” She washed him, quickly but gently, and then again, as though the mud layer was inexhaustible,