Softly Grow the Poppies Read online

  ‘Was ist das datum, bitte?’ He stumbled through the sentence, referring to the little book the nurse had given him.

  ‘Zehp-tehm-behn, my friend.’

  September! The soldier’s expression turned to one of astonishment and neither he nor the doctor knew why. Into the soldier’s mind came a faint memory of daffodils, wild primroses, violets, the rich palette of crocus, tall soldier tulips and narcissi: Spring flowers that grew abundantly under trees that were barely in bud. They flourished in a strip of woodland to which his desperate mind clung but before he could get a good grip on it, it was gone. The flowers he had visualised did not bloom in September so how much of his life had he lost in this place where German was spoken?

  ‘September! But—’

  ‘Ja, mein freund, my friend. You have . . . er, been here a long time but . . . er . . . soon prison camp you go.’

  The soldier lay slowly back on his pillow and could have wept for he did not know where he was or what he had done to justify taking him to a prison. Had he committed some crime? Dear God, he felt he would go crazy in this mad, mad world. He needed someone, something to cling to. A name – not his own perhaps but the name of someone he had known, even loved, for in this tricky memory of his he knew he had loved a woman and if only he knew her name it would give him some hope that one day this bottomless pit in which he floundered would be resolved. He tried to go through girls’ names starting at the beginning of the alphabet, which for some reason he remembered, pondering on the irony that though he could not remember his own name he could bring to mind the alphabet. Now then, begin with A and at once, there it was. ALICE! Her name was Alice. She was the one who . . . who what? What was she to him? Had he loved her? No, it would just not come and thinking, trying to drag the past into the present, made his head ache fiercely.

  He laid his throbbing head on the pillow, wanting to weep, then, as the doctor turned sadly away he gripped the sleeve of his white coat.

  ‘Can you not tell me what I am doing here in a German hospital? Was hilfe ich . . . habe . . . mich . . . verlaufen konnen sie . . . mir helfen?’ His pathetic stumbling to make himself understood reached the doctor’s heart which he had thought to be past such feelings after all he had seen of suffering. His own English was stilted but he did his best.

  ‘You Englander . . . prisoner of war.’

  ‘War! Bitte . . . ich verstehe . . . nicht . . .’ frequently consulting the dictionary.

  ‘Germany und Englander at war. Du wounded . . . in battle. Ich . . . ah, I learn English but not good. You have nothing to . . . die identifikation.’

  The soldier looked away hopelessly, his eyes wandering about the ward. There did not seem to be anything else he could say to this kind doctor.

  The baby on her lap chuckled in that endearing way babies have and reached out to fumble at the woman’s face that smiled down at him. He was quite beautiful and Rose thought how could he be anything else, the son of Alice and Charlie? Her heart was sad that neither of them had ever seen him, for Alice had slipped from her childbed making sure she did not look into the child’s face lest he divert her from her purpose before she disappeared from their lives. As Charlie had done.

  She was unaware that she was being watched as she took the little boy’s hands in hers, then bending her head she blew raspberries on to his bare stomach. He opened his mouth wider and emitted a shriek of delight.

  ‘You like that, don’t you, my darling.’ She laughed. ‘Shall Rose do it again?’ which she did and the soldier who stood in the doorway smiled and with a sigh put down his pack and said her name.

  ‘Rose,’ softly, tenderly. She looked up, her heart beginning to thump in her chest and there he was, the man she loved; the man who had gone off to war and had, she knew, been in the horror of the Battle of Loos. Before he went he had given Rose the telephone number of his friend at the War Office and told her to keep in touch with him, for not only would Tom Harris know where the 19th would be but might have news of Charlie and Alice. Rose had written to him to tell him of his brother’s disappearance and of Alice’s determination to find him.

  Gently she laid the baby on the floor where a rug had been spread to allow him to kick his chubby legs. She stood up and slowly moved across the room to where Harry stood, a desolate figure just come from the battlefield. She gently took away from him all the equipment every soldier carried around with him and when they were placed somewhere, anywhere so that his arms were free, she put hers around him and pulled him against her. His head was lowered until it rested in the curve of her neck, her hand smoothing his filthy, tousled hair. He sighed deeply, moaned almost, as though a great weight had been lifted from him. She had taken it from him with her loving womanliness, knowing exactly what he needed.

  ‘You know I love you, Harry,’ she whispered. He badly needed a shave, in fact a bath because he smelled of the mud, the blood, from some other soldier, she hoped, the stink of corruption, because Harry Summers had carried in his own arms many of the badly wounded men he commanded to the dressing station or to an ambulance if one was available.

  ‘Yes,’ was all he said, lifting his face to hers, his eyes welling with tears, for Harry was not the same man who had left her months ago. Then, ‘Will you let me love you, my Rose, before I go back?’

  ‘Let me get rid of this fellow and then I will bathe you and put you in bed,’ since she was of the opinion he needed to be cleaned up, fall into a depthless sleep before he loved her, not for her sake but for his own. A proud man had been Harry Summers and he would want her to see him for the first time as he had been before the war took him.

  Though they looked for her in the hospital, those who depended on her, patients, nurses, all those who had come to trust and admire her in the last few months, she was not to be found. Only Dolly knew that she and Captain Summers were deep in the comfortable bed in which Harry himself had been born. It seemed only right that the result of that loving had been Harry, then Charlie and that Rose was healing him as best she could in the only way women could heal their men who had been to hell and back.

  It was two days later that Harry was first introduced to his nephew and broke the news to Rose and Dolly that he had seen Alice. He had even managed a few words with her. She was well and sent her love to them both. There were tears in the eyes of all three for the woman they respected, admired and, most of all, loved.

  Now, she was the heroine of hundreds of men. Not just because she carried them to safety courting danger herself, but because she had become a legend as the woman who searched the battlefields for her man.

  9

  The soldier who, though he was not aware of it, was Captain Charlie Summers, lay on the floor of the cattle truck, his body pressed painfully against the side by the crush of other captured soldiers all around him. They were all officers for though their captive had nothing to tell them he was a captain, it was perhaps his cultured voice, so different from a Cockney or a Liverpudlian, that brought it about. Even the Germans followed the quaint custom that officers should be kept apart from ‘other ranks’. At last he could speak to someone in his own language and though he was totally bewildered by the news of ‘the bloody war’ that was being fought across the wilderness that was France, he was beginning to feel he had a place somewhere in the world. His head had been shaved for the surgery performed by Dr Westmann and the young lieutenant who lay next to him asked him cheerfully where he had picked up what looked like a ‘blighty one’ as the men called it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Charlie answered him hesitantly, wondering how the man could be in such good spirits as a prisoner of this war, whatever it was about.

  ‘What’s your regiment?’

  ‘I don’t know that either, I’m afraid. Apparently I took shrapnel in my head and it’s left me . . . a bit confused.’

  ‘Oh, bad luck, sir,’ the lieutenant said. ‘When was this?’

  ‘God knows,’ Charlie told him listlessly.

  ‘Don’t you have your do
g tags?’

  Charlie wished he would leave him alone and it seemed the boy, for that was what he looked like, a boy in a soldier’s uniform, began to take the hint. ‘No.’

  ‘Your uniform. Would it not have . . .’ But Charlie was dressed in the assortment of clothing the hospital staff had rooted out for him. Civilian clothes in a drab grey, a shirt, a jacket, old baggy trousers and a comical trilby hat.

  Suddenly from across the rocking, rattling truck a voice shouted in what seemed to be amazement. ‘Summers? Is that you, Summers? Good God, we thought you were dead, old man. What happened to you? It’s me, Jimmy, Major Jimmy Bentley. Jesus, it seems bloody years since I last saw you on the train leaving Liverpool. Remember you couldn’t get your mare aboard? You were with a real popsie and your brother. What happened to you? Look, let me get over to you if these chaps would let me through.’

  With much cursing and a great deal of shuffling of weary bodies the man who spoke managed to get across the swaying truck until he lay beside a bewildered Charlie. Charlie dragged himself into a sitting position and waited warily for this total stranger who called him Summers to speak.

  ‘What happened to you, old chap?’ the major asked gently. ‘And why are you out of uniform? When were you captured by the blasted Hun and the battle and . . . and how long . . .’

  Charlie stared with wonder at the gaunt face of the soldier and suddenly hope burst in him like a bubble rising to the surface of water. Here was a man who knew him. A man who had given him a name. All the time he was in hospital the others, doctors, nurses, stretcher-bearers, had called him ‘Tommy’ for that was what the British soldiers called each other. Now here was someone who had known him in the misty past and who could perhaps mend the many holes in the gauzy remnants of his life before his time in hospital. He had no idea where he was, why he had been in a German hospital or how long for and, more to the point, what month it was, even what year.

  ‘You tell me, Major, if you don’t mind. I have lost my life and until you spoke now I didn’t know my own name. It appears I was in the army. I can vaguely remember a horse; she was blown to bits by . . . I don’t know why or . . . or . . . Please, Major, please, give me back what you know of my life and then perhaps the rest will come.’

  He gripped the major’s arm so fiercely he winced and pried Charlie’s fingers from him.

  The major could see how distressed this wounded soldier was and wanted to put his arm round the man’s shoulders and say ‘there, there’ as his own nanny had once done when he was a boy but he was being watched by many of those nearest to them so he merely patted his hand and placed it back in Charlie’s lap.

  ‘You are Captain Charlie Summers. A cavalry man.’

  ‘I remember horses.’

  ‘You were in the 19th Battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment, as I was. We fought recently at the Somme—’

  ‘The Somme? Where—’

  ‘There is a great war taking place, Captain, between Germany and the British, the French and there are men from many parts of the world involved. If you cannot remember where you were last I cannot tell you in what battle you fell or how you ended up in German hands.’

  ‘I am from Liverpool?’

  ‘As is your brother, Harry. He fought in the Battle of the Somme and I believe there was talk of sending him home on leave. He, as your next of kin, was informed that you were missing a while ago and I believe there was talk of your wife—’

  ‘Wife?’ Charlie said wonderingly.

  ‘Yes, and the last letter he had was from someone called Rose.’

  ‘Rose . . .’

  ‘A lady of whom he seemed . . . fond told him that your wife had borne you a son. Now what did they call him?’ Major Bentley scratched his head in which something was crawling and which seemed to be the common state of all these filthy, mud-coated, blood-coated, exhausted men. Some of them were merely boys, come straight from the public schools where they had learned how to march and shoulder arms but nothing else that would keep them and the men they commanded alive.

  ‘I have a son, a wife, a brother and—’

  ‘I know, old man, it is a lot to take in all at once but I think it might help you to know that you have a family who care about you but who all believe you are dead.’ He stopped speaking abruptly, his eyes unfocused, staring at something that baffled him. ‘Though there is a tale that some young woman, a lady ambulance driver, wanders up and down the lines questioning soldiers about her lost husband.’

  Charlie gave vent to a gusty sigh that came from the depth of his soul and he felt a great wave of jubilation. He was someone at last. Not just Tommy who the rest of the ward thought was out of his mind but Captain Charlie Summers from Liverpool who had a wife and son at home. He could not visualise them, or the place that he had called home. Nothing in fact but what this officer – whom he could not remember nor the incident with the train and the horse – told him but perhaps now that he had these few facts he might put together the rest of his life.

  It was very hot and most of the men had discarded their jackets but he in his thin shirt felt no discomfort, for his heart was beating in rhythm with the clackety-clack of the train. None of them knew where they were, nor did they know that the Germans had camps all over the countryside and that in fact they were headed towards a town in northern France and that they were not far from the lines over which they had fought and where his own brother was now in the thick of it.

  ‘What’s the date?’ he asked the major.

  ‘It’s June 28th, Charlie.’

  ‘But last time I asked the doctor at the hospital he said it was September so how can . . .?’

  ‘How long were you there? If you could remember when you were captured . . .’

  Charlie felt reality spinning away from him again, for it seemed large parts of his life had simply disappeared. The guard who stood by the door of the truck where there was a small window lit his pipe and blew smoke through it, quite unmoved by the suffering of his cargo. The shifting, murmuring layer of men had received nothing in the way of food or water since they had left the railway siding where they had been loaded and many of them were dehydrated but there was no water to be had.

  Charlie licked his cracked lips and asked the last question. The answer to which he dreaded to hear.

  ‘Jimmy . . .’

  ‘Yes, old man?’

  ‘What year is it?’ and was appalled by the answer.

  ‘It’s 1916, Charlie.’

  Charlie fell back and began to repeat the mantra that was to keep him sane in what was to come.

  ‘I am Charlie Summers from Liverpool, Charlie Summers from Liverpool . . .’ He said it out loud to himself until an officer with a hacking cough and who seemed ready to die, told him to ‘put a bloody sock in it, old man’. He turned over, his face pressed into the straw that lined the truck and whispered silently to himself the words that were to keep him from simply dying as many of them did during the next months.

  She watched him sleep, her face scarcely inches from his. Dolly had taken over the care of young Will Summers with the help of Polly or Nessie, who fought over who was to bathe him, put him to bed, or feed him He could hold a rusk in his hand, attempting to get it into his mouth, as he did everything from a fold of the rug to the collar of one of the dogs and at fifteen months was walking in a top-heavy sort of way as though he would trip over his own feet. Which he did frequently. Now and again when he fell he resorted to crawling. The dogs played with him in mock fights, often knocking him over but he didn’t care, though Dolly was terrified one of the dogs might bite him. It appeared the animals sensed this lively creature who punched them or grabbed at their fur was to be handled carefully and their mouths were gentle as they nuzzled at his neck.

  The soldiers, who looked forward to his visits, adored him. Sister argued that such a young child should not be subjected to some of the sights on the wards but he was too young to realise the implications of men without limbs, the men who handled h
im as though he were made of porcelain, those who were blinded, their faces quite grotesque. Rose argued that it gave them a feeling almost of normalcy. The sound of his infant babbling, his laughter, his feet in their new shoes of which he was inordinately proud as he toddled along the ward, was a memory of happy times before the war.

  No one came near the bedroom that had once been Harry’s own. It was placed at the corner of the house with a sharp bend to navigate and was designated too awkward to use as a ward. Rose had helped Harry into a long bathtub in front of the fire and gently scrubbed the filth of the trenches from his thin body, washing his hair and every inch of him, making him groan despite his exhaustion as she worked her soapy fingers about his male organ which stood out from the plentiful mass of dark pubic hair. It did not last long, this evidence of his desire, of his manhood. He was simply incapable of lovemaking in his state and when she had dried him and rubbed his dark, curling hair he had sunk into the bed in which he had slept all his boyhood and young manhood and she watched him fall into the bottomless pit of sleep he desperately needed. He had five days’ leave and when he was rested she would climb into bed with him, as naked as he, and bring him back from the horror he had known.

  He slept for thirty-six hours. She left him now and then to check on Will and to do the rounds of the wards where all the soldiers knew her man had come home and she would be absent for a while. They did not begrudge it to her, or him. He was a soldier, as they were, and had suffered what they had though he had no wounds to show for it.

  ‘Us’ll keep an eye on’t babby, Miss Rose,’ they told her. Will had become a kind of symbol of hope to these poor, pitiful wrecks whose own lives, even if they did not return to the front, would never be the same again.