The Magdalene

This story is my entry in the 'Pastiches de Oggbashan Story Event', and is based on his story Christmas Truce.

For those not familiar with the old British currency, one pound sterling (£1) was comprised of 20 shillings, each worth 12 pennies. A variety of coins were in circulation, including the guinea, a gold coin worth 21 shillings or just over £1. To put that into context, the average working man in 1915 Britain earned about 30 shillings or £1/10 each week.

Guy Fawkes' Day is observed in Britain on 5 November each year, the anniversary of a failed 1605 bomb plot against King James I and Parliament.

At the time of the story, women were generally not permitted in public houses, what North Americans would call 'bars'. Many pubs had however a 'snug', a small, private section where women were permitted.

Lastly, one of the higher British awards for heroism by an officer was the Military Cross, known as the 'MC'. The equivalent for non-commissioned soldiers was the Military Medal or 'MM'. Either medal might be roughly equivalent to the US Silver Star.

========

1914 was a thrilling time.

"For tiny Belgium!"

"Stand against the Hun!"

"For God, King and Country!"

Even we women were thrilled, for the grinding realities of modern war were not yet even dreamed of - no, not in our worst nightmares.

I waved Michael off from the pier, one of thousands of cheering civilians, mainly women, old people and children. A flotilla of small boats, including many of the local fishing boats, escorted the Channel ferry carrying his battalion to the continent.

It's what you did.

It's what we believed in.

After all, they would be home for Christmas. Everyone said so.

We believed.

As the war dragged past Christmas and into 1915 and then 1916, as the casualty lists in the newspapers kept growing, as our certainties died a slow death, it became harder and harder to keep doing so.

And it was not particularly easy living in what had become known as the Home Front.

The scarcity of workers, for instance, brought up wages - quickly. By the end of the war, many men were being paid £5 a week -- some twice that. Even as a corporal, my Michael was being paid but one shilling, eightpence per day. That soon enough became a pittance compared to what farm labourers, let alone skilled workmen, could demand. Even women could earn as much -- and, in a major social shift, many women were indeed working, enticed both by their own need and by the constant drain of young men heading for the front.

And I couldn't expect Michael to send me all of his pay. Despite the pretty pictures painted in the press, I realized how dismal things must be at the front. I could hardly begrudge my husband a few shillings for soap, the odd beer in a French pub, tobacco for his pipe -- that sort of thing.

So I saw, most months, maybe a couple of pounds.

Wide employment and high wages led to inflation, something the government never really came to grips with. Prices effectively doubled during the war.

And Michael in his muddy, gas-filled shell hole for God, King and Country was still paid one and eight.

I got by, eventually giving up our flat to move back in with my parents. It was either that or take employment myself and my mother would have been scandalized at that.

One evening, three years into the war, there was a knock at the door of my father's cottage.

Inside, we looked at each other bleakly, for nobody was expected and, with casualty reports from the Battle of Passchendaele still making headlines each day, nobody wanted to open the door to whatever could be waiting outside.

My father eventually rose to his feet, knocked the dottle from his pipe into the fireplace, went out into the hallway and opened the door. I could not hear what the person outside said, but my father's voice, low as it was, carried well enough for me to hear it clearly.

"You needn't wait. I doubt there'll be a reply."

With that, he closed the door.

My mother collapsed in into a chair when she saw the still-sealed telegram form in his hand. I found myself unable to move, incapable of the tears I knew that thin slip of folded paper contained.

My father looked at me for a long time, compassion and fear fighting over his face.

"D'you want me..." he said before his voice failed.

I swallowed deeply. "No. I think it's addressed to me, isn't it?"

Tears in his eyes, he just nodded.

I reached out, took the thing and thumbed it open. I recognized the broad capitals of Mr Harrington, the agent.

"REGRET TO INFORM YOU CORPORAL MICHAEL HUGES KILLED IN ACTION BELGIUM, 26 NOVEMBER, 1917."

They hadn't even spelled his name right. To me, that seemed the ultimate indignity.

I let it fall to the floor.

My father picked it up, glanced at it and passed it to my mother before collecting me into his arms. I felt numb, impossibly so. The thought went through my mind that I should be ashamed -- shouldn't I be in tears or something?

In my shock, I simply couldn't cry. That, I thought, would come later.

A week later, a printed form arrived in the post, Army Form B 1-4-82. It's not something I'll forget.

"Dear Sir," it started. The 'Sir' was carefully scratched out and the word 'Madam' written beside it with a broad-nibbed pen.

"It is my painful duty to inform you that..."

Yes, Passchendaele. The cause of death was listed as, "Killed in Action." I'd already gathered that somehow, but it was good to have it confirmed. I was still numb.

The form finished, "I am, Sir (the word again crossed out) Madam, Your Obedient Servant." It was signed with a scrawl and an inked stamp blurred to illegibility.

At least they'd spelled his name right this time.

The Mothers' Union took me under their wing. I found that black widow's weeds didn't suit me very well, but it was expected of me. There was a memorial service in the local church and I found myself, briefly, with an embarrassment of flowers.

The week after the memorial service, the Army stopped Michael's pay allowance. Letters to the War Office, first from myself and then from my indignant father, went unanswered. Fortunately, living with my parents, it could have been much worse.

I still hadn't cried.

That changed when another letter arrived, this one rather crumbled, with a muddy thumbprint on the back of the envelope. It was hand-written in pencil and was signed by Michael's company commander.

Michael's letters had often mentioned Major Jones. He was, according to Michael, 'one of the good ones'. Jones, he said, cared for his men and had more than once gotten himself into trouble trying to worm his way out of clearly suicidal orders.

"Probably a good thing for us, Pet," he'd said. "Otherwise, he'd have been promoted too far to still protect us."

I always wondered how that comment got past the censors. Some of his letters had arrived with holes literally cut out of them to remove critical information concerning the weather at the front and how many stones had been found in the canned rations.

Jones was a rare one in another sense, Michael had said. He'd been an Other Rank most of his career, rising to the rank of Staff Sergeant by the Boer War and Warrant Officer, 2nd Class by the beginning of the Great War. Indeed, he probably would have retired as a WO2 to live out a quiet life in peaceful retirement had the war not broken out.

Instead, with the horrific casualties in the opening year of the war, particularly among junior officers, WO2 Jones had been offered a commission as an officer. Michael said it meant that Jones knew his job far better than many.

I opened the envelope carefully and found a two-page note written on what looked like Army stationary, but obviously one written by an exhausted and overworked man living in a hole in the ground.

Major Jones offered his personal condolences and told me that Michael had been one of the best men in the company. His death had been quick, he assured me, a random shell. Michael would have felt nothing. Sadly, his remains were not available for burial. "If there is anything I can do..."

It was a pretty standard thing, I could see. Yet, despite the impersonal nature, I found that I could now cry. The major's letter was my last real link to anybody who had actually known my Michael. Moreover, after reading it for perhaps the fifth time, I realized that this could hardly have been the only letter he had written that day. Causalities at Passchendaele had been horrendous, some said as bad as at the Somme the year before. The Army had still not officially released total casualty figures, something which had hardly gone unnoticed.

Despite all that, despite the strain Jones had been under, he had somehow found time to write that letter to me.

I still have it.

When I wrote back to thank him, I mentioned in passing the problem with Michael's pay. Mail to and from the front was sporadic, of course, and I was hardly surprised to get a letter from the Ministry of Pensions before I heard back from Major Jones.

The Ministry letter apologized for the delay in contacting me and informed me that I was entitled to a weekly pension of 15 shillings, backdated from the day Michael's pay allotment had been cancelled.

I realized that, through a quirk of bureaucratic irrationality, I was now receiving more money as a widow than I had as a wife.

What was most amazing to me was passing reference in it to another letter, one written to the Ministry by Major Jones.

Amidst everything else, bless him, the man had found time to fight another battle for a woman he'd never met.

+

I had come to hate the phrase 'For King and Country'. I hated the pious, saccharine commiseration from people so clearly relieved that misfortune had landed in my lap instead of theirs. I hated the black mourning garb convention insisted I wear. I hated the expectation that I would immure myself behind drawn curtains.

Above all, I hated the isolation, for there were none to talk to beyond old people and weepy girls either mourning or hoping against the odds that they would never receive their own 'B 1-4-82'.

The flow of casualties from the front meant that proper hospitals were severely overstretched and alternatives were always being sought. The parish priest mentioned following the service one Sunday morning that volunteer staff were urgently required in the local manor, which the Royal Army Medical Corps was about to open as one of the many auxiliary hospitals and aid detachments across the county.

I discussed it with my parents. While my father was supportive, my mother was less than impressed with a proper girl involving herself in something as shameful as nursing. (Mother was still deeply suspicious of Miss Nightingale.) Yet she didn't go so far as to actually forbid it, obviously knowing that I needed to do something to exorcise my own demons.

I was of good character and recommended by both the priest and the Mothers' Union: there were no problems getting accepted. I found myself issued with two starkly unattractive white uniforms, each with a large red cross on the bosom, and given two weeks training on sanitation and bandaging. We were after all not expecting critically injured patients at the Manor, just convalescents needing support as they mended.

The work proved to be hard, often dirty and sometimes, if I may be frank, quite disgusting. Yet I was an Englishwoman and these were Englishmen, heroes to their country, men who needed a woman's care. As so many other women have done over the ages, I put my shoulders back and did my bit.

In between cleaning, bandaging, making men comfortable and, yes, bedpans, I tried to spend as much time with the patients as I could. That woman's healing touch? It's real, I think.

The Manor's small private library had been left behind by when the Medical Corps arrived; I spent many hours when not otherwise occupied reading to our patients. Some of them were practically illiterate, but even the rather better educated liked being read to.

As well, whether or not it was just being away from the madness at the front which made them so, I found almost all of them polite and even cheerful.

The Matron, the woman in charge of the nursing staff, was a proper nurse and, moreover, a member of the Army establishment, her father having been a Medical Corps surgeon himself. We got along well enough and, in addition to my other duties, I found myself assisting with some of the paperwork.

I kept busy, in other words.

Despite the inflation, I knew I was better off than some of the other far-too-numerous widows in the area. I was able through my bank to anonymously send a shilling here and there each week. I won't boast; helping others is what decent people do, of course. And I was still with my parents, so I could with some economy spare it.

There were harder things to bear, certainly.

The Sunday papers regularly carried stories of heroic British soldiers and their gallant deaths in the face of overwhelming odds. What the papers never dwelt on in any detail was what modern weaponry -- machine guns, shrapnel and mustard gas, just for starters -- could do to the human body. Instead of clean, brave casualties with neat, easy-to-mend injuries, men were arriving with half a face or missing one, two, three or even four limbs.

The hardest part, for me at least, was not seeing their twisted forms. It was the look in their eyes, waiting for my  response the first time I saw them. Men who would charge a machine gun nest -- no, men who had  charged machine gun nests - had in their eyes such abject fear that I almost wept.

It was fear of rejection, rejection by me, rejection by a pretty young woman.

I learned very quickly to control the horror I felt at the sight of these broken forms and melted faces, to smile at them as if they were still the men they had been before. It was, I think, the hardest thing I was ever called on to do -- and the most Christian.

One can get used to anything. I think I did some good.

The Manor, as I said, had opened as a convalescent facility, operated for patients well out of the woods and now merely needing time and modest levels of attention. That was, of course, subject to change on short notice.

Mid-summer of 1918 marked a shift for the Allies. While censorship was still strict, the tone of the newspaper stories changed. The last big German offensive at the Marne had slowed, then stalled, then failed altogether. At Amiens in France, the stalemate was finally broken. In what came later to be called the Hundred Days Campaign, the Allies began a non-stop series of advances, ending only when the Germans sued for peace in November. We were finally, finally winning.

But at such a cost.

Over a million Allied soldiers were killed, injured or simply lost in those last three months. Four hundred thousand of them were British or Commonwealth soldiers. Even the massive medical system built up over four years of war crumbled under the flood of wounded being shipped back to Britain.

We at the Manor had less than a day to prepare for the first wave. Beyond the most basic stabilization surgery in France, they arrived in horrific shape, many indeed still with the mud of France caked on their torn and shredded uniforms.

My time of reading stories to cheerful, recovering young men came to an abrupt end. Everyone on staff worked endless days, generally at a level well above that they were trained for. General MDs found themselves doing quite complicated surgery, leaving the few RNs on staff to fill in behind them. I, with my two weeks of bandages-and-phenol training, wound up actually giving morphine injections on a frequent basis. On several occasions, I was called on to help in surgery, passing instruments I could barely name to an exhausted doctor.

I also wound up doing a lot more of the paperwork. It wasn't something I had been trained on, but those who normally did it were busy keeping people alive. And the entire medical system was in, if not chaos, then certainly great confusion. We were actually getting telegrams from London asking if we had Lance-Corporal So-and-So or Lieutenant Such-and-Such, patients the system seemed to have lost. As their service files were supposed to follow the patient, it was at times shambolic.

In the event, I wound up doing as much administration as practical nursing, although I still put in my normal hours on the wards. It was there, on Guy Fawkes' Day, that I discovered Michael's 'good one'.

'Jones, Alexander' was hardly an uncommon name.

'Jones, Alexander, Maj, 1/Essex R' on the other hand was much less common. I dropped the file on the desk and hurried to the ward.

He was, to be frank, a mess - filthy, just about naked and with a week's whiskers on his face. His abdomen, groin and right leg were mats of bloody bandages. Very, very pale, he looked far older than I could have believed possible.

I asked the doctor on the ward if the major's chart was available. He testily glanced at me, pressed beyond words by the demands being made on him, but sought and found the folder. After a quick glance, he handed it to me.

"Not much hope for this one, Mrs. Hughes," he said thinly. "Actually, it might be better for him if he doesn't make it, poor blighter." With that, he turned to the next patient.

I looked at the chart and gave a short gasp. Jones had severe injuries to the thigh and knee of his right leg. Well, he could probably recover from those; I'd seen many here with worse make a pretty fair recovery.

But Major Jones also had had what the other patients, when speaking amongst themselves, quietly referred to as 'The Wound'. Their fear, their horror at the very concept was to me amazing. In their eyes, no man could have The Wound and remain a man.

I stood there for a long moment, then turned to another of the volunteer nurses to help me. Pillar of the community she might have been, but the woman was clearly at the end of her tether.

She took one look at the thing on the bed and shook her head.

"No," she whispered. "I'm a lady. I cannot do this anymore."

With that, she turned and left the ward. She wasn't the only one, sadly.

I looked at the wreck of my Michael's officer, the man my husband had admired so much. Reaching inside my collar, I pulled out the locket Michael had given me so long ago. Thumbing it open, I looked at his uniformed photograph.

"I'll try, Michael," I said. The photograph was blurry; I hadn't realized I was crying.

I snapped it shut, tucked it back under my uniform, next to my heart where it belonged. I pulled my shoulders back and took a deep breath. And immediately regretted it, for the poor man stank abominably, a reek of mud, decay, chemicals, sewage -- the stench of death.

Trying to control my sobs, I got to work.

+

Cleaning him up by myself was a hard job, for he was a large man and I no bigger than average. It took me several hours and three sheet changes just to remove the grime and filth which seemed layers deep in his skin. And keeping him clean thereafter was hardly pleasant, either, for he was a baby in all but size.

Although gruesome, his wounds did not suppurate, thank the Almighty. Still, Major Jones was unconscious for over a week and it was a dodgy go for him the entire time. They'd actually moved him into the Dying Room one morning when I arrived, but I used such little influence as one widowed volunteer could summon up and they moved him back to the ward.

The other volunteers left him to me. Although I resented it then, in retrospect, it was probably a good thing. The good major was going to have a hard-enough time as it was without those holier-than-thou biddies gossiping to everyone in the county about his being but half a man.