Page 66 of Two Wars and a Wedding

There was no time to argue. There were too many men to tend to. Her fellow nurses taught her by example, slowing their motions so she could imitate them, positioning her hands for her, guiding her to the right cures in the cupboard. They took turns sleeping, so that two were always on watch in the night and three fresh for the day. As head nurse—oh goodness, what Ava would say, what a painful joke that was—Betsy tried to do with as little sleep as possible, to be there both for the day and part of the night watch.

Betsy worried that she was going to wear Charles’s angel clear off the coin for rubbing it.

A good thing you go to do, he had said, and maybe it was a good thing, maybe she could make it a good thing. She entertained the men with her broken Greek, letting them correct her. She lied and told the man with the shattered mouth that she’d seen worse and that he’d be right as rain after an operation or two, just wait until he got to Athens; he’d be kissing his children with that mouth in no time. They told her, in the still of the night, about their families, their mothers, their children, in simple words she could understand, and Betsy squeezed hands and patted shoulders and changed dressings—she was getting very good at changing dressings—and told them they were coming along nicely.

By the fourth day, every bed was full and the army doctor came with the unwelcome news that three of the nurses were needed elsewhere. They were to pack their things and accompany him immediately.

Betsy did her best not to howl, although she wanted to. “Why? Pourquoi?”

“Besoin” was all she was told. There was need for them. Elsewhere.

“Right,” Betsy said, and turned up her sleeves. It didn’t seem quite so impossible as it had four days ago. She knew the routine now. She knew the care the men needed, although goodness only knew how they were going to manage with two nurses instead of five and the scantiest of supplies. The doctor had taken the basket with the antiseptic and bandages away with him again.

Betsy sent her one remaining nurse with a list—in English, but how different could it be?—to the Red Cross hospital and the orderly with money from her own pocket to the market to obtain food for the men, proper, nourishing sick food.

Which they absolutely refused to eat. Some of them wouldn’t even touch the water, turning their faces away when she put the cup to their lips.

“What’s wrong? They’re not eating.” There was nothing wrong with the food. She’d had some of it herself.

Although her one remaining fellow nurse wasn’t eating either, which was rather worrying. Maybe there was something about the food she didn’t know?

“It’s Good Friday,” her Cretan friend explained patiently. “Holy Week.”

“Oh.” That would explain the priests in procession she had seen tottering down the street the night before. Betsy shook her head to clear it. She’d lost all sense of what day it was, what month it was. She’d forgotten that the Orthodox church ran on a different calendar.

“But they need to eat. Or at least take some water!”

Her colleague only looked pityingly at her and quoted something in Greek about faith being better than bread. At least, Betsy thought that was what she said. The Greek of Crete was very different from that of Northampton.

Faith was all very well, but bread was bread. Betsy was about to say so when the old caretaker hobbled in, carrying a saucer of burning incense.

As he walked between the rows of beds, the men, even the very sickest, rose as far as they were able, fanning the smoke into their faces, murmuring prayers, prayers for victory and for peace, lifting their faces to the heavens, even the man with bandages over his eyes, with expressions of such beatitude that Betsy found herself, simply, speechless.

Betsy meekly knelt with the rest, breathing deep of the scented smoke. According to the orderly, who had picked up what he could in the market, the news from the front was bleak. They needed all the prayer they could get.

The doctor didn’t come that day or the next. Instead, Betsy found her courtyard thronged with desperate, exhausted men, retreating soldiers who had been told to go to the docks for a ship that never came and didn’t know where to go. Betsy didn’t know where they were to go either, but they clearly needed food and a place to sleep.

Before she knew it, Betsy found herself running a makeshift hostel and canteen for retreating soldiers, using all their remaining blankets and straw to create rows of pallets in the courtyard and digging deep into the money she’d brought with her to keep the household in food.

A few of the men had terrible coughs. Betsy didn’t like the sound of that at all. She wasn’t nearly experienced enough to know if they were tubercular or merely suffering from what Charles might call la grippe, but either way she didn’t want her wounded exposed to it. She made them their own enclosure on the far side of the courtyard, as far away as she could from the convalescent and the merely exhausted, and sent to the market for honey to make them soothing syrup.

And still the doctor didn’t come.

Instead, the priest came, moving up and down the rows of recumbent men, his censor swaying, sending out the sickly sweet smell of incense as he chanted, “Christ is risen,” and the men called back, “He is risen indeed.”

It was Orthodox Easter. Easter Sunday. Betsy had lost all track of the days. There were nearly seventy men in her care now, in her care and that of the Cretan nurse, and the news from the outside was grim. The Greeks had broken at Larissa.

The Turks were coming.

On Monday the evacuation started. There was no warning. There was never any warning, Betsy thought crossly, as she shouted in Greek at the stretcher bearers to be careful, for heaven’s sake, these were wounded men they were carrying. It would be nice if someone would actually tell her things before coming and taking away her wounded. But apparently there was a boat waiting and all the wounded were to be conveyed to Athens.

Betsy watched as her courtyard emptied and then her wards, running after stretchers with instructions for the orderlies, making sure the men had their things—they got so upset if you gave them someone else’s cap—sternly telling one man that, yes, he did have to go to the boat, no, he couldn’t just leave and go back to his village, couldn’t he see that leg wasn’t ready to walk on yet?

Dr. Kalopothakes arrived just as the last stretchers were being borne off, and the building had gone, in the strange way of buildings, from being a hospital, a busy, useful thing, to an empty shell. It was very disorienting.

“Are we losing?” Betsy asked bluntly, so relieved to hear an American voice again that she hardly minded that it was Dr. Kalopothakes. “Are the Turks really coming?”

“We don’t know. Some of the nurses are going back to Athens with the men. You can go with them, if you like. You’ve certainly done more than your fair share.” Dr. Kalopothakes looked around at the empty cots, soon to be dismantled, at the neatly folded stacks of blankets and sheets. Looking directly at Betsy, she said, “You did well here.”