By this time the courtyard, the steps and terraces of the Hospital were
a scene of the most ghastly confusion. The wounded were still being
carried out and still lay, wrapped in blankets, on the terraces; those
who could sit or stand sat or stood. Ambulance cars jostled each other
in the courtyard. Red Cross nurses dressed for departure were grouped
despairingly about their luggage. Other nurses, who were not dressed
for departure, who still remained superintending the removal of their
wounded, paid no attention to these groups and their movements and their
cries. The Hospital had cast off all care for any but its wounded.
Women seized hold of other women for guidance and instruction, and
received none. Nobody was rudely shaken off--they were all, in fact,
very kind to each other--but nobody had time or ability to attend to
anybody else.
Somebody seized hold of the Commandant and sent us both off to look for
the kitchen and for a sack of loaves which we would find in it. We were
to bring the sack of loaves out as quickly as we could. We went off and
found the kitchen, we found several kitchens; but we couldn't find the
sack of loaves, and had to go back without it. When we got back the lady
who had commandeered the sack of loaves was no more to be seen on the
terrace.
While we waited on the steps somebody remarked that there was a German
aeroplane in the sky and that it was going to drop a bomb. There was. It
was sailing high over the houses on the other side of the street. And it
dropped its bomb right in front of us, above an enormous building not
fifty yards away.
We looked, fascinated. We expected to see the building knocked to bits
and flying in all directions. The bomb fell. And nothing happened.
Nothing at all.
It was soon after the bomb that my attention was directed to the lady.
She was a British Red Cross nurse, stranded with a hold-all and a green
canvas trunk, and most particularly forlorn. She had lost her friends,
she had lost her equanimity, she had lost everything except her luggage.
How she attached herself to us I do not know. The Commandant says it was
I who made myself responsible for her safety. We couldn't leave her to
the Germans with her green canvas trunk and her hold-all.
So I heaved up one end of the canvas trunk, and the Commandant tore it
from me and flung it to the chauffeurs, who got it and the hold-all into
Bert's ambulance. I grasped the British Red Cross lady firmly by the
arm, lest she should get adrift again, and hustled her along to the
Hotel, where the yellow tin box and the suit-case and the kit-bag
waited. Somebody got them into the ambulance somehow.
It was at this point that Ursula Dearmer appeared. (She had put up at
some other hotel with Mrs. Lambert.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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