Dead Man's Land by Robert Ryan

outside. The curtains were to shield the lad from the others, he now understood, not because of any hideous wound but his pariah status. SIWs of any kind were not well received by officers nursing genuine wounds. For every soldier who deliberately maimed himself, there were scores of young men who faced up to doing their duty. Understandably, the latter felt aggrieved when the former were shipped home.
    Of course, it could be that this young man was unfortunate in contracting the disease; but there were infected women who would nevertheless sell themselves as a ticket home for a windy soldier.
    ‘What treatment have you given the lad?’ he asked the nurse.
    ‘Injections and inunctions of mercury, Doctor.’
    ‘Mercury? Don’t you have Salvarsan?’
    ‘Not here.’
    ‘I have some in one of my medical kits. Whose patient is he? Dr Myles’s?’
    ‘Major Torrance’s.’
    Mercury injections were crude and the inunctions – the application of mercury ointments – messy and largely ineffective, but the newer drugs had been slow to catch on among the more traditional doctors and he could imagine supplies being difficult to source.
    Across the room, Myles was guffawing with a patient who had two stumps in place of legs. The paraplegic soldier was laughing along with the man who had removed his legs. Myles slapped the officer on the shoulder and moved along. Watson felt slightly envious of Myles’s unforced and jovial bedside manner. He had been taught to keep a distance from the patient, even in civilian life. To be detached, analytical and professional. Ah well, the man was from a different country. And a different generation, too, he supposed. Which was almost the same thing.
    ‘What’s through here?’ he asked Jennings when he had seen the last man, pointing to a thick curtain over a large doorway that had once held wooden doors, judging by the twisted hinges still lolling from the stonework. The door itself had probably been looted for firewood.
    ‘NCOs mostly,’ she said, changing the dressing on the weeping stump of a young artillery officer.
    ‘May I?’
    ‘Of course, Major. I’ll finish up here. We’re going to have you shipped along very soon, aren’t we, Lieutenant Walsh?’
    The artilleryman smiled, showing he had lost several teeth as well as his right arm. Watson watched her admiringly for a second, fussing with the amputee’s bed and carrying on a stream of light chatter designed to make him forget, for the moment at least, just how diminished a man he would be when he returned home.
    The wall was streaked with a grey-greenish mould that had colonized the brick beneath a leaking gutter. The gutter had been repaired, but the wall itself, part of the Big House’s kitchen block, still looked scabrous. Sister Spence had asked for it to be whitewashed and then for the greenhouse to be ‘freshened up’ .
    ‘I’d like to freshen her up,’ Mrs Gregson said, when she had gone. She had asked for overalls, but Sister Spence did not want any women on her CCS in trousers. She had found them some smocks that made them look like a pair of Humpty Dumptys. An orderly had brought two pails of water and a bag of lime and left them to it.
    ‘I think we should scrape that green off first,’ said Miss Pippery.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Well, the wash won’t stick properly. It will flake off within a fortnight.’
    ‘And where will we be in a fortnight?’ Mrs Gregson asked.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘I do. Somewhere else other than here.’ She bent down and tore open the top of the bag of lime. She ripped a fingernail and let out a curse.
    ‘Hello, ladies. Need a hand?’
    He was a second lieutenant, a touch gangly, but not unattractive either, with a fastidiously neat moustache and clear green eyes. He also had two balls of embarrassment glowing on his upper cheeks.
    ‘How long have you been standing there?’ Mrs Gregson demanded.
    ‘Oh, not long. I was just getting some fresh air. Bit stuffy on the