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Hanfield said that’s what they were.’ I’ll have to be careful, she thought. That was a close one, but Sister appeared to be satisfied.
    ‘Thank you, Amy,’ she said. ‘That’s all you can do in here.’
    The words were like a blow. No it isn’t, she thought. I could do everything in here. Men were dying and she could do nothing.
    She turned abruptly and hurried out. ‘Help in the wards, Amy,’ Matron said. ‘The beds have come. They all need making up.’
    The big luxurious lounges and the dining-room had been stripped and emptied and scrubbed and the beds arranged in rows, a strict four feet apart. Amy wrinkled her nose. The wards smelt strongly of carbolic, astringent and sharp. An efficient smell. So much for French perfume. Helen was already there, spreading sheets and tucking in neat corners.
    ‘You have to do the corners right,’ she said, ‘or the nurses will shout at you.’
    The nurses moved about, crisp in apron and headdress, and crisp in manner. One bed was piled with dressings and bandages, thermometers and pairs of scissors. There was a crate of hydrogen peroxide and a box ominously marked in red letters – Morphine.
    The morning wore on. They scrubbed and dusted and made beds and put away supplies. A brief lunch of roast beef and potatoes andcabbage, and then they began again. Slowly the piles of boxes disappeared . Slowly the equipment was put away.
    Amy stood in the doorway of the biggest ward, looking back. The rows of beds stood silently in the late afternoon light, waiting in terrible expectancy. The empty beds had a soul-chilling air of impersonal indifference, as if all feeling, all emotion, had left the world. Who knew who would lie there? Does it matter, they seemed to say? Does anyone care? They will lie here and die, and more will come and lie here and die and this is just the way it is. Men have always killed each other. They always will. It will never end. Does anyone care? Not the heads of state, she thought, who cause it all, not the generals in their fine uniforms, safe behind the lines.
    We care, she thought. We care. The beds waited. She was too horrified to cry.
    The next day they arrived. One after another the ambulances unloaded their dreadful cargo. The whole staff watched them arrive, standing in the foyer. Amy was overcome with pity and dismay.
    ‘My God,’ Helen whispered bedside her. ‘Oh my God.’
    The orderlies and nurses got the men to bed and stripped them of their lice-ridden clothes and washed them. The doctors hurried round the wards; the chest of morphine was opened. Dr Hanfield and the other surgeons operated all the day and far into the night. In the hospital , the war had begun.

CHAPTER THREE
    1914
    T HE work was relentless. Amy had not really known what to expect, but certainly not this endless flow of wounded men, many of them already dying of their wounds, of infection, gas gangrene, septicaemia, blood loss. They arrived filthy, in tattered uniforms, most of them covered in lice. They brought every wound imaginable; limbs shot away, abdominal wounds, head injuries, eyes missing and facial injuries almost too dreadful to look at. The operating theatre was working all day and half the night. She and Helen fell into bed every night, utterly exhausted. Helen cried herself to sleep for the first few nights. ‘Oh, those men,’ she sobbed. ‘Those boys. How can they be so quiet, so patient? They should be raging. I don’t understand what this war is about. It’s about nothing, just men wanting power – more and more power.’ Amy could only agree, horrified and sickened.
    Every day those men whose wounds had been treated and were fit to travel were taken to the railway station and loaded on to hospital boat trains en route for the many hospitals that had been set up in England, set up in schools, church halls and country houses, and largely staffed with women volunteer VADs and orderlies. And every day the orderlies and ambulance drivers collected