Raids frightened her as did the thought of starvation, and when frightened she was apt to grow rather sadistic, so that now she would want to rush off and inspect every ruin left by the German marauders. She had also been the first to applaud the dreadful descent of a burning Zeppelin.
She bored Stephen intensely with her ceaseless prattle about Alec, who was one of London’s defenders, about Roger, who had got the Military Cross and was just on the eve of becoming a major, about the wounded whose faces she sponged every morning, and who seemed so pathetically grateful.
From Morton came occasional letters for Puddle; they were more in the nature of reports now these letters. Anna had such and such a number of cases; the gardeners had been replaced by young women; Mr. Percival was proving very devoted, he and Anna were holding the estate well together; Williams had been seriously ill with pneumonia. Then a long list of humble names from the farms, from among Anna’s staff or from cottage homesteads, together with those from such houses as Morton—for the rich and the poor were in death united. Stephen would read that long list of names, so many of which she had known since her childhood, and would realize that the stark arm of war had struck deep at the quiet heart of the Midlands.
BOOK FOUR
CHAPTER 35
1
A stump of candle in the neck of a bottle flickered once or twice and threatened to go out. Getting up, Stephen found a fresh candle and lit it, then she returned to her packing-case upon which had been placed the remnants of a chair minus its legs and arms.
The room had once been the much prized salon of a large and prosperous villa in Compiègne, but now the glass was gone from its windows; there remained only battered and splintered shutters which creaked eerily in the bitter wind of a March night in 1918. The walls of the salon had fared little better than its windows, their brocade was detached and hanging, while a recent rainstorm had lashed through the roof making ugly splotches on the delicate fabric—a dark stain on the ceiling was perpetually dripping. The remnants of what had once been a home, little broken tables, an old photograph in a tarnished frame, a child’s wooden horse, added to the infinite desolation of this villa that now housed the Breakspeare Unit—a Unit composed of Englishwomen, that had been serving in France just over six months, attached to the French Army Ambulance Corps.