‘This must be what it’s like in a bloody slaughterhouse,’ Angela whispered to her when they both finally reached the end of the rows. ‘And that constant noise in the background is giving me a headache. What must it be like for those fighting on the front? It’s a wonder the noise doesn’t deafen them.’

‘If you think this is bad now just wait till it gets dark and everything goes quiet,’ a nurse who had been working with them said in the sluice room, which stunk to high heaven. It was actually nothing more than rows of buckets that they emptied the bedpans into until someone had time to empty them into a cesspit. The bedpans were then rinsed out under a single cold-water tap. ‘At the end of each day the stretcher-bearers go out onto the field to bring in the dead and injured and that’s when the work really starts. The doctors usually end up working through the night operating on those who are still alive, poor sods.’

Angela shuddered at the picture she was conjuring up. ‘And what happens to the dead?’

‘The lucky ones are transported to a graveyard where their resting place is marked with a simple wooden cross bearing their name. If there are too many of them they have to go into a communal grave. Obviously the corpses can’t be kept for too long, although it’s not so bad at this time of year when it’s cold. But in the summer it’s awful and the rats have a feast.’

Angela’s face was bleached of colour again so Holly asked quickly. ‘And do we ever get any time off?’

The nurse grinned ruefully. ‘Now and again but not very often. The last time we got a night off me and some of the other nurses went to a dance in the nearest French village hall but the trouble was none of us could speak much French so it wasn’t too successful.’

‘I can speak French.’

Angela stared at Holly. ‘You never told me that!’

‘Well, you never asked me. I had a private tutor for many years, who refused to speak to me in anything but French as a way of making sure I learned to speak it fluently. But come on, we’d better get back onto the ward and see what sister wants us to do next. We don’t want to get into her bad books on our first day.’ They all trooped back and soon they were busy administering tablets and medication under the sister’s supervision.

It was early evening and pitch-black when Holly suddenly noticed the silence save for the moans of the patients.

‘That’s it for another day by the sounds of it,’ the nurse they had spoken to earlier, who introduced herself as Laura, said. ‘Give it another half an hour and you won’t know if you’re on your arse or your elbow we’ll be that busy.’ She wiped her hands down her blood-smeared apron and hurried away to fetch a bowl for one of the patients who was hanging over the side of the bed being violently sick.