After such an enjoyable evening they met regularly at the kiosk, the cinema, the ceilidhs, and Netta saw Drew’s cheeks begin to fill out. She had not expected to make a friend in the asylum but Park Royal was no ordinary hospital.

*

Drew Stirling found his days brightened by the company of the flame-haired beauty but could not bring himself to tell her of his real shame. Few knew his rank or the real reason for his enforced rest cure. He himself didn’t want to think about any of it now the war was over. He would give the coming Remembrance Service a miss. It wasn’t going to bring any of his comrades back, the shrouded bits he had buried, the broken minds and severed limbs that disturbed his dreams each night.

All that carnage and waste… the burden of his unbelievable knowledge took its toll. No wonder he drank to anaesthetise himself from memories of carcasses, burning flesh and the stink of death.

How can anyone stay calm in the face of continual slaughter, seeing a handful of fine riflemen return from a sortie, all that was left of a company? Shivering wrecks of humanity that he was expected to patch up and send backwards, forwards or sideways into burial pits. At best he could secure them a few days’ respite at an exhaustion centre further back down the line. As they shoved forward from street to street, avoiding mines and snipers, ambushes and bombardment, performing miracles of minor surgery, stemming the blood and guts, mud and gunge, the strain took its toll on all his staff.

In his arrogance Drew had thought doctors were invincible to the suffering around them behind masks of dispassionate professionalism. He could observe the madness of sadistic officers, logistical cock-ups, the stupidity of some orders, but the cover up of the tent massacre was the final act of needless carnage that yanked him adrift from his moorings.

A tent full of sleeping soldiers was mown down by a drunken driver out on a spree, a futile accident. He had to peel men off the tent walls. Just another needless waste of life that no one would talk about. A single slug from the whisky ration was no longer enough to quench his thirst or calm his anxieties after that. He was a doctor and could control his anaesthetic, or so he thought, but no white coat could switch off his feelings or his fears.

Only long hard bouts of boozing could keep him operational. Other ranks could go to the exhaustion centres to see the trick cyclist but Drew had been raised with a puritanical outlook, a tendency to regard mental illness as mere evasion of duty and a sign of moral weakness. He was now beginning to think otherwise.