October 14th – Lord Dunsany – ‘Charon’ (1915) – Read it here.
Catch up on the challenge list here.
I love this, it’s so sad. It’s 1915, so peak war trauma, with no end in sight, and thousands dying in one day. It reminds me of all the apocalyptic ‘last person on earth’ literature of the Cold War era, a bit. I remember having to read Z is for Zachariah (1974) by Robert C. O’Brien at school, and it is giving me those vibes. It also reminded me of The Book Thief (2006) by Marcus Zusak, with Death as a character, carrying the victims of the Holocaust and the Second World War in his arms.
For the response to this, I’ve dug out a Ko-Fi letter that members had as a reward in June 2025, as part of the Egg & Gwen continuation. It’s the opposite problem here; in the spirit of the folktale, The Soldier and Death, and is just as horrifying. What if Charon were to find people stopped coming to him? What if people were not allowed to cross the river? I’m sharing this as it’s also set in 1914/15, so it fits that time period as well.
Let Them Go is an experimental piece related to the spin-off Pagham-on-Sea books that will be set in the early 20th Century, with Eglantine Pritchard vs the Pendle Sisters. This is part of Eglantine’s backstory, before she comes to Pagham-on-Sea.
Members can read her school days and a version of her childhood here.
This is a letter from a sister at the field hospital, much of which has been redacted by the censors, and goodness knows what they made of it.
CWs: description of injuries from shelling and gassing, casual-toned reference to Allied war crimes, surgery, body horror.
NOTE: A VAD / V.A.D. was a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment and may not have had any prior hospital experience except the training they undertook prior to being shipped out. They may have been in other professions like teaching or retail, but perhaps with some St John’s Ambulance training or experience, etc.
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Dear Kitty,
I am writing to you from our new quarters, a monastery that has been taken over for the needs of the hospital, some ==== miles from the front line, near the town of ===============. Something deeply unsettling has happened, and I feel I must write you and explain as best I can, as I cannot alarm anyone here with what sound like wild fancies.
We are too busy for such things, and I want my nurses and V.A.D.s on top form for the next push, when we will undoubtedly find ourselves busy! We have convoys coming through every day now, with more cases of gas-gangrene, and currently we are making do for some 140 men when we scarcely have room for 80, but we have made it work, of course.
Among those we’ve had through recently, and making good progress, are some sweet boys – ‘Canada’ is of course a Canadian, a fur-trapper, and he keeps the others in good spirits. There is ‘Curly’, a bald Australian who is great friends with his fellows on the ward, and also little T====, who cannot be more than fifteen, but says his military age is nineteen. That poor boy has pneumonia and shrapnel on the lungs causing ulcers, but he is still fighting through it. He is not well enough to be shipped home, and he will likely die in the next week or so, but for now he clings on. His poor mother!
Currently we have some 20 whose wounds have healed well but who cannot return to duty – these are the ‘head cases’, and they will be served their Blighty tickets soon, to be sent back to England with the more severely wounded who are now fit enough to travel but need more prolonged nursing care than we can provide.
Among our 140 are also some surrendered Germans and Prussians, although ‘Canada’ was surprised to hear that we have these at all; he said that they were told not to leave them alive, even if they surrender. I am not happy about nursing them, and we are so busy I cannot spare my nurses and V.A.Ds to take care of them, so I do it myself with what we have left over once our boys have been seen to.
I suppose all this is mere preamble to the story I want to tell you, but you will think it very strange. I could fill this letter instead with details of my walk to town and what I bought there, and for how much (unbelievable prices, as, apparently, there’s a war on…!), and going flower-picking in the woods as our big gun fires on enemy aircraft above us, or sound of the shelling at night that rattles the windows. The enemy got our range all right in our last place, and we lost several batmen when a shell went straight through their tent. Here we are a little more distanced from the artillery, at least, but you can still hear the sounds of the big assaults when another push is coming.
All of this to say that I am quite used to many things I never thought I would become quite used to, but when we moved to the monastery and received a new batch of nurses, four from Blighty and newly qualified, and five other experienced nurses from =====, Egypt, and how pleased we were to see them!
Among the newly qualifieds was a doughty Welsh girl, around 19, who had started nursing at 16 and so had a few years of training and experience but was the youngest of the lot. She is a solid sort of creature, not the sort of girl one would really look twice at in a crowd, except if she were to brush past you or step on your feet. That is not to say she is clumsy, but she is rather hefty, and while she gets on with all her work in a very dependable way, one feels it is best to give her a wide berth in which to do it.
I was fully expecting her to be one of the more emotional girls – the Welsh being what they are – or perhaps one of those fervently religious types one tries to avoid. We have one of these already, a perfectly lovely and very earnest sort, and I am quite ashamed to say that I find her immensely irritating. I did not relish the idea of having two such girls on the wards, as they might find common ground and become insufferable together, or else fight like cats in a bag over some small point of doctrine.
At any rate, I decided to split them up as far as sleeping arrangements went, and to put them on different rounds as far as possible. This is how Nurse P. ended up in a small monk’s cell with Sister E., whom I trust a great deal, and admire for her level head.
P. did not exhibit any emotional instability, and while she seemed to be a good, God-fearing sort of girl, and attended Sunday services when duties allowed, like the rest of us, she was not at all pushy about it. However, there was something strange about her.
Whenever she would see a new case, or hear a story the boys told about their experiences, many of which I cannot share in a letter, a queer sort of expression would cross her face, her chest would rise, and a strange feeling sweep over whoever was near her, like pins and needles all over.
I myself experienced this twice, and cannot account for it. One minute she was rubbing a Tommy’s feet and he was telling her about how he had bayoneted the enemy until he couldn’t stand, and the next this queer feeling rushed over me, causing all the hairs on my arms to rise.
He felt it too – he fell silent, and suddenly screamed out for his rifle, and begged for the stretcher bearers, and we couldn’t quiet him for half an hour.
So, when Sister E. came to me in the middle of the night and said she could not bunk with P. anymore, part of me was not surprised. It was why that surprised me.
Sister E. saw P. slip off from her rounds after a particularly nasty gas-gangrene case, and we had four deaths in succession on the same ward within minutes of one another, from the same convoy. My, the batmen were busy that night! And I remember we were all rushed off our feet with boiling water, fetching fresh bandages, and emergency surgeries. I was assisting with these in another part of the monastery, and we got through 30 in one night.
As soon as I was finished, and exhausted, Sister E. found me, and she was in tears. Not from the situation in the ward, but because she had been so badly frightened.
After following P. to see if she was all right, as one of the nurses had fainted badly the night before and had needed treatment herself, Sister E. saw her standing outside, and there was a strange feel to the air.
“it was like trespassing,” Sister E. said to me. “Like stepping into a place one shouldn’t be. I don’t mean a house. I mean a sacred grove, or something like that.”
(I am recording her words as best I can recall them, as that phrase seemed so odd to me – ‘a sacred grove’. It put me in mind of old stories and all those savage, queer things of the past, those standing stones and so on, where if one is walking alone on a lonely grey morning, or out too late at night, one’s imagination can run wild, and picture all sorts of dreadful things.)
Sister E. did not call out or announce her presence to P. because of this queer feeling, and then P. began to speak. She had her back turned to Sister E., so could not have been speaking to her, but also she was speaking in her own language, and Sister E. had never heard it before and did not know what any of it meant, only it had a rhythm and rhyme, like poetry. Sister E. became deathly afraid, “like something was coming,” she said, “like a shelling, only shells we couldn’t hear or see.”
Finally, P. stopped, and addressed something – Sister E. could not say what – in English.
“I will have no more death on my ward.”
Well, naturally, I thought poor old P. and Sister E. had both succumbed to mental and physical exhaustion.
P. may simply have been praying in Welsh, and Sister E. attributing something sinister to it simply because her nerves were stretched rather thin, and it was unfamiliar to her.
But after this, something terrible happened.
Nobody died.
Now, Kitty, I know you must think this a good thing, and a testament to our nursing and surgical skills. I believe some of it certainly was. And yet, I must impress upon you – nobody died.
We had a boy gargling his own brains as they leaked down the back of his throat, and a case of gas-gangrene so bad that he had to be put in a different room to the others because of the smell, quite off his head most of the time he was awake, and a Tommy blown to bits whose passing should have taken moments (it was a miracle they got him to the hospital at all, and by the time he was on the ward, there was nothing we could do for him). And none of them died.
They hung in place for two weeks.
Fourteen days. Fifteen nights.
There was nothing we could do to make them better.
And the worst thing of all – a batman reported that as he was moving a body from the ward, the last of the four to die that night and the last of them to be taken away, the man’s heart started beating again.
I cannot begin to describe the extent of this man’s injuries, the internal bleeding, and the damage caused by the shrapnel that had worked its way into his heart. Every pulse of that tired organ shredded it further, and it should not have been beating at all, that was quite impossible.
He was the 31st surgery of the night. They brought him down as soon as the batman found his pulse, and Sister E. had only just finished her macabre tale. I forget what I said to her. Some platitudes, perhaps I told her to get some sleep. I went back to assist with this new case, and I cannot describe what we found when we opened his chest.
His heart was beating, although the extent of his injuries were such that it couldn’t possibly be. There were holes in it. The ulcers in his lungs and the smell was diabolical. He was rotting already, a lump of necrotic flesh on the table, and there we were, taking out shrapnel in an operation that would surely be the death of him, and yet his heart would not stop.
He was bleeding profusely, but the blood didn’t seem to end.
I can’t explain that either. He lost more than five pints of it on that table, his heart pumping and pumping and pumping, and we couldn’t stop it, he leaked everywhere, and yet he always seemed to have more blood in him.
Well, we patched him up and put him in a monk’s cell on his own, but nobody could explain what we had all seen. Of course, we had been at this all night, we were all exhausted, and we couldn’t be sure of anything. It frightens me a little to think we performed surgery in that state at all, looking back, if this was indeed a shared delusion that all of us there experienced.
But the fact remains: that poor man was not dead, and he would not die.
Yet we could not make him any better.
We dealt with this state of affairs for two weeks, while I exhausted every rational explanation I could come up with, and Sister E. avoided P. the whole time, and trembled whenever she saw her.
Then I remembered what Sister E. had said about P., that phrase, “I will have no more death on my ward”, and I made up my mind to talk to her. She seemed most distressed by the state of the men, as were we all by then, and her usual stoicism was clearly under strain.
“I don’t understand why I can’t just tell it all to go away, and make them better,” she said to me, and her voice, normally a lovely rich alto, was harsh and almost a growl. And then she started to cry.
It wasn’t because she was upset at death or that she was simply overworked. She scrunched her face up in this furious sort of grimace, gritted her teeth while baring them, and tears rolled down her cheeks, as if she was too angry for words.
Well, I don’t know what she meant by ‘tell it all to go away’, but once more, I felt that rush of something radiating from her to me, and all the hairs on my arms stood on end.
I do not know if you have ever been in the presence of something or someone who is truly dangerous, Kitty, but now I can say that I have. And I don’t mean dangerous in the way that bombs are dangerous, or in the way infection is dangerous. I mean dangerous in the sense that not just your life, your world’s very existence, sits outside of one’s control, and is entirely in the power of the one standing not two feet away.
You might think this an absurd exaggeration, but I truly felt in that moment that if she wanted to, she could erase us all as if we had never been, and Belgium too, and France, and Germany, and England, and wipe us all off the map forever if that was what it took to end the war.
And she was angry. I decided I did not want to know what she could do if she was angry, and I did the only thing I knew how to do – I treated her like any other overwrought nurse in my hospital.
“Now then, nurse,” I said with all the authority I didn’t feel, “Pull yourself together, there’s a good chap. No crying in front of the boys. You chose this profession, and you must accept death as part of it. It is not our business to decide who lives and dies – it is our task to nurse them. You are part of this hospital, and you must learn to work with others: the world is not on your shoulders alone, although I dare say we have all felt like that at times. Just remember, there is no room for ego here, and you must learn to lean on your fellow nurses. Now wash your face, and do your job. No one is asking more of you than that.”
I do not know where I got the courage to say such a thing to this girl, and I do not know what part of that worked, but there was a moment of dead silence, where all the sounds of the hospital ceased.
I could hear nothing, save my own pulse, and P. was staring me right in the eyes.
I could not move a muscle. I felt if I did, I would fall, and keep falling forever.
Then she blinked, and everything came back in such a rush, the sounds, the smells, the reality of it all, that I was suddenly dizzy. It was almost as if, just for a moment, I had been somewhere else.
“Yes, Sister,” she said meekly, or as meek as I have ever heard her, and she marched off to wash her face and get on with her work, and that was that.
But after that night, as she visited the men and did her rounds, they started dying again. It was as if whatever had them bound to their beds in its unrelenting, cruel grasp, simply let them go.
And I am telling you this, Kitty, because I simply can’t explain it. Please write back and tell me I’m imagining things, and I will happily believe you.
Your loving sister,
S.
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