Standing in the peaceful solitude, it was hard to believe that a terrible battle raged near Ypres

Ruby and Ellen walked with locked arms, humming tunelessly. Despite all the tragedies of the past, in that moment Ellen felt almost content. There was so much to look forward to: teaching at the school, sharing her house with Ruby and Dougie, participating in the Society of Lady Artists. In August she was going to take a trip to Paris with Amy before she married. Amy was going for the fashion houses, as she intended to have a quite magnificent trousseau, and Ellen was going for the painters.

But life, Ellen had already discovered, never turned out quite as you’d thought or hoped. Just six weeks after her exhibition, the archduke Ferdinand was assassinated; a few days later Britain declared war on Germany.

Amy and Ellen’s trip to France was put off. Amy declared the war would be over by Christmas, though Ellen had her doubts.

Bewildered

Then, at the beginning of September, Norah paid a visit to the house. She sat in the kitchen, her hands cradled around a cup of tea as she subjected Ellen to one of her intense gazes.

“This war won’t be over before Christmas,” she began in her stern, no-nonsense way. “Any fool can see that.”

“I suppose,” Ellen agreed. She could not yet get her head around the idea of a war. She’d seen the boys in khaki marching off to the train and felt bewildered.

Norah was silent for a moment, her lips pursed in thought. “I know I’ve always said art is important,” she finally said. “And it is. But sometimes more is needed and this is one of those times.”

Ellen said nothing, for she had no idea what her former landlady was getting at. “I intend to join the Scottish Women’s Hospital at Royaumont,” Norah declared.

Ellen had heard of the organisation, founded by the suffragette Elsie Maud Inglis. Rejected by the British Army despite having raised £5,000, the Women’s Hospitals had offered their services to the French, and, joined with the French Red Cross, they had set up a hospital to treat the French wounded.

“That’s very good of you, Norah,” Ellen replied. Norah arched an eyebrow.

“One does what one must.” She paused to take a sip of tea and then put her cup down. “Why don’t you join me? There can be no greater cause than serving the wounded. The school will be here when the war is over. We shall all have to pick our lives back up, one way or another. But we are needed now.”

She leaned forward and took Ellen’s hand in hers. “Join me,” she urged. “Come to Royaumont and nurse the wounded.”

No peace

Ellen stood by the arched window of the abbey at Royaumont and gazed out at the meadows now cloaked in moonlight. Standing there in the peaceful solitude of a summer’s evening, it was hard to believe that a terrible battle raged north, near Ypres.

For the last week the women and patients at the Abbey of Royaumont had heard the constant booming and then the terrible explosion of mines the British Army had planted underneath German trenches. Soon the wounded would come off the hospital trains at Creil, and then Ellen knew there would be no peace at all.

It had been two-and-a-half years since she and Norah had joined the Scottish Women’s Hospital and come to Royaumont. It had not been an easy journey.

Along with her friend, Letitia Portman, who had only just completed her medical studies at Edinburgh, they had joined the indomitable Frances Ivens and crossed the Channel on a stormy night in December. It had not, Ellen reflected, been easy work, but in the last few years she had made many friends and found much joy.

When, in December 1914, they’d arrived at the abbey leased to them by a Monsieur Goulin, they had expected, according to Miss Ivens, “a fine house with ample accommodation, good drainage and water supply and electric lighting”.

What they had found was a decrepit, massive building that was in sore need of repair.

Many of the medieval rooms with their vaulted ceilings and arched windows and doorways were filled with masonry rubble, as well as straw and rubbish from when the Uhlans had bivouacked there during the Battle of the Marne.

There was no running water, no electricity and the enormous stove in the ancient kitchen had not been lit in over a decade.

Their hospital equipment and the mattresses they were meant to sleep on had not arrived, and so for the first few weeks they slept huddled on blankets and straw on the stone-flagged floor, dressed in every piece of clothing they possessed in an attempt to ward off the bone-deep chill.

Despite the cold and dirt, it had almost become jolly, Ellen remembered with a smile, as if they were on some sort of strange holiday.

There had been something invigorating about scrubbing stone floors by candlelight, and singing as they washed the dishes with buckets of icy water brought from the spring.

First the hospital had had to be inspected by the Service de Santé of the French Red Cross, and Miss Ivens and her crew had received yet another setback when it failed to pass its inspection on Christmas Eve.

The wards they’d worked so hard on had been dismissed by the inspectors as “cowsheds”, sending many of the hard-working orderlies and nurses into a fury. Miss Ivens, however, was far more practical, and within hours of the inspectors’ departure, she was shifting beds and sweeping floors.

Stalemate

Despite the bad news from the Service de Santé, the 25 women who comprised the first contingent of doctors, nurses, orderlies and drivers had a merry Christmas.

The cooks, under the leadership of Dorothy Littlejohn, rose to the occasion, and provided a traditional Christmas dinner.

A local woman had given them a mistletoe bough decorated with flags and ribbons and everyone’s spirits were raised by the festivities. The second inspection on January 6 passed without a hitch.

That fresh wave of optimism, Ellen remembered, had lasted through the spring of 1915. Both sides had been enduring a stalemate on the Western Front, and trenches ran all the way from Verdun to the coast south of Ostend.

Then, in February, the fighting was renewed, and by the end of March the French had lost 50,000 men.

More tomorrow. On Renfrew Street was previously a serial in The People’s Friend. For more great fiction, get The People’s Friend every week, £1.30 from newsagents and supermarkets.

Artwork: Dave Young