The Lost Soldier by Costeloe Diney Page B

in our hospital here in France. I am sure you have had some useful experience there, but here would be quite different. We have been flooded with wounded from the front and working with such badly injured men is most distressing and stressful. It would probably be better if you joined up as a VAD and came over here after some experience with the wounded in a hospital in England.
    However, as you asked me, I have spoken to Reverend Mother and she says if you are determined to come and nurse in France she will have you in our hospital here as we could do with all the help we can get. Obviously you would live in the convent with us, and be bound by the convent discipline that governs all our lay helpers, but this offer is entirely conditional on written consent from your father. If he forbids you to come there is no place for you here.
    My dear child, I would love to see you after all these years, but am anxious about you leaving home at your age to come into such a dreadful business. The work here is never-ending and extremely hard. The sights we see are indescribable, the pain and the despair harrowing, but if you have the heart for it, your hands will be most welcome.
    I wait to hear from you again, and in the meantime send my love,
    Aunt Anne
    Sarah read the letter through several times, her heart beat quickening.
    I can go! she thought. I can go to France! All I have to do, she continued more ruefully, is to convince Father.
    She thought of the letters they had received from Freddie, telling of the hideous casualties his regiment was suffering and how, despite all the work of the doctors and nurses in the army hospitals and casualty stations, there was never enough medical care.
    “The dressing stations and casualty clearing stations can’t cope with the number of wounded,” he had written, “and the base hospitals are swamped. Everyone does his best, but men are dying from relatively small wounds simply because they aren’t being treated in time and their wounds become infected.”
    Immediately she had read this letter, Sarah had written to Aunt Anne, her mother’s sister, who was a nun in a nursing order in France asking if they would let her come to them and help nurse the wounded.
    Sarah’s mother, Caroline was Roman Catholic, and it had been considered most unusual for someone like her father to have married into a Catholic family. Certainly his mother had never approved, especially as he had had to agree that the children should be brought up as Catholics, but the marriage had been very happy, and when Caroline had died having her third child, and the child with her, George had stuck by his promise and continued to have Freddie and Sarah taught the Catholic faith. He, however, remained the patron of St Peter’s Church in village, and the children often accompanied him to the Manor pew where they seemed as comfortable as in Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Belcaster.
    Aunt Anne had shocked even her own family years ago by joining a nursing order in France and becoming a nun. She had kept in touch with her sister’s children by letter since Caroline had died, and it was to her Sarah had turned when she had been told by the authorities that she was too young to go and nurse the wounded in France.
    “It’s not fair!” she railed at her father when she had been turned down. “Freddie’s out there fighting for his country, and so are thousands of men, much younger than I am, but they won’t let me go to do my bit.”
    “You’re doing good work here,” soothed Sir George. “Look at the hours you put in at the cottage hospital.”
    “But it’s not a hospital for the wounded!” cried Sarah in frustration. “I want to help nurse them .”
    “You are in a way,” her father pointed out. “By giving your time here, you’re releasing fully trained nurses to go to France, or to help in the big London hospitals.”
    But Sarah continued to brood, and one hot afternoon she let her frustration flow over again as