Blackout

War Emergency Hospital-Summer 1940

THE PATIENT SHOOK THE RAILS AT THE FOOT OF MIKE’S bed. “Hurry!” he shouted. “The Germans are coming! It’s the invasion! We must get out of here!”

Oh, God, Mike thought. We lost the war. I did affect events.

“What is it? What’s happening?” Fordham said sleepily from the next bed.

“The invasion’s begun!” the patient said, and the doors to the ward burst open, but it was only the night nurse. She ran over to Mike’s bed and put her hand on the patient’s arm.

“You shouldn’t be out of bed, Corporal Bevins,” she said calmly. “You need your rest. Come, let’s go back to bed.”

“We can’t,” Bevins said, shining his flashlight full in her face. “They’re marching into London. We must warn the King.”

“Yes, yes, someone will warn His Majesty.” She gently took the flashlight away from him. “Let’s go back to bed now.”

“What’s happening?” the patient next to Fordham asked.

“The Germans are invading,” Fordham said. “Again.”

“Oh, that’s all we bloody need,” the patient said and stuck his pillow over his head.

“I must get back to my unit!” Bevins cried, his voice rising. “They’ll need every man!”

“Shell shock,” Fordham said to Mike. “It’s the sirens that set him off. This is the third time this fortnight.” He closed his eyes. “He’ll be all right as soon as the all clear goes.”

But I won’t, Mike thought, lying there, trying to slow his pounding heart. What if they do invade? Or you read in tomorrow’s newspaper that Churchill was killed in a raid on an airfield?

The all clear went, its steady, sweet note as reassuring as Sister Gabriel’s voice murmuring, “You mustn’t worry about that now,” as she led Bevins back to bed. “You must try to sleep,” she said, tucking him in. “Everything’s all right.”

Is it? Mike thought, and in the morning made Fordham read him the rest of his Herald. The RAF had shot down sixteen planes, and the Germans had only downed eight, but that didn’t prove anything. The RAF had had far fewer than the Luftwaffe to lose, and he knew from his first-year lectures that they’d come within a hairsbreadth of losing the Battle of Britain. And the war.

In the afternoon, a middle-aged woman in a green WVS uniform came into the ward, pushing a cart full of books and magazines, and Mike waylaid her and asked if she had any newspapers. “Oh, yes,” the volunteer, whose name tag read “Mrs. Ives,” chirped. “What would you like? The Evening Standard? The Times? The Daily Herald? It has a lovely crossword.”

“All of them,” he said, and the next several days scanned them for the number of planes downed, which were posted like baseball scores-Luftwaffe 19, RAF 6; Luftwaffe 12, RAF 9; Luftwaffe 11, RAF 8.

The hell with the names of the small craft, he thought. I should’ve memorized the daily stats for the Battle of Britain. Without them, the numbers meant nothing, though they were worryingly large, and he read the other news feverishly, looking for something, anything that would prove events were still on course. But he only knew the events up to Dunkirk. Had the Germans blown up a passenger train? Had they shelled Dover? Had Hitler announced he intended to have completed the conquest of England by the end of summer?

He didn’t know. All he knew was that the news over the next week was uniformly bad: “Convoy Sunk,” “British Troops Abandon Shanghai,” “Airfields Sustain Major Damage.” Had things really gone that badly or was this a sign that the war had gone off-track, that he’d altered the course of-

“You mustn’t fret about the war,” Sister Carmody said severely, taking the Express he was reading away from him. “It’s not good for you. Your fever’s back up. You must concentrate all your energy on getting well.”

“I am,” he protested, but she must have instructed Mrs. Ives not to let him have any more newspapers because when he asked her for the Herald the next day, Mrs. Ives chirped, “How about a nice book instead? I’m certain you’ll find this interesting,” and handed him a masssive biography of Ernest Shackleton.

He read it, figuring if he did, Mrs. Ives might relent and let him have a newspaper, and that even a boring biography had to be better than lying there worrying, but it wasn’t. Shackleton and his crew had gotten stranded in the middle of the Antarctic with no way to let a rescue team know where they were and the polar winter closing in fast. And one of Shackleton’s crew had frostbitten his foot and had to have part of it cut off.

And even after Mike had finished it and lied to Mrs. Ives about how much he’d liked it and how much better he was feeling, she still wouldn’t let him have a newspaper. And he had to get his hands on one soon because today was the twenty-fourth, and the twenty-fourth had been one of the war’s major divergence points.

It was one he’d learned about when he was studying time travel theory. Two Luftwaffe pilots had gotten lost in the fog and been unable to find their target, so they’d jettisoned their bombs over what they thought was the English Channel and was actually Cripplegate in London. They’d hit a church and a historic statue of John Milton and killed three civilians and injured twenty-seven others, and as a result, Churchill had ordered the bombing of Berlin, and an enraged Hitler had called a halt to the battle with the RAF and begun bombing London.

In the nick of time. The RAF had had fewer than forty planes left, and if the pilots hadn’t gotten lost, the Luftwaffe could have wiped out the remaining air forces in two weeks flat-some historians said within twenty-four hours-and marched unopposed into London. And with Britain out of the way, Hitler would have been able to concentrate all his military might on Russia, and the Russians would never have been able to hold Stalingrad. “For want of a nail…”

If Cripplegate was bombed, it might not prove conclusively that he hadn’t altered events, but it would prove he hadn’t knocked the war off course, that history was still on track. The story wouldn’t be in the papers till tomorrow, or possibly today’s late editions, but the weather forecast would be. He could at least see if fog was predicted. It was clear right now.

But it’ll come in in the late afternoon, he thought, waiting anxiously for Mrs. Ives’s arrival.

But she didn’t come, Fordham didn’t have the Herald, and the sky was still clear when Sister Gabriel pulled the blackout curtains shut.

Even if saving Hardy did alter events, it can’t have affected the weather, he told himself. But in chaotic systems everything affected everything else in complicated and unpredictable ways. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Montana could cause a monsoon in China, then saving a soldier at Dunkirk could affect the weather in southeast England.

There were no sirens during the night, and the next morning the sky was still clear.

The fog could have been limited to London, he told himself.

When Sister Gabriel brought his breakfast, he asked her, “What happened last night? I thought I heard bombs.”

It was impossible to hear a bomb in Cripplegate from Dover, of course, but he hoped she’d say, “No, but London got it last night,” and then elaborate.

She didn’t. She gave him the same look she always gave Bevins and took his temperature. She looked at the thermometer, frowning. “Try to rest,” she said and left him to wait anxiously for Mrs. Ives. What if Mrs. Ives didn’t come again today? What if she never came back, like Mr. Powney?

She did, but not till late afternoon. “I’ve been down on first since yesterday morning,” she said, “assisting with the new patients. Nearly a dozen pilots. One of them crash-landed, and he-” she caught herself. “Oh, but you don’t want to hear about that. How about a nice book?”

“No, reading books makes my head ache. Can’t I have a newspaper? Please.”

“Oh, dear, I really shouldn’t. The nurses said you weren’t to read anything troubling…”

Troubling. “I don’t want to read the war news,” he lied. “I just want to work the crossword puzzle.”

“Oh,” she said, relieved, “well, in that case…” and handed him the Herald and a yellow lead pencil, and then stood there while he opened it to the puzzle. He’d have to at least pretend to work it. He started reading the clues. Six across: “The man between two hills is a sadist.”

What? Fifteen across: “This sign of the Zodiac has no connection with the fishes.” What kind of clues were these? He’d worked crosswords when he’d studied the history of games, but they’d had straightforward clues like “Spanish coin” and “marsh bird,” not, “The well brought-up help these over stiles.”

“Do you need any help?” Mrs. Ives asked kindly.

“No,” he said and quickly filled in the first set of spaces with random letters. Mrs. Ives moved on down the ward with her cart. As soon as she left, Mike quickly flipped to the front page. “London Church Bombed,” the headline read. “3 Killed, 27 Injured,” and there was a photo of the half-destroyed Church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, complete with the toppled statue of Milton.

Thank God, he thought, though he couldn’t be certain till he’d seen what the response to the bombing was, which meant convincing Mrs. Ives to keep on giving him the paper.

But when he asked the next day, she said, “Oh, the crossword’s done you good. Your color’s much improved,” and handed over the Express without any argument.

On the twenty-seventh the headline read, “RAF Bombs Berlin!” and the next day, “Hitler Vows Revenge for Berlin Bombing.” He breathed a massive sigh of relief. But if he hadn’t altered events, then what had happened to the retrieval team?

They don’t know where I am, he thought. It was the only explanation. But why not? Even if they hadn’t been able to find out anything in Saltram-on-Sea, they’d known he’d intended to go to Dover. They’d have scoured the town, checked the police station and the morgue and all the hospitals. How many were there? He hadn’t had time to research that because of wasting that afternoon waiting for Dunworthy. “How many hospitals are there here?” he asked Sister Gabriel when she brought his medicine.

“Here?” she said blankly. “In England?”

“No, here in Dover.”

“I say, you have been out of it,” Fordham said from his bed. “You’re not in Dover.”

“Not in-? Where am I? What hospital is this?”

“The War Emergency Hospital,” Sister Gabriel said. “In Orpington.”