The Warm Hands of Ghosts

Two days later, Pim announces that she will be joining Laura and Mary when they return to Belgium. She wants to help, though she is not a trained nurse. Laura tries to convince Pim otherwise. She shows Pim her scarred and knobby hands, stating, “If you’ve so much as a paper cut, or a blister on your own hand, well, that goes bad too. Over and over. It hurts very much. It scars. Do you want your hands to look like this?” (60). Still, Pim insists that she owes it to Jimmy to help.

Freddie and Winter dig through the mud. Freddie creates a small opening to wiggle through. He gets stuck halfway and panics, but Winter calms him, and they finally climb out into the open air. It is night, and they lie in the mud in freezing rain. Freddie reaches for Winter, seeing him for the first time. Winter’s arm is wounded and bloody. They cannot stay where they are but do not know which way to go. Heading for the Germans will be dangerous for Freddie, and heading for the Allied forces will be dangerous for Winter. Agreeing to keep each other safe and alive whichever side they end up on, they start walking.

On a passenger liner called The Gothic, the women head to Europe in March 1918. One night, they talk about soldiers who claim to have seen angels on the battlefield, which Laura thinks is nonsense. Bitterly, Laura insists it does not matter if angels are real, as men would merely shoot them from the sky. Despite years of ignoring her mother’s religious paranoia, she feels that the war is proof the world is truly ending.

Freddie and Winter stumble through mud, shell holes, and dead bodies in No Man’s Land of Yypres Salient. As machine gun fire and shelling begin anew, Freddie and Winter jump into a shell hole filled with freezing, muddy water. Another soldier jumps in after them, attacking Winter with a bayonet. Freddie panics and tackles the soldier, killing him. Freddie realizes he has killed a fellow Canadian soldier and goes into shock, his mind spiraling with horror and guilt. Winter grabs his shoulders and shakes him, telling him that it was an understandable instinctual reaction. They now know they are in Allied territory, which means that Winter is officially Freddie’s prisoner. Freddie promises to keep Winter alive.

Laura, Mary, and Pim disembark from their ship in Liverpool, England, and travel by train to London. At the train station, Laura and Pim witness a medical train car arrive filled with soldiers in straitjackets. Laura explains that these men are not physically wounded but have been driven “mad” by the war.

While in London, the women are invited to dinner with General Gage, who oversees the Allied forces in Ypres. At the dinner, the men are enamored of blonde and beautiful Pim. The general’s aide, Lieutenant Young, explains that he and Gage will be returning to the front in Ypres about the same time as the women. He flirts with Pim throughout the dinner, offering to teach her how to ride a horse and shoot a pistol. Dinner guests share rumors from the front about ghosts and a man who claims to grant wishes. After dinner, Gage speaks privately with Pim, explaining that he knew Jimmy. She returns from the conversation looking shaken.

Freddie and Winter hide in the shell hole with the man Freddie killed. At nightfall, they start walking again. Freddie is anxious and tense. To distract himself, he thinks about Laura. She was already serving in the war before Freddie enlisted. She tried to discourage him by describing one patient whose body fell into pieces when the orderlies tried to move it.

As they walk, Freddie hallucinates, seeing the man he killed floating in every flooded shell hole they pass. Unseeing, Freddie walks toward viscous mud that would drown him, but Winter grabs him around the waist to stop him. Then, in the distance, they hear a man crying out.

The women head to France by boat. They land in Calais and take a troop train to Dunkirk. The trip is miserable, as Laura has caught the flu. From Dunkirk, they take a lorry (a transport truck) to Couthove. Laura becomes increasingly ill on the drive.

Freddie and Winter hear the voice again; it is a man begging to be killed. They find the man sinking in mud. Freddie looks to Winter, who nods, and together they use rope to save him before he drowns. The soldier is a Tommy (a member of the British Army). When Freddie and Winter start walking again, the Tommy follows them. He hears Winter’s German accent but does not comment.