The Battle For A Volunteer Nurse's Soul Is Waged In Soldier's Laps

At the end of the first episode of The Crimson Field, though it was clear that the show is a thoughtful, elegant drama, it might still have room for a soap opera-worthy villainess, and that Sister Quayle could be it. The series premiere establishes her evil origin story: her ambition has been thwarted by the promotion of the much younger and presumably less experienced nurse Carter to Matron. It even shows her performing a shocking act of perfidy -- telling VAD Marshall she'd distributed the fruitcake the VAD had brought from home to the injured men, and then keeping it for herself. But the second episode doesn't just flesh out Sister Quayle's newest antagonist, late-arriving Sister Joan Livesey; it immediately puts the two of them at odds, and shows how they're both right, and both wrong.

On a macro level, the disagreement between Livesey and Quayle is one of philosophy. Livesey has come to the front from an infirmary in Liverpool, where she's had good results bringing along the volunteer nurses by trusting them with increasingly important tasks, and wants to repeat her success with the three VADs who've just arrived in northern France. When Quayle discovers VAD Berwick shadowing Livesey on her rounds, she lets Livesey know that isn't something she considers appropriate given Berwick's limited training. However, Livesey won't accept Quayle's correction, and tries to press her position over dinner: "All hospitals are essentially the same." "No," says Quayle icily. "They are not. The reason this hospital is different from the Liverpool infirmary is because the men here have come from hell. This is their sanctuary, and they need to feel safe, because they have not been safe, and what makes them feel safe is calm, professional expertise, not the clumsy enthusiasms of the well-meaning amateur." Livesey points out that more volunteers will come, and that if Quayle's plan is to put all of them to work inventorying linens, it's not a good use of anyone's time or talents: "Your nurses are fit to drop. Men lie there waiting. Perhaps, Sister, it's you who don't feel safe." "The passion of youth," patronizes Quayle. "It's only natural that you should want to make your mark here, but you are still very new. Don't try to run before you can walk."

Livesey takes this as her cue to leave, but already we've seen evidence that supports both of these positions. Quayle's description of the care she feels the injured soldiers require and deserve is supported by the tender attention she's paid Pte George Shoemaker.

We understand Quayle's position in her argument with Livesey because we know she means it: her assertion that the men need "calm, professional expertise" has already been dramatized by her telling Nurse Jesmond not to allow a volunteer like Trevelyan to do even something as innocuous as feed Shoemaker his breakfast. That the head injury suffered in battle is so traumatic that he cannot know the difference in qualifications between Jesmond and Trevelyan is immaterial. Livesey may want to push the volunteers into new areas of responsibility for the sake of dividing the men's care more evenly among all available hands, but to Quayle, the hardship her nurses may suffer is nothing compared to that of their patients.

It doesn't take long for Berwick to, once again, become the fulcrum for Quayle's and Livesey's differing views on volunteer nursing. As everyone's been dreading, a convoy of 200 patients arrives, and the triage situation is dire. Assuming Berwick knows what she's doing, Livesey gives her a basic assignment: "Wash, change, pulse, and temperature." Loath to tell her new motorcycle-driving, plain-speaking heroine she's less than competent (and thus detain Livesey from more pressing tasks only she is qualified to perform), Berwick tries to do what she's told, and in the early going, her limited experience isn't a problem for the soldier she's assisting; he is in serious distress and keeps reaching for her in a way that suggests how badly he craves human contact above all else.

But then Berwick comes to the point where she's going to have to open his pants, and loses what remains of her composure instead.

Livesey finds her the next day to find out what went wrong, which is when Berwick confesses that she actually never did bathe any men during her training, choosing instead to hide out in the linens without anyone's noticing. What she doesn't tell Livesey is what she already opined to Marshal and Trevelyan the other night while discussing her friend, the patroness of a fallen women's home: that "Men are beasts." Perhaps if she had, Livesey wouldn't have presented her with a fully naked corpse...

...in order to try to demystify male physiognomy. The experiment is not quite a success: Berwick calls Livesey "depraved" and runs sobbing through the camp, which is the condition Quayle finds her in. She invites Berwick into her tent, gives her a glass of brandy (I assume? Something brown, anyway) to calm her down, and gently prods for information about Berwick's "friend" Livesey. "No friend of mine," snaps Berwick. Quayle:

Berwick has not only proved Quayle's point with her squeamishness about the patients' terrifying junk; she's defected from the Livesey side and become, by default, Quayle's pet, to be deployed against Livesey...well, who knows how. It's a blow for Livesey and her hope to effectuate positive change in the camp, but then again, maybe she should have chosen a less useless protegee to pin her hopes on -- one who wasn't so sheltered and simple-minded as to think she could get through the war without ever laying eyes on a strange man's wang. To say nothing of hands. Presumably, Berwick's arc will turn out to be growth from innocence to competence, through her realization that Livesey's way is the right one. Short of that, I'll be happy if she can just grow up.