Her letter to Robbie Shaw—already written and addressed to his barracks in Brisbane, but not sent for lack of moral courage, waited amongst the pages of Baroness Orczy’s A Bride of the Plains. The letter read:
Dear Robbie,
I should certainly have taken up a pen to write this earlier than now. I have very much enjoyed our long exchange of letters but—as you see from mine—I have resisted all ideas of a formal engagement and have warned you of my misgivings. Yet I have also delayed from cowardice in telling you this—that I cannot convince myself of the image of me you’ve manufactured in your head. Since I think we are such different people, you and I are setting ourselves for a great blunder which could ruin both our lives. I will certainly fail you and you will be embittered. Even were we amongst other people on social occasions there would be a problem. You are so at ease—you showed that on Lemnos. Whereas I’m edgy. People would say I was aloof and partly blame you for it. I know above all that we must step down from these delusions we both have.
I have to tell you—and I know a man of your cleverness would realize this—my decision has nothing to do with your injury which makes you look valiant anyhow and a true hero, and adds to your style.
As for the rest, it’s my devout hope that you’ve come to the same conclusion as I have . . .
Towards the end of their England leave, Sally persuaded Honora and Leo that they should visit Eric Carradine at his hospital in Sudbury in Suffolk. They did so in the same mist which had hidden and aided Naomi in Boulogne. Freud decided to come too. They traveled in a gritty train in blind countryside and walked a mile and a half from the railway station to the gates of the military hospital. It was—like all such places—surrounded by therapeutic grounds and gardens. But the cold had driven everyone into the central fortress of the hospital itself. They were shown into a sitting room by a British army nurse, and anticipated they would find Lieutenant Carradine better than when they had last seen him in Egypt nearly a year before. When he was brought in in a wicker wheelchair with a blanket over his knees, the four of them stood and automatically smiled. But there was no smile on Lieutenant Carradine’s lips.
Elsie? he said in a high-pitched voice. Are you Elsie’s friends?
They said they were and introduced each other. They mentioned that they had met in the convent hospital in Alexandria. He seemed to take all this in. Please, he said, sit and pull your chairs closer.
A little puzzled, they all sat. Closer, he ordered them. And when they’d done it whispered, This is a terrible place, you know. You mustn’t give them a thing. An inch and they take a mile. Where’s that bitch Elsie anyhow?
Don’t you remember? asked Sally, trying to hide her discomfort. They sent her to Australia. But she intends to get back to you as a volunteer.
Taking her sweet time about it, he said, and howled. How’s a man expected to endure France after this? But I thought Elsie might have another man, you know. Did I read that somewhere? I think I read it. The Daily Mail . . .
The British nurse—who had remained—said, Most days Lieutenant Carradine is quite a lot better than this. Sometimes you’re fine, aren’t you, Lieutenant Carradine? He doesn’t remember his bad spells. But when he’s better I’ll tell him you were here. He won’t remember, I’m afraid.
She saw them out, leaving Eric Carradine still sitting in his wicker chair. Better not tell his wife you found him like this, the nurse suggested. Because he will improve in the end. He’ll probably always have an occasional bad day though.
• • •
The Australian casualty clearing station at Deux Églises lay on the gentle western slope of a minute hill—streaked with snow and blind to any approaching enemy. It was as yet a settlement of tents and huts. A north–south road ran at its base, and its sides were bordered by two others running east and towards the battlefield. The modest outline of the village of Deux Églises—marked by two small spires above bare trees—lay within sight to the north.
Closer to the village stood another clearing station—British. For clearing stations had been envisaged as working like twins, and the theory was that when one was full of its misery, the other one—empty till now—would then begin to receive. They would breathe in and out in alternate rhythm.
The noise of guns was not simply a louder but sharper spur here. You felt sometimes you could detect in the massed sound—like an instrument in a band—the frightening malice of an individual shell, nearer and more particular in its intentions. Sally noticed that not all the nurses were threatened by the noise. They heard it as a clamorous promise of what would come to harvest in the approaching season. Once again—for them—this year was the year. But last summer had cured Sally of looking for too much from the returning sun.
For Sally and for others preparing the station for business, doubt came with the news that the tsar had fallen and Russia was as good as beaten. Russia from where, said Freud, one of her grannies came, and was pleased to do so. The tsar was not an admirable man in the book of the Freuds. Other opinion in the nurses’ mess reasoned the Germans had still to keep their watch on the Eastern Front and that the Royal Navy had choked off German supplies for the west. Various soldiers they knew who had captured enemy dugouts said you could see how poor the supplies Fritz ate were compared to the good old days of the previous spring. And, said the This-Year-Is-It party, last year had indeed been bloody. But much had been learned.
A late winter letter from Charlie Condon found her. Charlie made no attempt to be prophetic about the war. He wrote a great deal about climate. The mud had frozen and the earth was suddenly ripe for sketching, he wrote, the black craters rimmed with snow. The air had cleared the week before, and an abnormal sun had appeared and the atmosphere had become vacant of gas—which cured everyone of the croaking tendencies they got from the usual lingering of the fumes. No slush lay in the trenches, which were frozen firm. Men had worked out that the regular puttees cut off circulation to their feet and caused frostbite, said Charlie. They were now using sandbags for gaiters. He liked these practical fellows, he said. Most of them had had hard lives. Yet one of them was a young Presbyterian minister who put up with the swearing of the others and did himself tend in that direction. There were some miners from the Hunter Valley who said they were communists and communism was the way of the future. The Irish—the Kellys and Byrnes and so on—were pugnacious and prideful but said the rosary like children every evening.
That was the sort of thing Condon wrote—not things to be embroidered on battle flags, or promises of an early close. Charlie defined a state of being and that somehow consoled Sally more than the hollow assurances she heard from others. The Kellys brawling and the miners arguing politics made the trench like something domestic and tedious. That was what—for Charlie’s sake—she wanted it to be.
• • •
A convoy of Ford motor ambulances arrived outside the admissions ward on the very first evening at Deux Églises and before all was ready. Duckboards were not yet laid down in the big marquee t o make a floor. The question of how many cots were needed was still being debated between the chief medical officer, Major Bright, and the matron—a seasoned-looking, robust woman named Bolger. From the numbers of ambulances appearing that night on the frozen road outside, it was now clear that if this was the season to let the armies settle into their miserable lines and simply outwait the cold, the generals had not taken the message.
In the great bare-floored admissions marquee, the neatly made little man Major Bright, wearing a surgical coat, moved about energetically with the ward doctor and inspected the men laid down on cots or on the ground. Bright walked around the tent of perhaps forty stretchers giving brisk instructions for the disposal of the stretchers. He needed to clear the tent so another forty or more could be brought in.
For the early phases of arrivals, a large number of the nurses, including Sally as a ward sister, were there to deal with what must be dealt with at once—hemorrhage or agony or the coldness of shock. Ot
her nurses waited in the wards beyond this great tent in which the needs of the harmed would be decided. So from their tables stocked with medical equipment—from dressings to opiates to hypodermics and sphygmomanometers for blood pressure, which in the stretcher cases who had survived the ambulance might well be diving fatally—nurses moved under the measured orders of Major Bright, calm Matron Bolger, and the ward doctor to inject morphine or to fill in names and conditions and dosages and the ward destination of each case. Orderlies carried the uniforms and kit taken from the wounded and hurled them into the tented gear room attached to the main marquee, which was drenched in electric light from a generator thundering outside.
Some men brought into the reception tents were found by this hard light to have died on their stretchers and were taken out to the morgue shed. The gray, ageless, unseamed faces of the chest or stomach wounded raised in Sally the ridiculous but angry question of why they had been carried so far to die, as if the surgeons further forward at the main dressing stations—and the stretcher bearers—had deliberately passed them down the line rather than deal with the deaths themselves.
A small mess annex opened out within the marquee. The walking wounded—wearing tags which said “D”—were given hot tea and cocoa. Men with “NYD(S)”—the “S” signifying not physical but psychic shock—pinned to their uniforms by dressing station doctors stood shuddering amongst the walking but could not be trusted with scalding fluid.
On the main floor there was an attaching of labels. Bright and the ward doctor moved about allocating “A,” “B,” and “C” to the stretcher cases—but other labels were also attached—with notations reading “Urgent,” “Abdomen,” “Chest,” “Spine.” Sally remembered having read such scrawled notes pinned to men arriving in Rouen. A nurse must admire the system, though it was one whose structure was under great pressure from the time the first raving head-wound case was laid on a cot or the ground and a deathly abdominal case was placed beside him, and staff nurses rushed in to stem sudden hemorrhaging.
Sally found herself taken back also to the Archimedes—the fetidness of uniforms or bits of them—and the stink from souring blood and that general stench of wounds turning towards sepsis or gangrene or gas gangrene. There was also the threat of panic in the air, lacking at tidier Rouen.
Supervising the movement of the nurses and having now the eminence of being a sister—the subaltern of a matron—Sally had asked to be appointed to the resuscitation ward up the slight slope towards the tent she shared with Honora and Leo and Freud. Her motives—apart from the fact that new methods were used there—were not fully apparent to her. As soon as men began to be taken there she would need to leave the admissions tent and go with them.
The night outside—when she left the admissions hut—carried intimations of madness. There were continuing barrages at the front and planes could be heard overhead. Sally had charge of two young staff nurses who walked with strange calmness beside the stretcher of a chest wound being carried by orderlies to resuscitation. His blood pressure had plummeted and they were in a hurry to get him into a place of floorboards and stoves. They laid him on a bed and piled on the blankets. Sally cannulated his arm while the young nurses set up a frame and hung from it a saline solution they connected by tubing into the vein. The orderlies then covered his body with a canopy to retain all warmth. A little double Primus burner with a metal dampener on top of it to give safety to its flame was lit by an orderly and placed in a concave space at the bed end. And now all else must wait. A ward doctor appeared and the canopy was lifted so that he could consider the man’s pulse and ponder whether he would need to give the patient blood by transfusion. Plasma was promised, he said, but had not yet arrived.
Sally was busy in the resuscitation tent for twelve timeless hours. By then the numbers to do with wound shock—the expectations of anyone working there—had been established. There had been seven who could not be revived and eighteen sent on to surgery—where their fate would be a matter of margins. Four cases remained in the ward—their organs plugging along on the fuel of low blood oxygen.
She connected a healthy orderly’s blood flow into that of a threatened case through a glass connector tube. She saw lesser wounded men turn up to ask reverent questions about some of those the resuscitation ward had handled. And then it all stopped. Nearly everyone except some thoracic cases had left for the base hospitals by ambulances. More patients might come that night. But until then there could be sleep.
• • •
The name that Sally began to hear this time from the walking and those with conscious speech left to them was Bullecourt. The parents of soldiers would not have heard of it. A month before, soldiers themselves would not have heard of it, or that the village of that name had been subsumed into the great defensive line named after Prussian General Hindenburg. Nor was Bullecourt over swiftly. A number of crowded convoys had arrived at Deux Églises and been “cleared,” the men sent off with their records and X-rays. But still three Australian divisions—amongst whose numbers were Lionel Dankworth and Charlie Condon—were in place there and ready to advance again.
There were other meaningless names she would hear from the shocked and the wounded—from that portion of them that was talkative. Le Barque and Thilloy, Bapaume and Malt Trench, Lagnicourt and Ecoust, Doignes and Louverval. Time accelerated at Deux Églises. The passage of men, the evacuation of most cases by motor ambulances lined up in the lane or on the road to Deux Églises—all that had become a rhythmic phenomenon. The relief came on nights when there were fewer arrivals, or even from the closure for a day or so of the station.
Nurses were in the meantime rotated ward to ward—the aim being that they would learn all the medical functions of this endless war. Freud clung to her theatre work—assisting a Captain Boyton from Chicago who had become a member of the Royal Medical Corps to honor his British mother and who had somehow ended up with the Australians.
Outside the mess, orderlies dug slit trenches in case of air raids, and a capacious bomb shelter. The bombers people called Taubes groaned across the sky at night and sought some site or town or artillery park suitable for an exercise of their malice.
Men now arrived clogged with the season’s mud and in tunics rendered solid by it. It was a malodorous mud in which rats had feasts at corpses and which was saturated by gas. In the fields about the clearing station the flowers were not yet out, and the screen of trees which protected Deux Églises were only beginning to leaf. So all the vaunted European spring had to offer was this heinous sogginess. It was therefore out of the mire that a dread letter for Honora came.
His battalion adjutant wrote that Lionel and a section of his company had occupied a forward position—a sort of listening post—overnight. They had got hemmed in there by machine-gun fire. The next day they were seen by the enemy, attracting artillery shelling during which Captain Dankworth was killed with some of his men. Survivors returned by night to the Australian lines. They brought back his pay book. He had been gallant and affable and universally liked, the letter said.
It was at least two days before Honora gave the others the letter to read. With set lips Slattery had continued her work—levelly and without any irascibility. Now she was dry-eyed and rather dismissive of friends such as Karla and Sally when they tried to find the condoling words. There was an unspoken ban on them paying her any added tokens of comfort and concern than were usual in an average crisis. There were living and barely living to be attended to. So get out of my way!—that was Slattery’s implied message. For I have a job to do in public and a shrine to tend in secret.
Major Bright had her to his office. Bright told her that there was an office run by a young Australian woman in London. A Red Cross volunteer—the daughter, in fact, of a former Australian prime minister. The woman’s office was called the Australian Casualty Information Bureau. It would investigate the details about Lionel Dankworth’s fate to the best of its ability, said Bright, and report back to her.
&n
bsp; Both Major Bright and Honora wrote off to the bureau as the spring really did become spring and hollyhocks and foxgloves grew in the fields between the clearing station and the village. This was a time when on rare free days picnics could be attended—for Major Bright was a great picnic man and organized one for most Sundays, whether he could join it or not.
While Honora waited for an answer, certain delusions afflicted her. One mealtime she told Sally there was every hope Lionel was alive. She had written to his battalion commander who had assured her Lionel’s body had been intact. He had not been blown apart—though chunks of shell had entered his body. The Germans—who had advanced the next day—might have found and tended him. For despite all the guff, she assured Sally, they were as humane as we were. And they could have brought Lionel round. But since the men had returned his pay book, and because the identity disks did not always stand up to the heavy conditions of the front, the Red Cross beyond the German lines might not know who he was and would not know whom to tell. Or else, Lionel might be suffering from amnesia or cerebral inflammation from the concussion of the shell. So Honora now took on at the same time the weight both of grief and of hope. In fact, hope gleamed in her like a fever. Sally and Freud watched this with frowns and mumbled words of caution. But she could not be dissuaded from the likelihood of something having saved Lionel.
There was a new recklessness in her too. In speech, the barriers which had existed now broke down. They had been lovers, Honora said. She had succumbed to the argument that God would understand if those who were tagged for death took a few hours to love. You can depend on a nurse to know the proper precautions, she told them frankly, but my period is regular only in its absence—what does that do to us, I wonder? But I wouldn’t want to know a God who would judge. I’m even a little saddened by the care we took. We should have let things happen as they may. Because up there where the men are, things happen without anyone’s permission every second of every day.
The Daughters of Mars Page 36
