by Kim Kelly
It says gravely injured. What does that mean? What does shrapnel wounds right leg/hip, fractures femur & pelvis mean? Dear Madam: it’s a warning. But I’m oddly thrilled. He’s alive. Because this is not a pink death telegram delivered via parish priest; this is a white letter, a slow white letter from Victoria Barracks. Which might mean he’s toughed out gravely for weeks already. No pink telegram to tell me otherwise. Gravity rushes through me with every breath, but I can’t help trembling with relief. Little Daniel smiles in his basket as I peer in at him: ‘Dad’s all right.’ Of course he is.
Louise is in town shopping and Sarah is at her house now; I’ll keep this to myself till I know for sure.
Lots of apples still left to bag and with every one I take out of the tubs in the shed I make a wish. Pretend that my thoughts can reach him, have reached him, will make him well. Not too well, though. I want him to come home. Unfit for service. Now. Grave battle wounds mean amputations, though, don’t they? I’m not silly, and I haven’t failed to notice the increase in advertisements for prosthetic limbs over the past year. I don’t want them to have cut his leg off, but if they have, they have, and it means he can come home. How do you amputate a hip, though? Oh God. I wonder how many women are praying that their husbands and sons are merely crippled today — not too badly, but just enough. Thousands probably. This war is warping the fabric of everything.
The letter also said in handwritten scribble beneath typed warning that he’d been recommended for some award, for doing something or other with a gun under bombardment. I don’t doubt Daniel’s bravery, but that doesn’t sound right: he was supposed to be digging holes, and he has an aversion to firearms. But what would I know? Then again, maybe they say things in these slow white letters and pink telegrams to make you think your dearest was a hero, to soften the blow. Maybe more so now than ever: I think the whole country is in shock at the numbers lost in France, but Billy Hughes is going to hold a referendum on conscription, to change the constitution to force All Our Boys to serve overseas. After all, at the bottom of the letter, in big bold type are the words: IT BEING CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD THAT IF NO FURTHER ADVICE IS FORWARDED THIS DEPARTMENT HAS NO MORE INFORMATION TO SUPPLY. Perhaps that can be interpreted as: DON’T DARE ATTEMPT TO SEEK THE TRUTH. Maybe no one’s getting pink telegrams now, maybe Daniel’s not even … Maybe, Francy, this war is warping your brain. Billy Hughes might be the prime minister, and he might look like a troll and act like a troll, but he couldn’t make the army lie, could he. And half the Labor Party is against him and conscription. Bishop Mannix has promised thunderbolts if the referendum goes ahead.
Daniel also has fractures right arm, and the address given for the hospital in France was quite plain. Get back to counting apple wishes against miserable facts.
Please God, if you let Daniel survive, I will eat dirt for the rest of my life. I will sell my half of the Wattle smack on the third of May next year, my birthday, and I will give the money to the miners, pay off our greedy capitalist debts in capfuls of cash. My Daniels can live on apples and potatoes and my love. Please. But why would God listen to me and my impossible promises? I haven’t kept my last one: Little Daniel will not be raised a Catholic: Big Daniel will have been through enough without coming home to discover his son is a Certified Mick.
No. Sensible, higher thought: if he survives, I know I’m not going to get the very same Daniel back, but the wish I make the most is that there is just enough. That’ll do. That’s reality. But as much as I can, I’ll try to keep that to myself too: keep believing that my wishes make a difference.
DANIEL
‘Watch him for melancholy,’ the doctor says to the nurse as he walks off, as if I’m not here. As if I’m about to be anywhere near melancholy. I’d be dancing, running around punching the air, if I could. He’s just told me that he’s not going to cut my leg off. I have a promising leg, and it’s staying with me. Not quite out of the woods till the wounds heal, but it’s enough to make me feel like the luckiest bloke not exactly having his best day, but a bloody good one. Even if this is a new and improved experience in being arse-bound. Can’t get off the fucking bed bound. Can’t fucking move actually. Well, that’s not exactly true: I can move my left foot a bit, which doesn’t mean a lot in this position, and I could move most of the top half of me if the attempt didn’t mean agony, which leaves only my left arm free, to do bugger all. Fuck that, I’m here. Yes I am. And I really have to stop swearing so much. I’m going to go home, eventually. The doctor said it’s very unlikely that there won’t be some permanent damage. Is that so? Good-o. Stupidity has taken me a very, very long way round the block, but I’ve got there.
Everyone here in this ward has got there in one way or another, and I can tell you that the atmosphere is very bright today. Best get-together going on in France, even if you are minus an arm or a leg or an eye or half your guts. And we’re all Australian — since they have to pen the animals separately, apparently. I’ve got to write to France, my France, to tell her all about it. Got to find someone to write for me first.
Foley walks in — he won’t do. He’s slinged up and won’t be writing anything for a while either. He spots me, not difficult, and comes over. First thing he says is: ‘Sorry, mate. Sir.’
I say: ‘Don’t be. I didn’t have to go, did I. Glad I did.’
‘Does that hurt?’ he asks, looking at the rigging that’s got my legs strung up by metal rods and rings and lines with little sandbag weights over bars above and over the far end of the bed.
‘Not much.’ Not at the moment. Not if I don’t move. A few days ago, when I came to properly after the second operation, was another story: more than a little bit blindingly crook; some padre rubbing my forehead and holding my face in his cold hands and talking mumbo-jumbo like Dracula en français, shocking me back into the land of living excruciation; best forgotten. And don’t ask about the arm: there’s a razor at work in there on my elbow right now. But whatever you do, don’t look under that dressing round my thigh: very frightening.
‘How long will you stay like that?’
‘Don’t know, don’t care.’
Then he says, shaking his head, and laughing as much as Foley ever does: ‘Heard about your prisoner too and what you said to that Tommy major.’
That stops me. I don’t want to think about that. About being mad, about Fritz Johan, anything to do with the front at all. I want to just forget it. He sees, and drops it.
He says: ‘So I take it you’re tagged for going home.’
‘Yep. And you?’
‘Not unless I get the plague in here. Just a surface wound.’
That stops us both.
He says: ‘You’re a lucky bloke then, aren’t you.’
I am. Can’t hide the smile.
‘Well, just wanted to say g’day,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you later.’ And he’s off, not happy about the prospect of being sent back to hell. Poor Foley, Clem Foley; he’s got something in his eyes that looks like permanent damage too. Hope not. I could have been a bit more diplomatic, couldn’t I.
But Dunc’s here now. The fun never stops. And I’m going to have to talk about it now because that’s why he’s here. To ask me what the fuck I was doing.
He’s holding a letter, though. I already know who it’s from; I can see her handwriting on the front. He says: ‘Thought you might like this sooner rather than later.’ He’s grabbed it for me from camp, God love him. He opens it for me and hands it over, steps away while I read it; he’s not just here to give me this.
It’s not a letter that I read, though; it’s a card that she’s painted with her watercolours: Josie’s, our house, on the front and, inside, apples fat on their branches, around a photo of the funniest-looking little baby you’ve ever seen. She’s written: It’s a boy! He is you all over, don’t you think? He is Daniel. Just Daniel. Whatever you’re doing, well done, darlingest. That’s everything you need to know. Magic flies around the world to you in relentless salvos. Your France.
> I lose it in front of him, completely, no problem at all, but I’m laughing too. He’s got a look saying: Well?
‘Boy,’ is all I get out.
He looks at his watch, then he asks what he came to ask, while I’m good and raw: ‘So, now you can tell me the unofficial version of events.’
‘What’s the official one first?’ I’m not that raw.
‘That in the attempt to rescue Strathlyn, who later died, you caught Fritz, disarmed him and handed him over to Tommy.’
I can only say: ‘I knew Stratho was probably dead, so I shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and Fritz handed himself in, and I handed my mind in after that.’ He doesn’t need the details. ‘What did that Major do afterwards?’ Am I in the shit? Do I care? Not really.
‘He came after me, carried on about you threatening him. I refrained from asking him if he didn’t have more important things to do and instead asked whether or not you’d given any indication as to where you were off to. He said he thought you’d probably have got yourself to the casualty station, since he’d noticed your arm. Startling: both the arm and the fact that he still found you a threat. I was on my way back out anyway, so I went looking for you there; no sign, so I pushed on. And then there you were, wandering along the road like you were out for a ramble. Is there anything else you want to say about it?’
‘No. Except thanks. Not for the official bullshit.’ I know why he’s done that, if only for morale, for the others. ‘But for whatever you did when, you know, while I was carrying on. You knew what you were doing, didn’t you.’
‘I’m your CO, I know everything. Including the fact that without this rather more sophisticated splint you’re in now, you might not even be here. Now that’s a piece of engineering.’
‘Certainly is.’ And I’m very, very grateful. Not just for the splint, if that’s what you call this thing that’s got me half drawn and quartered, but for the fact that I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t be around if Dunc hadn’t shoved me on the back of that motor- lorry and demanded I be dropped off here, where there’s a proper bone doctor. Not too many get that service; if it had happened at the front, then I’d probably have died before I left the butchers at the clearing station.
‘So, you’re going home,’ he says. ‘Lucky chap. I shall miss you.’
That gets me. I’ll miss him too. It occurs to me I might never see him again, so while we’re being chatty I have to ask: ‘Tell me why you’re here — and don’t say the same reason as me. I’m here because I am an idiot. What’s your story?’
He stands there looking at me for a second and then says: ‘I had a friend, a doctor, who signed up the first week, killed in Turkey not long after I first met you. So it is the same reason, really.’
No it’s not, I can hear that loud enough: he’s cut, very. So I have to ask him: ‘Are you queer?’
He rolls his tongue around inside his cheek and shakes his head: ‘You really are special. But yes, you could say that. Does it make a difference?’
‘No. I just had to know, so I don’t wonder.’
‘Fair enough,’ he says. And he’s about to leave when I ask him: ‘You haven’t got time to write a letter for me, have you? It won’t be a long one.’
‘All right,’ he says, scrounges paper, and pulls up a chair.
I say: ‘My France. Received your alarming news and photo of the kid. He’s odd-looking enough, so he must be mine, but I hope he’s not too much like me. Received all your salvos too by the looks of it. Trust you’ve received pleasant notice from AIF about the state of me by now. If not, I’m a bit bunged up, successfully enough to be sent home. Well done me. Don’t expect dancing, but otherwise intact so far and however it goes I’ll compensate by giving full effort to the things I do best, for you. Double. Please don’t worry, it’s just a few broken bones really. No idea when I’ll be home, but look out. In the meantime stop blinking, will you. I can’t stand it any more. You’re champion. See you when I’m looking at you. Both of you. Slightly less stupid and very well behaved, no choice, Daniel. PS: My handwriting hasn’t got neater, Captain Duncan is scribe. Seems I owe your father and his connections a fair bit.’
‘That’s it?’ Duncan is bemused. ‘What a sweetheart you are.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ I say.
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ he says, and after he takes the address, he farewells: ‘Well, good luck then. Might see you at home, et cetera.’ And he’s off. Back to the front. On those little feet.
And I am a bit melancholy now.
Bit more than that after a month of this. Very ugly Australian, very surly arse, very sore arse. If one more bloke calls me lucky I’ll … not do anything, because I can’t. And I’m screaming all over my skin to get out of here. You get too good a view of the war from this place: this isn’t a proper hospital, it’s a field hospital set up in a big old mansion, one step up from a clearing station really: fix them up and shift them off back to the front or to some other more pleasant place to convalesce, without the sounds of aeroplane engines and occasional distant shelling to cheer you up, and some poor bastard yelling somewhere, sometimes right next to me. I’m stuck here: Not To Be Moved. Unless for X-rays and manipulation, and I’m not allowed to be awake for the excitement of that: just the extra kick of pain when I come to again. Doctor’s Pet, I am: he’s very pleased with himself. Despite the cramps that sometimes make me want to cut my leg off, cut both of them off I’m that sick of looking at them, bone and muscle are floating around at his command when he blows in and blows out again with doctor mates to demonstrate his miracle double abduction splint that’s apparently successfully stopped a piece of my hip from floating away altogether. His name is Lieutenant Lovejoy, of all things, he’s a very English gentleman, and he says to me today, like he’s talking about the mail: ‘It won’t be long now, we’ll get you down and in a full cast and you’ll be more comfortable.’ Can’t wait for that. My arm has been in a full cast all this time too, and the razor’s still at work on my elbow in there. But you don’t make complaints: you’re too grateful that you’re alive and being looked after. You grin and bear it, or just bear it. Try to.
Through the daily routine, most of which I am exempt from, except for being washed at four am, temperature taken at five, breakfast at nine and then dressing. I find this fascinating. There’s hardly any of me that can be dressed, but come eleven am, nurse is there to get a blue hospital shirt on me. Why? Well, in case the King walks in unannounced. As likely as me escaping. Never mind that it’s completely unnecessary, it bloody well hurts. Then, after dressing, it’s lunch at one, and absolutely fucking nothing until five, when nurse comes and takes my shirt off. Jesus. I try not to be rude to the nurses, they’re only doing what they’re told and trying to get everything done, but sometimes I can’t help it. Some blokes don’t even bother trying: come lights on at four they tell them to bugger off: that’s why they pen the animals separately.
Today, I can’t help it. I look at her walking towards me; tiny little thing, she is, and I say: ‘No. I don’t want a shirt.’
She says: ‘Please don’t argue, sir.’ Firm with her sharp Scots accent, but I think she’d rather move on to the next pain in the arse.
I say: ‘You’re not putting it on me.’
‘Yes, I am. Or would you rather Matron sort you out?’
‘Can’t you just leave it today?’
‘No. It’s only a shirt. What on earth is the problem?’
I tell her, finally: ‘It hurts.’
‘What do you mean it hurts?’
‘It hurts my arm, when you lift it. All the time.’
Horrified: ‘Why haven’t you said anything before today?’
Good question; maybe I don’t know what pain is worth mentioning. ‘I don’t know, but I’m saying it now.’
‘Right.’ And she leaves me be, thank you.
But no thank you when Lovejoy returns and shears the cast off to have a look: I just about hit the roof with it.
/> ‘This is no good,’ he says.
Is that right? You could have done me a favour and knocked me out for this one.
‘It’ll have to be redone.’
Meaning?
‘It’s not setting correctly. Needs surgery. But not here.’
Why not? He doesn’t say. Says something under his breath instead about some ‘damn fool’, knocks me out for another X- ray and puts another cast on it. ‘This should be more comfortable,’ he says when I come to. And it is; he’s changed the angle of my elbow from ninety degrees to a hundred and twenty and it’s amazing what a difference those thirty degrees make. Even better, he says to my nurse: ‘You’re not to dress Sergeant Ackerman unless he specifically asks you to.’
‘Yes, Doctor,’ she says, but you should see the look she shoots him behind his back as she walks away: she hates his guts. Who’d be a nurse? None of this is her fault.
He’s about to walk away too, but he stops and says to me: ‘How you bearing up, generally?’
How do you reckon? Happy as Larry. ‘All right, I suppose.’
He says again: ‘Won’t be long now, we’ll get you down from the traction. You’ll feel better with your legs on the bed.’
No I won’t. I’m not going to feel better until I leave here. This afternoon I watch a very unlucky bloke dying of septicaemia across the other side of the room. All doctors too busy with a full load of new casualties, too many holes to patch and amputations to do today; and nothing you can do for blood poisoning anyway, apart from a shot of too much morphia, which is in short supply at the moment and can’t be wasted on him. Please, someone shoot him. But nurses don’t carry guns; there’s probably a very good reason for that.
I go for days at a time without really speaking now. I am lucky, I am lucky, I am lucky. Doesn’t help.
Bloke in the bed next to mine, congratulating himself at only losing three fingers on his trigger hand, says to me today: ‘What’s the thing you want the most right now, ay?’ Leery, cheery, sliding his eyes over the backside of my main nurse. Her name’s Sister Taylor, or Pam to me, and she’s got enough to put up with herself.
