Just above the nurses’ tents—amongst the wildflowers—nurses off shift sat in deck chairs with their faces southwards towards the sun. Here Honora wrote a further letter expounding her theory to the Australian Casualty Bureau. But the same day she got one from the young woman who ran that office.
We have received an unofficial report from a man in the infantry battalion to which Captain Dankworth belonged. The informant states that on the early morning of 14 April Captain Dankworth and the patrol he was leading were discovered and made to take shelter in craters in No Man’s Land. Captain Dankworth was killed by a shell which landed on the edge of the crater in which our informant also assures us—and you can take comfort in this, perhaps—the death occurred in an instant. Also killed were Lieutenant John McGregor and Corporal Sampson, whose pay books were also brought back to the Allied lines. May I assure you that the Red Cross is active in German hospitals and prison camps. But they have not discovered the presence of Captain Dankworth or of any wounded Australian carrying his name or description. Thus, for your own sake, you should not entertain hope.
Though the informant and his comrades brought back Captain Dankworth’s pay book, they left on his body, which was still identifiable, not only his disks but a letter from you on which he placed great value and which was addressed to him in full by rank and first and second names. These between them would serve to guarantee him an individual grave, rather than the fate of being buried as an unknown soldier.
Nothing in the letter—which Honora willingly showed Sally—seemed to affect Honora’s level of belief, or—for that matter—her work. But she was more subdued and a muted presence at the mess table. The idea of her letter in the enemy’s hands was something to which she returned very often.
I don’t know how I feel about my letter being read by Germans, she confessed. Oh yes, it means he will get his burial—if the woman in London’s right. And I have to say she seems to be an honest woman. But there were tender feelings in there. I hope no bugger of a German intelligence officer laughs when he reads them. If he’s lucky, he’s had some poor German woman write similar stuff to him . . .
Still, at other times her idea was the letter would be read not by some German, or once Lionel Dankworth had been respectfully buried, but rather when he lay stunned in a German general hospital and recovering from oblivion an atom at a time.
Spring and All Its Follies
And now, along with the leafing of the trees, the day sky over the clearing station seemed to break out in aeroplanes. They saw German biplanes flying high and tentatively westwards and grinding at the firmament. Antiaircraft guns people called “Archies”—now moved in at the crossroads outside the village—fired at them from sandbagged redoubts either side of the large crucifix which stood there with its back to the battle. Smaller aircraft called fighters came low over the slight rise. They broke on the view like birds harried out of a copse. They coerced everyone’s attention and tore away with it.
One morning a German Taube—or whatever species it was—appeared so low that those who were then in the open swore they could see the pilot and observer looking down. Sally was walking the path between her tent and the gas ward to which she had now been rotated and saw a pilot lean out of his socket in the air and wave at her. He wore a young man’s larrikin grin. The observer in the other cockpit took no notice of her. But there were lethal reasons the pilot flew low. He was hunting for a target and hoping to find an installation that was not blessed with a red cross—as was the roof of the main admissions hut. Flying on, the young pilot saw the Archies, heard their first thunder, scudded by them and pushed a lever to drop two bombs—for reasons hard to explain—on Deux Églises. This was surely an error of war. There were no military columns in the streets. Deux Églises might as well have been Bungendore or Enoggera—offering nought that endangered the German Empire. While Sally flinched at the explosion, over her shoulder three aircraft wearing British insignia and with mysterious letters painted on their wings came at a predatory rate and raced low down the road to intercept the German who was still foolishly circling for evidence of his bombing success. They went at him—one higher, one level, and one lower.
They were all so close to the earth as to give Sally a sense of their impossible speed. The German aircraft now headed northeast. But it took a little time for its pilot to achieve his full, desperate pace. She heard the British machine guns prattling away loud and harsh. The German turned and dived—trying to lose himself in terrain or the trees along a canal—and the three British planes clamored on his tail. And then came a detonation that vibrated the rural air and was distinct from the artillery background. Beyond the village a cumulus of black smoke arose. The grin of the young fellow who’d waved at her was consumed by fire. Some orderlies grabbed an ambulance and raced away to bring in the two Germans, but they were both dead. And just as well—for their faces would have been smashed to fragments on impact by the coping of their cockpits and the butts of their machine guns, and the rest of them burned.
The meeting of eagles above Deux Églises—the fact the man had waved, gallant and amusing while seconds from death—showed her yet again that Charlie Condon, who possessed grace and style of a much higher order, must surely be in someone’s sights. It was possible to deny it during hectic duty. But she could become immobilized for an instant on the pathways and distracted by anxiety even when entering the wards.
I have been deluding myself, Honora all at once confessed to her companions that evening at their dinner of army stew and beans and good bread. Would they search the body of a putrefying man?
Her use of the word “putrefying” shocked them. They would not have believed Honora would admit putrefaction to the catalogue of her possibilities for Lionel Dankworth. It is very likely, she said, he is buried with my letter still on him. There’s something of me, of my hand. It means that he has a little monument in his pocket.
The nurses looked at each other.
Yes, said Leo, whose beloved Fellowes was working at a clearing station thirty miles off. And he’ll have more monuments in the end.
At this time Germans were being brought in. Some walked. One of them—Sally would remember amidst the flux of cases—had a pitiable bayonet wound to the sternum. It crossed Sally’s mind to wonder if Honora might be vengeful with them. But from what anyone saw she was businesslike and attentive in a normal sense. Why would you expect otherwise? Sally asked herself. But then she noticed that with the German walking wounded Honora sometimes briskly removed their jackets and exhaustively searched their pockets—almost as if there might be something sewn in the seams. She did not ask their permission, and they submitted to her search with a frown. She would obviously search the entire German army—all without hatred—to find the one who had her letter and thus knew Captain Lionel Dankworth’s place on or beneath earth.
• • •
Naomi had not expected or wanted a reply from Robbie. But one arrived, in a Comforts Fund envelope from which she could tell it had come through the army postal services in France. Her impulse was to leave the thing unopened, but there was a sense in which she was too busy to develop any habit of delay.
Miss Durance,
Your letter followed me from Australia from where I was finally despatched to France to be an RTO—Railway Transport Officer—and where I hoped to visit you at your posting. To say that I am disappointed is to put it very light. What I am most disappointed in is your delay in telling me to give up hope of your affection. I can only believe you when you say that my damaged gait has nothing to do with it. It is that you put off so long letting me know where I stand that I can’t respect. You always seemed to me to be made of more forthright material. You did warn me that when I saw something in you I was fooling myself. So I can’t say that you missed out on telling me to use caution.
But I must say once more—so many months! On the transport I daydreamed how we would meet up in France. Well, I was a fool. And you were not genuine with me. Since
there is nothing more to be said,
I remain,
Robbie Shaw (Capt.)
There was first a rush of shame when Naomi read this. It was followed by anger at Lieutenant Shaw’s moral haughtiness. He wrote as if she had as good as been engaged to him. That was his delusion. She walked the wards directing the work of the English Roses but rage would take her in the midst of sentences and she would forget their purpose.
What dosage did you say? an English Rose would ask, and Naomi would need to begin again.
But within a mere handful of hours, she was overtaken by a sense of reprieve. She had sidestepped the obvious but most lethal marriage. Kiernan had helped her do it.
As Naomi savored freedom from poor Robbie and anticipated a letter from Kiernan, Matron Mitchie had caught a cold which developed very swiftly into pneumonia. She gasped and became distressed about some jangled, fearful terror of childhood or girlhood. Or even of the Archimedes. The Archimedes must be there, Naomi was sure, in Matron Mitchie’s delirium, since Naomi hadn’t been able to eradicate it from her own dreams.
Doctor Airdrie was the one who diagnosed Mitchie’s condition. Major Darlington also visited Mitchie and took her vital readings and weighed her general condition. Lady Tarlton sat by her bed reading softly to her while—in her own fevered privacy—Mitchie rattled away at phantoms. Even while levering herself about on walking sticks, Mitchie had mesmerized them into the belief that her energies had never been diminished. After this, Lady Tarlton muttered to Naomi, she should be sent at least to England to be built up. She should then go home, wouldn’t you say?
Lady Tarlton looked like a woman due for a collapse herself. Her face had been pinched to thinness by the winter. The spring had not yet fully restored her. She remained recklessly devoted and palely beautiful. Her gloriously disordered hair flowed from the French mountaineer’s cap she wore for warmth. Her arguments with generals had still taught her no subservience. She was talking about starting an Australian Club in Paris this coming summer. Because whenever the boys went to the capital from the trenches, they had to hunt around for accommodation. They were left to the mercy of the YMCA, she said, and hung around on the pavements outside estaminets and the tourist sites trying to convince themselves they were having a good time.
Lady Tarlton had been to Paris looking at buildings, seeking help from generals and making small progress. Her contempt for some of them was probably mutual, but her certainty she would override the generals of the rear was still girlish and bracing.
Floating about the wards, she was willing to talk about her battles with generals in front of anyone, and the Australians loved it—all her lambasting of the heroes of the desk. You’d think, she complained one day in that airy, nose-high, chin-jutted way of hers, I had asked them to open an Indian brothel.
Darlington remained her helpmeet. Not only did he serve his long hours in wards and perform surgery as sepsis bloomed in wounds or limbs were deformed in their healing, but he filled in forms, wrote letters, and then spent time examining tissue from the living and the dead in his pathology laboratory downstairs.
Naomi continued to meet now and then English nurses in Boulogne or Wimereux who had heard of Lady Tarlton’s Australian hospital and thought of it as an amateur affair run by eccentrics. The place was rendered more laughable because gossip of the rumored love affair between Lady Tarlton and her senior surgeon was no longer confined to the château. The fact was that their own surgeons and doctors encouraged their nurses to believe Château Baincthun a farce. A nurse she met in Boulogne asked her, Isn’t there a crackpot doctor there who wants you to wear a mask all the time?
It was the sort of question which called up instantaneous loyalty in Naomi. I’m sure it would be interesting for you, she said, to see his figures on sepsis.
But it had to be admitted he had the cranelike gait and the fixed eye of at least a highly argumentative fellow. He and Lady Tarlton shared that same air of having to push down walls to make the world see the self-evident things they saw.
Soon after Airdrie’s diagnosis, Matron Mitchie’s breathing grew very labored and her temperature went to a hundred and four degrees. The struggle reached a level where she should have surrendered—but of course she would not. This did not mean at all—Naomi knew—that she would live. It meant only that she was willing to endure a terrible death. There would be no sliding forth beneath an easeful cloud of morphine for Mitchie.
By the end of May, her pneumonia had broken. Now she appeared elderly. Her wrists were purple and thin and her fingers trembled as she reached for a teacup by her bed. Naomi could not be spared to sit by her for long. She was now their chief ward sister and—in fact if not in title—their matron. The idea that she should be in receipt of a matron’s instead of a staff nurse’s pay fortunately amused her rather than rankled. All industrial unease of that sort had been somehow washed from her soul. The reward of being prized by Lady Tarlton and trusted by Major Darlington—that’s what she looked for.
At last, a letter from Kiernan!
You must forgive the delay—or at least I hope you might. I received your news about Robbie Shaw with a delight I won’t disguise. I feel a devotion to you that is total. We were in the mist but utterly identified each other. Is that your impression too? If it’s not, please ignore me. Here I am talking to a woman who has just liberated herself and I’m suggesting new shackles.
He then nominated dates on which he would have leave in Paris.
If my letter is not an utter mystification, would you consider the following: that we undergo a betrothal ceremony—the first step to marriage should you desire that—at the Friends’ chapel in Paris? There is one, as it turns out. You may seek some other secular gesture we could make, and if that is what you would like then that is what we shall do. But the reason I suggest the Friends is because the process is thoughtful yet not binding, sensible and not loud. It strikes me that those qualities suit you. You are not a Friend, nor need you to be, nor am I attempting to make one of you. You are dearer to me than that.
If this letter is craziness in your eyes, don’t feel you need to reply . . .
It was instantly apparent to Naomi that what Kiernan wanted was what she wanted. She believed in that formula—“thoughtful yet not binding, sensible and not loud.” It was easy to tell Lady Tarlton she wished to meet her fiancé (the term “boyfriend” was fatuous) in Paris and that it was important to his religion that there be a ceremony of betrothal.
You have a fiancé? asked Lady Tarlton.
I’ve just received the suggestion by mail, said Naomi.
A ceremony? Is he Jewish? asked Lady Tarlton.
He’s a member of the Society of Friends.
Quakers, she said. How fascinating. My family, of course, were Friends. I, however . . . I’m afraid I let it go. But, though human, they’re not given to as much hypocrisy as the others, you understand.
Naomi took the afternoon train from Boulogne to Paris and found her way to the British Nurses’ Home, which was an ornate place facing the ordered spaces of the Champs de Mars. For the purpose of betrothal, Lieutenant Kiernan had been given one day’s leave and collected her—as a telegram had promised—at nine o’clock on the Sunday morning from the front of the nurses’ home. She felt the unsullied and irreplaceable joy of seeing him. There was no sense in her of being conscripted for some alien ceremony. He wore a brown suit—it was the first time Naomi had seen him in civilian mode. So dressed he seemed a novelty and—even more—as if a dimension had been added to him.
I wouldn’t impress them if I turned up in uniform, he told her.
Should I have worn something else?
Oh, no. Nurses are obvious noncombatants.
Their cab took them across the river. It was starting to be a splendid, still morning and the river swept away silver-green as the taxi made for the region named Montparnasse. The cab driver was not certain of which alley off the Rue de Vaugirard to drop them, but at last a point was selected and Ia
n helped her forth onto the pavement and paid the driver.
I think it’s just along here, he reassured her when the cab was gone. This is it, I’m sure, he said, pointing down a cobbled entryway. My informant told me a double wooden door painted black.
They found such a wooden door where Ian Kiernan had expected it to be. But the rooms above it showed no sign of life. Naomi was content with the hour, and delighted simply to occupy the place beside him. They smiled at each other. She took off one of her leather gloves just because it was a warm enough day, and he lifted her bare hand and put his lips to it.
Be careful you don’t catch anything, she said.
Right you are, he said, but shook his head. It’s very Australian, he said, to debunk a man’s kiss. I hope you won’t feel obliged to do it in subsequent instances.
A spry little man of about sixty years, wearing a good-quality alpaca suit, an upright collar, a somber tie, but with kid gloves on his hands and a fashionable cane under his arm, came down the alley. He had already seen them and adopted a smile and increased his pace.
He looks like Billy Hughes, she whispered to Ian.
Sedgewick, the man said as introduction. You must be Brother Kiernan. How amazing that there are Friends in a place like Melbourne.
Naomi thought the same could be said for Paris.
I am the registering officer and the clerk for today’s session. We have perhaps twenty-eight members. But sometimes we have surprise arrivals—Red Cross people who are Friends. There are also some Quaker ambulances . . . You have both brought your records? Good. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind my keeping them until after the meeting.
The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Page 37
