She hadn’t thought until now of that option, and it transformed her from demented girl into campaigner.
He said, with a small chuckle, you’re going to bludgeon the top blokes into a pardon?
I am, she said.
But you have no obligation at all, you know.
That talk is rubbish, she told him. He smiled at her so plainly but, she thought, with a mass of meaning—an invitation and farewell at the same time. According to what she knew of them, men were good at mixed messages—even Quaker men.
And now it seemed that everything had been encompassed and she could not think of what to say. Ten seconds ached by.
All right, said a provost as if he wanted to end the silence. That’ll be just about it, lady and gentleman.
And so—regretting her silence had signaled the meeting’s end—she was escorted out. She found the main entrance. I won’t tremble and weep, she promised herself. I’ll annoy and agitate. Life would be made tolerable by that mission.
At the front door a guard said, Hang on, Miss, there’s Gothas overhead.
She could hear the bombers now, in amongst the background thunder of guns, the Archies close by and the seamless rage of the barrage at the front. She waited a second and then placed her head in a groove between two stone moldings and began to shudder at the awful perversion of things—of sky not permitted to be sky, of air not permitted to be air.
Men Lost
Naomi could not have explained the exact stirring of resolve that sent her into the street once the Archies stopped and safety was howled forth by way of a Klaxon. But the moment came. At the road passing the mouth of the mairie she saw some young but worn-looking Tommies—their eyes vacant and their pace unsteady and some without their rifles—drifting past. Their uniforms were stiff with mud or dully gleamed with filth. They began milling around a mobile canteen serving tea in the street. These man-boys drinking tea, and standing about cadging cigarettes, were—though Naomi did not fully understand this—the hollow-eyed ejectees of a broken front. Here and there military trucks pulled up and soldiers jumped down with rifles and took up positions at the major corners to try to gather up any further tide of broken men and urge them to stand fast.
An elderly lieutenant wearing the patch of some administrative corps watched this unfold, shook his head, and turned and saw Naomi.
Well, it’s on now, Miss, he said. The line’s busted and we are for it.
A paternal interest came into his eye.
You should get on your way, if you can. The trains may well still be operating. The further northwest you get, the better, for now. Though we don’t quite know where they’re aiming for yet.
She thanked him and went on. At the ornate railway station a few blocks away things were more orderly and men got down from the Boulogne train with their rifles and kits and looked robust enough to take a swipe—at least—at restoring the line.
She boarded the train for its return to the coast and shared a compartment with a priest and a middle-aged French couple. It would have made as much sense to try the husband for cowardice—with her and the priest as judges—as what she had seen that day. The priest read his office book and the French couple and she exchanged a few primitive sentences in English and French about their destination. They either said they were from Wimereaux or were going to Wimereaux.
The railway ran along the Somme and then curved north, and there was certainly a sense of escape to it. The priest—having finished his office—joined in the chat. He seemed to be delighted to know that Naomi was from Australia. Les belles Australiennes! he insisted. Nos Australiennes!
Her fellow travelers did not seem alarmed by the threatened assault on the heart of France. Perhaps they were not as aware it was to happen. The priest reached into his pocket and handed her a small medal. She accepted it in her gloved hands. Somewhere between Methodism and Quakerdom, belief and disbelief, she held a graven image in her hand. And yet to do so seemed of no great import and bolstered her sense of purpose in a way she would not once have believed possible.
• • •
The astonishment awaiting her on her return was that Major Darlington had gone, all in one night, and—said the English Roses—without a proper farewell to Lady Tarlton. A new chief medical officer was awaited. In the meantime, Airdrie and the weedy but obviously enduring young ward doctors did what they could. The nurses knew where Naomi had been—how could such news not get around the hospital?—and were awed and dared not ask her the length of sentence.
Everyone in the meantime watched out for Lady Tarlton. In the wake of Darlington’s departure she had chosen to retire to her office. They wanted—not without feeling for the woman—to see how she would seem once she reappeared. At teatime she came out as usual to make the rounds of the wards and talk to soldiers. Her presence was as ever a powerful medicine as she leaned above them asking after their health in that most elevated accent which many Australians had not heard till they came here. The recuperating officers waiting to go back to the front—their shrapnel or bullet wounds or concussions now healing—were clearly and to a man enchanted by her.
But that evening the experienced could see a delay in her gestures and inquiries—a distractedness that was no more than a tremor, a pulse. The eyes laid on the patient might go blank for a second and then engage themselves again.
Come to my office, she murmured in contralto to Naomi at the end of rounds.
Naomi was secretly and with shame pleased to have a sister in misery. As she followed Lady Tarlton, the eyes of all the Red Cross women were on her, covetous of her closeness to Lady Tarlton. They and the Australian nurses watched them with that fascination which women in a crisis of love generate in others. As they walked, Lady Tarlton questioned Naomi about Ian. Naomi—still dazed from the day but sustained by a margin by her belief in her campaign—told her all the details and confessed her urgency to write and write again to General Birdwood and General Howse of the Medical Corps.
Lady Tarlton’s office as they entered seemed as ever it was. Fresh piles of documents on the desk and around the walls gave no suggestion of slackening business. She motioned Naomi to a seat, went and got a bottle of cognac from a bookshelf—there was no concealment and it stood in plain view—and poured some in two glasses that were on the desk.
Men are very strange creatures, Naomi, she said. And when they’re not, they get punished by prison.
She sipped the cognac.
We had a quarrel. A quarrel—no more than that. Yet he used it as the pretext. It wasn’t why he left. I’ll never believe that. It served him as an excuse, a casus belli, and he bolted.
She drank again. Mmm, she said as she swallowed. Perhaps from now on, the bottle shall be my lover.
Naomi privately thought the bottle was an unlikely destination for all the light and energy in the woman.
The Quaker and your mishap, she told Naomi. Mitchie and her surgeon, me and mine. They are all misadventures, you know. It’s a wonder we put in the effort. It seems I made a fool, or tried to, of a cousin of Darlington’s in Boulogne, some Pooh-Bah in the Medical Corps. I remember the man, and am rather amazed the major was related to him. I mean, the major is a man of genuine talent. But I believe that as a result said Pooh-Bah swore vengeance on Darlington as well.
She drifted off and looked across the room blankly for a while.
So that’s the official story, she continued. But there is a real story. And it’s a sadder one. But we are straying too far from your grief.
No, please.
Be assured—we are just beginning our campaign in regards to your man.
But you did say “sadder” . . .?
Yes. To men in power any woman who tries to deal with them on their terms is ex officio mad. My husband thinks me mad and actually evinces the sympathy of his fellows over me for going native in Australia, for never having the entirely appropriate dress, for failing infallibly to tolerate the primates who pass for society’s leaders as he envisages th
em. So there you are—I’m announced as mad. I’ve been mentioned in dispatches for it a number of times. And so, since I’m madly importunate with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and particularly towards Major Darlington’s poor upset cousin, the major suffers, you see. They talk about how poor old Darlington took up with the mad woman. After showing such promise! According to them, I am supposed to have been certified in Australia and spent time in a colonial asylum! And here is a man with research he wants accepted by a larger world, with valuable arguments about sepsis—a brilliant man. Yet everyone he talks to is thinking not about his argument, but about his mad lover. You see . . . And that was why he went. He had to choose between eminence and me.
Even in her own present state of wretchedness and edgy fortitude, Naomi felt the pain of this story, but doubted she could make any soothing commentary.
Of course, said Lady Tarlton, you don’t want to hear this. I have hopes that despite this show of a trial, in the end, soon, you’ll prove to be a fortunate woman. And have your Quaker, if that’s what you want.
But you deserve good fortune too, said Naomi.
Why ever would I? asked Lady Tarlton with a laugh.
Because you’re beautiful and clever and have a mighty soul.
Lady Tarlton laughed. That’s the very recipe—down to the last ingredient—for disaster. You know, when the war ends I might simply return to the old business and be a milliner. That would fulfill every worst expectation that ever they had. And indeed I love it. I loved constructing those confections that women put on their heads. To me the right sort of hat is far more interesting than anything hung in the Royal Academy.
Lady Tarlton began laughing and shaking her head, weighing the world as they all seemed to be required to do these days.
Darlington will now be treated with more seriousness, she admitted. From the point of view of antisepsis it is a day of triumph. Far more important than an adulterous affair. Except I did not think of it in those terms until now. Strange. In the midst of so-called sin we feel we are virtuous yet.
Lady Tarlton found this amusing. Naomi smiled too, within her intent to rescue Kiernan, and sipped the cognac. They sat in the silence of their unlikely companionship and the coincidence of their miseries.
• • •
The wounded enemy, captured and questioned, seemed quiet, grateful, and so pleased with the food—plain as it was—that it was clear rations were shorter on their side. But now their brothers were advancing to encircle the food of the west. British battalions appeared at Mellicourt and rested along the streets of the village and then marched up the road past the clearing station to the front to take up the line. Nurses and orderlies who happened to be in the open cheered raggedly as they went past. These men seemed eager in their mass and were placed at a distance from their inner, quivering selves by the overall militant tide running eastwards to meet a contrary current. There was a chance they were mere tokens of sacrifice, that the chief praise they would receive from all history might be those few thin cries of applause from the tired men and women of Mellicourt clearing station.
The patients at Mellicourt were cleared as hurriedly as they could be. No one knew what was to come, but it was clear the wounded and ill would be safer in base hospitals. Gas cases were removed in a day or so, and surgery was restricted to men who needed it at all costs. Any vehicle was likely to be used to move the injured—returning ammunition trucks were loaded up with the minor wounds. In a confusion of orders, two eight-ton trucks were packed up with stretchers and blankets, tanks of oxygen, and unopened cases of dressings and pharmaceuticals, all ready to be removed to safety.
Stragglers appeared—the crumbs of broken units—going west and mixed in with families on wagons or pushing the children and their goods in wheelbarrows. Even wagons hauling guns ground along the roads going west—seeking a new but rearwards position from which to pour down fury on the advancing enemy.
It was amidst all that flurry that somehow Charlie Condon appeared. It was beyond belief that in the great confusion of geographies and movements he could have located Sally. But having presented himself to Major Bright he was permitted to find her in her ward.
Go, go! said the Australian matron distractedly after Charlie appeared at the door of the only partly occupied resuscitation ward. The matron assumed that given the crisis he would not be staying long. Sally went towards him. She could not remember what was said when she got to him—the ordinary things, no doubt. Embracing was a dangerous indulgence to display to her matron and fellow nurses—they both knew that. But on the path they hooked each other’s hand until they reached the mess and a sitting room at the end of the hut which no one was using at this furious hour. They sat together and hauled their bodies close on an old settee which seemed to offer them intimacy but—being where it was, where anyone could appear at any second—could not deliver it. She could feel the mass of his upper body half turned to her. Sitting together wasn’t satisfactory. The whole of a body could not be brought in contact with the whole of another.
This is improbable, Charlie, she said. I’m not saying unwelcome. But it’s so improbable you’d be here.
No, he said, it’s probable. Remember how I was down here on reconnoiter. Now I’m with the advance party from Flanders.
They embraced again. Their mouths were so responsive and knowing of each other that it amazed her and gave her at a calmer level a sense of their destiny, and thus of safety. These seemed the most natural postures now—the postures of nearness which under the pyramids she had thought herself incapable of and had had no ambition for.
Mustn’t worry, he muttered. Our men have always been out in the open and bleeding. Now they’re in the open and, God knows, we’ll make them bleed.
She could tell he was convinced of this and his evoking of vengeance did not shock her. They were his enemy.
There’s talk we’ll be ordered back, she confided. Maybe Corbie, but who could tell? Perhaps the Germans will take Amiens itself, for all we know. I don’t want to see you coming in on a stretcher anyhow. And if you try to turn up and smile at me from a prone position, I’ll be very angry.
I have to go now, Sally, he said.
A high plane of a bed in a curtained room was clearly not going to make itself available to them. This was not the time, although their bodies claimed it was. He stood stooped for a while, since love was ridiculous too. Then he ran out to a truck waiting in the Bapaume Road. His eagerness frightened her. She mistrusted such haste. She felt almost betrayed with the speed and eagerness with which he ascended into the cabin and slammed the door.
• • •
Soon after Charlie left, stretcher bearers arrived in ambulances with wounded and told of regimental aid posts and dressing stations abandoned to the enemy with the poor fellows still lying in them. Prisoners who had been put to work under guards making a new path outside the wards were now speaking to each other in very jocular German. They could foresee assured deliverance. Some Gothas overhead began dropping their bombs from low height onto the retreating regiments and French people on the road. At a nearby crossroads two Archies barked at them like toothless house dogs. Morphine protected the worst wounded from knowledge of events. But in many other faces Sally saw an added panic and unrest. For the front from which they thought their wounds had excused them was reaching west to encompass them again.
At four o’clock, when Slattery and Sally were working in resuscitation with eight young nurses—all in the normal attempt to make the patients safe for being moved—Major Bright entered the ward and announced, We have orders to leave. You should pack what you have. Assemble with your luggage in ten minutes. We have to walk to the station, half a mile. There’ll be no one to carry bags so perhaps you will want to leave things.
Sally was appalled. She said she couldn’t simply leave the patients.
Honora said, I’ll stay with them. I am sure the Germans are not the barbarians we think.
Bright seemed impatient with this woman
whom he was said to be infatuated with.
I’ve already made the same offer, he said, but it is not to be entertained. We are all ordered to leave.
Then you’ll have to carry me away, said Slattery. I’m not going of my own will.
For God’s sake, Slattery, don’t be dramatic. I promise you that once we’ve drawn back, you’ll be as buried as you want in a cascade of thousands who need you. But all I know is that we’re going west of here.
There were more than thirty nurses—and a number of doctors and perhaps sixty orderlies—who gathered their lighter kit and set off on the clogged road. They hobbled along with their luggage in hand towards the local railhead. Here they had travel warrants to Amiens to present. An orderly led them by a side road to avoid the blocked main, arrow-straight Bapaume–Albert Road. A spur line came to the railway station near the village and as the clearing station’s evacuees converged on it they met thousands of people—and a further vast and undifferentiated crowd of soldiers who had been attracted to it also. The side road they had taken had availed them nothing—this small station built to service local farms was now besieged by an overwhelming mass. There were men not so much in uniforms as in a carapace of muck sitting on windowsills and doorsteps, looking blankly at the commotion. Guards overwhelmed at the entrance gate to the station let the nurses through and onto the platform, where a rail transport officer who looked oddly familiar to Sally limped about blowing a whistle and pointing to the mass of soldiers and civilians waiting either side of the line.
The officer hobbled up to them and said, Ladies, leave your luggage here. The train is said to be due in twenty minutes. Matron, your women may need to fight their way aboard.
He took a whistle hanging from a lanyard around his neck and blew it to direct the guards to keep the rabble off the track. But the last vibrations of his whistle were overtaken by something profounder and more massive in sound. He blew the whistle again and screamed at the nurses. Across the line, everyone! Slit trench, far side!
The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Page 47
