The Daughters of Mars (46 page)

Before she could he gave her further motive. He said he was unsure—as everyone was—about future leaves. But—though it was not his business—he would come back and find out how she stood with her prospective fiancé.

I’ll be posting a letter on that matter, she said.

To me? he asked with all the teasing leisure of the implicitly chosen man.

If I’m to write to you, I’ll need your address.

“Third Australian Casualty Clearing Station” would find me, he assured her. Oh, and you’d better add “France.” Though we might be in Belgium for all I know.

I’ll be telling Robbie Shaw, said Naomi out into the fog, that I’ve decided I can’t condemn him or me to all that misery and disappointment just because of some sense of honor.

Ah, he murmured—and coughed.

Stuck for words are you? she said. Usually you fellows want to make all the declarations and use all the adjectives.

There are many adjectives I’d like to use. But you’ve warned me off.

Well, then, I’ll do the job. You are a noble soul, Kiernan. I would in
fact go nearly anywhere for you. I don’t mean where you’re going now. I mean generally and for good.

He coughed. Good gracious, he said. Give me a moment. I’m outflanked and flustered.

He kissed her cheek and she turned and kissed his—a kiss far more rationed on both their parts than she would have preferred.

Gosh, he said. We’ve still got time to have champagne.

This is enough, she told him. Anyone could have champagne!

They listened for traffic on the promenade. Since there was none, they crossed it clamped close by held elbows. They came again to the apartments, hotels, restaurants, and shops along the front. He kissed her on the point of the cheek and at greater length.

It
is
quite a changed world indeed, he told her, in which women have the courage to say what must be said.

She had to return to duty. He signaled a cab that emerged from mist. They traveled together through its opaque grayness to Château Baincthun. The cab would need to take Kiernan back to town, and she told its driver to stop at the gate. Kiernan seemed to understand she did not want to take him further. She wanted him to be secret yet. She chose to arrive alone at the château—she knew mist would protect her as she approached it up the frozen driveway under the enhanced murk of the elms. He went a few steps with her and kissed her again in a way she considered more satisfactory and which promised less cautious experiments eventually. He murmured, There is nothing a person can say at a moment like this.

Lingering around is hard, she agreed. But wait a minute anyhow.

She contemplated his face.

I wish I was French. Then I could pray to the Virgin for your safety.

Sadly, it hasn’t helped the French. And, as you know, I am a man of the rear.

You almost sound as if you wish you weren’t.

Young men feel the pull of self-immolation. If they didn’t, none of this would be happening and the château here wouldn’t be full.

Well, maybe you should go now, she said. Because the conversation’s straying.

You must let me know when you hear from Captain Shaw.

The last contact was the best. She felt the pressure of his arms and the potential pressure and mass of his body. The only way to deal with this pleasure was—when it ended—to give him a small and playful push. He vanished into the cab, and she saw him go. He looked at her through the near-opaque oval rear window of the taxi. Mist consumed the vehicle but then she was held in place by its receding sound. That soon vanished from the air and she walked on crackling ground up to the architectural grimness and cold corridors of the château.

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. Other 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.