The Daughters of Mars (59 page)

And so in the first days of spring Ernest turned up at Château Baincthun—a lanky, strong-looking boy Naomi half remembered from the Macleay. He told her he had walked from Boulogne—where he was waiting for the boat to London for leave. He had spent the winter campaigning but as was usual with men he gave few details. In fact, when she was called to meet him, she thought that what he had been through seemed to sit easily with him. Unlike officers he wore no gloves and not even the mittens the orderlies at the château wore. The cold, wet hike from town had not seemed a hardship to him. She took him to drink tea in the room that served as the nurses’ mess.

Sorry if I’m a bit in the way, he said. He did do an impersonation of a clodhopper in his army boots. And when she introduced him to Lady Tarlton, he was shy and spoke carefully, like a questioned adolescent.

It’s my mother writing every week, he explained to Naomi. “Have you seen the girls?” Not that I’ve got any objection to that. Except I know you’re busy . . .

And he made a gesture to the east, that casual reference to the huge zone of mire and blood. He drank his tea thirstily.

Isn’t it funny to think that after the war we will be stepbrother and -sister? I think it’s a real bargain on Mum’s part. I always thought you Durance girls had a kind of style. Well, as long as you can stand the rough Sorleys . . .

Have you had any wounds? she asked.

I had the gas a bit, he admitted. The stuff that hangs around and everyone’s hoarse with it. But I wasn’t bad enough to go to the regimental aid post. You know, it’s a shock at first. You go into stunts where you don’t think a fly would live, let alone a man. But somehow you go on fitting yourself in amongst the lumps of lead. We’re doing pretty well up in Flanders. Showing them a thing or two.

When it was time for him to go back to the camp she had a motorcar—not the fatal big black-and-white one—brought round to take him. She did not want him to travel alone on foot in the cold.

They waited on the steps for the vehicle. She asked, Have you seen my sister?

No. But if she’s at a clearing station . . . It’s amazing who you meet here if you stay long enough. I’ll wait till after Fritz is finished with this big push they say is on the cards. Then I’ll see her.

Hey, you’ve got a lot of authority, he said, winking at her as the car arrived and he got in. The Durances
are
a step up for the Sorleys.

No. Your mother says that. But she’s wrong.

She watched the car roll away amidst the skeletal trees. Now she had another child to be concerned for.

• • •

A strange thing was observed at the clearing station in Mellicourt. Sally became aware of military police arriving and taking away orderlies. Not all of them, but a sampling. They were not under arrest, she was told by the nurses. They were to be transformed into infantry—even if that left the wards shorthanded.

These events had their impact at the Château Baincthun too. Naomi received an urgently scrawled note from Ian Kiernan.

I’m afraid I write this by grace of a provost sergeant major. I am in the old gaol at Amiens. It’s a bit like a gaol out of an opera. They have gleaned nonessential men from the Medical Corps and ordered them to take up arms and go to the front. I have been considered nonessential to the future of my clearing station. I realize my naïveté, in that I did not ever think this a possible outcome. Madame Flerieu was right. But having refused to obey the order, here I am.

Dearest Naomi, I know you are busy until late at night. But could you write a letter to the deputy provost marshal, Australian Corps, and tell him of your knowledge of my conscientious objection? Could you also ask Mr. Sedgewick if he could write and mention our meetings with the Committee of Clarity? I know this is tedious for you, my love, but I am pleased to be able to allay your fears. The provosts treat me with every sympathy. I just wish if possible to avoid ending up in a prison in Britain—who would not wish that? In the meantime, we take comfort from the fact that the Australian commanders still refuse to impose the death sentence for my sort of behavior. I hate to think there may be some poor British Quaker, or even Canadian, who has been trapped in this peculiar way and could be executed.

She took the letter to Lady Tarlton. Oh my dear heavens, said Lady Tarlton after reading it. Would you like me to write too?

You’d consider that, would you?

Yes. You must go to Amiens at once and take a letter from me. As if anyone would want to
pretend
to be a Quaker.

Naomi did not comment on this curious compliment. Lady Tarlton quickly assembled all manner of warrants to allow her to travel. They both knew it would not be a comfortable journey since Amiens was at the very crux of the British position along the Somme and was known to be so by the enemy.

When she arrived in Amiens, after a journey of many delays, and found her way to a military office near the entrance to the station, she was told that the prison was five kilometers north and to the west of the river. No, no transport. She should try to take a taxi.

She went to a hotel and found a lazy porter and risked giving him a handful of francs to find her a cab. The cab driver was told to expect a similar bounty. So in the back of his taxi she set off across the canals and at last through the suburbs and out into the countryside. The prison rose up—a fortress—amidst the clouds of a dour plain and its cultivated fields. Arriving at its gate she tried to persuade the taxi driver to wait. But despite all offers of reward he pretended not to understand and drove off. It was no problem—she could walk the five miles back to town.

She went over cold gravel to the wooden postern and noticed a bell to one side that could be rung by hand. This she took to with a will. A British corporal opened the postern. She told him what she wanted and he seemed amenable and asked her to step inside. She found herself in a gatehouse which contained cave-like offices. First she had to sign in. She had to admit it was not exactly like the oppression of the Christians as depicted in Sunday School. The British NCO seemed quite sympathetic that she’d got herself involved with a shirker.

And you’re the fiancée? a sergeant-major asked from a more deeply placed desk of the office.

Yes, she said.

Good of you to come and see him, said the man.

He said he’d have a word with the captain, and turned a handle on his telephone. He murmured into the machine very confidentially. Young lady here. Wants to see her fiancé—Australian deep thinker. Serving nurse, named . . .

He cocked an eye but then looked at the register.

Durance, is it? Durance, he concluded. He looked at another roll book on the table. First Lieutenant Ian Kiernan, Australian Medical Corps. Yes, sir.

He came out from behind a counter and escorted her into the yard and along its thick enclosing wall and through a door. They entered now a further room which was utterly enclosed and totally bare except for a deal table and two fragile-looking chairs. Here he left her.

Naomi waited five minutes and grew more and more depressed by the place, and overwrought by its air of punishment—not anticipated punishment either. But punishment already as good as accomplished. Then there was a noise at the door and two military police armed with pistols brought in Ian. He looked identifiably the same Ian as before, but he was inadequately dressed for the weather—no jacket. They’d taken his braces and his belt so he had to hold up his trousers with a fist bunched at his waist.

The guards took up their posts on either side of the door. One of them announced in a voice of triumph, No, no touching.

And no loud opinions, thank you, said the other in his own loud voice.

Ian smiled. He sat at the table. She wanted of course to hold him but when she reached for his wrist, one of the guards said, Miss . . .

If you’re so keen on the war, why aren’t you fighting? she said to the guard. She knew it was a doomed argument.

Please, Naomi, Kiernan pleaded.

I’ve heard that one before, Miss, said the provost anyhow. From nearly every shirker.

She realized she must concentrate on Ian.

They are so stupid to lock you up after all this time, she said.

Well, now that I am in prison, the Committee of Clarity has every reason to believe in my sincerity, he said. By the way, Lady Tarlton wrote and said she would use her good offices . . . They gave me her letter because they were impressed by her title. They’re obviously going to use the same argument as Madame Flerieu. It served her and will serve them. If I was a conscientious objector, I shouldn’t have been in the Medical Corps in the first place. Medical orderlies are ripe to be called on to become riflemen, and they are naïve if they enlist and consider that they will never be asked to pick up a rifle.

But the chief medical officer at the clearing station must know your sincerity.

Oh, yes. But there have been French mutinies and even British ones. And our chaps are making an art form of absence without leave. The authorities have to make a stand, you see, and they are not always exact about how they do that.

He turned his head and she could see a bruise she had not spotted before, running from below his right temple and over his cheek and down his jaw. He put his finger to his lips.

Inexact methods, he murmured. But that’s over now. A rite of passage.

The military policemen maintained their silence.

The strict charge is mutiny, he told her. When I get to the court martial, would you find it possible, my dearest Naomi, to be a witness? If they knew that we were pursuing betrothal under the aegis of the Friends . . .

Yes, she said. You must insist they call me.

One of the military policemen said time was up.

She said to them, Can’t you give him a jumper? It’s cold today.

All the prisoners have a blanket in their cells, one of them said.

She stood as Kiernan was taken out. Alone in the soulless room, she was overwhelmed by a combination of desire and a feeling of
revelatory force. The world was after all malign by its nature and not by exception. Or else it was established that it was wonderful but a madhouse. Young men were smashed for obscure purposes and repaired and smashed again. The Friends were thus the criminals in the planetary asylum.

The trial will be in Amiens in March, the sergeant told her on the way out.

• • •

On the morning before the trial, Naomi again left the Château Baincthun—this time she had been summoned as a witness and by an authority superior even to Lady Tarlton’s. Lady Tarlton had declared herself ready to go and speak as to Ian’s character. But since she knew Ian only remotely, she was not summoned.

At the end of a tedious railway journey she reached the Gare d’Amiens, just by the cathedral, and had a dreary walk through streets populated by soldiers to the nurses’ hostel. Here she failed to eat a plate of lumpen food. A ferment of concern had her repeating in her head every argument for Ian’s exoneration. The skein of reasons rolled and unrolled itself there almost by its own volition. Just a few degrees more of intensity and she felt she would be in the streets haranguing military men. In such a state—and occupying a shifting mattress—she failed to sleep. She knew that most of the Australians were up in Flanders and that coming down here to the trial in Amiens was probably an excursion the officers of the court martial welcomed. She hoped that would put them in a kindly frame of mind.

A room in the
mairie
had been requisitioned for the trial and in the morning Naomi walked to that august French republican building with its two wings which made a near-encircling square within which little leniency seemed possible. Mounting the steps, she presented herself to the Tommy provost at the counter. He signed her in and asked her to wait in a corridor. Sitting on a bench, she saw a number of disheveled British soldiers proceeding to trial in handcuffs, to be judged for crimes of indiscipline and inebriation and desertion.

At last she was fetched by an Australian provost who asked her what the weather had been like on her journey and led her down a further corridor and into the featureless courtroom.

She saw Ian first. He stood in apparently good health behind a wooden barrier to one side of the room. He wore a jacket but with no webbing belt. They must have given him braces for the day because his pants seemed to stay up without the indignity of his holding them. There were two officers seated at tables on the floor of the court and then—at the table set on a rostrum—sat three young-looking officers who were to be Kiernan’s judges. She had expected older men. But many of the older men had been winnowed out. The contrast between the judges’ smartness, as worn as their uniforms might be, and Ian, produced a peculiar dread in her. Her eyes fixed on them as she was sworn in by a military clerk of the court and told to sit. They—by contrast—still wrote casual notes and turned around in their chairs to mutter to each other.

Ian’s eyes lay calmly on her a second, and then he looked to his front as if he had earlier been ordered to. He had a young captain for his counsel—a man with the sort of moustache grown in the hope it will cause him to be taken seriously. His military prosecutor was a major and seemed the oldest man in court—though barely forty years. Could these men all be relied on to judge Ian in their own terms? That was the tortuous question. Were there unseen superiors they would attempt to gratify? And though this room in the
mairie
was bare and lacked the atmospherics of the stage, the members of the court could have with justice appeared in any court-martial drama in any theatre. It seemed a gratuitous matter that a man’s freedom should hang on a ritual like this, with the three immature priests and the acolytes putting on their amateur show.

She was asked to stand in front of the table behind which stood Ian. During swearing-in and all the rest she could not see him. The prosecuting major asked her to outline her own military and individual reasons for having presented herself. Did she know the accused, when had she first met him, under what name did she know him, and in
what subsequent circumstances did they meet? He asked automatically and seemed to have no idea how crucial all these matters were. There was a different order of urgency in her answers.