The Daughters of Mars (61 page)

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!

Beneath the bombers they ran across the tracks and threw themselves into the trenches. They clung close. Slattery and Leonora were beside Sally, who had a brief view of Freud along the trench. Freud was hunched yet somehow looking detached from the peril. While the
bombs could scare the deepest atoms within Sally, there was a part of Freud that could not be alarmed.

Above them were sounds more vast, she was sure, than anything that had been in their universe before—enmity that made the walls of earth shudder like a land in earthquake.

Their stocks of thunder depleted, the Gothas at last vacated the air. There were now hollow noises of lamentation from the earth above the trenches, and they climbed out, chastened. Major Bright and other doctors were traveling round in a spot where there were wounded and a mess of dead. Soldiers and men and women lay like winnowed stalks. Inspection showed Sally and the others that a mother and two small children—laid out neat as if for burial—had been killed by concussion. A regimental sergeant-major crossed the lines—a man still in control—and said the captain regretted to inform them that the rail line had been destroyed just a few hundred yards west.

I’m afraid that you’ll have to leave your luggage in the ticket office, said the sergeant-major, which I’ll lock. Then you’d better take off by foot.

They presented themselves to Bright and asked to be permitted to move amongst the injured. The curse was they had no equipment. Sally attended uselessly to a hemorrhaging boy with badges which declared Staffordshire Light Infantry. Some tried to treat with handkerchiefs and other oddments those soldiers who had been hit by shrapnel. In a kind of exasperation and clearheadedness Bright ordered them to get going and threw their bags into the ticket office at the station. They set off along the line—some with hand luggage and some with nothing. They were no longer separate from the beaten troops and the fleeing French.

They made relatively fast time the first mile and then—in a laneway by the rail—there appeared a string of five lorries, rocking over the mud which a few genuine spring days had mercifully hardened. All the nurses were to board them, said Bright. Light was fading as they climbed up as clumsily as they liked. No one expected athleticism from them now.

Many fell asleep under the canopies of the trucks and were woken after a while by stiffness. They alighted into a cold spring night at a crossroads where two British casualty clearing stations stood. The matron divided them into two parties and half were sent to the station north of the road to crowd in with the nurses there and half south.

Sally and the others sent to the south side waited in the nurses’ mess as a brisk British matron had orderlies carry palliasses and blankets for them into the women’s hut. As they waited they washed as well as they could, made cocoa and ate bread. Then they went into the hut—amidst the bedsteads of the British girls—and found their places on the floor and slept.

In the morning as they went from the tent to help in the wards, they saw a new battalion marching in the most splendid order down the road towards Albert. So used were they to disorder by now that the sight of hundreds of men advancing by company seemed a forgotten spectacle. The first time they had seen men move with more than training intentions had been in Egypt in eons past. Those men were immaculate and unsullied and accompanied by music. The nurses thought the music had been crushed by now. But these men gave off a similar air of solidity both as a mass and at the core of each component soul. British nurses standing amongst the huts and tents were telling them, It’s your Australians!

The fact that these were of her tribe and looked unflustered seemed like a curative for the Allied retreat and evoked in Sally and the others a primitive urge for celebration. Hope insisted on rising as it had in the ill-informed spring of 1916. They started hauling out handkerchiefs to wave, unaware for now of this being a commonplace of war and a means to stoke martial purpose. They went running down towards the road swinging them—cheering ecstatically as if this column were not simply a fragment of an army or a mere stone thrown into the maw of a gale but a total answer.

Leonora yelled, Gidday, boys! to them, and the men said, Crikey, it’s Australian nurses. And men roared out that they were going to go
and get the dingoes. That they’d show Fritz he shouldn’t have left his dugouts. They’d come down from Belgium (following routes Charlie might have had some role in reconnoitering) to do that. This energy and ferocious purpose they gave off sent the women into a further delirium. Yesterday—the pain of being refugees and powerless. Today—this, the antidote. Now there were trucks, and another battalion, and Australians yelling,
Fini
retreat, girls! They looked so fresh because they had just left the railway and were full of marching. And if they were maniacs and spat in the face of reality, then theirs was a mania necessary for the morning.