This is not so much a military matter, declared Darlington, as an industrial outrage.
But, Major, asked Airdrie, in what way could we do anything to amend the mistakes of the front? We seem to be a wee bit removed from it.
Major Darlington was in no way aggrieved but raised a finger in the air.
Well, Doctor Airdrie, I intend to frame a letter on the matter which I would be obliged if those of you who felt so inclined could see your way to sign. The letter will assert the necessity of a boots-and-socks officer, to whom a section of men in every company will be assigned with the objective that they will deliver fresh boots and socks every two days to the men in the front. I admit that this might seem at first glance a comic suggestion, or one which is uneconomic. Well—if so, let them come to the rear and count the beds devoted to this curse. What will be done with the boots and socks replaced? Let our chaps throw them at the Huns if they care to. Money can be squandered on high explosive but not—so it seems—on footwear. Ah, now I think I have reached the end of my peroration on the matter. I must thank you for your attendance. And a round of applause, please, for our demonstration soldier.
All felt compelled by Darlington’s zeal and gave a spatter of applause.
Mitchie murmured to Naomi as they left, None of that is as mad as it seems. Can you see any of the young lieutenants you know wanting to be appointed boots-and-socks officer though? Doesn’t sound heroic, does it?
Naomi saw a second’s contact between Airdrie’s hand and the wrist of a handsome English Red Cross nurse whose name she was uncertain about. She would not have welcomed such a touch herself. So why was there a second’s strange envy?
• • •
In the autumn Sally heard rumors running around Rouen that nurses might be put in casualty clearing stations located in the region of peril called “up the line.” These were not quite believed at first. Yet the matrons came around the wards that November asking for volunteers for such places. Nurses had not been permitted to work in them before. So there were many applications. Sally, Honora, and Leonora Casement nominated themselves and were accepted almost automatically because of their long experience of wounds. There was the attraction as well that appointment to a casualty clearing station brought with it an immediate ten-day leave pass for England. This—pleasant in prospect—did not count with Sally. In so far as she understood motives, she realized that there had arisen in her a curiosity like Charlie Condon’s before he knew what it would be like. Women too—she realized—might want to be sucked closer in to the fire.
The news had to be broken to their long-standing patient Captain Constable. Sally and Honora still worked regularly on the crater of his face, the screens drawn around to save him embarrassment. Yet he was ambulatory now and sometimes went out for walks bandaged—moving at a processional pace but without a stick along the streets of the Australian general hospital. The matron had at first an eye out for the growing friendship between Slattery and Sister Durance and the unreplying Captain Constable. But it was as if his injury was considered to have unmanned him. Since it was reasoned a nurse was unlikely to be infatuated by a faceless and wordless man they were permitted to become his friend. And they knew that as they were going elsewhere, so was he—earlier perhaps than they. For the wound—considered purely as a wound—was healing over. Easing the packs of gauze out of the mess after one dressing, Honora said, You’re as clean as a whistle these days.
Honora, however, was chary of telling him they were going. Sally did it straight out.
Honora and I have been appointed to a casualty clearing station. We’ll be leaving the racecourse.
Constable shook his head a little in spite of his massive wound.
Honora told him, You’ll be off to Blighty yourself soon—I’d say within a week.
He reached for pencil and paper. “Clearing stations are too close to things,” he wrote.
He passed it to Sally since Honora had the irrigation syringe suspended in her hand. Well, that’s part of the attraction, Sally told him. You know what I mean.
He wrote and then displayed. If you had seen me there—when I first came in, filthy and all—you would have left me for dead.
No, said Sally with genuine conviction. I would have seen your eye. It is a fine eye. As for you, I was looking at a book in the mess on maxillofacial surgery. There are charts of how thoroughly they can remake your face. There are photographs of other men . . . You just wouldn’t believe it.
He scribbled, “Do you think I could see this book of yours? Or will it give me the willies?”
She read this and answered, It’s been rubber-stamped on the title page NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM OFFICERS’ MESS. But I’ll steal it.
She would too, said Honora, safely back on the whimsy track. Light-fingered, this one.
There was an amused grunt from deep in Captain Constable’s throat.
The tome contained graphic news that some might think a patient should not be burdened with. A matron would not have been amused to see Constable skimming such a volume. To save the chance of being detected by day concealing the heavy, glossy-paged manual in her clothing, Sally brought it in one night after dinner. Advancing through the tobacco fumes emitted by recovering men, she came to him and put it in his bedside locker.
Look at this tomorrow, she said, when we put the curtains around you. Honora and I will leave you alone then to consider it. I have marked the places with paper. I know you. And I believe you’ll be encouraged instead of depressed.
That was how it happened—he kept the manual conscientiously hidden in his locker and, after studying it behind screens, gave it back to Sally the following night. He wrote, “I see they’ll take skin from over my ribs.”
Yes, she said.
He wrote, “God made Eve out of a rib. The surgeons will make me. Flaps of skin, they talk about. For a while I’ll look like someone’s rag doll.”
Sally read this. Then he wrote, “The surgeons seem pretty impressed about what they can do. I notice though that the book doesn’t ask the patients what they think.”
Sally regarded him earnestly. You can’t let me down by getting sad about the book. I gave it to you because you’re the sort of man who can deal with the brass tacks.
He wrote again. “Brass tacks it is!”
Honora and Sally saw him leaving the ward the following morning, escorted by an orderly because of his single eye and the problem it might give him between there and the ferry. They had time for the briefest exchange of sentiments.
• • •
On a streaky winter’s day they were driven through tranquil open countryside until they came to a dank tent near a crossroads. Here they were hastily fed and received a day’s instruction on the operation of a clearing station. Put bluntly, a medical officer told them, patients arrived, and within two days, and with a few exceptions, they had either succumbed or had been transported back to base hospitals such as Rouen or Boulogne or Wimereux. The nurses would be presented with a range of cases and with such suddenness that—as the first rule—they must never let themselves feel as if things were out of control. We want women, said the medical officer, who will not be put off, either by the frequency of unfriendly aeroplanes or proximity to shelling.
The clearing stations were anomalous, the medical officer told them. They were close to the front, five to seven miles back, yet sufficiently hard to reach via the communication trenches that sometimes, as an instance, gas gangrene—the buildup of gas in the tissues—had already struck by the time the patient reached them. And particularly so if the wounded man had been retrieved from No Man’s Land after lying out there for a time.
He unscrolled a chart and hooked it onto a tripod. It was a pleasing chart in its rationality and design. The ambulances came to the admission ward and those who did not die there would be taken in a fanned-out pattern to a series of huts or wards beyond—medical, resuscitation, preoperative, chest, minor wounds, or gas. Patients in the preoperative surgery were tak
en quickly into X-ray and on to the operating theatres. Those in resuscitation would need surgery—but must first be made stable. A further diagrammatic arrow led into the postoperative and evacuation wards from which the gas and minor wounds cases would have been early transported to the general hospitals of the rear. All this rationality in the diagram seemed to contradict the medical officer’s allusion to possible chaos.
Now, look here, he said, at the ward marked “Resuscitation,” for those suffering wound shock.
They listened to him talk quite graphically—and even with narrative force—about how in shock the peripheral vessels of the body could not contain fluid; about violent variations in blood pressure; about coronary embolus; about the rapid pulse that then became almost imperceptible. In the worst cases a transfusion of isotonic fluid and blood plasma could be given. Or direct donations could be made by a paraffined glass tube between a donor vein and the recipient vein. Each orderly, each nurse, each doctor would be blood-typed at the clearing station pathology lab in case of the need for a transfusion.
Indeed, glass transfusion devices—needles, bottles, corrugated tubes, the latest gear—lay on a table by the diagram waiting to be demonstrated by the matrons. But staff engaged in resuscitation—the medical officer continued—should be prepared for death to occur in patients without warning and despite the best efforts.
As the Rouen women left the tent for their buses and took their minds off wound shock to contemplate their leave, they saw Freud talking to another woman. Freud had volunteered from her hospital at Wimereux and now greeted them with her usual careful intensity. She was still a grave personage. The theatrical Karla Freud remained hidden. But she joined Honora, Leo, and Sally at a table in the ferry from Boulogne to Dover.
So, said Honora, there’s ten days of muck up and then we’re chucked in the deep end.
As long as a person can keep afloat, said Freud, the deep end’s the right place.
Freud’s eyes glimmered with the promise of pride.
So I’m very happy, she announced. And I’m happy to see you too.
She seemed almost like the old Freud, and was pleased too when they met up with her again in their London hostel—the grand Palmers Lodge at Swiss Cottage. The location was stimulating—Piccadilly and Green Park just a short train ride away, with Fortnum & Mason and its fancy tearooms, and then a stroll on to the theatres of the West End!
• • •
An English officer with sleeve ornamentations—which showed he belonged to an ancient British regiment that probably fought at Waterloo, if not Agincourt—had spoken to them before the show and insisted on bringing them champagne at the interval. This gave him the indulgence to wink at his companion officers and ask, This is a British show, this one. Isn’t it?
They were attending a performance of Chu Chin Chow, a phenomenon of the stage, it was said. They had let build in themselves a nationalist radiance at their connection with the most famous show in the West End—for the author and leading actor–singer was Oscar Ashe, an Australian. This was the show men were advised they had to see in case they were killed before their next leave. The War Chest Club across from the Australian Headquarters on Horseferry Road had bought up the tickets and sold them cheaply to those on leave. The only disadvantage to visiting Horseferry Road with its ugly barrage balloons floating in its grimy sky was that yellow-faced munitions girls—pretty despite the tinge the picric acid in the shells they made gave their complexions—waited around there to make extra money out of the young Australians emerging with their leave pay. But the benefits of Horseferry Road and the War Chest Club included the cut-price delight they were now enjoying at His Majesty’s Theatre. They behaved like girls who hadn’t seen the apocalypse. That was the way the soldiers behaved too. They shared a box of chocolates between them—Freud and Honora and Sally, Leo having been taken out to a dinner by Captain Fellowes. They absorbed the fantastical shifts of light and scenery and let the music reduce the world and its clamor to a string of gloriously vacuous tunes and primitive sentiment.
And then, this champagne in the interval. Honora rebuffed the offer of supper from a young officer. Lionel Dankworth—the angular and kindly soul from Lemnos—was due for leave and would come and meet her in London. This put her in hectic spirits.
And so the enchantments of the evening played themselves out and the officers took them to supper collectively—all on the strength of their sharing a continent of birth with Mr. Ashe.
• • •
Freud joined them again the next day for a meal at Mrs. Rattigan’s Anzac Buffet in Victoria Road—Mrs. Rattigan kept a separate dining room for nurses but made officers and men mess in together. They were all sitting in the lounge afterwards to discuss whether they ought to take the ferry up the Thames to Hampton Court when they saw Sergeant Kiernan across the room engrossed in a copy of the New Statesman. Except that Kiernan was now an officer, with his hat and swagger stick on the chair beside him. They moved en masse to greet him, though Sally noticed that in approaching even decent fellows a darkness—something other than complexion—came forth in Freud’s eyes.
Well, said Honora. What’s a Quaker doing dressed up as a lieutenant?
He rose. He looked well in his uniform—plain as it was and issued by a quartermaster. It was certainly a variation from those of the men they’d met last night. It owed everything to standard issue and little to Bond Street.
Ah, he said, with lowered eyes and a smile which was not quite apologetic. I’ve joined the respectable classes.
He raised his face then and looked directly at them in turn. He said, All the women of the poor old Archimedes.
All the poor old women of the Archimedes, Honora corrected him.
Nonsense, he said. You all look marvelous. Have you sung for the mess, Nurse Freud?
I’ve lost the knack for singing, Freud told him, closing off that subject.
Sally asked him how he had been elevated to this eminence, a first lieutenant. Two pips on his shoulder. Would you call it a battlefield promotion? she asked him.
No, he said, I’d prefer you didn’t. I was working at a casualty clearing station at Pozières and we all ran out of equipment and dressings. Everyone cursed the supply officer and there were complaints that he left the regimental aid posts and dressing stations even worse off. I spoke frankly to a surgeon about it. Next I knew they sent me on a two-month course in England. Here I am. Medical supply officer for a casualty clearing station.
They wondered aloud which one, and he told them.
What bad luck, said Honora.
Theirs bore a different number.
But maybe you could come across to us someday and give us lessons in French history or something else as grand.
I’ll be too busy with my stores. All those lovely bandages, all that potassium manganate.
The tail of his coat bobbed and seemed a little short on him as he murmured with laughter.
My boat train leaves this afternoon, he said. Yours, I take it, doesn’t. You don’t look like women about to go back.
He gathered his hat and the unaccustomed stick. He didn’t make a convincing officer. The others went out into the vestibule with surprisingly little comment.
He asked Sally, I wondered where your sister was?
It’s a simple address, she said. The Australian Voluntary Hospital, Château Baincthun, via Boulogne.
She spelled Baincthun for him.
That afternoon—probably by the same boat which would then return Kiernan to France—Lionel Dankworth was arriving in London. He had booked a room in a hotel near Victoria Station and had written to Honora asking her to invite them all to come as his guests to a supper for which he had reserved a private dining room. So the afternoon ahead lay glowing with possibility. Amidst a horde of Australian and Canadian soldiers, they prowled Westminster Abbey looking for the tombs of the renowned. The busts and elegant slabs and the remembrance plaques didn’t seem to them to be a promise of death, but called up
ideas of an amiable world—one balanced between life and an appropriate vanishing remote from the disorder and imbalance of where they came from.
They got to the hotel in Victoria around six o’clock. Lionel Dankworth was already there—waiting for them in a tearoom and accompanied by two friends. Honora ran up and as he rose gave him an intense, unembarrassed, almost motherly hug while his hands wandered uncertainly around her shoulders. They all went off then to the private dining room, where a massive table was set amidst walls heavily padded with velvety scarlet wallpaper. Lionel distributed his two fellow soldiers amongst the women. They were lieutenants from his company. It didn’t take too many seconds of slack conversation for their eyes somehow to wander off as if they were all at once reminded of something they had to do the next day and which mustn’t be forgotten. After the soup—a lobster bisque—Lionel was urged to his feet by Honora, who sat beside him. As he did it, she merrily tapped a knife against a glass to call for order. He was tall but had filled out at the shoulders, a man of obvious command yet one who was nonetheless nervous for the moment.
Ah, he said.
There was a gap during which he looked at the table setting in front of him.
I take this liberty, he continued, or at least Honora told me to take it, because she was of the opinion that the speech ought to be delivered now instead of after the beef.
He coughed.
This means she wants her life settled on course earlier than it would have been if we had followed the normal pattern and waited for one more dish to be served.
They all gave an anticipatory laugh.
As she rightly said, we Australians don’t tend to follow the set-down pattern. So I just wanted to announce on my own behalf but above all that of my very beautiful friend here, Miss Slattery, that we are from this moment engaged. And therefore doomed to marriage. Or at least I should hope we are.