You must talk to Lady Tarlton, Naomi urged her after greetings. This going-south idea is doing no good at all.
That may be so, Airdrie admitted and reached for a cigarette. But convincing the boss lady is another thing. Look, Mitchie will be hunky-dory once she gets there.
It makes good sense medically, said Naomi. Except Mitchie has a real dread.
What is there to dread? asked Airdrie. I wish she were sending me.
Yet Airdrie could tell Naomi would not let the question rest.
I’ll go and see Pretty Polly myself, Airdrie sighed. But you come too.
They went down the corridor and knocked on Lady Tarlton’s office door. The young London Red Cross woman who worked as her secretary opened it. Lady Tarlton was at the desk frowning over documents. The office looked cluttered at first view—there were piles of paper around the walls, for example—but it did not take long before you saw they were organized, that each individual suburb of paper beneath the citadel of the desk had been deliberately assembled by the secretary and put in folders by alphabetic order and held in place by paperweights. Here were bills and requisitions, rental agreements, invoices for repairs and food and heating fuel and linen—some supplied by the military, some supplemented by her own purse and that of the London committee to whom she must send proper accounts. She looked up and greeted them with her normal flustered warmth.
Naomi and Airdrie did not sit. Naomi frankly made her point about Mitchie. When she was finished Lady Tarlton sighed a long, musical sigh. We must go and see her then, she said at last, dropping her pen and fetching up a shawl to wear in the corridor.
The door of Mitchie’s room was opened by the English nurse meant to accompany her to Antibes. Mitchie greeted them with something like sullen disgust. Here we go! she said, casting up stricken eyes. The bailiffs have arrived!
She began to cough horrendously. Lady Tarlton sat on the chair by her bed and took one of her hands. Mitchie grudgingly permitted the grasp.
What’s the trouble, old friend? asked Lady Tarlton. I have only your welfare in mind.
That’s a fine excuse for torment, said Mitchie.
I feel I’d be guilty of murder if I did not send you off, Mitchie. Everything’s so damp and changeable up here.
Mitchie’s cheeks flared an angry, tubercular red. She tossed her head wearily.
If I were lying on a stretcher with my intestines hanging out, you’d have some idea of what to do for me. You’d listen to all I said. I am not in that condition and so I’m shorn of a voice of my own. I’m patronized and patted on the head and told I’ll be taken—by orderlies!—to a train, and put on it like someone who’s overstayed her leave.
The other thing, Mitchie continued, breathless but unlikely to stop, the other thing is that I am considered to be simply stubborn—like an old woman, or a four-year-old. I can be cajoled and humored, and treated with force if all that fails.
My dear friend, said Lady Tarlton. There won’t be any force.
I’m glad to hear it. In that case I won’t be going.
Lady Tarlton was silent, and her eyes looked bleak.
I have potent motives to remain here, Mitchie reiterated, believe me. Just because I don’t blab them, it is no reason to consider me a pigheaded old biddy. For example, will I get the official casualty lists at this Antibes place?
No, I hope not. For you, it’ll be as if the terrible ruination here doesn’t exist.
But this is all that counts. This is the world. The ruination, or whatever.
For dear God’s sake, Lady Tarlton honked. You’ve done more than anyone else could in this snake pit. You are an amputee with consumption. And even at the risk of offending you, I will not be guilty of your particular murder, my dear friend.
Mitchie slumped and began to weep with an obvious, chastening rage. That quelled them. That quelled Lady Tarlton too.
Damn you all! she yelled, and then lay panting. I have a son. I have a son who arrived here last spring. I have a son about to turn twenty-five years and he tried eighteen months ago to be taken as a soldier and at last, to hell with them, they did take him. His battalion is in this push. And I’m to sun myself somewhere in the distance? Damn you! Damn you all over!
Her tears stopped now as she realized she had seized a small corner of Tarlton’s authority and sureness.
Oh, it was all a mess in those days. There was no chance of marriage. I had to leave the little boy, you see, with my mother. But now my son knows I’m his mother. I met him in Boulogne and he was . . . he was just such a template of a boy. And I won’t leave him now. I won’t be dragged away by your orderlies or by provosts or any other bugger.
They were all silent. Nothing more conclusive could be said. Lady Tarlton looked at her two companions.
Major Darlington would be angry with us, she said. He will have us all wearing masks around you if you stay here.
I wouldn’t mind that, said Mitchie. I would rather stay here with masked friends than down there with barefaced people I don’t know. And . . . my boy!
Naomi swallowed. She knew it was all settled now. Lady Tarlton had given up Antibes.
I’ll go and get you some tea, Naomi said.
Good girl, said Mitchie—but like a reproof for having extended her duties to the menial. You go and do something like that. Bullying doesn’t become you.
Well, said Lady Tarlton as Naomi left the room yet could still hear. It looks as if we must cancel the travel plans. On the other hand, Mitchie, you must damn well promise me not to die.
If he lives, Mitchie told her, then I’ll live.
• • •
Making the tea, Naomi absorbed the revelation. She had thought of Matron Mitchie as a universal aunt. That she should be directly maternal hadn’t occurred to her. She returned to the room tentatively with the tray. For the anger which had been in Mitchie was unfamiliar and full of risk for emotional novices.
When she got back to the door there was silence inside. Lady Tarlton and Dr. Airdrie had obviously retreated. Mitchie called for her to come in and her voice retained no trace of anger. Once Naomi was inside and had poured the tea, Mitchie ordered her to sit down. Naomi saw that the matron was drying new tears. But they did not seem to be the tears of helplessness.
The father, she said, is a surgeon. At that time he had recently arrived in Australia from Edinburgh. Newly minted, newly lettered. Fine featured and very gifted. He was sure of what he knew but didn’t bully people with it. He was also certain of what he didn’t know and did not try to move into those areas. So he seemed a fine man. Men can be fine in all areas except one. He had arrived in Melbourne as if he was a single man and was rather quiet about the fact he was already married and his wife was waiting for their child to be born and to mature a little before she too took ship with it. And to be honest I wanted to believe he wasn’t already taken. He never told me straight out he was. He seemed too . . . young and singular and new made to be a married man.
Afterwards, I went home to Tasmania, pretended to be a widow and gave birth to the boy in Hobart. My mother—she was a brick, a true woman. My father pretended it wasn’t happening. But my mother stuck close to home and wrote to friends that she was the pregnant one—what a surprise! She was forty-five but one never knew! And we stayed together all through it and when the boy was born in a hospital she took him home with her and raised and presented him as her son. And so I became his much older sister, as far as the world was concerned. And my son believed it. The whole arrangement was a sort of cowardice on my part. But the other thing is—I wanted to save the boy from the stain of being a bastard. And when I went away to work and left him with Mammie . . . it was for him but it was for me too. Whenever I saw him it was a joy and a reproach, and I didn’t like reproach as a full-time business. You see now what sort of girl I was. How stupid and how shallow.
When I met the boy in Boulogne early last spring and I told him the facts, he was angry—he stormed out of the café where I told him, and I
went back to my billet in town. But he sought me out later in the day and he had this forgiving sort of frown when he saw me and he put his arms around me and began to cry. What a dear boy! He was still dubious about it, I could tell. Trying to switch his whole compass around so that the needle pointed to me. But if I went to this Antibes, he wouldn’t be able to visit me down there. And if anything happened, I wouldn’t be in reach of him.
Naomi put out her hand and—after hesitation—laid it on Matron Mitchie’s.
I think Lady Tarlton is convinced now, she said.
I’ll tell you what, said Matron Mitchie. She’d bloody better be! Nor do I care who in the hell she tells anymore!
Mitchie could have been talking about an enemy.
• • •
In May a flood of men came down to the station from the morass. Nurses noticed the wounds had altered subtly—they were an hour or two older, since the front had gone forward. There were rumors that the casualty clearing station too might be moved some further miles northeast.
The terror of the front these days was borne in on Sally by the hollow-eyed stretcher bearers, who sometimes came directly from the line to the clearing station and then found a tent or hut and took a cup of tea and were felled by sleep on the fringes of some ward. The bearers had extracted men from the mired trenches and carried them against the traffic of food supplies and ammunition boxes and wire coils. The stretcher bearers with their burden of maimed soldier tottered on narrow duckboards, which felt like a raft at sea—or so one of these men told Sally. If pushed off the path, they and their wounded man might sink into muck that seemed to stretch to the earth’s core.
There was a new gas now—mustard gas. It did not cripple the membranes and crimp the alveoli. It burned all membranes instead. It burned the eyes, the face, the mucous membranes, and the walls of the lung. The mustard victims arrived at the gas ward stripped naked by the orderlies in reception and carried on a clean stretcher in a clean blanket. For the oily vapors of the chemical yperite which had entered their clothing could burn them through fabric.
Sally—now rostered in the gas ward as part of the earlier-proclaimed broad education—supervised nurses and orderlies here as the victims’ entire bodies, even groins and armpits, were sprayed with sodium bicarbonate. Other nurses hurried to them with steaming bowls of sulphates and sodas to inhale. If men could still not be comforted, and believed themselves drowning in their own lung fluid, the orderlies and nurses rushed oxygen cylinders and masks to them. The nurses did what could be done to help the naked and blistered, gasping men to gargle out the poison, to wash it from their noses and eyes. But the bodies of the gassed themselves exuded the poison, and every quarter of an hour nurses must go outside and take the fresh air and cough their throats clear of the communicated venom.
Bright remarked to Sally one night on a hurried visit that the pain in the head of a mustard-gas patient was as though acid-laced water was invading his nasal sinuses not once but continuously. This sense of drowning caused the wide-eyed distress she saw everywhere.
In the end they might be given chloroform or morphine to ease their burning membranes and their panic. The ward doctor more than once told Sally to cut open a man’s arm to reduce the volume of blood crying out for oxygen. When a man’s heart failed from edema—that inner drowning—Sally and her nurses reached for syringefuls of reviving camphor and pituitarin to revive the fellow.
One evening when the motor ambulances arrived and the transfer of patients from the admission hut to the gas ward was in progress, she was walking behind a victim, accompanied by an orderly with a Tilley lamp. She had visited admissions to assess how many more men they could expect in the tented ward. The sounds of the night were the normal background symphonics and shouted commands. The huge penetrating noise came from above in an instant. She heard the plane descend as if it were intimately dedicated to her, and she opened her mouth to warn the men. But all voice and hearing ceased—or was absorbed into something vaster—and the air was taken from her and she was thrown backwards with a ruthless force. She tumbled without dignity or hope—taking breath in the middle of her flight and having it jolted forth again as her hip crashed to earth.
She lay on earth where time was canceled. All lamps out, all lamps out! she eventually heard an orderly sergeant yelling.
The turning off took a little time. She could see the shattered lantern she had been following lying some distance along the gravel path and an arm and hand still holding it. It had been hooded with a metal flange but somehow the night flyer had seen it and taken to it in the utter bliss of attack. Parts of the first bearer and of the patient they had been attending to were scattered in gobbets of flesh in a crater beyond the dying lantern. The second orderly had a cut to his face and sat dazed where he had landed. He and Sally had been leaves blown in a happier direction.
She got up amidst a rain of grit and in a terrible acidic stillness which wasn’t like quiet at all but which assaulted the air and rang in the ears. She could hear more planes close above. Was it virtue or fear that sent her running towards her ward? The shadow of the Church of England padre—who officiated regularly on the hill and worked in between as an orderly—emerged from it through the double black-out curtains and grasped her.
You must find shelter, Sister, he shouted.
The suggestion made her furious.
No, she said, I have to stay in the ward.
Jostling past both of them from within, Honora Slattery went towards the trenches with a blanketed patient over her shoulder. That seemed absurd. But Sally lacked the mind to be sure whether the sight was odd or normal. She ran into the usually dim-lit ward—bright now, since one of the Tilley lamps had shattered and set fire to the flooring. She fetched a blanket, and she and the ward doctor smothered the flames. Some men who should not have sat up were doing so and looking about with piteous eyes and shouting. The bombardment had jolted their system into life and activated their breath. Further detonations not so far away showed that planes were probably trying to destroy the barrage balloon depot—since pilots hated those contraptions.
I’m with you! she called to the patients, though she could not quite hear herself and would later think the declaration melodramatic.
Go to the door and see what you can see, the ward doctor dementedly told her.
She rushed to the door and pushed through its two flaps as if she could read from there the intentions of the planes, their number, and the likelihood and path through the air of more bombs. In the open night between the ward and the trenches, perhaps a dozen weeping men staggered about the yard and along the paths. Others knelt or cast their arms wide and raved or screamed. NYD(S).
She saw Honora emerging now from the thoracic ward—why had she gone there?—with yet another man on her shoulders. What are you doing? Sally—clearheaded now on the subject of Honora’s lunacy—called out to her.
I am putting patients in the trenches, she shouted back. I put the first one in and he turned out to be a German. Imagine that!
She had mad purpose in her eye—she would carry every man in all the wards into slit trenches if she could. From within the gas ward Sally’s own orderlies began helping their patients past her and to the shelter of trenches and dugouts.
Honora ran on. Sally turned back into the gas tent and passed the remaining wide-eyed nurses and orderlies, who were aware something momentous and ill defined had occurred. The ward doctor was with the gas cases who could not safely be moved. Two nurses were going about placing basins over the heads of the patients. It was a halfway rational idea to save them from shrapnel and it possessed for the nurses the comfort of acting to defy events.
The ward doctor told Sally something had happened near the theatres. They could smell the chloroform, and mixed with it was the penetrating stench of ether. If there was a fire out there then all the gas cases would need—whatever the results—to be moved.
Sally joined a nurse who was already at the rear door of the tent. Fro
m the hut steps they saw the surgical theatre hut begin to burn. The air was anesthetic from the shattered bottles of chloroform but it was the ether supplies that were burning, releasing vapors that the fire instantly sucked back into itself.
Sally heard people lamenting. Someone shouted, The hoses aren’t working! A bucket line of nurses and orderlies attempted to stanch the flames. Were surgeons, theatre nurses, patients caught in there? Water wouldn’t do anything, she knew. Earth or sand was needed to quench blazing ether. It was now that she reachieved her reason fully. She turned back into the gas ward and shouted without reference to the ward doctor that nurses and orderlies must hurry all possible cases into slit trenches.
You go, Sister, said the ward doctor.
No.
You go! he roared. I’ve sent off all the other nurses.
All right, she said. She would be a free agent once she was out in the night.
As she stepped forth she heard another inhuman impact some distance off, but it was not close enough to bear her mind away. She began pushing and dragging demented, howling, praying men towards trenches they did not want to enter. She thought of the thoracic ward and crazed Honora.
A Klaxon which had not rung at the start of things to warn anyone sounded now to reassure everyone. Silence all at once finally manifested itself like the clap of a great hand and stunned the earth. Voices and even yells were minute within it. The air was full still of the stench of the theatre fire and the embers seemed to fall like an incandescent snow.
Sally heard men’s plaintive voices from a half-collapsed tent. Inside, Honora was lifting patients back onto beds, one bleeding from the ears from a nearby detonation. Am I too? Sally wondered, and began to help. Orderlies arrived to readjust the tent poles. At last, according to some dazed, unspoken accord between them that their job was done, she and Honora left the restored tent. The remaining heat of the theatre blaze wafted across the station. Sally set out back for the gas ward and skirted her crater—the one which held unscannable fragments of the gas case and an orderly. She saw Freud and Leonora coming from the lost fight with the fire, walking towards her and the untouched thoracic ward as if no shock had overtaken them and as if on normal duty. They stepped carefully but without amazement around obscure body parts that covered the paths and other spaces. As Leonora reached Sally, she said, An orderly told me. They blew up the morgue. What a triumph, eh?