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.
Despite not possessing any breath, she began to give the summary of their long acquaintance which the prosecutor did not let her spend much time on—interrupting details she considered crucial. For example, how Ian had behaved after the Archimedes sank. How could she make this major assess the true weight of these matters? How could he be made to see that it was essential to the globe’s sanity that he be acquitted?
So, he asked, you are now the fiancée of the accused?
She said that they had been betrothed according to the rites of the Society of Friends.
The Quakers? he asked.
That’s what people call them, said Naomi. And then she said, in case the name were an argument against Ian, When I visited the Society of Friends in Paris with Lieutenant Kiernan, I did not see anyone quake. In fact, the reverse was true. It was all calm consideration on their part.
And you are not one of these Quakers yourself?
No. I am not. But I am not averse to them.
Then how would you say this war should be fought? By men like Lieutenant Kiernan? Should everyone be a surgical supply officer or a medical orderly?
One of the presiding officers did remark offhandedly that the prosecutor was being perhaps too zealous and that Staff Nurse Durance was not herself on trial.
You don’t come from a background of conscientious objection to fighting, do you? the major asked her.
I do not, she agreed. But, mind you, the question never arose where I came from.
If you had a son, say, and there was a future war, would you let him fight?
I would try to stop him. I’ve seen so much mutilation . . . No mother would . . .
All right, the major said, holding up a hand and returning to his table. He sat and now Ian’s young captain was permitted to ask his questions. She watched his face for the sort of moral force that might set Ian free.
Has Lieutenant Kiernan ever mentioned in your presence his objection to bearing arms?
She was pleased to report he had. Even when we first met in 1915. Once we had become friends, he said many times he wanted to look after the wounded and sick but that his religion prevented him fighting.
And you and Lieutenant Kiernan are survivors of a torpedoed ship, the Archimedes? How did Lieutenant Kiernan behave at that time? Was he at all cowardly?
I would say he was very brave.
How did he demonstrate that courage?
In the water he took control of our party. It was why so many from our raft survived. He kept us together and urged us not to let go. Some men did let go but it was not his fault. When we saw a ship, he let off our flare.
And sadly that was all Ian’s lawyer wanted to know. Ian looked at her with a half smile as she was taken out of the court. She did not intend to go politely. She turned and said, Gentlemen, everyone who ever met him was told. That his conscience would not let him bear arms.
The young officer who had represented Ian intercepted her and whispered, If you wait outside, I’ll tell you the outcome.
The humanity of this cheered her. She waited in a delirium on a bench in the corridor. Here, she surmised, in peaceful times shopkeepers and farmers had sat awaiting decisions on land boundaries and drainage. Her imagination swung between Ian set free and some improbable sentence of years or worse. T
here was no question but that she too was counted in whatever befell him.
She was aware as she waited of all the futile prayers, including hers, which filled the air—appeals to a deity who did not seem able to stand between artillery and this or that mother’s son or wife’s husband. She felt the uselessness and the silliness of adding her own. Yet it was an unstoppable impulse. She pleaded that the judges became drunk with wisdom and sent Ian back to his clearing station.
The young captain advocate came out of the court.
I’m sorry to tell you this, he said. It’s fifteen years.
The stated span of time made no instant impact on her. Fifteen years? she asked. What does that mean?
It’s the sentence, sorry to say. Everyone agrees it’s rotten luck. But it had to be done. And of course it’s better than . . . other possibilities. What you said about his bravery when your ship sank . . . that helped him.
The reality of this toll of years entered her now like a wave of heat. She stumbled. He caught her by both elbows.
Steady on, Nurse, he told her. The presiding officer said you could see the prisoner for a few minutes. Only this: it’s best not to get him or yourself distressed.
Two military police officers took her to a small room where she could say good-bye to him. He was already standing with his hands cuffed in front of him. The officers remained there and seemed anxious above all—like the ones at the prison days before—that no touch should occur.
This is ridiculous, she said to him. Ian, what can I do?
He said, Would you thank Lady Tarlton? Not much she could say, since she’d barely met me. And my CMO—I’ll write my first letter to him. You did wonderfully, Naomi. I’ll always remember you. Could you write to Mr. Sedgewick and tell him the marriage will not take place? You should forget about me now.
She held up her hand. She was close to anger, in fact. How can I root out memory? she asked. Lady Tarlton and I have not even begun writing letters for clemency and sending them to all points of the compass.
She hadn’t thought until now of that option, and it transformed her from demented girl into campaigner.