Ian Slater - WW III

“No, not dead on arrival,” Matron had said humorlessly, demonstrating how such things had to be handled if one was to work one’s way through the bureaucracy. “DA means ‘dockyard accident,’ “ she explained brusquely.

It was a small enough incident, but it meant that responsibility and costs would be entered against the dockyard rather than the Canadian navy, and it told Lana something about Matron and the bureaucratic system they’d have to contend with even in a harbor that in wartime became one of the busiest and most strategically important in the world, the start of the long convoy runs across the Atlantic and a port that during the Second World War had repaired more than six thousand Allied ships.

Lana had been asked out several times by young doctors at the hospital, but declined, her experience with Jay having been so traumatic that while it didn’t sour her against men in general, it made her wary — and the very thought of having to fend off the uninvited and inevitable sexual advances was too much to contemplate. For now it was all she could handle to pass the examinations in a punishingly more concentrated training period than was normal, because both Washington and Ottawa had advised Halifax that a “substantial number of casualties” could be expected.

The scuttlebutt had it that a convoy from England was already en route. And in the pubs around the old cobbled streets of the “Historic Properties,” where press gangs had once roamed shanghaiing “volunteers” for Her Majesty’s Navy, there was a rumor claiming empty container ships had been sent first so as not to risk any vital cargo. A “guinea pig” run for the British and Americans. The Halifax Chronicle printed the story.

Within three hours SACLANT in Virginia and CFB — Canadian Forces Base Halifax — flatly denied the assertion, pointing out that container ships were now in the process of loading some of the millions of tons of materiel that would be needed to reinforce Europe. The Chronicle’s publisher was invited to the admiral’s house for tea. It was brief, polite, and during the conversation the admiral asked the publisher’s advice on whether or not he thought it would be worth, “in the public interest,” running a story on the Canadian War Measures Act. He reminded the publisher that the last time it had been used was in 1970— when the then Liberal prime minister, Trudeau, had deployed armed soldiers on the steps of Parliament, and during which time, the admiral noted, newspapers, along with everyone else, were forbidden under the emergency powers to discuss the FLQ — Front Liberation du Quebec — the terrorist organization that had kidnapped Labour Minister Pierre LaPorte, shot him dead, and dumped him in the trunk of a car.

The reporter for the Chronicle who had broken the “empty cargo” story was reassigned to the obituaries.

To the other three nurses with her, Lana’s personality was something of an enigma, an odd mixture of shyness and assertiveness in her job, and working with the patients in an oddly detached way. She wasn’t unpleasant, but rather, distanced, as if somehow nursing for her was less a vocation than a refuge. It was several weeks before one of them discovered from an American newspaper that she had been the Mrs. J. T. La Roche and sister of the naval officer who, if he survived, looked like he was going to be court-martialed. This news only confirmed Lana’s fellow nurses in their intuitive belief that she was running away.

“But to a hospital?” one of them had put to the others.

“Why not? After a rotten marriage, a hospital’s as good a place as any to lose yourself for a while. Get a new perspective.”

They were right and wrong — right in that Lana had found a place to retreat, where other people’s needs forced her to leave her troubles for a while, but wrong in thinking it gave her a new perspective. The outbreak of war to Lana was but another example of people’s inhumanity to others, something she had experienced in her marriage. And she made the depressing discovery that no amount of work, no amount of depressing news from the war in Europe and in Korea, could take herself out of herself long enough to rid her of the feeling that inside she was somehow permanently contaminated, dirty, that in succumbing to Jay’s sexual demands, she’d sullied herself more than anyone could ever know. The very thought of it would start her throat constricting as if she were being suffocated, nowhere to hide, no one to help — a heart-thumping terror of suddenly losing control. In those moments she was secretly but deeply depressed. And despite the veneer of self-assurance, she realized that not even the cataclysmic possibility of nuclear war could erase an individual’s guilt.

It didn’t take Lana long to fall afoul of Matron. On one of their few days off, after Lana and a black girl from Boston had discovered their U.S. dollars were worth at least fifteen percent more in the Canadian port, the four nurses had taken a cab around to see some of the sights. One of the girls wanted to go to Fairview Cemetery on the city’s west side, where 125 people who had died on the Titanic were interred and where more than 200, some of them unrecognizable after the blast, had been killed on December 6, 1917, when a French munitions ship, the Mont Blanc, on convoy to Europe, had struck a Norwegian merchantman and exploded, razing most of the buildings on the city’s northern side, killing over fifteen hundred men, women, and children and permanently injuring thousands of others. To Lana’s surprise, she found the cemetery peculiarly comforting-why, she didn’t know.

When they returned to the nurses’ quarters, they were summoned by Matron.

“I don’t want my nurses tearing around town waving dollar bills about like tarts!”

The nurses were taken aback and angry, but none of them stood up to her except Lana.

“Matron, I don’t know who could have told you that. But we were on our own time and—”

“ Own?” asked Matron malevolently. “No one has their own time in a war.”

Lana didn’t answer that as yet they had seen nothing of the war. Intuitively she sensed Matron hated her for her good looks.

“Well,” Matron continued, “you’ll soon be too busy for any nonsense.” She paused for a moment, was about to turn her back on them, when she cast a steely gaze on Lana. “Mrs. La Roche, you may not be aware of it, but a great deal of unnecessary resentment can be caused by people with more money flashing it about in front of others who go without. Canadian nurses earn far less in real terms than you Americans — not nearly enough to hire taxis to roam at leisure—”

“But, Matron,” interjected one of the two Canadian nurses, “we didn’t mind spending—”

“The point I’m making is that there’ll be enough for people to gripe about once these wards start to fill, and believe me, they will. We’ll have enough to deal with without petty squabbling breaking out between Canadian and American and British servicemen about whose girl is whose and who has the most money. Don’t tell me — I’ve seen it before in—” She decided not to reveal her age. “I merely want you to act responsibly. That’s all.”

Elizabeth, the black girl from Boston, shook her head as they watched Matron walk away, heels clicking on the hard linoleum floor. Even the echoes of her sharp footsteps on the immaculately clean floor had the very sound of cold efficiency.

“I’ve been told about people like that, but I never believed they actually existed. Old bitch!”

“They exist, all right,” said one of the Canadian girls. “Can’t bear to see anyone else happy. I think she likes the war — gives purpose to her miserable existence.” Lana felt herself going red with embarrassment.