Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

They laughed lowly. Then they retired in the wake of the burial party of soldiers.

Naomi wondered, who would be unlucky when Fritz came?

Major Bright gave Sally a regular rundown on how Honora was progressing. She had begun working again, he said. She was not content with resting in Rouen. At the advice of a mentalist, she had done what all her friends had unsuccessfully urged her to—stopped writing to the casualty bureau.

In talkative moments in the nurses’ mess, Leo took some minor enjoyment from Bright’s visits to Rouen. He seemed to carry this boyish conviction that no one could see through him. Freud had a great deal of time for Major Bright and thought Honora—when back to herself—should be encouraged to seduce him. Freud had begun favoring words such as “seduce” again. It was as if—as in the old days—she wanted to shock her sisters out of sedater terms. She called couples “lovers” where others used terms such as “pairs.” She had been witnessed having the sort of quarrels with her American—Captain Boynton—that were symptoms of an intense but difficult attachment. She had certainly won back her air of knowing and the casual ease which had characterized her before the outrage on Lemnos.

Yet sometimes Sally wondered if it was really ease. There was still a fever in it. She respected Boynton, though, for the fact that when Freud worked with him as a theatre nurse, he encouraged her to excise smaller pieces of shrapnel with scalpel and forceps—a setup anyone else would consider irregular but which Freud was skilled enough for. He thought she ought to start medical studies after the war—though if the war lasted another five years, she might be forty before she finished.

The clearing station did not move until the New Year of 1918, when the wards had been emptied and snow covered the mounds in the field of the dead who were now being left behind. Trucks were packed with surgical and medical gear—even the X-ray machine, with its miraculous potency shrouded with a tarpaulin, was winched up onto the rear of a lorry. The women barely turned to look at the vacant huts and tents, at the pathways and duckboards—it would not do to look back for fear of being overwhelmed—but climbed on an old French bus to go up to Bapaume. They had on their balaclavas, overcoats, rugs, and whatever they possessed which could lend warmth as the bus slowly took on the temperature of outside. At one stage the engine died, but the driver and an orderly somehow got it going again.

Despite the scathing night, Sally slept—they had all learned to sleep with an ease soldiers were said to have—and when she woke again she could see a ruined town. They were in the sector black with ruin and rimed mud which had been prized from German grasp last autumn. They got down from the bus and went wandering in the ragged town of Mellicourt. Very few people still lived there. It was in particular the old who emerged to answer their rapping on the doors of cafés and estaminets. And they shook their heads—nothing to eat. Nothing warm to drink. The pipes were frozen.

The new clearing station—chiefly hutted and with plain canvas marvelously rare—lay on flat ground and closer to the front than Deux Églises. Its cookhouse was already pumping smoke and offered a guarantee of comforting fluids. Again ambulances arrived the first night. British gas cases, nearly all of them. All the normal comfort was extended to various and hectic traumas.

It was a matter of joy to Sally to know in the meantime that the Australians had either been put in a quiet sector at Messines or had come out of the line and were resting. They might be drilling for future dangers but were safe from present ones. She had, of course, therefore written to Charlie, telling him where she was now in case he had a bicycle available and was within riding distance.

When a note came back from him, it asked if she could by any chance be in Amiens on 16 March? “I’ll visit the main entrance to the belfry near the mairie every half hour from nine o’clock. I believe it’s still standing but even if it’s shelled in the interim, people will still be able to direct you to where it was in its square. All in hope of seeing you…”

There was not enough time to get a reply back to him. She went to doughty Matron Bolger, who had once saved them from hysterical fear by recounting their mess bills. Reasonably enough she frowned. No one knew when an onslaught would come and the resultant flood of activity.

Are you meeting a fiancé? the woman asked.

It would be convenient to say yes since that would end two-thirds of the argument and the matron could add the word “compassionate” to “leave.” But Sally did not share a name for what existed with her and Condon, even with the matron.

I had a very close friend named Nurse Carradine, said Sally. She is working at the fracture hospital in Amiens.

It was a good story—a story nearly true. If she were allowed to go to Amiens, she would indeed visit Elsie Carradine.

Because Amiens was full of what the matron called rough soldiery, she even used the telephone to make Sally a booking at the nurses’ hostel—a converted convent. Sally traveled there the usual way—in an ambulance taking men from Mellicourt to Carradine’s fracture hospital. Arriving late in the evening of the fifteenth, she asked the location of the belfry. An elderly French porter at the hostel convent drew her a map. It was a mile or so away, over a canal with ancient-looking houses along it. The great black shape of the overwhelming cathedral acted as her reference and she came at last to the bell tower standing in the midst of a square. A few less fortunate structures nearby had been damaged by bombardment. But the belfry Charlie had nominated stood ornate and unmarred. She went to a café at the edge of the square and sat there but visited the door of the tower each half hour until eight o’clock that evening—just in case he was early. Then soldiers approached her and asked her if she was waiting for someone. There was such raw appetite in their eyes that she gave it up. This—as she had already discovered—was a city of men. She had been told that it was the center of venereal disease for young Australian men—who innocently took pleasure here in whatever address and then passed the name of the house on to their friends in the line.

From the belfry she crossed the canal again to get to Carradine’s place. It seemed to her that old men and women, harried-looking mothers with urchins, café owners, and one or two priests had stayed in town amongst the soldiers of many nations. She found the Rue St. Germain, of whose convenience to the hospital Carradine had boasted in a letter.

Sally rose up the stairwell beside apartments that had the look somehow of being shut up, and found the right number on the second floor. After she knocked, she heard Carradine tell her to come in.

Elsie was advancing across the living room in an apron tied over the azure dress of the Red Cross volunteer nurses. On the couch, to Sally’s surprise, sat a drowsy Lieutenant Carradine—although he would now prove to be a major. He was wearing an army shirt and pullover and unheroic pyjama pants. His face looked thinner even than when they had visited him in England.

After Sally and Carradine had kissed and hugged—Carradine exerting a greater pressure than Sally could find it in herself to apply—Elsie stood back and said to her frowning husband, You remember Sally Durance, darling? She visited you in Sudbury.

And there it was—the bewilderment on his face. He did not remember.

Of course, he said. He was used to faking knowledge which the wound and its malign afterhistory had taken from him.