Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

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.

He said, with a small chuckle, you’re going to bludgeon the top blokes into a pardon?

I am, she said.

But you have no obligation at all, you know.

That talk is rubbish, she told him. He smiled at her so plainly but, she thought, with a mass of meaning—an invitation and farewell at the same time. According to what she knew of them, men were good at mixed messages—even Quaker men.

And now it seemed that everything had been encompassed and she could not think of what to say. Ten seconds ached by.

All right, said a provost as if he wanted to end the silence. That’ll be just about it, lady and gentleman.

And so—regretting her silence had signaled the meeting’s end—she was escorted out. She found the main entrance. I won’t tremble and weep, she promised herself. I’ll annoy and agitate. Life would be made tolerable by that mission.

At the front door a guard said, Hang on, Miss, there’s Gothas overhead.

She could hear the bombers now, in amongst the background thunder of guns, the Archies close by and the seamless rage of the barrage at the front. She waited a second and then placed her head in a groove between two stone moldings and began to shudder at the awful perversion of things—of sky not permitted to be sky, of air not permitted to be air.

Naomi could not have explained the exact stirring of resolve that sent her into the street once the Archies stopped and safety was howled forth by way of a Klaxon. But the moment came. At the road passing the mouth of the mairie she saw some young but worn-looking Tommies—their eyes vacant and their pace unsteady and some without their rifles—drifting past. Their uniforms were stiff with mud or dully gleamed with filth. They began milling around a mobile canteen serving tea in the street. These man-boys drinking tea, and standing about cadging cigarettes, were—though Naomi did not fully understand this—the hollow-eyed ejectees of a broken front. Here and there military trucks pulled up and soldiers jumped down with rifles and took up positions at the major corners to try to gather up any further tide of broken men and urge them to stand fast.

An elderly lieutenant wearing the patch of some administrative corps watched this unfold, shook his head, and turned and saw Naomi.

Well, it’s on now, Miss, he said. The line’s busted and we are for it.

A paternal interest came into his eye.

You should get on your way, if you can. The trains may well still be operating. The further northwest you get, the better, for now. Though we don’t quite know where they’re aiming for yet.

She thanked him and went on. At the ornate railway station a few blocks away things were more orderly and men got down from the Boulogne train with their rifles and kits and looked robust enough to take a swipe—at least—at restoring the line.

She boarded the train for its return to the coast and shared a compartment with a priest and a middle-aged French couple. It would have made as much sense to try the husband for cowardice—with her and the priest as judges—as what she had seen that day. The priest read his office book and the French couple and she exchanged a few primitive sentences in English and French about their destination. They either said they were from Wimereaux or were going to Wimereaux.

The railway ran along the Somme and then curved north, and there was certainly a sense of escape to it. The priest—having finished his office—joined in the chat. He seemed to be delighted to know that Naomi was from Australia. Les belles Australiennes! he insisted. Nos Australiennes!

Her fellow travelers did not seem alarmed by the threatened assault on the heart of France. Perhaps they were not as aware it was to happen. The priest reached into his pocket and handed her a small medal. She accepted it in her gloved hands. Somewhere between Methodism and Quakerdom, belief and disbelief, she held a graven image in her hand. And yet to do so seemed of no great import and bolstered her sense of purpose in a way she would not once have believed possible.

The astonishment awaiting her on her return was that Major Darlington had gone, all in one night, and—said the English Roses—without a proper farewell to Lady Tarlton. A new chief medical officer was awaited. In the meantime, Airdrie and the weedy but obviously enduring young ward doctors did what they could. The nurses knew where Naomi had been—how could such news not get around the hospital?—and were awed and dared not ask her the length of sentence.

Everyone in the meantime watched out for Lady Tarlton. In the wake of Darlington’s departure she had chosen to retire to her office. They wanted—not without feeling for the woman—to see how she would seem once she reappeared. At teatime she came out as usual to make the rounds of the wards and talk to soldiers. Her presence was as ever a powerful medicine as she leaned above them asking after their health in that most elevated accent which many Australians had not heard till they came here. The recuperating officers waiting to go back to the front—their shrapnel or bullet wounds or concussions now healing—were clearly and to a man enchanted by her.

But that evening the experienced could see a delay in her gestures and inquiries—a distractedness that was no more than a tremor, a pulse. The eyes laid on the patient might go blank for a second and then engage themselves again.

Come to my office, she murmured in contralto to Naomi at the end of rounds.

Naomi was secretly and with shame pleased to have a sister in misery. As she followed Lady Tarlton, the eyes of all the Red Cross women were on her, covetous of her closeness to Lady Tarlton. They and the Australian nurses watched them with that fascination which women in a crisis of love generate in others. As they walked, Lady Tarlton questioned Naomi about Ian. Naomi—still dazed from the day but sustained by a margin by her belief in her campaign—told her all the details and confessed her urgency to write and write again to General Birdwood and General Howse of the Medical Corps.

Lady Tarlton’s office as they entered seemed as ever it was. Fresh piles of documents on the desk and around the walls gave no suggestion of slackening business. She motioned Naomi to a seat, went and got a bottle of cognac from a bookshelf—there was no concealment and it stood in plain view—and poured some in two glasses that were on the desk.

Men are very strange creatures, Naomi, she said. And when they’re not, they get punished by prison.

She sipped the cognac.

We had a quarrel. A quarrel —no more than that. Yet he used it as the pretext. It wasn’t why he left. I’ll never believe that. It served him as an excuse, a casus belli, and he bolted.

She drank again. Mmm, she said as she swallowed. Perhaps from now on, the bottle shall be my lover.

Naomi privately thought the bottle was an unlikely destination for all the light and energy in the woman.

The Quaker and your mishap, she told Naomi. Mitchie and her surgeon, me and mine. They are all misadventures, you know. It’s a wonder we put in the effort. It seems I made a fool, or tried to, of a cousin of Darlington’s in Boulogne, some Pooh-Bah in the Medical Corps. I remember the man, and am rather amazed the major was related to him. I mean, the major is a man of genuine talent. But I believe that as a result said Pooh-Bah swore vengeance on Darlington as well.