Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Lingering around is hard, she agreed. But wait a minute anyhow.

She contemplated his face.

I wish I was French. Then I could pray to the Virgin for your safety.

Sadly, it hasn’t helped the French. And, as you know, I am a man of the rear.

You almost sound as if you wish you weren’t.

Young men feel the pull of self-immolation. If they didn’t, none of this would be happening and the château here wouldn’t be full.

Well, maybe you should go now, she said. Because the conversation’s straying.

You must let me know when you hear from Captain Shaw.

The last contact was the best. She felt the pressure of his arms and the potential pressure and mass of his body. The only way to deal with this pleasure was—when it ended—to give him a small and playful push. He vanished into the cab, and she saw him go. He looked at her through the near-opaque oval rear window of the taxi. Mist consumed the vehicle but then she was held in place by its receding sound. That soon vanished from the air and she walked on crackling ground up to the architectural grimness and cold corridors of the château.

Her letter to Robbie Shaw—already written and addressed to his barracks in Brisbane, but not sent for lack of moral courage, waited amongst the pages of Baroness Orczy’s A Bride of the Plains. The letter read:

Dear Robbie,

I should certainly have taken up a pen to write this earlier than now. I have very much enjoyed our long exchange of letters but—as you see from mine—I have resisted all ideas of a formal engagement and have warned you of my misgivings. Yet I have also delayed from cowardice in telling you this—that I cannot convince myself of the image of me you’ve manufactured in your head. Since I think we are such different people, you and I are setting ourselves for a great blunder which could ruin both our lives. I will certainly fail you and you will be embittered. Even were we amongst other people on social occasions there would be a problem. You are so at ease—you showed that on Lemnos. Whereas I’m edgy. People would say I was aloof and partly blame you for it. I know above all that we must step down from these delusions we both have.

I have to tell you—and I know a man of your cleverness would realize this—my decision has nothing to do with your injury which makes you look valiant anyhow and a true hero, and adds to your style.

As for the rest, it’s my devout hope that you’ve come to the same conclusion as I have…

Towards the end of their England leave, Sally persuaded Honora and Leo that they should visit Eric Carradine at his hospital in Sudbury in Suffolk. They did so in the same mist which had hidden and aided Naomi in Boulogne. Freud decided to come too. They traveled in a gritty train in blind countryside and walked a mile and a half from the railway station to the gates of the military hospital. It was—like all such places—surrounded by therapeutic grounds and gardens. But the cold had driven everyone into the central fortress of the hospital itself. They were shown into a sitting room by a British army nurse, and anticipated they would find Lieutenant Carradine better than when they had last seen him in Egypt nearly a year before. When he was brought in in a wicker wheelchair with a blanket over his knees, the four of them stood and automatically smiled. But there was no smile on Lieutenant Carradine’s lips.

Elsie? he said in a high-pitched voice. Are you Elsie’s friends?

They said they were and introduced each other. They mentioned that they had met in the convent hospital in Alexandria. He seemed to take all this in. Please, he said, sit and pull your chairs closer.

A little puzzled, they all sat. Closer, he ordered them. And when they’d done it whispered, This is a terrible place, you know. You mustn’t give them a thing. An inch and they take a mile. Where’s that bitch Elsie anyhow?

Don’t you remember? asked Sally, trying to hide her discomfort. They sent her to Australia. But she intends to get back to you as a volunteer.

Taking her sweet time about it, he said, and howled. How’s a man expected to endure France after this? But I thought Elsie might have another man, you know. Did I read that somewhere? I think I read it. The Daily Mail …

The British nurse—who had remained—said, Most days Lieutenant Carradine is quite a lot better than this. Sometimes you’re fine, aren’t you, Lieutenant Carradine? He doesn’t remember his bad spells. But when he’s better I’ll tell him you were here. He won’t remember, I’m afraid.

She saw them out, leaving Eric Carradine still sitting in his wicker chair. Better not tell his wife you found him like this, the nurse suggested. Because he will improve in the end. He’ll probably always have an occasional bad day though.

The Australian casualty clearing station at Deux Églises lay on the gentle western slope of a minute hill—streaked with snow and blind to any approaching enemy. It was as yet a settlement of tents and huts. A north–south road ran at its base, and its sides were bordered by two others running east and towards the battlefield. The modest outline of the village of Deux Églises—marked by two small spires above bare trees—lay within sight to the north.

Closer to the village stood another clearing station—British. For clearing stations had been envisaged as working like twins, and the theory was that when one was full of its misery, the other one—empty till now—would then begin to receive. They would breathe in and out in alternate rhythm.

The noise of guns was not simply a louder but sharper spur here. You felt sometimes you could detect in the massed sound—like an instrument in a band—the frightening malice of an individual shell, nearer and more particular in its intentions. Sally noticed that not all the nurses were threatened by the noise. They heard it as a clamorous promise of what would come to harvest in the approaching season. Once again—for them— this year was the year. But last summer had cured Sally of looking for too much from the returning sun.

For Sally and for others preparing the station for business, doubt came with the news that the tsar had fallen and Russia was as good as beaten. Russia from where, said Freud, one of her grannies came, and was pleased to do so. The tsar was not an admirable man in the book of the Freuds. Other opinion in the nurses’ mess reasoned the Germans had still to keep their watch on the Eastern Front and that the Royal Navy had choked off German supplies for the west. Various soldiers they knew who had captured enemy dugouts said you could see how poor the supplies Fritz ate were compared to the good old days of the previous spring. And, said the This-Year-Is-It party, last year had indeed been bloody. But much had been learned.

A late winter letter from Charlie Condon found her. Charlie made no attempt to be prophetic about the war. He wrote a great deal about climate. The mud had frozen and the earth was suddenly ripe for sketching, he wrote, the black craters rimmed with snow. The air had cleared the week before, and an abnormal sun had appeared and the atmosphere had become vacant of gas—which cured everyone of the croaking tendencies they got from the usual lingering of the fumes. No slush lay in the trenches, which were frozen firm. Men had worked out that the regular puttees cut off circulation to their feet and caused frostbite, said Charlie. They were now using sandbags for gaiters. He liked these practical fellows, he said. Most of them had had hard lives. Yet one of them was a young Presbyterian minister who put up with the swearing of the others and did himself tend in that direction. There were some miners from the Hunter Valley who said they were communists and communism was the way of the future. The Irish—the Kellys and Byrnes and so on—were pugnacious and prideful but said the rosary like children every evening.