Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Outside the mess, orderlies dug slit trenches in case of air raids, and a capacious bomb shelter. The bombers people called Taubes groaned across the sky at night and sought some site or town or artillery park suitable for an exercise of their malice.

Men now arrived clogged with the season’s mud and in tunics rendered solid by it. It was a malodorous mud in which rats had feasts at corpses and which was saturated by gas. In the fields about the clearing station the flowers were not yet out, and the screen of trees which protected Deux Églises were only beginning to leaf. So all the vaunted European spring had to offer was this heinous sogginess. It was therefore out of the mire that a dread letter for Honora came.

His battalion adjutant wrote that Lionel and a section of his company had occupied a forward position—a sort of listening post—overnight. They had got hemmed in there by machine-gun fire. The next day they were seen by the enemy, attracting artillery shelling during which Captain Dankworth was killed with some of his men. Survivors returned by night to the Australian lines. They brought back his pay book. He had been gallant and affable and universally liked, the letter said.

It was at least two days before Honora gave the others the letter to read. With set lips Slattery had continued her work—levelly and without any irascibility. Now she was dry-eyed and rather dismissive of friends such as Karla and Sally when they tried to find the condoling words. There was an unspoken ban on them paying her any added tokens of comfort and concern than were usual in an average crisis. There were living and barely living to be attended to. So get out of my way!—that was Slattery’s implied message. For I have a job to do in public and a shrine to tend in secret.

Major Bright had her to his office. Bright told her that there was an office run by a young Australian woman in London. A Red Cross volunteer—the daughter, in fact, of a former Australian prime minister. The woman’s office was called the Australian Casualty Information Bureau. It would investigate the details about Lionel Dankworth’s fate to the best of its ability, said Bright, and report back to her.

Both Major Bright and Honora wrote off to the bureau as the spring really did become spring and hollyhocks and foxgloves grew in the fields between the clearing station and the village. This was a time when on rare free days picnics could be attended—for Major Bright was a great picnic man and organized one for most Sundays, whether he could join it or not.

While Honora waited for an answer, certain delusions afflicted her. One mealtime she told Sally there was every hope Lionel was alive. She had written to his battalion commander who had assured her Lionel’s body had been intact. He had not been blown apart—though chunks of shell had entered his body. The Germans—who had advanced the next day—might have found and tended him. For despite all the guff, she assured Sally, they were as humane as we were. And they could have brought Lionel round. But since the men had returned his pay book, and because the identity disks did not always stand up to the heavy conditions of the front, the Red Cross beyond the German lines might not know who he was and would not know whom to tell. Or else, Lionel might be suffering from amnesia or cerebral inflammation from the concussion of the shell. So Honora now took on at the same time the weight both of grief and of hope. In fact, hope gleamed in her like a fever. Sally and Freud watched this with frowns and mumbled words of caution. But she could not be dissuaded from the likelihood of something having saved Lionel.

There was a new recklessness in her too. In speech, the barriers which had existed now broke down. They had been lovers, Honora said. She had succumbed to the argument that God would understand if those who were tagged for death took a few hours to love. You can depend on a nurse to know the proper precautions, she told them frankly, but my period is regular only in its absence—what does that do to us, I wonder? But I wouldn’t want to know a God who would judge. I’m even a little saddened by the care we took. We should have let things happen as they may. Because up there where the men are, things happen without anyone’s permission every second of every day.

Just above the nurses’ tents—amongst the wildflowers—nurses off shift sat in deck chairs with their faces southwards towards the sun. Here Honora wrote a further letter expounding her theory to the Australian Casualty Bureau. But the same day she got one from the young woman who ran that office.

We have received an unofficial report from a man in the infantry battalion to which Captain Dankworth belonged. The informant states that on the early morning of 14 April Captain Dankworth and the patrol he was leading were discovered and made to take shelter in craters in No Man’s Land. Captain Dankworth was killed by a shell which landed on the edge of the crater in which our informant also assures us—and you can take comfort in this, perhaps—the death occurred in an instant. Also killed were Lieutenant John McGregor and Corporal Sampson, whose pay books were also brought back to the Allied lines. May I assure you that the Red Cross is active in German hospitals and prison camps. But they have not discovered the presence of Captain Dankworth or of any wounded Australian carrying his name or description. Thus, for your own sake, you should not entertain hope.

Though the informant and his comrades brought back Captain Dankworth’s pay book, they left on his body, which was still identifiable, not only his disks but a letter from you on which he placed great value and which was addressed to him in full by rank and first and second names. These between them would serve to guarantee him an individual grave, rather than the fate of being buried as an unknown soldier.

Nothing in the letter—which Honora willingly showed Sally—seemed to affect Honora’s level of belief, or—for that matter—her work. But she was more subdued and a muted presence at the mess table. The idea of her letter in the enemy’s hands was something to which she returned very often.

I don’t know how I feel about my letter being read by Germans, she confessed. Oh yes, it means he will get his burial—if the woman in London’s right. And I have to say she seems to be an honest woman. But there were tender feelings in there. I hope no bugger of a German intelligence officer laughs when he reads them. If he ’s lucky, he’s had some poor German woman write similar stuff to him…

Still, at other times her idea was the letter would be read not by some German, or once Lionel Dankworth had been respectfully buried, but rather when he lay stunned in a German general hospital and recovering from oblivion an atom at a time.

And now, along with the leafing of the trees, the day sky over the clearing station seemed to break out in aeroplanes. They saw German biplanes flying high and tentatively westwards and grinding at the firmament. Antiaircraft guns people called “Archies”—now moved in at the crossroads outside the village—fired at them from sandbagged redoubts either side of the large crucifix which stood there with its back to the battle. Smaller aircraft called fighters came low over the slight rise. They broke on the view like birds harried out of a copse. They coerced everyone’s attention and tore away with it.

One morning a German Taube—or whatever species it was—appeared so low that those who were then in the open swore they could see the pilot and observer looking down. Sally was walking the path between her tent and the gas ward to which she had now been rotated and saw a pilot lean out of his socket in the air and wave at her. He wore a young man’s larrikin grin. The observer in the other cockpit took no notice of her. But there were lethal reasons the pilot flew low. He was hunting for a target and hoping to find an installation that was not blessed with a red cross—as was the roof of the main admissions hut. Flying on, the young pilot saw the Archies, heard their first thunder, scudded by them and pushed a lever to drop two bombs—for reasons hard to explain—on Deux Églises. This was surely an error of war. There were no military columns in the streets. Deux Églises might as well have been Bungendore or Enoggera—offering nought that endangered the German Empire. While Sally flinched at the explosion, over her shoulder three aircraft wearing British insignia and with mysterious letters painted on their wings came at a predatory rate and raced low down the road to intercept the German who was still foolishly circling for evidence of his bombing success. They went at him—one higher, one level, and one lower.