The Daughters of Mars

Rare Pyramids

Sally near collided with Honora Slattery in the corridor of the Heliopolis Palace Hotel. Through double doors nearby they could hear the hubbub of conversation from the grand ballroom, where beds were laid out ten across the width of the room and in God-knew-how-many ranks—she hadn’t had time to count. Above the ballroom floor were galleries, and these too were loaded with beds—so fully that their creaky floors and the ornate Moorish columns which attached them to the roof seemed too frail to take the weight.

The officers’ lounge, midnight, Honora said. Come on, we’ve got to have a drink to get rid of this bloody year. Lionel Dankworth will be there.

Dankworth was wounded?

He had an ear shot off. His hearing’s intact.

As narrated by Honora, it sounded less than threatening. She did not seem tormented by the quarter inch which dictated Dankworth had lost an ear rather than a head.

Mudros was gone and there seemed too much life at the Heliopolis for anyone to be wistful. The huge rooms pulsed with it—the strident outnumbered the shy and the convalescent the sick.

It turned out that Lionel Dankworth had been enchanted with Honora Slattery to the extent that he had accompanied her to mass in the chapel of the Heliopolis Palace. Catholics were like that, people said—ruthless with using love as a lever to shift people.

Sally knew that—unless it was for a purely ceremonial event—no one could inveigle her to church. God had left the earth by now and was hidden amidst stars. Good for him! A first-class choice, the way things were. Yet she also knew that even in her disappointment with the deity, behind her failure to believe any further, lay a soul designed for belief. Under different stars she could have been a dour votary. It was Honora who seemed designed for raucousness and fun and a kind of frank sensuality. The tension in Honora between jokiness and devotion seemed to hold Dankworth in wonderment. He’d never met it before.

There were the tents of a new camp beyond the town of Heliopolis and in the desert. The streets were full of new boys—reinforcements. They were as amazed by where they’d ended up as their forerunners had been a year ago. They caught the tram outside the Palace to go into the center of Cairo. There they would repeat—as if they were newly discovered and their own invention—the japes of those who were now too mangled for levity and whose sportive pulse had been quelled on Gallipoli.

There was little to make Sally go to town. One night Lionel Dankworth and another officer took Honora and her to dinner in the piazza on the Nile embankment outside Shepheard’s—the hotel having now been elevated to the status of Allied headquarters. Dankworth’s ear wound was barely visible and well healed. Honora’s clear hope was that Sally and the other officer would take—as Lionel Dankworth and Honora had taken. Though she was not against the idea of infatuation and the life it might give to banal hours, she could not seem to achieve it when a specific man was presented.

As for the antiquities… well, the idea of looking again at the pyramids was painful when so many of the company she had visited them with were gone. It was a good time of year for it though, Lieutenant Dankworth said. You could get to the top of the pyramid of Cheops without any heat exhaustion and see forever in all directions in a clear atmosphere. So Honora and Lionel went—scooting diagonally across the length of Cairo and even visiting the army camp at Giza for drinks with some other Gallipoli chaps.

Time to toast 1916, said Honora—extending her invitation for New Year drinks. It has to be better than this because it couldn’t be worse.

May we, or at least some of us, said Lionel—making his toast that night—punish John Turk in Palestine for anything he might have done to us in Gallipoli.

There was quite a crowd of men and nurses present. One of them had visited an aerodrome in Sinai and, seeing the airmen take off over the desert, had decided that was what he would dearly love to do. There were so many fellows applying, but the infantry and even the light horse lost their shine when compared to climbing into the air like that.

You see, he said, we’ve never had an eagle-eye view. Napoleon didn’t. Imagine if Wellington at Waterloo is wondering what to do, how long to hold out before retreating, say, and Napoleon is pouring the Imperial Guards in and the future all depends on Blücher’s Prussians turning up in time. Just imagine if Wellington had been able to say, “Lieutenant Fortescue, can you hop in your B.E. and go up four thousand feet and tell me if Marshal Blücher is on his way?” Now I’d say that’s true power. An ordinary soldier with greater power to see—to get a grasp of things—than any general.

All right, said Lionel, but then you’ve got to come down. Remember that bloke Icarus?

The men were drinking whisky and ale, the women champagne and orange and—for those who had not essayed liquor yet—fruit juice with chipped ice. And a quiet voice speaking not of vast pictures of desert or sky-highs but of earthbound things asked, Excuse me, aren’t you one of the Durance girls?

Sally had been talking to some of Lionel’s friends and saw the face of a grown boy when she turned—the features in the suntanned face had a delicate neatness a mother and aunts would cherish. A choirboy face, people said, and also, in common wisdom, that they were the most dangerous.

Charlie Condon, said the young man. East Kempsey.

Your father was the solicitor? she asked.

Yes. That’s it.

The Condons were part of the ruling class of the town in reputedly classless Australia. The gentry were the solicitors and the accountants and the bank managers whose children played together and whose wives spoke to each other. Yet this young man was shy about talking to her. She thought he did not look like a veteran. He lacked that dark pulse in the eyes.

Didn’t you go away to Sydney to study? she asked.

He said he had.

One of the boarding schools, she surmised. Then… was it the law?

Heavens no, he said. A stab at law maybe. But other things interest me. By the way, you were a year ahead of me at school. To a bit of a kid, that’s an age.

Thank you, she said and was willing to smile. You make me sound like a maiden aunt.

I’m so pleased I saw you. It’s ridiculous, but we spend all our time looking for faces from home, our part of home. And I don’t even like the place.

But we want to know, don’t we? Like it or not.

What about you? Were you nursing there? In the Macleay, I mean.

Yes, she told him and then it recurred—that she’d nursed her mother to death. In his presence it was something she wanted to suppress—to the point of oblivion.

My sister left as soon as she could, she told him—as a matter of history and not grievance. She’s back there right now, but she says she’s coming back here. She’s visiting my father at Sherwood. And my stepmother. You remember a Mrs. Sorley?

I remember a boy called Sorley, Condon admitted. I remember the widow, but only dimly. Wasn’t her husband killed by a tree?

That’s right.

Oh, he said, a famous Macleay tragedy. I always thought she looked pretty jolly for a widow. Not that I’m saying…

No, she said, I know you’re not saying…

He developed an even smile. She had for some reason expected him to grin crooked and to show the devil beneath the pretty features.

A funny place, he told her confidentially. There are a lot of people in that valley who think they’re the ant’s pants—as if Kempsey and the Macleay were Paris or London or Moscow. And when you come back from Sydney everybody’s trying to land you with their daughter—as if it’s the only place you could possibly meet a girl. Crikey, I am being critical, aren’t I? You must have brought out the moaner in me.

That unblooded look emerged in his face again. It was still a serious matter for him—his boyish rebellion against the Macleay River and its valley and its principal town.

He didn’t give off that almost chemical mixture of fatalism and bloody remembrance and tired ruthlessness the survivors did. Some of the veterans were courtly and polite because it was a railing to cling to, and to save them from the pit. The new men were polite to and courtly towards women and the world because they thought they had a life to pursue and had not yet faced the force that so utterly overpowered politeness. It wasn’t his fault—after all, he was a year younger than her. It was simply obvious.

They spoke for the rest of the evening—she broke away only when she saw Honora smiling in her direction and presuming that her conversation with Lieutenant Condon stood for some outburst of magnetism. It would be useless later saying that she had found it pleasant talking to him, since because of Honora’s own infatuation with Lionel Dankworth—deformed ear and all—she was geared up to read intense attachment everywhere and even in the mildest friendliness.

At three o’clock in the morning everyone went up on to the roof. There was a resolve to stay up there and see the first light of the year come out of Sinai—it would happen about half-past five. It must be seen—went the proposition—because this would be the year of victory and peace. Sally decided not to share the experience. As the party took to the stairs, Sally called from below, Honora, I’m going now. Thank you, it was very pleasant.

That pale word again.

Charlie Condon was already on the lower steps. Coming, Charlie? asked Honora, who obviously knew him.

Just a tick, Miss Slattery, he called, raising an arm and an index finger up the stairs to beg indulgence. The others ascended.

Well, he said, it was a fine thing somehow. Meeting you again in such altered circumstances. Look, Miss Durance, you’ve been to Giza, haven’t you? I bet you’re a veteran of Giza?

I was there earlier this year. No, it’s last year now.

Yes, well, it’s all new to me. You can’t believe it when you first see it, can you? You can’t believe you’re there, sharing the same air with it.

Yes, I think I felt exactly like that.

Now there’s another one I want to see. It’s up the river. Sakkara. The first pyramid of all—King Djoser. I wondered, would you do me the honor of visiting it with me? Not a huge distance. Hour or two on the truck. Or there’s a bus. We could take a picnic.

For the first time since she had come to Egypt, she had been asked to go somewhere she wanted to go and in the smallest party possible. The chance of an excursion without being swamped by conversation—after so many continuous nights of such conversation—was welcome.

If you will excuse me, he said, I will go up to the roof garden. I’m new here. This year is likely to be my initiation in military matters.

Condon suggested they try the adventure of an Egyptian bus to Sakkara. It was a novel idea since everyone else she knew tried to cadge lifts in army trucks or ambulances or commandeer a car when on a jaunt. People had told him they could get a truck back to Cairo or even Heliopolis without difficulty that afternoon. Sakkara was on the south–north road from Aswan. To her it counted for little that soldiers might smirk at picking up an officer and a nurse from the side of the road.

Catching the tram from Heliopolis and the bus from the railway station seemed a genuine adventure. It bemused the bus-traveling effendis—the Egyptian gentlemen in heavy European suits and tarbooshes—and the shy fellahin, laborers and small farmers, Nile cow-cockies as Condon would say, who frowned and stared as if the universal order had been upset.

As she watched unaccustomed quarters of the city sweep by, she realized that her elated feeling that the world had altered was because she and Condon had for a few hours moved beyond military reach. They rolled out into the irrigated countryside and its strips of cultivation and she assessed that the day was like a warmer autumn day at home and the sky wide open and vast. Occasional trucks going northwards showed unwelcome glimpses of khaki.

It’s a little mean of me, said Charlie as they sat and the bus engine whined and dragged them along at perhaps twenty miles an hour. I know all the travel guides at Sakkara try to make a living. But I think I’d rather not have a guide. I mean, some of them talk you blind and distract you when you see something marvelous and try to sell you rubbish.

He wanted to know—of course—whether this was agreeable to her. She said it was. He assured her he had a Murray guidebook with him—people preferred them over the German Baedeker guides—and somehow she knew that he had absorbed it conscientiously and would reliably tell her everything she needed to know at Sakkara.

As they traveled he confessed he’d been studying in a Sydney art school which emphasized sketching as the building block of all art, and whose motto was that it was better to sketch well for a lifetime than to paint badly for twenty years. He didn’t like to bring out his pad when there were lots of people around. But the reason he liked sketching was not just that a sketchpad was so much more portable. It began to show you—as one of his teachers had argued—that light is everything. Color was a mere servant to light. Light is everything to everything, and in everything too. It was, of course, the first time she had heard a discourse on these matters. She was as impressed with this reflection as with the bus—which seemed in part Condon’s own conception.

When they got off in the flat-roofed oasis town of Sakkara, a dozen men came up and mobbed them and tried to rent them donkeys and offer themselves as guides. Children milled and plucked garments and called Charlie “effendi” and “sir.”

No guides, no guides, called Condon, right or wrong, just or unjust. No, no guides. Just ponies.

He went down the line of those available. He turned to Sally and said, These two look good, pointing to two beasts who looked to her little different from the other sinewy creatures. Their owner shook his head sadly as if his animals were too precious to him for lease. How many piastres? Condon began. Though new to the place, and inexperienced, he brought an air of casual worldliness to his transactions.

Sally and Condon—once atop the ponies—rode off. Children ran behind praising the bey (a term of praise above effendi) and lady for their horsemanship. This ferment of applause was the product of poverty, and she and Charlie had already committed the crime of depriving a local of a tour-guide fee. Yet they had all they wanted—Condon carried in his kitbag water, boiled eggs, and canned salmon, and some flatbread from a bakery stall in Cairo. Condon amiably telling them, Imshi, the tail of children faded beyond the edge of town. Their ponies scurried across gravel and left the last little irrigated green plot of Egyptian clover behind.

Very soon the pyramid began to rise in huge steps before them. It ascended to a blunt apex in the sky. She could sense and shared in Condon’s zeal to walk along the remaining colonnade in front of the pyramid. They tied up their ponies to rings embedded in a low stone wall for the purpose. Then they got down and were alone. No Scots in kilts. No slouch hats. No British officers in tropic-weight tailored uniforms. No one. Small gusts of wind sounded enormous as they turned over pebbles in the great, silent dome of the day.

Condon was carrying a battery torch. They might be able to visit the burial chamber, he said, and see the frescoes. He let go of his knowledge easily. He seemed no pedant. This ancient tumulus involved an architect named Imhotep, he said, who used limestone for the first time in history here—in Djoser’s stairway to heaven. Charlie Condon was more interested in the four-thousand-year-old cleverness of Imhotep—which had lasted—than in the power of Djoser, which was lost. This columned approach, he said, must have been crammed with people—image makers, butchers, money changers, wine sellers. For this was the great market of the necropolis of Memphis. One of the tombs was, in fact, said Condon, of Djoser’s butcher.

Charlie Condon populated the place without effort—a man who wanted to see the total present in the light of the entire then. But they found the entrance to the burial chamber padlocked—a guide would have no doubt fetched a key to open it. As a further exercise of his stylishness as a traveler, he picked the lock with a penknife. Sally laughed—but in part for fear of the winding chambers he was so keen to enter with her.

Do you know where I learned to pick locks? he asked her as they entered darkness and he switched on the torch. Newington College. It’s an excellent place to go if you want a criminal career.

There were vivid, graceful human figures painted on the walls, she saw as Condon’s torchbeam lit the way down the first dark passage. Some of the painted shapes had their faces chipped away as if by chisel. Condon wondered was this the work of Christian iconoclasts? No, he decided. I believe they really got to work in Greece and Turkey. Here it could only be the Muslim iconoclasts. Mohammed had approved of his iconoclastic brethren but had asked them to spare a painting of Jesus and Mary.

Smelling the dim must of centuries, feeling the closeness of the walls, Sally was tempted to say ironically that she was pleased he had made that clear. They took turns into further passages and Condon marveled. Sally thought, however, that no one knew they were here beneath Imhotep’s limestone. The passages, she suspected, had been designed to confuse those who entered. Charlie Condon—in sketcher’s raptures—praised his ancient colleagues. We know they thought like us, he told her, because they drew like us. To her they seemed to draw very differently. But he was the expert. At last—to her great solace—he said they should go out again. He assured her he had the map worked out in his head but it might become confused if he took more turns. He half chided himself on the way out for not having brought a guide. But how could you tell which ones were good?

At last they reached the sunlight. We did excellently, he told her and shook his head. But this is an astounding trinity, when you think of it—the oldest remaining stone building. The most potent pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. And the oldest building of which we know the name of the architect.

To the side of the pyramid lay a lower, stepped building and Condon led her in there. It was not as disturbing as the long passages of the pyramid, and lit up a statue of Djoser. Someone had been at his nose with a chisel but the rest was so immediately human—including the tight, unhappy mouth and low forehead and braided hair.

They had absorbed and been absorbed sufficiently to need to seek a pause when they emerged again. Condon spent a little time reconnoitering for the stone floor of an early Coptic monastery, said to be near the pyramid, and complained that the man who’d discovered it had cleared out all sign of it and given or sold it to museums. So they found a fragment of wall which cast shade and sat on stones, Condon producing the food from his kitbag, Sally a tablecloth she had brought with her in her satchel. They sat on a stone surface and ate the fresh, appetizing flatbread.

They tell me, Charlie murmured, chewing, that you and Honora were on a ship that was sunk.

We were fortunate, she said. And it seems a very long time ago.

What is it all like? When everything starts. The other fellows don’t even try to tell a person.

They can’t tell you. It’s like a new world where there aren’t any words. As for me, I’ve only worked around the edges. But even I can’t explain…

I was ready to come away in November 1914 and got scarlet fever—had a dreadful time talking doctors into letting me get here now, but of course a person thinks all the time, What is it really like? And even—what it’s like when men die around you?

I can’t remember screams, she said. By the time they got to us on the ships or the island, most of them were quieter than you would think they should be. Morphine might have helped. If they’re our patients, we see them go—sometimes it’s hemorrhage. But twenty paces away no one in the ward hears anything.

You must think my questions are absurd, he admitted.

No, she hurried to tell him. I would ask them myself if I were where you are. But don’t forget pneumonia and typhoid and dysentery. They can bring a fellow low too.

Thank you for being so frank, he said, his head on the side. The men aren’t as frank as that.

Well, it’s true you seem to be a different person when these things happen. Not your daily self. You’ll find that. I wasn’t my ordinary self when the ship sank. I was another creature. And that creature finds it hard to explain things.

There was something fragile about him which made her remember the war shocked, the men of bad dreams and waking fears. Was it the fundamental delicacy of his face? His passion for the ancient sketching?

Suddenly he was on another tack. Have you ever looked at the black fellows? he asked.

What do you mean by looked? she asked.

Well, I mean, taken a chance to have a good gaze at their faces?

I don’t think anyone does that, she admitted. I haven’t. Gazing? People don’t gaze at them. Sometimes it’s politeness—they’d be embarrassed to be gazed at. And fair enough—some of it’s fear too. Our fear. And, I mean, the blacks at home seem a pretty desperate lot, don’t they? And that puts us off looking at them.

Well, I used to gaze at them when I was a kid. I got in trouble from grown-ups for it. I played with our abo laundry woman’s kid in the yard in Rudder Street. I wasn’t at my gazing stage then. Gazing came later. This building…

He nodded his head towards the pyramid.

They’re older than this, you know. The Aborigines. You see it in the face. If I find the courage, I might go one day and negotiate man to man with one of them and try to sketch his face. They say at the art class it’s easier to do if you go to the desert—one of the teachers has done it by train and camel. It’s easier to gaze at them there than it is at home. But I’d like to gaze at them at home. Where they’re not romantic figures. Where they’re living in misery.

The mention of art teachers serious enough to penetrate the interior seemed to suggest to her that these were no fly-by-night art classes he attended. She asked him what school it was.

It’s run by an artist, Eva Sodermann. She was worried when the war started she might get interned. But we all petitioned the government. Up to the time I left, it had worked. Anyhow, one of the men who comes there, who teaches with Eva, quite a jaunty sort of fellow—he studied in Paris. Even sold a few paintings to the Royal Academy in London. We used to look at him in awe. You know what he told us? All the paintings he did in Melbourne in the 1890s… no one bought them. Now they have. But he still has to earn his bread teaching. So… God help the rest of us.

I wish you’d brought your sketchbook with you though, she said.

Oh, he said, I’m no good at it in company. I won’t mind showing off when I succeed. But on the way I need to fail and I like to do that bit privately.

But I wouldn’t be critical, she assured him.

You should be critical, that’s the point. There’s no art even at my level unless people are critical. Art doesn’t exist until someone says, That’s good. Or else until someone says, That’s on the nose. I’m too proud to be on the nose in public. As an artist I’m still tentative, even if I talk as if I know what I’m doing. In fact, I was a law student taking a bit of a break to go to an art school. And I’ll probably study law again if no one buys my work. Or at least if no one employs me as an art teacher.

I hope you come to trust me well enough, she said, that you’ll feel free to sketch in my presence.

The even, too innocent smile again. That’s a wonderful thing to say, he told her. When I rally the confidence, I’ll sketch you. Even if I’m not one of those fellows who gets popularity by sketching their friends halfway well. But I’ll study you unawares and do the sketch later. No sense in sketching someone who knows she’s being sketched. It just encourages the subject to put on airs. I want humans in the moments they’re unaware of their grace.

The compliment shot past her eyes and was gone—just as their sudden discomfort wanted it to be. The glare of early afternoon began to hurt the eyes. The sky was vacant of all screening devices, whether sand or cloud. They went and looked at the flat-roofed tombs around the pyramid and made a few investigations of their chambers. Less worried about being lost beneath the vanity of an old emperor, she saw more clearly why the frescoes were marvelous and why they might evoke a kinship between Condon and their makers.

British trucks coming up from Aswan could be expected to roll through Sakkara from three onwards. Charlie and Sally packed their satchels and fetched the ponies and left King Djoser for good.

The West Encountered

Easing back into the velvet and leather of First Class, Leo said, I pity the boys back there in Third with their wooden seats.

On a long train, the nurses occupied perhaps no more than two carriages—a living and breathing buffer between the officers’ carriages forward and the harsher ones back there where the masses of infantry and gunners and sappers, stretcher bearers and orderlies rode. Everyone had been rushed away from the old port of Marseille—from the sight of offshore Château d’If with its Count of Monte Cristo associations and from the city’s dominating cathedral, as well as from other more profane possibilities which could have created the problems of Australian discipline that Cairo had. Nearly all their ship from Egypt was—within an hour of landing—on a train bound for the more serious north of France. Heading north through unafflicted sections of France they gawked at their railway squares and church spires, at their mairies and hotels with the tricolor flying. The train pulled into sidelines to let other trains pass loaded with French soldiers—poilus—in their blue-gray uniforms. In the Rhône Valley—the rail running amidst ploughing farmers—nurses from farms exclaimed about the chocolate-colored soil that promised fertility. There were gray fortified medieval towers the farmers took for granted but which to girls from communities shallow in time riveted the eye and the imagination.

On the station at Arles, French girls gave crucifixes from large baskets—one for every passenger who would accept it. The wives of the town offered apples and oranges and wine at the carriage windows.

They sat in a siding for four hours near Avignon and saw beyond a bridge the heights of its papal palace and its skirt of humbler buildings obliquely visible across fields violet with dusk. At Lyons they queued with soldiers at the station’s taps with the water jugs from their compartments and a wash basin loaned by the porter. Sally filled one of those decanter-like water bottles and stood up and looked straight into the face of Karla Freud.

I saw you, said Freud in a tight sort of voice. She carried a decanter too. It was exactly as if she was continuing an unhappy conversation begun on Lemnos. How are you?

Karla! cried Sally with a complicated joy. She put her decanter on the ground and hugged her.

Ah, said Freud, you missed me, did you?

Yes, of course we did, Sally claimed but already she felt guilt. It was a revelation: they had tried—in fact—to forget her.

I wouldn’t have known you gave me a thought. No letters. No visits in Alexandria.

Freud was located far beyond complaint and blame though. The accusation was sad but absolute.

They didn’t give us time, Sally told her. They sent us straight across to Heliopolis.

She knew she was equivocating.

Yes, and I suppose mail didn’t occur to you. May I use the tap, if you don’t mind? There’s a bit of a queue behind.

Sally moved away and picked up her decanter. She waited for Freud to be finished. Honora and Leo appeared and also waited to talk to Freud. That was it, they couldn’t help solemnly waiting. And solemnity was the wrong mode.

Freud finished filling her own decanter and walked to where they stood. Honora and then Leo kissed her on the cheek.

We had no idea where you were, Leonora claimed.

You must have really searched, said Freud. She let them stew a while. Then she said levelly, I know how it is. You thought rape was catching. I was as good as dead. Don’t worry. I might do the same as you, mutatis mutandis. You didn’t know what to say and I’d probably have resented anything you did say.

Sally said, You’re absolutely right. We were a disgrace.

Naomi writes though, Freud told them. Naomi always has the right word. But anyhow, they put me in a British hospital in Alex. It was good. I could start from square one. So forget what I said.

But still—in the midst of all the milling around the tap—it astonished Sally that she had not thought to chase up Freud; that she had considered her at an end.

What I won’t stand for, said Freud, is if you start any gossip about me here. I’ll hate you for that all right.

What sort of girls do you think we are? asked Honora.

Well-meaning. So were the generals at Gallipoli.

Oh, I don’t bloody well know what to say, Karla, Honora continued. But at least the fellow’s dead…

That makes everything all right, doesn’t it? asked Karla with an extraordinary and withering combination of forgiveness and irony. Look, I’ve got to take this back to the girls. But I might see you somewhere. Don’t worry—I mean it. We’re all stupid bitches on our day.

She raised and tapped the decanter. They went back to their carriage too since the engine was making head-of-steam noises.

After the train moved out again they awoke often—it was frequently sidelined and being static was what kept them awake most, with thoughts of their neglect of Freud. As morning came they looked out from the moving carriages across flat fields where old men dug. Bluebells and irises could be seen pocking the edges of copses and promising a vivid destination. Nearing Paris, though—they could even sight the Eiffel Tower—they veered away towards Versailles and looked at the vanishing promise of the great city. They assured each other they’d get there soon.

At some stage—while Sally slept—the men started to leave the train. She woke to see long lines of them shuffling onto double-decker buses—the first such contraptions she had ever seen. Were the men to be carried by bus straight to the front? After they had gone, the nurses and orderlies were asked to descend and climb on old-fashioned buses to be taken to a number of destinations they had been allotted. They were allocated to Rouen, but saw Freud climb on a separate bus, which someone said was bound for the British hospital in Wimereaux.

The fairly plain little villages they passed through—the doors of houses crowding to the edge of the narrow road—lacked the charm of the awakening fields. They were no longer, in any case, in a mood to be fanciful. They were willing to believe that the people who lived here were as plain as the people of Dungog or Deniliquin. Sally received small thrills of difference at the sight of a bakery in a square or of crossroads Virgins and crucified Christs in their little shrines. Even over there eastwards—on the way to the front—Christ and the Virgin obviously presented themselves village by village to the French soldiers as a small promise of protection and another scale to a man’s armor. Nurses drowsed and shifted irritably by the misted windows of the bus.

After rolling through a half-rustic suburb of Rouen and glimpsing the dull river—the same Seine which ran through Paris—they entered some ornamental gates with a stone arch proclaiming in metal script Champs de Cours de Rouen and—on a sign beyond the gates—Hippodrome de Rouen. Their bus ground past a few stables on which soldier carpenters were working. They saw before them then a metropolis of huts and marquees, and were delivered to the open yard beside an assembly of these huts marked with signs and corps and divisional colors and a kangaroo and emu. Orderlies—already standing with clipboards in hand—met the bus and directed nurses to their tents down firm-surfaced roads lined with sandbagged walls to waist height. Birdwood Street, they might say, number seventeen. They would point to a veritable street—with a pole and a name on it, as in a township. All the streets were named after an Australian general, and one of them after the director of medical services. And in the midst of a vast racecourse—with the distantly glimpsed railings of the course and a brick wall marking the perimeter of the medical town—was the Australian general hospital.

As Honora, Sally, and Leo found their way down General Bridges Street, a number of men came out of a tent—their faces bandaged, their arms in slings—to watch them. They were Tommies. Honora waved her hand not occupied by a valise towards them with the ease of a spoken-for woman which Carradine had once shown. So they found their tent. To enter beneath the canvas did not feel at all like entering the canvas of Lemnos. The beds looked better. Each woman had a cupboard to hang her clothes. Pleasant orderlies brought their heavier luggage in and told them where their mess tent was. In the mess tent were apples and porridge—or a decent stew and fresh bread. So now—they decided—they were located in the kindly stream of a good supply system. They received the standard lecture on flirtation’s limits. They were to use proper titles when speaking to matrons—not least because it shocked the British Red Cross volunteers if they didn’t. They would notice that most of their patients were—for now—Tommies and Kilties and Taffies and Paddies.

After their meal they strolled back, restored, along the hospital roads and said hello to Frenchmen and Britons to calls of, “Wotcha, luv” and “Quelles jolies Australiennes” and so on.

Sally was sure they were all still thinking in part of Freud and their stupidity in her case. Yet they devoted themselves to issues such as whether the stove in their hut needed to be lit. Honora declared it was no colder than a mild winter’s night at home. Then they slept.

When they awoke late that spring afternoon they gradually became aware that the patient capacity of this city of a hospital at Rouen racecourse was two thousand—and it was a hospital of beds, not just mattresses. As a sign of its seriousness there was a well-set-up dispensary from which in an orderly manner drugs were given out on doctors’ prescriptions, as happened in the civil world. This too—as the establishment prepared itself for a war-ending spring slaughter—was a sign of good order. The conclusion the women slept under was that this French affair was a better-ordered war altogether than the hit-and-miss affair of Gallipoli.

When they rose they reported to the reception ward where men were brought on arrival at Rouen. The first ambulances to arrive were full of German wounded. Some came in by the rail spur which ended near the gates of the racetrack. Others arrived by motor ambulance—even by the barges which docked at the quay on the river. Sally was impressed that the more severely wounded Germans were carried in on stretchers which proved to have a blanket not only over the patient but underneath. Femur wounds were splinted and amputees draped over by protective canopies. Many of the supposed enemy wore only tatters of gray uniform and some of them entered the hospital tents on crutches. Others already wore smocks which were marked with the letters “POW.” Many of them ridiculously retained their military caps—those with peaks for officers, and those without for men, and the little button of German colors in the center on the front. It was hard to believe in their culpability. Sally nonetheless could not help studying the faces of the enemy for signs of difference. She gave up the effort as the medical demands of moving bodies for washing and dressing took over. Flesh was flesh.

In the morning a matron called them together in the mess and—using a compliant British Tommy and one of his number of shrapnel wounds for illustration—demonstrated how to irrigate wounds with the newly appointed official disinfectant and method called Carrel-Dakin. A Frenchman—peppered by a bursting shell with extensive but non-fatal wounds—was also brought in on a stretcher for them to practice irrigation on. He lay without complaint throughout the demonstration smoking cigarettes provided by orderlies.

Their sleep that afternoon was broken by the cries of Australian carpenters and of German captives in “POW” smocks who worked as their offsiders. Language incomprehension added to the noise both made as they hammered and sawed in the evening light and tried to convert the stables for thoroughbred racehorses into wards.

The matron-in-chief now called the ward doctors and nurses together and addressed them. The spring and the summer and their battles were on the way and there was something those from Lemnos or Alexandria, Cairo or Heliopolis had not seen yet. There was gas. Yes, they would be taken on a tour of the gas wards.

This was a dimension of barbarity that had not existed on Gallipoli and had been undreamed of in the Archimedes. The nurses were required to take notes on the variety of gases, and all this felt to Sally like a forewarning that there was an even less contained savagery in France than there had been in Lemnos. An unease kept the palms of her hands wet as the matron enlarged on the array of afflictions contained under the general term.

A chemical gas recipe—said the matron—devised by this or that German gas officer is projected towards our poor fellows in a cloud from a line of cylinders. Or else shells full of a recipe are fired by batteries and land with a thud amongst them. We have our own chemical officers since the Germans forced us to retaliate in kind—they began the practice by firing grenades full of tear gas almost as soon as the war started.

The poison gases fell into four distinct groups, the matron instructed them. They were told to make notes, and Sally ended up with dismal columns she would never remember—“Acute Lung Irritants,” “Lachrymators,” “Sternutators,” “Vesicants.”

There were also superficial irritants such as tear gas—although those attacked by them might not consider them superficial but grounds for fleeing trenches. The acute irritants were capable not simply of irritating but of killing by pulmonary edema. Some were solids packed into an exploding shell. Microscopic particles of them could destroy men’s lungs. There were also liquids or liquefied gases, such as chloropicrin, phosgene, and chlorine, and these were dispersed as sprays by cylinder on the right wind, or, increasingly, in a shell by a small explosive charge.

The malign inventiveness of it all made Sally think that she had entered a new continent of human bile.

They should approach these cases with confidence. Most of those who suffered lethal effects had already died closer to the front than this. Here the cases were chronic. They still needed oxygen and—in the case of lachrymatory gassing—care of the eyes. And even here, pulmonary edema could strike a man.

She was brisk—this matron. She had the hydra-headed vileness of gas under her management.

But there was something else they would not previously have seen on such a scale. They should follow the matron—out of the mess into the last lilac light. In the fine spring afternoon day nurses and orderlies who had had the patients’ beds out in the sun were now moving them indoors. Nurses helped the blue-pyjamaed wounded on a last evening stroll. At the end of General Bridges Street there was a crossroad named in honor of a racehorse—Carbine Street. Here the matron-in-chief led the women into a long tent with a cardboard plaque on the door that read NYD. A few dozen of the German prisoners the British had caught in the shock of their first spring foray lay on beds or walked about arguing amongst themselves in German or sat rigid on chairs under the care of a number of orderlies. Some of those who at first looked tranquil on beds were—on a closer look—convulsed into shuddering balls. Some of those who walked about began pushing themselves against the tent wall and bulged it out in terror when an orderly approached.

The matron gathered her nurses about and spoke softly—a tour guide in a strange church.

On both sides of the line, said the matron, whether in clearing stations or general hospitals, lie men who show no wounds but who are afflicted in some disabling way. Doctors believed this mental disablement was funk at first. At the other end of the scale there were even alienists who claimed it had nothing at all to do with a man’s mental history. They argued that such was the absolute shock of the war—the shock of high explosives or of being buried alive—that the invisible disablement might befall any soldier, however brave. Unlike inmates in many mental wards, these men never or rarely show violence.

She walked the nurses down the aisle under a guard of orderlies. Sally knew that even in Egypt the term “shell shock” had escaped as if from a burrow and run through the wards and was picked up by some doctors and debated by others. Its relationship to cowardice—that was the debate.

What is NYD on the door? asked Leo softly.

There is always doubt, said the matron. So it stands for “Not Yet Diagnosed.”

They were permitted to sleep longer that night and were awakened later in the morning by an Australian orderly with a Scots accent. He rang a bell and walked amongst the tents singing genially that his heart was in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.

They die so quietly, said Leonora of the British and the Germans they nursed. It’s just like Lemnos that way.

If conscious, a man might announce his awareness of death in the quietest tones—as if telling a friend that he was going to a shop on the corner to buy tobacco. Some of them were more appallingly young than in Egypt. Britain was scraping boyhood’s barrel. Some were chatty—telling their horrifying stories of the hours of being carried back out of the trench system. Or else they had limped rearwards on shattered limbs or with chest wounds against the tide of reinforcements and supplies—ammunition boxes, cooking boilers, barbed wire—making for the front trench. The worst of cases died at the regimental aid posts or the forward dressing stations. If not there then at a casualty clearing station.

But the wounds of those who reached Rouen were still full of murderous potential. One night in the ward labeled “C” and reserved for Germans Sally watched the heart rate of a young prisoner who had suffered a mere upper-arm flesh wound climb ferociously as his temperature rose in concert. She and Honora watched him gasp and were pleased to see early morning, when he could be sent to the theatre. Here, his arm was amputated. But the bacteria had beaten the surgeon’s knife and entered his system. Or else, some meningeal infection had been provoked in his brain. The boy died not with the quiet Leo had remarked on, but raving. His corporal grasped his hand and gave answers to his hectic, fearful inquiries.

Because Rouen was so large—and authoritative in its bulk and marked streets—it struck Sally as a hospital where men were kept for their entire medical care. But the ward doctors had nurses mark the British and Canadians and Indians with a “1,” “2,” “3”—according to their readiness to return to the front (1), their likelihood to recover within three months (2), or their unreadiness for battle for at least six months—if ever (3). If marked 3, they would be taken by ambulance to the port of Rouen for shipment to England. The recovered—of course—went in the other direction. Back into the threshing machine.

Coming Back

A Melbourne late summer day. The desert that had killed Burke and Wills was breathing on the city. The air moved as fiercely as anything Naomi had known in Egypt. And in that furnace heat she saw from the deck of yet another sister—the Alexander—a thousand young reinforcements sitting on their kits on the blazing wharf where tar melted beneath their boots. They shouted to each other and endured the withering day. Maybe they thought, If we can’t put up with a hot Melbourne afternoon, how will we put up with other places?

Across the wharf came a party of nurses in summer straw hats and the same lightweight gray Naomi wore. They were led at a sedate pace by their matron, who moved stiffly on a stick and bore in her other hand an unfurled parasol designed to fight the sun. This party was not delayed on the wharf at all, but—reporting to a sergeant-major at the gangway—immediately permitted to climb the gangway. They were slow. The younger legs of the nurses were inhibited by the awkward gait of their leader. Even though she was so lamed, this woman leaned on her walking stick with a flamboyance which falsely suggested it was an implement of gesture rather than something needed. Naomi saw then it was Matron Mitchie. A nurse behind her carried her satchel. On both feet—including the one that was prosthetic—she wore black shoes. She rose up in the fierce air, with the wind tearing at and buffeting the face veil which hung from her hat. Naomi concluded that Mitchie had been sent to conduct these girls and to advise them on shipboard life. By that night she would be back to one of the military hospitals around Melbourne to continue practicing how to walk on a false limb.

My God, panted Mitchie. She stepped off the top of the gangplank and down a little into the shade of the deck. She waved her stick for the pure joy of arrival.

My God! she called. It appears to be Naomi Durance!

She handed her parasol to her assistant and embraced Naomi with one strong arm. The other women arriving on deck looked startled. It wasn’t in the normal repertoire of matrons to caress.

Did you notice what an athlete I am these days? she asked. Not waiting for an answer, she introduced Naomi to her aide. A Nurse Pettigrew.

Poor girl, aren’t you? Mitchie asked Pettigrew. Given an old wreck to look after. And having as well to carry her satchel.

Naomi said, You must be visiting someone aboard. Or seeing these girls settled?

No, I’m visiting you. And I’m visiting France and what it holds. I may visit England, land of my forebears, though they did not frequent distinguished parts of that kingdom. But, in a word, Mitchie and company are open again for business—and not without some little argument. Come, let’s find the cabins for these girls before the officers get on board.

In the passageway inside—where the purser sat ready to tell them where their assigned cabins were—Mitchie whispered, It’s brave of you to go back. After that hospital at Mudros Harbor in lovely Lemnos. Not to mention the little bath we had in Mare Nostrum.

I felt that I had nowhere else to go, said Naomi.

How peculiar, said Mitchie. My very feeling too. We’ve been spoiled for the usual regimen.

Naomi was aware of her good fortune in finding a benign aunt aboard a vessel in which she might have been a bewildered spirit. She had already seen Sergeant Kiernan come aboard and had felt reinforced by that fact, even though they had barely spoken. But he was her seer. He was a quantity of shrewdness and wise counsel—a sort of essential store.

Robbie Shaw was not here. He would have dearly desired to be, but was still waiting—so he said—in all senses of the verb to wait. She had frequently let him know that she would not remain in Australia throughout his struggles to have military and medical boards ship him abroad again. Now she was proving it. Robbie wrote that he hung discontentedly around military offices in Brisbane where they had the hide to tell him, he said, that he had already done all that any man could be expected to. But he—having felt that attraction to horrifying circumstance too, to serving the giant mechanism—was not willing to be orphaned by it until the halt was called. What a peculiar thing it all was. This desire to find a home with the gods of sacrifice. She had assured him that she cherished his friendship and wished he could fulfill his ambition. She had once written that in her assessment he was a completer fellow than nearly any other man she had met. But though this was true, she said, she must also insist this did not mean they were suitable for one another.

Baying sergeants and the echoing, metallic thud of boots on corridors—which in more peaceful times had been carpeted and subject to less din—showed that now the ship was taking on its new warriors. She had heard the urgency of sergeants’ commands before harrying soldiers along. It was all so anxiously reminiscent of the Inniskilling men entering the Archimedes. In the meantime Naomi welcomed three new women to the cabin she had occupied on her own along the coast to Melbourne. She felt little of whatever original itch she’d possessed to know shipmates. She knew they would think she was aloof. That was the price of being a Durance.

Through the opened ports she saw thunder clouds surging in, to the relief of the city. Everyone climbed on deck again and watched the cooling electricity of the rain torrents over Melbourne and the thunderheads dropping hail on the wharf like a good-bye gift.

At Fremantle the Alexander became part of a convoy. In the Indian Ocean—in that vastness which made a pond of the Mediterranean—it was rumored that German raiders were loose. All deck lights were doused and cabin lights hidden by curtains. No French destroyer with a supply of blankets could save them in this immensity.

With the troops on deck agog, the Alexander and the other transports entered Table Bay, Cape Town’s harbor. Here it became known by rumor that they were bound direct for England or France. Naomi went to town twice on the squalid little train from the dock. The first was with Kiernan to travel to False Bay and drink tea and eat cake while watching the dazzling southern Atlantic.

The two of them exchanged tales of their homecoming. But Kiernan had not run into a wall of bogus congratulation. His father had been prayerful and rather depressed. He was developing that unjustified repute for disloyalty which afflicted all Quakers in wars. He was fighting off by every legal means a—to quote Kiernan—“compulsory offer” from the federal government to buy his engineering works for war production. He had been promised by public servants that his steel containers would be used purely for water storage. He was certain that they would also be used to store fluids of greater military intent.

I am afraid I complicated things, Kiernan confessed to Naomi, by pointing out that motor fuel was needed not only to run military trucks but also ambulances. In any case, it’s becoming clear he could end up being considered a pariah. Yet he’s a fine citizen when it comes to civil society. I won’t boast of his exercises of charity, because it is the duty of all Friends to perform such things.

It struck her that this discourse was more substantial provender than Robbie Shaw offered.

Her only other journey ashore was to accompany Matron Mitchie to the emporiums of the city. Making her part-sideways, part-direct approach to the glass counters, she showed a taste for jewelry and face powder and bought some talcum. That evening, as on others, she asked Naomi into her cabin and—sitting in a shift—exposed her raw stump and the long, tough scar for Naomi to apply ointment to.

The hard tropic times and sleeping on deck began. By day the ships of the convoy pushed through a gelid ocean which made dense opposition to their bows and gave their sterns no encouraging push. From nearby cruisers they heard machine gun practice—a submarine drill which caused a surge of momentary panic in Naomi’s chest. Moored off Freetown in saturated air they were not let ashore because of the fevers the place was so willing to pass. They watched from the railings the Africans on the coal bunkers below—singing as they loaded coal aboard in baskets. Everyone formed up on deck for the sea burial of a tubercular stoker.

Out to sea again, and further ceremony occurred when the convoy stopped briefly as three soldiers on neighboring transports received similar rites. Then—in one day off the Azores—the air grew cooler, and in a further few days cold. The ocean turned turquoise somewhere off Spain or Portugal—from both of whose shores the convoy took wide berth for fear of observation by enemy spies. It turned gray under the influence of a lingering winter off Biscay. Soon sleek, lithe, and darting destroyers met them and herded them into the Channel.

A spring fog both protected them from the submarines and prevented those young soldiers who were not immigrants to Australia but were born colonial from sighting the isle of their progenitors. When the ship found Southampton and fabled England, all seemed low sky, grim, gray derricks, long warehouses. Trucks took them to the railway station, past dour, unwelcoming terraces and boarding houses little better than tenements and comfortless pubs on corners. And so to a crowded and besooted railway station. Some of the young soldiers must have secretly asked themselves if this was what they had volunteered to die for.

The railway station—it had to be said—was also a coal dust–ridden wonder, august in its columns and great vault. The troops were bound for the training grounds of Salisbury Plain and the nurses for London. In Horseferry Road, Westminster, where the Australian military administration had its headquarters, they would have their future disclosed to them.

Cosmopolitans

From Rouen they could go for a day to the Paris they had been cheated of on the way north. Sally had written to Freud’s hospital near Wimereaux and named the spring date on which the three of them would be under the main clock at the Gare d’Orsay—a clock which none of them had ever seen but which surely had to exist in all railway stations—at ten o’clock. If Freud could get a lift along the coast to Boulogne, she would find the train journey from there less long-winded than their journey from Rouen.

For their Paris leave they were issued with rail warrants and taken by ambulance to the great white railway station of Rouen-Rive-Droite, where the light through the artfully designed windows was uncertain as to whether to be dreary or display some pastel subtlety for their day out. By the time the train left, the day had decided to honor their journey with color and they were in a mood to let the countryside enchant them. They passed copses of elm trees and poplars which seemed to Sally to have been culled down from ancient forests into ornamental size. The dying ring-barked verticals of tall gums which marred Australian distances were utterly missing from the scene. In the villages women and children were drawing their water from the pumps at the end of streets while—puffing on a cigarette—a boy in sabots and aged about ten watched the train sweep by. An occasional grand house would stand in its own company of trees beyond ploughed fields. But no châteaux were jammed up against the railway line—coal grit was for ordinary people.

Then they approached the squalor and glimpses of grandeur in the city and rolled into the Gare d’Orsay—the grandest locomotive palace one could imagine, the most infused with style, a structure of French jollity to stand in counterpoint to all the solemn domes and columns of British-built railway stations from Tasmania to Egypt. They found on the concourse the great clock they had expected. Beneath it—tall and pale and a little undernourished-looking—stood Freud. Her appearance there—upright and singular and even with that vacancy on her face which belongs to those waiting for a train to arrive—seemed to round out the day with absolution. They rushed to her and she returned their kisses soberly but without any hesitation.

Where are we going? she asked—as if they were in charge.

They could cross the bridge to the Louvre and decided to do that first. The museum was full of soldiers of uncountable nationalities. A good argument for the ultimate rout of the enemy seemed established in this variety of uniforms of alternating dourness and flamboyance. The fancier the clobber—went Honora’s opinion—the less fighting the bloke had done. They had time only for a few galleries—they told themselves they would be back and would devote a day entirely to the museum. Sally was unexpectedly startled by the figures in landscape (landscape for some reason being the lesser element for her) or figures alone. But she was inhibited—since meeting Condon—from ill-educated Oohs and Aahs, from saying something basic when something better should be said. She nonetheless found herself rehearsing—in case she met Charlie Condon soon—the names of artists. She liked David—he was easy to like—and Ingres’s woman with the high-waisted gown. Somehow she understood that she would not have brought the same eye to them if it weren’t for Condon and the brief but intense education on sketching and allied matters he’d given her at Sakkara.

When they emerged from the Louvre they found the day still bright with high, streaky clouds and—though it was chilly—they walked in the Tuileries Garden where trees were still bare. Their branches offered buds though, like promissory notes on a coming exuberance. Then—following the map Sally had bought—they hiked along the embankment of the river towards the island where the great cathedral was to be found. This too they had all seen represented in childhood compendia of the world—and then there was Quasimodo lurching and dominating their imaginations. Like the pyramids, the cathedral could be approached by ordinary steps taken by one’s daily legs—the same legs with which one emerged from Kempsey’s Barsby’s Emporium and crossed Belgrave Street to Mottee’s Tearooms. The cathedral bloomed with side chapels and before each one were ranks of burning candles. Honora lit one after another for what she called “my special intentions” and sank to her knees before the Virgin, moving her lips in beseeching God’s favor for Lionel Dankworth, whose last letter was from Egypt but who might even now be in France. Another little flame for her family and one for the Allied cause. And a fourth. For Freud, she confided to Sally in a whisper. For the wrong we did her. She went on fitting small franc notes into the cash boxes attached to the racks of candles.

When Honora’s votive candle foray ended, they climbed Quasimodo’s tower where—looking down the reaches of the Seine—she covered her Paris amazement with a more earthy issue. She could see the hatted heads of men in the open-topped pissoirs, capable without embarrassment of lifting their hats to passing ladies.

The Eiffel Tower waited in its gardens for them and was reached by the Métro with its crowds of soldiers and older men in suits—all with lush Gallic moustaches—and worn-looking housekeepers, seamstresses, wives. Their weariness was unlikely to be dispelled even by a military triumph. Then, as they mounted the Métro steps—there, the tower beetling and dizzying but tethered by its four giant feet to four distinct plots of earth.

Back at the railway, they kissed Freud good-bye in the belief they had at least in part expiated their earlier crassness. She responded with a wary affection—not sure yet whether she wished to go back to full sisterhood. She found her train. Then they took theirs to Rouen, on a long-lasting spring evening.

As they ate chocolates and pastries, Leonora suddenly asked the others whether they thought there were malingerers amongst the NYD. On the table before them lay the litter of what Leonora called in her private-school way a beano—boxes which had held exuberant gâteaux and little fluted cups for the most improbable chocolates and the most fanciful confections. As Leonora raised the matter of NYD, Honora made a sucking, dubious sound through her back teeth as if uncertain that she wanted to discuss it.

Warwick thinks there are, Leo said. Not all. But a sizeable number. Malingerers.

Warwick was of course Captain Fellowes. Leo would be the sort of wife who would gladly take on her husband’s opinions and not feel imposed upon by them. She was an excellent nurse, energetic and willing, skilled and kindly. But she thought that Captain Fellowes’s ideas were worth a lifetime of assent.

Sally ran through the catalogue of cases she’d met. The young Scotsman who talked a great deal when not heavily sedated and who, as his dosage wore off, was likely to rush around the tent asking everyone where his mask was and—comic if it weren’t tragic—looking for it under beds and chairs. He had been gassed himself—though the doctor said not badly. It seemed, though, that he had seen his fellows choking to death and thereafter even the smallest residual waft of chlorine or phosgene left behind in the trenches after a gas attack was enough to unhinge him.

So was this pretense? But to pretend for weeks on end to be out of your head with shock was itself a sort of madness anyhow.

Honora gave a small chocolate burp and echoed Sally’s thought.

If any of them are fooling us, then we shouldn’t be ashamed because it means this—they have fooled their way through three levels of doctors and officers, from the front line to the dressing station to the casualty clearing station and on to Rouen. That’s what you would call a worthy performance.

I was on duty in there one day, Leo persisted, however, when I turned suddenly and saw this sly, half-smiling look on one of them. Just in the second before he went back to aphonia and shuddering away. It made me wonder.

It might just have been a variation in the condition, Sally suggested. Or it could have been a rictus.

You’re very charitable, said Leo with some of her beloved’s skepticism.

But, said Honora, even if they are pretending, something horrible made them give up their sense of honor and become pretenders.

Leo ploughed on in a way Sally now found overblown. Perhaps it was the binge of sugar and chocolate and cream that had made her uncommonly persistent.

That’s easy to say. But they’ve abandoned their comrades, in that case. Warwick doesn’t think they’re deliberately shirking though. He believes it begins with the medical officers at the aid post. If the first doctor they meet is too sympathetic, it has a knock-on effect—they act it up for the next MO they meet at the dressing station and then for the next one at the casualty clearing station. So that by the time they’ve got back here, they’re convinced they’re a complete mess and act accordingly. Warwick says he would like to be a doctor at the regimental aid post, and tell most of them they were fine and give them some medicinal brandy and a good sleep and send them back.

But he’s too badly needed at base, isn’t he? asked Sally.

Yes, said Leonora. In a sense he would be wasted up there.

They assessed that. It was true—even if uttered with a touch more certainty than required. She continued, He’s a man of kindness. He doesn’t easily suspect people. But he’s entitled to his skepticism.

As we are, said Honora with sudden sternness, to our conviction. I think it’s clear there’s such a thing as this shell shock. Most young men can’t act for two bob. You can see right through them. The cases I’ve seen aren’t acting.

Let’s not argue over it, Sally urged them. It’s been too good a day to end in a brawl. Besides, another few months of nursing, I think, and we’ll all know for sure.

I wonder, will there be less of it when our Australian boys go into the line, said Honora in a whisper.

Warwick believes so, said dutiful Leo.

This was in many regards a spring of jaunty hopes. Wounded Englishmen strolling General Bridges Street knew what the boomerang-shaped badges on the nurses’ go-to-town uniforms meant, and the Gallipoli “A” for Anzac at their shoulders as well. And English officers stopped them to say, We saw your chaps coming through Armentières to relieve our Twelfth Division. My heavens, they looked so robust and confident!

The influence was more in people’s minds, though, than in military dispositions. Not even the greatest Australian patriots could argue that they had the tens of millions as America did to make an army so massive that it could by mere numbers tame the year and bring it to peace. Of course, the newer women in the mess believed that each Australian was worth a number of the others. But as Kiernan had said on the Archimedes, flesh was flesh.

What could not be argued with was the fact that to other armies the Australians were like the birds of the spring. They were a sign of things turning—of the greater and greater accumulation of armies whose soldiers would resolve it all before the trenches froze again. The Australians were the harbingers.

In that atmosphere of newness and hope, Captain Fellowes and Staff Nurse Leonora Casement sent out a cyclostyled invitation to all doctors and nurses of Number 3 Australian General Hospital Rouen to attend a party in the officers’ mess to celebrate their engagement. It was considered they would not need to wait much beyond autumn to have their wedding. Speeches of praise for the couple were made by the colonel and matron. Leo’s face shone with such authority that for an hour it was easy to believe the Western Front would accommodate itself to her nuptial timetable.

Now the first of the Australians began to arrive. One was a young officer who had been training in a quiet area they called “the nursery.” But a shell had found him there and his entire head was—for the moment—bandaged. The wound beneath that was a test Sally and Honora were set. This scale of harm and outrage numbed and drove from her mind for days on end the memory of her mother and of all connivance with Naomi.

In the surgical ward—since it was considered his wound would need occasional trimming under anesthetic—the young man took in soup and tea through a tube inserted into his bandages. Other nutrients in sterile solution were infused through a vein in his arm. The ward doctor seemed pessimistic and had declared a face wound a prime site for sepsis. When they first exposed the raw meat of the man’s face by removing the packing placed there at the casualty clearing station from which he’d come to Rouen, Sally and Honora found that one eighth of a grain of morphine did not save him agony. Stutters of complaint escaped from the bloodied hole in his face. His one eye seemed to shed tears. So the dose was raised to one quarter—which left him drowsy by the hour and was a good arrangement in Sally’s estimation. When so relieved, he could dazedly attempt to speak, making words from the throat and not with his palate. The voice box was intact but many words were unformed for lack of lips. The name on his label when he’d first come in was Captain Alex Constable.

This young man—whose face was steak from his upper right eye socket to the corner of his lower mouth—uttered one day after his wound had been dressed the sound “A’her ease nur.” He repeated it, quite politely but insistently. They eventually realized he wanted a pad of paper and it was all at once so obvious that he should have been given one—and a pencil—earlier. It was as if his lack of a face had somehow prejudiced everyone into thinking he couldn’t write. Honora fetched a pencil and a notebook with AUSTRALIAN COMFORTS FUND on its cover. He held up a hand—long-fingered—and had it do a form of salaam in thanks. There was humor in his remaining eye, now left uncovered by the dressings. And so he set to writing a letter. The energy and fluency with which he wrote were astounding to Sally. When he was finished he tore out the pages he had written on and coughed—that was one form of expression thoroughly remaining to him. He folded the letter in four to fit the flimsy envelope they gave him, and handed it over for postage. He then wrote on a full, unfolded page, “Nurses, could you kindly send this missive to”—and there was an address—“Mrs. G. D. Constable, ‘Congongula,’ via Narromine, New South Wales.” They said, Of course, and he nodded and began writing again. “Sorry to hold you young women up,” said the page he ultimately handed to them.

Honora assured him she’d get the word out. She was not any surer than Sally as to why this concerned him. But his wound entitled him to consideration. He had no face. He might not live. At best, years of painful remedy awaited him. And the thing he claimed annoyed him was the rumor that he was the first Australian to be wounded on the Western Front.

A letter awaited Sally one evening when she got to the mess. It was from England.

There was soon a letter from Charlie Condon as well. He too had arrived in France and had been at first delayed in Marseille with suspected typhus. But the symptoms had misled the British doctors and he had recovered in a few days. This gave him the chance, he told her, to visit the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Marseille—it was in a palace, and the seventeenth-century sketches there put the last remnants of his fever to total flight. “When you looked at them,” he wrote, “you felt light as a breeze and you thought, I can produce a line like that.”

He was, he said, about to find his way north.

The Chariot Descends

Matron Mitchie—refusing help—had taken the train to a hospital at Sidcup in Kent to have the bucket of her false leg redesigned to the final healing of her stump. She now returned and professed the adjustment to her prosthetic leg so satisfactory that very soon—so she claimed—she would be able to walk without that pronounced stiffness which gave away most amputees. Naomi did not understand how this would be achieved but did not argue.

Nor did she when Mitchie told her to pack up for a move. Mitchie had already packed under her own steam. She had not long tolerated the personal nurse Pettigrew. Not that Pettigrew was lacking in skill. But Mitchie was a woman who wanted to attend to things herself.

Are we all packing? asked Naomi.

No. You and me. We are off to improved digs. A bit of an undemocratic arrangement vis-à-vis the other girls. But they’ll survive.

Descending the grim institutional stairs of the Home for Fallen Women an hour later, they found waiting for them an enormous white limousine trimmed with black—a Vitesse Phaeton no less surprising than if Elijah’s chariot had descended on this bleak street. Naomi’s dun uniform and gray hat were a welcome option when faced with such a vehicle. She would otherwise have had to find something up to the style of the thing—for which she had neither the resources nor the gift.

A middle-aged chauffeur in a uniform of cap and jacket and leggings stopped and opened the back door to admit them. He introduced himself as Carling. Once amidst the splendor of upholstery, they were driven through the center of London and across Hyde Park and its exercising cavalry and baby-walking nannies to the Dorchester Hotel, where they were allotted rooms they had no time yet to see. Instead, they left their baggage and returned straight to the enormous car. Then the great vehicle found its way into Mayfair, whose astonishing townhouses seemed as gratuitous and wonderful to Naomi as buildings on a different planet designed to house a different race.

Well, said Mitchie to her, now we’re ready for socializing in London.

As the Phaeton slowed, Mitchie told her, The people we’re meeting here are the clever Lady Tarlton and her total donkey of a husband, Viscount Tarlton. He was governor-general of Australia for a time until the prime minister got fed up with him. That’s all fine with you, I assume? I’ve kept it as a surprise.

The house they arrived before was tall and painted a jovial cream color. The driver helped them out and they rose up the steps to be met by—what else?—a doorman in livery. He made a hand gesture that they should enter the great circular lobby which rose to a brilliant dome trimmed with gold-leaf moldings. Naomi thought it must be a stage set. It was surely not for occupation by people.

A servant who looked more like some masquerading duke in morning suit took their entrée cards and pointed them towards the large room beyond the lobby. At the double doors into the room stood another servant in morning suit next to a most beautiful, upright, muslin-draped, and well-bosomed woman wearing her brown hair informally ribboned at the back and—unlike any of the other women who were arriving, including Mitchie and Naomi—with no gloves on her hands. A slim, slightly shorter man with a ginger moustache stood on the other side of this woman. He was dressed in a suit which so exactly fitted him that it was like an outer skin. His face was handsome in a boyish way but his eyes were vacant. The morning-suited servant—having got their names in whispers from Mitchie and Naomi—muttered to the gentleman and the smiling, splendid woman that these newcomers were Miss Marion Mitchie and Miss Naomi Durance.

Oh, cried the woman with the not-quite-perfectly-done hair. I don’t need an introduction to Marion. I know Marion. You remember her, Bobby? From Melbourne?

Oh yes, said Lord Tarlton, who didn’t remember Mitchie at all.

His wife kissed Matron Mitchie on the cheek with a sisterly intensity.

My champion in the wilderness! said Lady Tarlton. Do go in, Marion, with your friend. Have whatever you like, and I’ll come along in a moment to have a good confab.

Lord Tarlton put a hand into Naomi’s gloved one and muttered, Delighted! in a voice of great indifference. Lady Tarlton shook it with more earnest energy. I do so admire you for being here in embattled Britain, she said.

In a room full of men and women who were chiefly middle-aged and looked important—some of the men proving it by wearing the red tabs indicating they were generals—a waiter with a tray came to ask them what they would care to drink. Matron Mitchie nominated dry sherry and so did Naomi—though purely for lack of something else credible. No one came to talk to them so they went to a deep-set window and Mitchie gratefully took a seat in a gilt-backed chair placed there. The honking in the room was like that of poultry who knew a thing or two. Naturally enough Naomi asked Mitchie how it was that a woman from her world had met someone so preposterous as to bear a name like Lady—or, as she was announced, Viscountess—Tarlton.

Well, Mitchie explained, Lady Tarlton asked me to help her set up a nursing service in the bush—for women, you understand. She’d traveled in the bush with her husband when he was governor-general and living proof any fool can do the job, and while he looked at horses and girls, she looked at the way real women lived and gave birth on the farms further out. She also tried to go up into the tropics to see what was happening there. But the prime minister told her it would cost too much for a naval ship to take her. Really, he was just trying to hurt her husband. Mind you, she’s disapproved of. People call her “spirited.” And you know what they imply by that? Immorality, that’s what.

Mitchie snorted at that trick of words.

And did you set up this scheme of nurses in the bush?

She set it up. She gave her own money for it. Oh yes, she might seem a long way removed from your ordinary shearer’s or selector’s wife. But you’ll see she has this sympathy. It’s in her nature.

Naomi dropped her voice. And is it in Lord Tarlton’s nature?

She wanted to hear a mischievous answer and got one.

Very little you could put a reasonable name to is in his nature.

Within herself, Naomi was dizzied at this conversation. I am talking, she realized—or at least being spoken to—like a worldly woman in a play. She was warily delighted with it but would have been happy to be free from the stiffness and furtiveness this house imposed on her and go back to Paddington.

Mitchie said, They don’t really live together as husband and wife, and it’s just as well, since Tarlton doesn’t deserve her. Look at her! See the loose hair? The ribbons? Posh people don’t like that at all. Some of the Melbourne snobs didn’t like it either. They said she was “untamed.” As for him, I’ve got to admit he was in Gallipoli for a while. But he’s the sort of man who always comes through, or—more likely—gets out in time. Probably by being sacked.

Mitchie shook her head to clear it of Lord Tarlton. She sipped her sherry a while. Now, the point is, she said then, Lady Tarlton has visited every rich Australian in London. And likewise the English who have Australian connections and are making a slap-up fortune from Australian copper and iron and so on. With the blessing of that chap over there—recognize him, the slightly portly fellow? Fisher, our former prime minister. The very chap Tarlton annoyed. He’s here out of respect for Lady Tarlton. No other reason.

Naomi glanced. So I am also looking at prime ministers as if they were mere bank managers. Mr. Fisher was certainly portly, though his face bespoke good intentions.

She wants to create an Australian voluntary hospital in France, Mitchie continued. The military people hate her for the idea—maybe they’re frightened she’ll do a better job than them. But she is very powerful and they have to take her seriously, and even give her nurses from the army nursing services.

You don’t mean us? asked Naomi.

If you like. She wants me to be matron of her hospital, and I can offer a post to you, Naomi—a means to get away from all the army stuffiness.

I promised I’d join my sister.

I know Sally. She’d understand. Look, I’m not pretending it won’t be hard. You’ll be helping to run the place, as well as nursing. And there’ll be a lot of paperwork for us to do. We’ll be working with Red Cross volunteers who might come and go for all I know. Do you think you might like to work with me on such a scheme?

A rosy feeling of both deliverance and promise swept through Naomi. And Sally would be within reach. France was not immense.

In fewer than two weeks, said Mitchie, you and I would be off to Boulogne with Lady Tarlton to find a site that might serve for the hospital. When I say the hospital, I should tell you that she would not have her name formally attached to the nurses in the bush, and she intends in the same spirit to call her hospital not Lady Tarlton’s but simply the Australian Voluntary Hospital.

Barely knowing it was happening, Naomi began to weep softly.

Oh, my dear, said Matron Mitchie. Is that grief?

It’s that you trust me.

Oh yes? asked Mitchie. I give you an impossible job and you shed tears of gratitude. See what you think in six months!

The portly, tall man with the long, benevolent face and the soft eyes—that is, the man who was once prime minister of the Commonwealth—had begun to look over and now excused himself from men and women around him and advanced on them. Naomi could barely grasp what he was saying. Mitchie displayed her easy worldliness by calling him “High Commissioner,” because he’d given up his life in Australian politics to take up that role in London—not bad work for an old coal-miner, as Mitchie would later remark. He talked of their dedication and how Australia honored them. He uttered the normal hope about the war ending with any luck by the autumn of this year of Our Lord 1916. He even quoted generals—British and French—who had assured him of it. Across the room, people were beginning to leave the reception, and when nearly all had done so, the high commissioner shook their hands and went too. Lady Tarlton—smiling and tall with her hair having further escaped her ribbon—approached them from across the room.

Charlie Condon turned up overcoated one chilly morning at the Rouen racecourse to see Sally. When he took his slouch hat off, she could see how carefully he had combed his brown hair during the journey. His eyes still had the same enthusiasm as they had shown in Sakkara, his nose was flared as if he were anxious to breathe in the encounters he was about to experience, and the V of his well-shaven jaw ended in a bulb of chin which shone with what she thought of as boyish inquiry.

He had set out early from a rest area near Amiens and found a truck that was coming to Rouen, and had been on the road for five hours—even though he had needed to travel barely sixty miles. He would need to leave by three o’clock—when a truck would come to get him again.

His arrival at the door of the nurses’ mess was the sort of thing that got fatuous talk going, but by good fortune she did not need to swap shifts and go to the matron for permission to rearrange the roster. She had, in fact, just finished the night shift in the surgical ward which contained Captain Constable. Charlie Condon’s eyes glittered in the doorway of the hut which had now been put in place by Australian carpenters and German prisoners to accommodate the nurses at mealtimes and during recreation.

After she’d got him some tea, they were able to go into Rouen—there were always trucks and cars and ambulances going there. They squeezed into the front seat of an ambulance and walked from the dock—where it was going—to the cathedral square. About the cathedral, Charlie Condon had—as Sally knew beforehand he would—absorbed a great deal. Would his continual enthusiasm ever become tedious? It was not yet. Knowledge was for joy with Charlie and not for showing off. There were newly famous paintings by an artist named Monet, he said. Done some years back, but the world was just starting to catch up with them. About twenty paintings of the great cathedral, he said, the façade and towers in all hours and every degree of light.

She liked the majesty of that phrase: “every degree of light.”

What gives me hope, said Charlie, is that’s what we have back home. Light, light, and more light. Light to burn. Light to waste. But you’ve heard me go on about all that.

He had no idea of the scale to which everything was news to her. He told her of the stained glass seven hundred years old which had a unique turquoise that modern glassmakers couldn’t reproduce. She sensed that the fact there were such things made the world liveable for him.

He listed Rouen’s relics which had brought in pilgrims from all over Europe. And they weren’t all pious pilgrims. It was because they were sinners that they went on pilgrimage and hoped that the sight of the body parts of saints would save them from their crimes. Of course now, he said, it seemed there was no end to body parts of saints and sinners strewn across France and Flanders.

After a few hours a cathedral wanes in interest—something infinite gluts the finite taste. He took her to lunch. It was an auberge called La Couronne which claimed to be the oldest in France—a gabled house, with balconies and leadlight windows and a certain droop to it from the long-running work of gravity. The landlord seemed to expect them. Charlie confessed he had sent a telegram to make a reservation. All without knowing whether he might be eating on his own. The scale of that act of daring impressed her.

Later, she found that the sauce for the duck they ate was made from blood. Because she was a farmer’s daughter, the concept did not repel her. They drank Bordeaux wine—though her hayseed palate took no special delight in it except in its worldliness. But the subsequent feeling of lightness combined with the idea of the telegram and with turquoise glass and the ageless recipes contained in this old house all made an entrancing hour.

What are they like? he asked then. They were eating an apple tart with fresh cream. It was improbably laced with a brandy named Calvados. The fellows you nurse?

He still had that unrequited curiosity about it all.

There’s the new element, Charlie, she told him. There’s gas. We’re shipping a lot of men with gas damage back to Blighty. Which means they’re almost certainly finished as soldiers—and maybe as men. So you must always keep your mask handy. The foul stuff seems to be everywhere up there.

They sent us through a training field full of gas with our masks on. It isn’t the most comfortable experience.

Captain Constable occupied the center and forefront of her imagination. She wouldn’t mention him to Charlie, for there was a fear of infecting him with this reported ill fortune.

Are the Germans shelling you where you are?

No, said Charlie, the shelling’s pretty mild. Sometimes one comes over. It almost seems an accident. There’s a story that can’t be true—but it goes that the Germans have made a deal with us that if we don’t shell Steenbecque, they won’t shell Hazebrouck. Anyhow, that’s how it’s working at the moment. But when we’re considered fit for blooding, off we’ll go to somewhere less cozy.

She sipped wine as a sort of necessary tribute to the day.

Charlie talked about a farm family he and other officers had been billeted with for a while in a small house near Steenbecque. The family had been sullen at first. It had been roughly treated early in the war by German officers and then fairly contemptuously by some British ones from a highfalutin regiment. But Charlie helped with chopping wood and even with milking the family cow—doesn’t hurt to do one cow, he said—and the French family warmed and were astonished. The farmer’s wife asked him how he could actually be an officer and chop wood?

They walked the streets afterwards and Charlie was willing to look in the windows of boutiques—what in Australia they delighted in calling “frock salons.” Charlie was not uninterested in fabric and in the lines of garments. After all, he explained, it was just an extension of his interests. In Rouen it drew no remark at all to go looking at fabrics on the arm—for she had taken his arm—of a man. It seemed to be considered that a woman was fortunate still to have an ambulatory soldier to promenade with on a quiet afternoon.

At two or so Charlie said that he meant to see where Joan of Arc had been burned. She had seen it before—in town with Honora and Leo.

But you must have been there before? he asked. No, she said.

They progressed down the cramped medieval streets to a little square—a church stood there and a monument with fleur-de-lis engraved—topped by a cross to mark the place Joan had died.

Imagine how scared she was, said Charlie.

None of them had thought of that on her earlier visit. They’d marveled at her gameness—a French foreshadowing of Ned Kelly. She was a creature from a valiant tale rather than a girl really tethered and planted in the midst of a burning terror. But Sally could all at once now feel panic in the air.

He was scanning the eaves of the old houses of the square—as if there was some prayer and cry of fear wedged up there. His jawline was straight and his neck scraped and red in places from an earnest razor.

Simply her and the fire, he murmured. And her conscience and her terror.

He turned his face to Sally and laughed then—the memory of their pleasant day retethered him to air that was tranquil and did not blaze. He consulted his watch. My God, his truck was due at the racecourse in half an hour. They looked around for a motor taxi but saw only the occasional private auto and farmer’s dray. They raced back to the cathedral, where a British ambulance driver—in town on some unstated duty—got them back to the hippodrome. There the two of them stood in the gravel road before the administration buildings. They were both uneasy—they were further embarked on friendship than they quite knew what to do with. His truck rolled up and saved them from their bewilderment. She wondered if he would try a kiss before he boarded it and could see he considered it but found that perhaps the day had been too randomly built by him—too plump with jumbled incident—to justify it.

He’d sent a telegram to the auberge! The idea seemed flamboyant beyond the limits of anything she’d known. People sent telegrams for deaths and weddings and urgent unexpected arrivals. He’d sent a telegram for a table.

From the time of their visit to the Tarlton townhouse, Matron Mitchie and Naomi had rooms provided for them at the Dorchester. Although Naomi’s was appropriately more modest than that of Matron Mitchie, it still astonished her with its sumptuousness and—by contrast with Lemnos—its vast bed. She had not slept in a room and on her own for close on two years. Yet the luxurious solitude made her edgy. As payment for this high living, Mitchie set her to work immediately, devising a roster for a hospital of two hundred wounded—to begin with anyhow, said Mitchie. So Naomi planned a schedule for phantom nurses not yet recruited from the army nursing service or from the Red Cross volunteers or from civilian hospitals. Forty trained nurses were needed just for the two shifts of twelve hours and the one day’s rest a week initially planned. Nearly as many women would be needed by night as by day since inquiry showed convoys often arrived then.

Occasionally the grand Vitesse Phaeton collected Michie and Naomi and took them to the dazzling house in Mayfair, where Naomi attended to the filing of requisition forms and receipts for all that could be needed for a genuine hospital. The requisition forms represented what Lady Tarlton was asking the army to provide. But the receipts represented what she had bought with her own money or that of the unspecified rich Anglo-Australians whom she held in the palm of her hand. Naomi filed as well letters on hospital rations—right down to the level of salt and mustard and thrice-weekly oatmeal—which Lady Tarlton had exchanged with members of her London Committee. Amongst Lady Tarlton’s personal purchases were autoclaves, arm and leg splints, bedsteads, and two first-class theatre tables. She had elicited from a medical supply company an X-ray machine. The requisitions addressed to the army were for disinfectants, antiseptics, dressings, sutures, surgical instruments, and all that the army should—in good conscience—provide its wounded. One letter assured her that once the voluntary hospital was established in the Boulogne region—where advice from the office of the director of medical services had suggested it should be located—a body named the Advanced Depot of Medical Stores would be ordered to supply said hospital. Supplies and equipment appropriate to a pathology laboratory would obviate the necessity of sending samples to the already busy pathology sections of the army general hospitals.

The range of the letters and forms—the number of folders to which Naomi had to take recourse—was itself a measure of the seriousness of Lady Tarlton. If Naomi had believed that Lady Tarlton was going into the hospital business on a genial whim and as an amateur, her filing of the woman’s letters—sent and received—dispelled it.

On a clear spring morning—when it seemed the entire width of the Channel could be seen with all its shipping and scampering destroyers—Mitchie and Naomi occupied a state cabin along with Lady Tarlton in a troopship on its way to France. They drank tea and were permitted by a lieutenant general—who touched his cap to the viscountess and with his staff made way for her and her two comrades—to descend the gangplank first.

As Southampton had offered so little of ideal Britain, the basin in which they landed at Boulogne offered nothing of France. Though a distant castle could be seen on a rise, it was a mere token. They were separated from it by a vast, squalid railyard, where troops who had arrived fully equipped on earlier ferries waited and smoked by companies and battalions amidst shuttling trains. Here, loneliness in crowds and expectation and fear seemed to create their own odor. Soot lay over all. The absolute khakiness of the mass swamped the few tokens of difference—a group of kilts here, a slouch-hatted Australian there. But chiefly masses of undifferentiated men in steel helmets. And all of them nutriment for cannon.

They watched from the pier as from a shipboard crane onto the wharf of their cross-Channel steamer descended the great white-black Vitesse Phaeton with its driver, Carling, in a military uniform supervising and yelling extraneous advice to the English crew above and the French stevedores below. The Phaeton landed on the wharf with a small mechanical squeak. Carling opened its back door and ushered in the ladies. They sat within and waited for the bags to come—Lady Tarlton’s great traveling trunk and the more modest luggage of Mitchie and Naomi. Carling—Lady Tarlton explained—had been Tarlton’s batman in the Dardanelles. Tarlton himself, she said, had for a time served as a brigadier general there but had been recalled.

Now that Tarlton himself is hors de combat—his yeomanry regiments were wiped out, you know, poor chaps, and the War Office decided he should abandon soldiering—Carling has become my—as the Australians say—“offsider” and “rouseabout.” No, offsider. You’re the rouseabout, Matron Mitchie!

Naomi wondered what indiscretion committed by Lord Tarlton or what shock suffered by him had caused them to tell him he was no longer required to lead yeomanry into the face of machine guns.

All packed up, the Phaeton drove them out of the great railyard and past a fish market. Women in the ordinary streets of the lower town were cooking pancakes on charcoal stoves. Soldiers and children in sabots waited for their order to be finished. The Phaeton then rose uphill into the town proper—which now revealed itself to look like the France she had expected. There were tall old buildings from what she would learn to call the Second Empire period. Naomi noticed the words “Angleterre” and “Anglais” on stores and streets. And yet little looked English. A mere twenty-six miles across a stretch of water made everything look somehow not-England. You traveled twenty-six miles in Australia and nothing altered. Two hundred and sixty miles, ditto. Here, it was a mere ferry ride between strangenesses.

At a Second Empire hotel called the Paris Grand, their luggage was unloaded under Carling’s direction and morning tea was—as Lady Tarlton said—“taken” in a high-vaulted lobby. The lobby was drenched with light from vast windows and seemed to exist in warless parallel to the business they were about to launch on.

And Miss Durance, said Lady Tarlton, shaking her head, as if it were a means of seeing her more clearly, what is your history?

I’m afraid I don’t have a history, Lady Tarlton, Naomi said, unaccomplished at answering that kind of question. You know Australia, Lady Tarlton. I’d had a life—as people do there.

Lady Tarlton laughed—a fluting but genuine sound, with too much body to it for it to be merely patronage.

I like the directness of your answer, she said, looking with her left hand for stray strands of her auburn hair—there always seemed to be one.

Matron Mitchie said, Ma’am, Miss Durance took control of our raft. I think had it been left to a man, I might not be here.

Naomi felt powerless to correct this kind of palaver. But Lady Tarlton tossed her head and cast her hands eastwards as if the front line were only a block away. Well, we see what happens when things are left to men. Tell me, though, Miss Durance, did you train in the bush?

Two years in a country town, ma’am. Then the city.

Tell me about the obstetrics in the country town.

Puerperal fever was not unknown in the Macleay District, said Naomi.

She did not mention that much evidence for this killer of young mothers could be found in the cemetery just below the ridge from the hospital. Poorer people upriver were forced to depend on a dairy farmer’s wife with some midwifery experience to deliver their babies. When things went wrong the women might be two or more days’ ride up the valley. They were brought to town only after the fever had already taken hold.

Lady Tarlton looked intently at Mitchie. You see, Marion. You see! If we had had more time…

In the Western District, said Mitchie with forgivable pride, we had bush nurses visiting women all through their pregnancies. Any chance of a problem and the woman was moved to town. But… the whole thing has languished without Lady Tarlton there to look after the financial side.

To harry donations, Matron Mitchie means, said Lady Tarlton with a wink. If the Australians had not begged the secretary of state for the colonies to relieve them of my husband’s presence, we would have put a scheme in place throughout the country so that it would have been normal and unassailable. But my husband can’t tolerate the Labour prime ministers the Australians have the ill grace to elect. Tarlton refused to allow the election the prime minister asked him to call. And so it was—as a wag in the Sydney Bulletin wrote—“Farewell Lord and Lady Tarlton, Sprigs of a Noble tree, We cannot tell you how pleased we are to see the back of thee.”

Yes, confirmed Mitchie. You were tarred with the wrong brush. Women don’t count as much as politics.

Lady Tarlton and Mitchie had created a standard of frankness Naomi hoped she would not be called on to imitate, and indeed tea finished and she had not been asked to say anything of that kind. They made for the car again and drove through a countryside of hedgerows which concealed small, bountiful-looking fields. They inspected a number of vacant châteaux in overgrown grounds abundant in spring flowers. But some had been rendered unhealthy inside by too long a closing-up. The owners were either too hard up to restore them, or else had made themselves patriotically absent in the West Indies or North Africa until the war ended.

Lady Tarlton argued with French agents in unembarrassed, high, nasal French. If the lower floors looked passable, she would lead everyone upstairs—Mitchie included—and look for the promise of light and airiness and security against draughts. Occasionally she would ask, How many beds can we fit in here, Mitchie?

Twelve, Mitchie would say. Or two dozen for a vast room—a nobleman’s former library, say.

So many?

Things were much more crowded in Egypt, and on Lemnos, Mitchie assured her. They could fit forty beds in the ballroom downstairs. And the family chapel would provide a ward for at least a further fifteen—ideal for a recuperating officers’ ward.

We must plan for a winter in which peace has not broken out, said Lady Tarlton—obviously skeptical of the military promise of the coming summer. Therefore the grounds must be extensive enough to accommodate marquees and huts. Then there were latrines to be dug. There should be woods nearby to moderate the heat and give the walking wounded something to explore and the wheelchair cases bosky excursions through forests and by ponds.

Three châteaux had been inspected. Lady Tarlton was becoming pessimistic in her vocal way and began asking the French agent and Mitchie and Naomi questions which were not meant to be answered.

I mean, one is doing one’s best, pottering around the châteaux of the minor and more cowardly nobility—or probably of craven bourgeois who bought these places for show and then abandoned their country in her hour of peril. But I keep telling this agent I don’t want a jumped-up manor house. I need a big château, and something in good order. I need some decent plumbing too. I am not in the house restoration business.

She honked at the agent who was driving with them, J’ai besoin d’un grand château. Très grand.

The man lit up as if he had exactly the right grand château in mind. It proved—when they drove there—to sit on a low coastal hill in the direction of Wimereux. Its name was Château Baincthun. Even its avenue lined by yews—when they drove up it—gave a promise of space. Its vistas were wide but its copses close. Its façade was white and ornamented and fluted. The capitals under its roof were topped by stone-carved faces of kings or counts or sages.

By the time she had inspected its main downstairs room, Lady Tarlton clearly wanted it. The light flooded the dusty boards upstairs in a most inveigling way. Rear and upstairs rooms must be inspected to accommodate staff.

Marion, warned Lady Tarlton, as if Matron Mitchie were the flighty one, imagine this not in today’s relative splendor but with ice on the eaves and an Arctic wind trying to pick the locks.

Matron Mitchie found it possible to do so and still believe in the warmth of the boys—as long as there were stoves in the wards.

Well, of course, said Lady Tarlton.

After taking the proffered lease on the Château Baincthun to a notary in Boulogne—who claimed that his father had tendered his services to Charles Dickens, a frequent visitor to Boulogne—they dined in a private room at the Grand Paris to celebrate. Lady Tarlton pressed Bordeaux wine on them. Naomi managed to choke a glass of it down her untutored throat and struggled with its unfamiliar robustness. Like other colonials she found the aftertaste—the after-feel, as well—a matter of greater relish than the drinking itself.

The Racecourse and the Château

It was working towards summer now. The sky was yellow at the rims but arched to a dazzling maritime blue above the racecourse. Sally waited for Naomi at the agreed-upon time at administration huts near the arched entrance. Her sister was coming from two hours’ drive away and delays were possible, and indeed a half hour passed until a great black-and-white beast of an automobile pulled up by the huts. A middle-aged man in a private’s uniform got out of the driver’s side and came and saluted Sally. Naomi spilled out of one of the rear doors after him. Her motherless co-conspirator, she thought at once. Her sister, orphaned by a dead mother, by a father who reasonably enough replied to their desertion of him by remarriage. But Naomi was smiling without reserve and that brought Sally up to the regions of light. I love her, it came to Sally. This revelation surprised her. I love her and want her to be well. They embraced heartily—Naomi so willing and reckless that it brought out a similar passion in Sally.

What have you got yourself into? Sally asked.

Forgive me, said Naomi. I said I’d come back and here I am in Boulogne, with you in Rouen.

Oh, I understand you had to go to Mitchie. And what’s fifty or sixty miles?

Sally also found herself now confronted with a tall, auburn-haired woman in a fawn dress trimmed with navy blue, and a straw hat atop a river of hair almost artfully unruly. She had heard in her sister’s letter of a week past of Lady Tarlton. She’d expected a severe mien and no one as ageless as this—or so casual in finery—or so distracted from her own splendor.

Don’t mind me, Lady Tarlton announced to Sally. I won’t interfere between you and your sister. I’m on my way to beard the medical officer commanding Rouen. Not just beard him, as the Bard mysteriously says. I hope, in fact, I can frighten him. Come into the car.

Sally obeyed. The women settled themselves in squeaking leather and Carling closed the door.

It is a modest enterprise your sister has committed herself to, Miss Durance, said Lady Tarlton from her seat. If I let them, they will try to turn us into a mere rest home and officers’ club. As your sister will tell you, they are dragging their heels on giving me military doctors to work with my young Scottish doctor—a woman, in fact—and my two young male physicians, both afflicted with bad chests. I would have all women doctors if I could. They are not as pompous as an army surgeon. And they’re certainly better than boys just cured of their consumption.

She had a strange lack of reserve—a candor almost out of order. It was clear she had a disciple in Naomi. Her statement had produced a glow of purpose on Naomi’s face. The middle-aged soldier-driver cranked the engine as Sally—like Naomi before her—accustomed herself to the opulence of upholstery and mahogany woodwork.

As they rolled forth from the arched gate, Lady Tarlton turned again to Sally, who was staring out of the window with the suspicion that the world would look different through the glass of this magnificent mechanism.

You are not tempted to join us, Miss Durance? At the château, I mean.

Apart from an instant thought of Lieutenant Constable and his obliterated face, Sally had a sense that there was something that could not be predicted in Lady Tarlton’s scheme.

She said, I am very flattered by the…

Lady Tarlton shook her head. I understand, she said, with her strange laugh which threatened to overflow its limits. After all, sisters might love each other. But sometimes there’s room only for one of them per hospital.

Not that, Lady Tarlton, said Sally. But the three of them knew it was that.

Sally and Naomi were dropped in the square of Rouen, with the Hôtel de Ville on one side and the stupefying complexity of the cathedral Charlie had taken her to on the other. As the enormous car drove off, Naomi and Sally laughed together like two girls recently interviewed by an eccentric headmistress. They went straight to a café—a little wooden place with tables set on the surface of the square. Naomi raised her face to the sun and the gesture made Sally feel gleeful too. It was the sort of day when even sisters with their history could sit together and think, If they could see us now—here on the timeworn pavement—drinking our ferocious black coffee and eating not cake but gâteau!

You know, said Naomi, it’s peculiar. It seems to me we’re happier now—at this second and here—than in our past lifetime there.

Lemnos, you mean?

No. There.

You said Matron Mitchie was back? asked Sally, to move the conversation on to safer ground. How is that possible?

Pure willpower, that’s how. She’s a single woman with hardly any relatives. She may be frightened that if she lacks a mission, she’s at an end.

But we’re single women too.

Well, Naomi conceded, a little younger, to begin with. And it may change one day too. Marriage doesn’t seem an impossibility to me anymore. I think the further I’ve got away from the Macleay, the less astounding it looks.

Robbie Shaw?

I don’t know. I’ve written to him and as good as told him no. But he still persists.

He wants to be your fiancé?

When I said the less astounding marriage looks, I’m not thinking of anyone in particular. I’m beginning to think Robbie Shaw’s idea is impossible. I don’t have the disposition for him. I ought to write to him again but I keep delaying. This is the problem: the further away I get from him, the more inconceivable marrying him seems. Whereas it’s supposed to be the other way round. He is a good fellow, a positive fellow. But he thinks there’s something definite in me, when really I am only covering a lack. That’s a dangerous delusion, you see. He’d find out afterwards and never forgive me, and so a really unhappy twenty or thirty years would begin. I’ve got other things to do with the next twenty or thirty years.

But that’s the way marriage works, isn’t it? asked Sally. It’s not possible unless the man and the woman are deluded.

They were silent. They did not want to apply Sally’s thesis to their parents.

No, said Naomi. I think a marriage can be sensibly embarked on. But the other thing Robbie Shaw’s deluded about is that they’ll have him back here, when one of his legs is five inches shorter than the other. They had Matron Mitchie back. But I think now it might have been Lady Tarlton who worked that magic. Shaw doesn’t have a Lady Tarlton. But listen, you said in your letter you’d met a soldier?

How astonishing it was to Sally that she didn’t feel discomfort at this conversation.

The solicitor’s son, Charlie Condon, she said. He’s amusing and has a very lively brain, though I can imagine on a hot day his enthusiasm for old buildings might get a bit much. But he’ll need a clever woman when the time comes. He is a good sketcher but intends to become a better one. He wants to sketch blackfellas, even. It’s the whites in the Macleay he’s not so keen on. He says… Well, he understands how things are in town. A person can say these things when you’re so far away and it’s all reduced to size. All that bush hypocrisy.

They contemplated the idea of the town shame and decided they didn’t want to expand on it.

Charlie hasn’t been in fighting yet, said Sally. And I wish he didn’t have to be. A shell could cut the life of a fine soul like his in a second. It’s done it to other fine souls.

Then she told Naomi how Charlie had visited her and ordered a table by telegram. Underneath was the thought—If this can be told, then all can be said. All must anyhow be said one day. The blame and the thanks.

There was one subject left—Mrs. Sorley. They had both got letters from her which were pleasant and sensible and careful of their feelings.

Naomi confessed, She has sure instincts, that woman.

So we have to go on being fair to her, eh?

It’s beginning to look that way.

Each sister knew—and knew the other one knew—that what stood in the way of becoming daughters to Mrs. Sorley was their caution about liking this unchosen figure, in case it happened that they began to feel her more admirable than the mother they were connected to by sinew and blood and acts of awful kindness.

After their morning coffee, Sally took Naomi through the cathedral and showed her the things that Lieutenant Condon had shown her. Then, almost with relief at having got through the meeting, they saw the great limousine prowling for Naomi around the square. Sally waved to it as energetically as Naomi. In spite of their compact in Alexandria, they were still practicing being at full ease with each other. But this French reunion had gone well.

Captain Constable’s pulse and his blood pressure remained those of a healthy young man—though one plagued by sleeplessness. Sally did not often see his eye closed, even at night, and he would frequently want to write something down. Only sometimes—and then in the dark hours—was there self-pity in what he wrote.

One night he remarked, This is more like an accident in a factory than a wound taken in a battle.

Sally whispered rigorously, taking no nonsense, What’s the difference? This war is a kind of great factory. All I know is you’re still a first-class man.

His mood quickly lightened.

He wrote, Oh yes? Where’s the evidence for that?

I know you by the way you are taking this!

No choice, he wrote. If I tossed things in now, I wouldn’t get through it all.

Thinking like that, she told him, shows the man you are.

And the exchange went on, as they passed the pad back and forth.

I would have liked to have found out whether I made a true soldier or not. I wasn’t even at Gallipoli.

And where is Gallipoli now? she asked. Gallipoli is a boneyard.

She handed him the pad back. Those men—the survivors—they know themselves now, he wrote.

She said, There are millions of men who know themselves without war. Millions.

He shook his head and wrote energetically. When he handed her the pad, it read, Yes. But once you become a soldier the whole point is war. The whole point of it is finding how you manage yourself in war.

He nodded after she had read it, and Sally looked at him with the bleak knowledge that he was right. A thunder came up to the east. It was massive enough to make them uneasy about its meaning and intentions.

Will you ever listen to that? asked Honora, coming up to Sally.

They went to the door of the Nissen hut—the tents were giving way to such structures—and parted the inner and outer air-raid curtains. The eastward sky was continuously and massively lit by pulses and changing emphases of light which moved up and down the horizon. It was bigger than Gallipoli.

Honora said, Bloody old Mars himself doing the scales.

Are they doing it? Or are we? Sally asked. It dwarfed nature and its fires and furies. If it were them making this, how could the front hold? How could the war endure? This was the war’s summit, she was sure. Something must end and something be born.

The thunder went on throughout their daytime rest and into a second night and a second day, and so on. At midnight on the third day the regiments of wounded arrived in convoys of ambulances that choked the approaches to the racecourse. It was like Gallipoli—the mutilation had overflowed the forward stations. And so in the reception wards to which most nurses were rushed, men still wore the reeking uniform fragments and the regimental insignia that now stood for nothing.

Again—amongst the mass of these British—the nurses were faced by an astounding and unearthly lack of raucous complaint from men getting to know their wounds. Even some of the amputees had abandoned their screams in the regimental aid post or the dressing post and clearing station and were now left with mere crumbs of complaint which nurses went about soothing with hypodermics full of morphine.

Only after the turmoil ceased and men had been carried away to appropriate wards was Sally sent back to the post-operative ward or the gas or thoracic wards. It was a broad education you got in Rouen.

She was sometimes sent to the gas wards for night duty. Usually it was days since the men had inhaled the stuff, yet the taint could still be smelled on them and their eyes were still wide and alarmed—their eye sockets and lips blue, their breathing tormented, froth around their mouths. Orderlies came round with hypodermics and atropine sulphate solution and Sally injected them. A device named “the octopus”—many masks running from an oxygen cylinder—was designed to give simultaneous comfort to a number of men. Revisiting them before going off duty at dawn, she saw that it had little effect. The gas was still working on their hidden membranes.

The shelling and roar and night illuminations in the east continued but there was no conclusive news—it appeared that no climax had been reached and little had been won. When it was adjudged safe by the ward doctors, amputees were taken out to the hospital ferries at the port of Rouen. So were some thoracic and abdominal cases—and head wounds and the blinded and gassed. Honora said with some credibility that they were making room for Australians—for they did not doubt Australians had now been thrown into the furnace and were on their way. That was the arrangement—clear the Australian hospitals for Australian casualties. In any case—Sally reflected—in this hectic season, Lady Tarlton’s hospital would not beg for patients. Such was the weight of daily arrivals.

On the strength of her Archimedes experience, Sally spent three nights in the theatre giving anesthetics—more precisely, ether—for the nerveless and level-headed Dr. Fellowes. Ether was considered safer and more mistakeproof when you had an occasional anesthetist, which Sally was. But her work became necessary because in suddenly warm weather and over a day and a half, convoy by convoy, the Australians did indeed arrive—up to a thousand a day. They were nearly too numerous—too smeared in feature and too blurred in endeavor and pain—for her to look for Charlie Condon amongst them and see if he had been punished for knowing so much about Rouen Cathedral.

The men arrived with a word on their lips—Pozières. It might have been a village but it was vast in their minds: the birthplace of their pain. The English newspapers had a name even broader than Pozières. The name of a bloody river previously unremarked in the earth’s imagination. The Somme ran scarlet and was vaster than the Nile or Amazon now in the imagination of all those in France. It was the altar on which Abraham did sacrifice his son, and no God spoke out to stay the knife.

The name ran around the reception ward while, with an orderly’s help, Sally took a fouled dressing off the groin wound of a weathered, young-old man, when his femoral artery began to gush. Just stop the bleeding, Nurse, he said reasonably, and I’ll get back to the missus and kids. All the pressure she and the orderly could apply did not save him—this man they knew could hew timber and hand plough and be unwearied at the day’s end. He shuddered and then yielded up his existence.

The name Pozières was uttered by a boy with a chest wound who told Honora that he was too tired to sleep. In the theatre—before he was etherized—he admitted to the theatre nurse and the surgeon that he was only sixteen. The walking wounded from his unit pronounced the name too, as, getting ready to be sent back to the front or on to England, they paid him a visit and brought him cigarette cards they had collected for him—comic scenes of bulls charging tigers, of parrots shocking maids with the viciousness of their language, of cowboys and Indians, of soccer players, and trout fishermen.

A newspaper in the nurses’ mess declared: “Huge Losses to the Hun. ‘Fritz Is Running,’ Says General.”

Captain Constable remained at Rouen through the melee and treatment and transfer of men that Pozières created. The name seemed to call up a private crisis for him. Sepsis had broken out at the edge of his wound, a peccant tooth needed to be removed under anesthesia and the pus drained. And so England and its promised round of face-remaking surgery receded for him. As thousands came and went, he remained fixed in place. For it was axiomatic that no work could be done in England to repair him until he had been free of sepsis for six months.

At the Château Baincthun, Lady Tarlton had just two surgeons and two ward doctors on the day the Australian casualties began to arrive to join the small numbers of British officers of middling or light wounds so far sent there. Someone in the office of the deputy director of medical services clearly thought that a titled woman like Lady Tarlton should be confronted only by officers. But now Australians of all ranks turned up in motor ambulances.

The military had sent an apparently robust surgeon named Major Darlington. But he had a distant manner, and to Mitchie and Naomi it became clear that Lady Tarlton suspected he was a military reject—not for surgical reasons but perhaps for social ones. Immediately and unsuccessfully she set the Red Cross in London the job of recruiting another civilian surgeon—as if that could be done these days.

Darlington was a lanky man with a slight stoop that made him seem attentive but whose sentences sometimes were ambushed by thought and trailed off. But it was not long before he was seen as the essence of the place. Word of his competence came from theatre nurses. And from his side, he was pleased to be placed at an institution where he had control of his own pathology laboratory.

His junior was a young woman named Dr. Airdrie, a small-bodied and frizzy-haired volunteer with the Scottish Women’s Hospital who was sent to Baincthun at Lady Tarlton’s request. She too came to be considered a treasure of the place. But Darlington remained an odd treasure.

Mitchie walked the admission ward with Major Darlington, Naomi with Dr. Airdrie, and they directed where men were to be taken next. Airdrie still wore a little of her resentment at being sent here. She had been heard to say in her brogue, I didn’t volunteer just so I could be a hobby doctor in fooking Boulogne. Her mind had been on the Mediterranean or Mesopotamia. But these ambulances grinding up the elm-lined drive of the previously undervisited Château Baincthun were changing her mind about Lady Tarlton being just a gentlewoman hostelier.

Soon Airdrie and Major Darlington became so busy in the theatre—and the two young ward doctors so overburdened—that Mitchie and Naomi became decision makers. They instructed the few newly arrived Australian nurses and others from the Red Cross, whom Lady Tarlton had gathered in to keep penciled records of wounds and treatment on sheets hung at the base of each man’s cot—just as in the best-run hospitals. They announced dosages of morphine and other drugs and decided on the changing of dressings and irrigation of wounds. Naomi behaved with a confidence she had not felt at all on the Archimedes. She had learned somehow not to fret about decisions made in good faith. Men grinned up from the admission-ward cots when they heard her and the other Australian nurses talk. Could an accent be curative to those who shared it?

Naomi worked by timeless routine in which hours did not exist. Only the seconds of pulse measurement meant anything. There was no leisure to observe the larger areas of time their watches proffered. A convoy of ninety wounded from Pozières arrived and Naomi worked for more than a day without being aware of it—except through a contradictory lightness of her upper body balanced by a sense of the gravity dragging at her legs. As well as acting as a virtual matron, she had in a day and night herself dressed wounds and hauled oxygen cylinders for the nurses to administer to the gassed. The roster she had worked at in the Dorchester Hotel might as well have been a transcription of Paradise Lost for all the relationship it bore to the days after Pozières.

By early August of that year—the predicted year of triumph, 1916—the wards were crammed with Tommies and Australians and a few Indians. Another young ward doctor—a rejectee of the Medical Corps for some reason of health—arrived. So did a squad of voluntary aides summoned from London—of course through Lady Tarlton’s airily deployed influence over the Red Cross.

My husband is hopeless, she hissed at Naomi and Mitchie one morning as they drank tea—scalding their mouths—in the mess room. He doesn’t like my doing this and my being importunate with some of his chums. So he tells me he lacks any power. He’s a whisperer, that’s what he is. He can undermine, but he can’t build.

And then—being herself a woman of action rather than whispers—she went to see what the volunteer English women were making for men’s breakfasts.

It was easier for a man to get to Blighty from Baincthun. Major Darlington was kept busy making these assessments, which came on top of his surgery and work in the pathology lab. Dr. Airdrie and the ward doctors joined Darlington in their reluctance to send a man back to the front until he’d had at least a little Blighty leave. Rhetoric about shirking had no impact on them. Except in the rarest and most blatant cases of recovery—or in the face of furious insistence by a soldier that he should return to the fighting, they sent all who could travel—including the battle shocked—by ambulance to the ferries. And recuperation at the Australian Voluntary was no idle business. In the summer garden, Lady Tarlton used men to dig drains or stoke boilers or milk the three dairy cows she had acquired so that the wounded should have fresh milk. Carling was their inexhaustible foreman.

Those military satraps still hate us, you know, Lady Tarlton announced as a boast to all her staff.

The young Scots woman, Airdrie, had a melodious laugh and clearly admired Lady Tarlton. Since she was freshly minted as a physician, the Australian and English nurses muttered that she lacked a mentor to turn her into a fully accomplished surgeon. She was not haunted by that. The wounded Tommies and Australians who came under her knife all said—those who could—that they trusted her for her lack of airs. Men found the presence of a woman surgeon a strange thing only once they had outlived the pain of wounds and surgery.

Baincthun People

Naomi worked—according to need—as theatre nurse and anesthetist for both the surgeons. Mitchie’s Australian and Red Cross nurses became the sort of fast learners and expert dressers that she and her sister had been—under necessity—a year before. Mitchie nicknamed the Red Cross women “the English Roses,” but some of them were from the women’s suffrage movement, of which it seemed Lady Tarlton had herself been a member. Many were from what the British called “better families.” Their accents were not so far removed from that of Lady Tarlton. Their parents probably knew and trusted her as a mentor for their daughters. Others of the English Roses were not nurses and insisted on being cooks and scullery maids—a form of rebellion against the cosseted lives they had led, an assertion that women were equal in the moils of the earth and were all subject to the same condescension from the male world. Naomi and Mitchie’s group delighted in telling them that Australian women had had the suffrage for—how long was it now?—twelve years. But they could not pretend it had delivered women from care—from being aged beyond their years and strength by labor and concern.

Major Darlington’s slightly dazed belief in the uses of pathology was unshakeable and he promoted it even—or perhaps especially—in conversing with nurses and orderlies. He had quarreled with his superiors over the wearing of face masks in the treatment of wounds. The Australian Voluntary and its little pathology lab—which he equipped at his own expense—was his chance to manage experiments on the issue. To it he summoned nurses and orderlies and took swabs from their throats. He ordered that in certain wards nurses and orderlies dressing wounds should wear masks—a prominent placard marked MASKS was placed at the doorway of two wards. A NO MASKS sign was posted at the door of the other two. The wards in the newly built huts in the garden were not included in the experiment because that might make the numbers too hard for him to get his work done, either as pathologist or as surgeon. He came around the wards—himself wearing a mask—to take samples of wound tissue. He put them in a glass dish and bore them away. As he worked he told nurses in wafting and often broken sentences that he suspected streptococci in their throats were a peril to wounds. Not that, he laughed—in one of those near-silent laughs uttered with lowered chin and like a series of nods—their having streptococci was in any way a jailable offense. Streptococcus likes us, he told Naomi and some of the other nurses. He likes to take us dancing.

At this he uttered coughs of laughter.

His lean face—sallow on his arrival, and watchful and sour—then composed itself into an expression of calm purpose.

The masses of wounded and gassed of the bloodiest and most chemical-doused summer in human knowledge continued to arrive. They were at least two-thirds Australian—to justify the establishment’s name—but frequently more. The hospital did not receive the shell-shocked, even though there were men with wounds who woke at night hyperventilating or screaming. But the Australian Voluntary was not equipped with alienists.

At the Voluntary there were separate messes for officers and men who were well enough to sit at tables. As summer progressed the tables were sometimes put out on the pavement in front of the château, where officers and men began to mingle as they had in the battles which brought them here. At Lady Tarlton’s insistence a glass or two of wine was served with dinner for anyone fit to desire it. She had put together a subcommittee in London who put up the money for such delicacies. These seemed to be placed democratically on the tables without discrimination—preserves and condiments and shortbread from Fortnum & Mason were made available to the officers and men alike. It honored the reality, Lady Tarlton said to Naomi one day as they looked across the terraces at the walking wounded and recuperants at the sunny tables, of a citizen army in which some privates were schoolteachers, religious ministers, and journalists. She did not mention the hard-fisted country boys and the worldly innocent children of the slums. Yet—contrary to normal military credos—the firmament did not crack open when Lady Tarlton permitted this mingling.

Faster than Naomi could have believed, the days began to shrink and leaves reddened and withered to warn generals of their failed summer. The wildflowers of the hospital grounds of the Australian Voluntary Hospital—hyacinths and primroses—closed up. The sky turned a stubborn gray and descended on the château so that it seemed within reach of the gray slates of the roof. The mornings were misty with vapors the sun could not always burn off. Heaters were moved into the wards. The rain grew colder and even more slanted than on Lemnos—driven before a wind that swept in from the Channel and froze puddles overnight on the doorsteps of the château and in murderous little patches on the pathways to the huts. An English nurse broke her ankle in a journey between the reception wards in the garden and the house. Another scalded herself carrying cocoa across an open stretch. But the volunteers did not leave—as they had every right to. Lady Tarlton was a magnetic figure and the English Roses proved strong-willed young women who stuck. And where else would they go on the Western Front to see their suffragist principles in practice?

In the first onset of cold—the rehearsal for the winter that would ultimately take the unconcluded war to Christmas and into 1917—the young Scottish surgeon Dr. Airdrie would visit the wards in a wool-lined skin-and-fur jacket of the kind worn by officers and men. She sported stylish stalking boots which seemed to imply that she was ready to go hiking or hacking or hunting stags in the Highlands. Penelope was her first name—so it emerged—but no one used it. Perhaps because she had not encountered many other women doctors and had contempt for the hauteur of male physicians, she was familiar with the nurses and seemed to talk to them as if no veil of wisdom separated her from them. When—if ever—the war’s giant wheel ceased to turn, she would be taught how to behave—at peril of her career—in a civilian hospital.

Naomi came to see that Airdrie had no other choice than to chat over tea with them. For she was in many ways the most isolated person in the château—potentially separated from nurses by her university education, but inevitably seen even by the distracted Major Darlington as a medical anomaly. She told Naomi and others that she found the two former consumptives who worked as ward doctors very plain company. They were the sort of men, she said, who’d studied their wee medicine rather than grow up and become human beings. Mammy so wanted her little boy to be a doctor! she mocked.

She liked to gossip and that was always welcome. Lord Tarlton owned half of Banffshire, she claimed—his grandfather, an English interloper, as described by Airdrie, had cleared out the population of the estates to Australia and New Zealand.

My uncle knows the present Tarlton remotely, she said, and a cousin was his land agent at some stage, though I haven’t bothered Lady Tarlton with that news. As for Lady Tarlton herself, her name is Julia Henning and she’s English—Manchester-born in fact. She owned her own millinery shop in the West End, with very blue-blooded ladies as her customers. But still, in the eyes of that group, a hatmaker—however fine a hat she might put together—is subhuman. My mother says it was murder for them when they married. Lady Hatshop, everyone called her. You see, there was many a mammy with a plain daughter had her eye on wee sawney Lord Tarlton. So there was an unco scandal when he bespoke beautiful Miss Henning. At first glance he might seem attractive—in a bit of a dither like Major Darlington—but there are no depths behind it. A high Tory messenger boy.

I mean, she continued, even the army dispensed with him. And I believe he didn’t cover himself with glory in your country either. His wife’s politics helped drive them apart from the beginning. So why did they marry? Well, a title’s a title and a beautiful hatmaker is a beautiful hatmaker. And Miss Henning might have thought she could influence him and make something of him. But no sooner did he have her locked up than he started tomcatting his way around London. They have no children but he has bastards everywhere—I know one he’s supporting in Putney. Though the Australians hated him, he has a certain charm and has wee bastards there as well—the daughters of the big graziers. He made himself persona non grata with all the big… What do you call them?

Squatters, Naomi supplied.

Yes, them.

You must be exaggerating, Doctor, Naomi suggested.

I don’t think I am very much, said Airdrie after a pensive assessment. I would say that Lady Tarlton is the woman with the best excuse in the Empire for taking a lover.

Taking a lover? asked Naomi.

Taking a lover? asked the English Roses. Who?

Well, said Airdrie, let those with eyes to see…

Naomi was surprised by how quickly the initial shock of the idea faded in her and was replaced by annoyance at Airdrie and her supposed knowledge of Lady Tarlton.

You’re a good, loyal girl, said Dr. Airdrie with conviction not mockery. You’re standing up for Lady Tarlton, aren’t you? Defending her repute? I don’t think you need to. In my eyes, her repute stands.

Even then, Naomi saw some of the English Roses avert their eyes as if they knew something Naomi didn’t.

And I thought you were being tolerant too, Durance. Of this Lady Tarlton and Major Darlington matter. Good luck to her, declared Airdrie. Funny though, that she goes for those slightly dazed sort of fellows. But you didn’t know? Don’t be ashamed. It speaks well of you.

Naomi set to in her mind to remodel the Lady Tarlton she knew to the possibility Airdrie was right. It was easier to do than she had thought. She would have been shaken a year or so ago—or, say, before the Archimedes. Now it was such a small matter. The front dwarfed all.

Airdrie approached her as she left to go back on duty.

I’m sorry, she said. I was mischievous in general but it was not aimed at you. You probably think I am a mere gossip too, and I am. Love it, I do. Can’t help it. Forgive me.

Naomi walked away and didn’t care what Airdrie thought of people who were brusque.

That evening she got an apologetic note from Airdrie, inviting her to lunch in Wimereux—they could get a lift in there with Carling the following Saturday. This would of course be dependent on a convoy coming in. But moules and pommes frites were a specialty of the Pas de Calais, wrote Airdrie with gusto. Yummy! And all you say to me—I swear—will be kept secret.

When it did snow in the meantime, an unusually early fall portending a bad winter, Mitchie’s few Australian nurses danced in its cleanness—never before encountered by them—in the garden. They were watched with amusement by the English Roses. Naomi had by now heard a lightly wounded Australian officer murmuring the news that Major Darlington was getting on a treat with her ladyship. But even the Australians—with a taste for ribaldry—were careful how they displayed their amusement at this. Envy must not be confessed to, and so the male code was to reach for mockery. It would have been more open if Lady Tarlton and Major Darlington had not grown to be so worthy of esteem and veneration. There seemed to be a strong and informal agreement amongst the increasing number of those who knew of their affair that it should no longer be a matter of comment. A trip by the walking wounded into Boulogne, where they talked to other soldiers, proved that rumors that the Australian Voluntary was an eccentric and slapdash place were common. Knowing what they knew, they resented that image. As well as that, the affair had not distracted Lady Tarlton from keeping the meals plentiful and the wards warm in the huge spaces of the château—a house which, as she had feared, invited in a gale each time the main door opened.

Penelope Airdrie and Naomi went into Wimereux for their lunch and were pleased to take shelter in a restaurant from the windy promenade on which—for a freezing half hour or so—they inspected the long stretch of tidal beach and the murky whitecaps of a dismal sea.

Never one for the seaside, me, confessed Airdrie.

A fire blazed in the restaurant. They ordered mulled wine. Then a huge bowl of moules and another of fried potatoes was brought to their table. They donned large bibs and—after opening and devouring the moules—rinsed their hands in bowls of water. Dr. Airdrie looked out through the lace curtains.

Never pretty, never pretty, this time of year.

This gave her an opportunity to ask Naomi details of Australian weather, Australian skies, Australian strands. It was peculiar that weather brought out a tendency to patriotism in a person. Storms and murk were forgotten. Summers were described and frosts unmentioned. As she expanded on the subject of humid days generating thunderstorms, Dr. Airdrie raised her hands to cover her face.

You’re not feeling sick, are you? asked Naomi.

I am not myself, said Dr. Airdrie. Listening to you, I am not myself. I believe I am in love.

Naomi thought this was worth at least rinsing her hands and ceasing to eat. Oh. Who is the most fortunate man?

That’s the thing. I’m not of the fortunate-man persuasion. I love you.

Naomi felt riveted to her seat and something like an electric pulse moved upwards through her body. It was her turn to cover her face. This could not be taken in. It was not a matter of moral bewilderment. It was too strange.

Please say nothing, Airdrie softly urged her. I have studied you and the way you go about your work. This combination you have of intelligence and reserve and grit.

Naomi decided she would flee the restaurant. A kind of panic drove her. The words intelligence and reserve and grit had done it. Her haunches began to move without reference to her conscious mind. She could have been on the street before she knew it. But she knew on some calm plain of her soul that Airdrie would be back at the château by the evening and need to be worked with. She had heard a matron at Royal Prince Alfred warn of “Sapphic tendencies” which sometimes arose in nurses’ quarters and were to be fought and—please, girls!—reported. Yet after all—after Lemnos and Freud’s rape and all the rest—she was more stunned by Airdrie’s gush of affection than by the idea that the doctor was somehow reprehensible and immoral and, as the matron in Sydney had urged, reportable.

She had been in love—or had thought she was—with the French teacher at the high school in the Macleay. A sunny younger woman who broke girls’ hearts by marrying a traveler and moving to Sydney. In her imagination Naomi had imagined kisses exchanged with the French teacher. But that had been a girl’s fantasy and had not lasted to become the currency between a woman surgeon and a nurse.

Please, Dr. Airdrie said—seeing at once she had been too rash. I shouldn’t have said anything.

Naomi knew she didn’t want Airdrie. But she also did not want Airdrie shamed—and that in spite of the woman’s recklessness. This is why she talks to the nurses in that fevered way, she thought. She’s uncomfortable with her desire. The “Sapphic tendencies.” They make her chatter away.

Naomi reached and held her wrist—just as a woman would the wrist of another who had suffered a loss. Airdrie’s voice became almost inaudible.

I am not enchanted by men, she confided, though I like their company. I am enchanted by women. I’m enchanted by you.

Listen, said Naomi. You’re a good surgeon and the men respect you. And so they should. But I don’t want you to be in love with me—if you are in fact in love, and not just lonely. Saying what you said bewilders me. It shames me too.

Airdrie’s brown eyes showed a flare of anger.

You’re shamed by love? If that’s the case, I pity you.

Maybe you’re right to.

The fury died in Airdrie. It had been perhaps just a product of the rebuff and of her discomfort. Both of them took off their ridiculous burghers’ moules-eating bibs. Their meal was finished.

We can work together, said Airdrie flatly, whatever you think of me. That should be a given.

Of course, said Naomi. We’ll work together as usual.

Any edge of complaint in Airdrie had now been utterly blunted and more as exposition, she murmured, If a man declares love for a woman, that’s romance. But if a woman declares love for a woman, the heavens fall in. It’s worse still for men who love other men. But I’m of normal Presbyterian stock and I fear that in the eyes of most people, and in yours, I’ve committed some crime.

No, no, said Naomi. I know by now that all the crimes are up at the front.

It would actually be easier to deal with my feelings of the moment, Airdrie confessed, if you were outraged. If you picked up your skirts and called down God’s judgement and flounced out.

Once I would have condemned you to hell. Because I didn’t know the scope of things.

Airdrie sighed. So, you won’t give off an air of contempt when we’re working at the Tarlton convent, eh? You won’t flinch when I appear?

Don’t be ridiculous, said Naomi. It was difficult when Airdrie—a surgeon who was meant to maintain remoteness—behaved like some anxious schoolgirl. It was also endearing.

They picked up their glasses of wine. Naomi looked her in the eye as if it was the best method of rebuff. She saw that though this doctor was a year or two older than she was, in some ways she was clearly younger than that.

Did you know I have a sister? Naomi asked. I have a real sister just down the road in Rouen.

You do? said Airdrie. You are not offering her as a substitute sacrifice, are you?

That’s not worth answering.

Younger than you?

That’s right. And we never got on until this war. It is stupid and vain to think that all this…

She waved her hand to imply not just the restaurant but the fiasco out there in the gale, where men stood in streams of water beneath parapets waiting to go on some useless patrol or for a stupefying barrage to descend on them.

It’s stupid to think of this, Naomi persevered, as if it was a machine to make us true sisters. But that’s the way it’s happened. It won’t be any consolation to the wives and mothers of the men. I may one day have a husband—though I can’t exactly imagine it. But if I don’t have a husband, I’ll have my sister. Perhaps we’ll get old living in the same house in the same town. It is possible now where it wasn’t before. While we were at Lemnos we used to say that France and Belgium couldn’t be worse than Gallipoli. But it is worse by multiples! We’re so accustomed to dreadful things now that we might need to live together because no one else will understand the things we’ve seen.

The two finished their wine as equal partners, and beyond the window the malicious gale—mirror to the conflict itself—refused to abate.

After Naomi had rebuffed Dr. Airdrie—after her relief at surviving the lunch with something like aplomb—it was nonetheless as if through Airdrie’s proposal Naomi’s own loneliness had been proven. Her room was at the back of the house. It had been a little too warm through the summer—it missed the sea zephyrs and picked up any hot breeze from the south. Now it was so cold that it needed a stove, but she hesitated to ask for one because there was always a shortage. She used canvas from a torn tent to plug the gaps between the window and its frame. But the cold still seemed to her not a condition but a diabolic presence—like her own solitude made flesh.

As she lay there at night she began to understand that what Dr. Airdrie had spotted in her—and seen as an opportunity—was this unrealized need for warmth, for a body to interpose itself between her and the ruthless cold. Lady Tarlton complained that in the unheated offices overnight, hospital fountain pens broke open when the ink turned to ice. The water pipes froze, and nurses had to melt ice to make cocoa for the patients. And when the cold—despite blankets and a military long coat, army socks, long underwear, even a balaclava—threatened to split Naomi open, she understood the need to be held, flesh on flesh and blood against blood. The past freezing nights had brought her to this conviction—that she might meet Airdrie partway. There might be closeness without passion—embrace of one kind and not of another. Each morning she was pleased she had not yielded to this idea. Each night—under extracoarse blankets—she feared the entry of the perfidious cold into her core.

Someone could see her on her way to Airdrie’s room though—that would be the trouble. Or Airdrie would be called on to operate at some frigid hour while Naomi was there. But one night her coldness could not be endured alone anymore, and she took to the corridor. She had excuses if encountered—she was on her way to a particular storeroom where perhaps there were spare hot-water bottles. She rehearsed the contract she would make with Airdrie.

But as she got close to the surgeon’s door and stooped to knock secretively, she heard conversation inside. It was nothing too loud but was definite discussion of some kind. She could hear the piping voice of a particular tone and rhythm. It was one of the English women—one of Lady Tarlton’s elegant young suffragist women of good family.

At once Naomi lost all sense of cold. Astonishment created its own friction in her blood. Surprisingly, she was amused. This was Dr. Airdrie’s version of love! She had grieved Naomi’s refusal—if at all—a week at most. Or maybe she was just cold too and had found another girl who possessed the desire for warmth. But if Airdrie had been in love with Naomi, she had found new consolation pretty quickly. Alone and in an army coat and socks—unlovely and freezing and shamed and amused by her own innocence in believing Airdrie—she turned around. Remorse and hilarity had both begun to warm her and to prickle along her veins.

Though she was grateful to reach her room and be taken in by its particular freezing air, once she lay down in cold sheets the idea she’d been infected by after the Archimedes came to her again with new certainty. I am not a complete or sealed person. If I was, why did I set out for Doctor Airdrie’s room? Why did I find cold unbearable then and now find it tolerable? I am a string of recoils from circumstance. It was a matter of a mere filament whether I went to be warmed by Airdrie or not. If I had stayed in my room I would not have known why. And I don’t know why I went.

So there was the Naomi who stayed in her room with the threat of ice, and the parallel Naomi who crept down the hall to be warmed by a surgeon. This was simply an echo of her suspicion that there was the Naomi who fell deep down with the Archimedes living in the same flesh as the Naomi who refused to. And so—with her parts and actions scattered all over the atmosphere and cold earth—she could not but deny the glacial night and fall into a profound, accepting sleep. There are men in frozen trenches tonight, she mumbled as a last conscious reproach. They all lacked an Airdrie.

Casualty Clearing

Major Darlington became exercised by the number of men at the Château Baincthun taking up beds in summer and winter because they had been disabled by trench foot or frostbite. Around the bed of a trench-foot–afflicted Australian private who had lost toes to surgery, he gathered Dr. Airdrie and all the nurses—both the half-dozen Australians and the English Roses.

Cripes, a man might as well be onstage, the Australian mumbled as they all gazed at him.

Here is a case, Darlington told them, of quite needless damage—though not, I hasten to say, through the fault of the man involved.

He addressed the Australian, who was clearly embarrassed by this jury of nurses.

Not your fault, eh, old man?

I wouldn’t say so, said the soldier. I mean, sometimes a man got distracted with everything that was happening. Gas was more important. And no use changing your socks if your legs are likely to be blown off pretty soon.

I am sure, said stork-like Darlington, nodding and nodding again. Now, if we want to prevent this sort of thing, we simply must provide a dry, warm place in the trench where men will attend to the problem, have leisure to rub whale oil into their feet and change their socks and—if necessary—boots. For want of such precautions, this will happen, he said, nodding to an orderly, who removed the private’s dressings and exposed the scabbed stumps and blackened flesh of his feet.

Did you use whale oil, my good man?

Everyone just gives up on the whale oil, the private told him. Five minutes after we do it, we’re back up to our hocks in mud again.

You see? Darlington asked his audience. You see what happens?

What puzzled Naomi and the nurses was the question of what—at this distance from the front—they could do about the issue except adopt a stance of impotent protest. But Darlington had not finished.

On the front line, he intoned, men are allowed to stand for days in glutinous muck. Until a chap inevitably becomes a casualty. And sometimes staff officers in clean socks and polished shoes want to punish men, you see, to punish and harangue them for their functional disablement, for a condition which is the fault of the generals. But this, you know, this disablement takes beds from other wounded. No offense intended, old chap. But obviously someone must bear responsibility for the condition of the trenches.

This is not so much a military matter, declared Darlington, as an industrial outrage.

But, Major, asked Airdrie, in what way could we do anything to amend the mistakes of the front? We seem to be a wee bit removed from it.

Major Darlington was in no way aggrieved but raised a finger in the air.

Well, Doctor Airdrie, I intend to frame a letter on the matter which I would be obliged if those of you who felt so inclined could see your way to sign. The letter will assert the necessity of a boots-and-socks officer, to whom a section of men in every company will be assigned with the objective that they will deliver fresh boots and socks every two days to the men in the front. I admit that this might seem at first glance a comic suggestion, or one which is uneconomic. Well—if so, let them come to the rear and count the beds devoted to this curse. What will be done with the boots and socks replaced? Let our chaps throw them at the Huns if they care to. Money can be squandered on high explosive but not—so it seems—on footwear. Ah, now I think I have reached the end of my peroration on the matter. I must thank you for your attendance. And a round of applause, please, for our demonstration soldier.

All felt compelled by Darlington’s zeal and gave a spatter of applause.

Mitchie murmured to Naomi as they left, None of that is as mad as it seems. Can you see any of the young lieutenants you know wanting to be appointed boots-and-socks officer though? Doesn’t sound heroic, does it?

Naomi saw a second’s contact between Airdrie’s hand and the wrist of a handsome English Red Cross nurse whose name she was uncertain about. She would not have welcomed such a touch herself. So why was there a second’s strange envy?

In the autumn Sally heard rumors running around Rouen that nurses might be put in casualty clearing stations located in the region of peril called “up the line.” These were not quite believed at first. Yet the matrons came around the wards that November asking for volunteers for such places. Nurses had not been permitted to work in them before. So there were many applications. Sally, Honora, and Leonora Casement nominated themselves and were accepted almost automatically because of their long experience of wounds. There was the attraction as well that appointment to a casualty clearing station brought with it an immediate ten-day leave pass for England. This—pleasant in prospect—did not count with Sally. In so far as she understood motives, she realized that there had arisen in her a curiosity like Charlie Condon’s before he knew what it would be like. Women too—she realized—might want to be sucked closer in to the fire.

The news had to be broken to their long-standing patient Captain Constable. Sally and Honora still worked regularly on the crater of his face, the screens drawn around to save him embarrassment. Yet he was ambulatory now and sometimes went out for walks bandaged—moving at a processional pace but without a stick along the streets of the Australian general hospital. The matron had at first an eye out for the growing friendship between Slattery and Sister Durance and the unreplying Captain Constable. But it was as if his injury was considered to have unmanned him. Since it was reasoned a nurse was unlikely to be infatuated by a faceless and wordless man they were permitted to become his friend. And they knew that as they were going elsewhere, so was he—earlier perhaps than they. For the wound—considered purely as a wound—was healing over. Easing the packs of gauze out of the mess after one dressing, Honora said, You’re as clean as a whistle these days.

Honora, however, was chary of telling him they were going. Sally did it straight out.

Honora and I have been appointed to a casualty clearing station. We’ll be leaving the racecourse.

Constable shook his head a little in spite of his massive wound.

Honora told him, You’ll be off to Blighty yourself soon—I’d say within a week.

He reached for pencil and paper. “Clearing stations are too close to things,” he wrote.

He passed it to Sally since Honora had the irrigation syringe suspended in her hand. Well, that’s part of the attraction, Sally told him. You know what I mean.

He wrote and then displayed. If you had seen me there—when I first came in, filthy and all—you would have left me for dead.

No, said Sally with genuine conviction. I would have seen your eye. It is a fine eye. As for you, I was looking at a book in the mess on maxillofacial surgery. There are charts of how thoroughly they can remake your face. There are photographs of other men… You just wouldn’t believe it.

He scribbled, “Do you think I could see this book of yours? Or will it give me the willies?”

She read this and answered, It’s been rubber-stamped on the title page NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM OFFICERS’ MESS. But I’ll steal it.

She would too, said Honora, safely back on the whimsy track. Light-fingered, this one.

There was an amused grunt from deep in Captain Constable’s throat.

The tome contained graphic news that some might think a patient should not be burdened with. A matron would not have been amused to see Constable skimming such a volume. To save the chance of being detected by day concealing the heavy, glossy-paged manual in her clothing, Sally brought it in one night after dinner. Advancing through the tobacco fumes emitted by recovering men, she came to him and put it in his bedside locker.

Look at this tomorrow, she said, when we put the curtains around you. Honora and I will leave you alone then to consider it. I have marked the places with paper. I know you. And I believe you’ll be encouraged instead of depressed.

That was how it happened—he kept the manual conscientiously hidden in his locker and, after studying it behind screens, gave it back to Sally the following night. He wrote, “I see they’ll take skin from over my ribs.”

Yes, she said.

He wrote, “God made Eve out of a rib. The surgeons will make me. Flaps of skin, they talk about. For a while I’ll look like someone’s rag doll.”

Sally read this. Then he wrote, “The surgeons seem pretty impressed about what they can do. I notice though that the book doesn’t ask the patients what they think.”

Sally regarded him earnestly. You can’t let me down by getting sad about the book. I gave it to you because you’re the sort of man who can deal with the brass tacks.

He wrote again. “Brass tacks it is!”

Honora and Sally saw him leaving the ward the following morning, escorted by an orderly because of his single eye and the problem it might give him between there and the ferry. They had time for the briefest exchange of sentiments.

On a streaky winter’s day they were driven through tranquil open countryside until they came to a dank tent near a crossroads. Here they were hastily fed and received a day’s instruction on the operation of a clearing station. Put bluntly, a medical officer told them, patients arrived, and within two days, and with a few exceptions, they had either succumbed or had been transported back to base hospitals such as Rouen or Boulogne or Wimereux. The nurses would be presented with a range of cases and with such suddenness that—as the first rule—they must never let themselves feel as if things were out of control. We want women, said the medical officer, who will not be put off, either by the frequency of unfriendly aeroplanes or proximity to shelling.

The clearing stations were anomalous, the medical officer told them. They were close to the front, five to seven miles back, yet sufficiently hard to reach via the communication trenches that sometimes, as an instance, gas gangrene—the buildup of gas in the tissues—had already struck by the time the patient reached them. And particularly so if the wounded man had been retrieved from No Man’s Land after lying out there for a time.

He unscrolled a chart and hooked it onto a tripod. It was a pleasing chart in its rationality and design. The ambulances came to the admission ward and those who did not die there would be taken in a fanned-out pattern to a series of huts or wards beyond—medical, resuscitation, preoperative, chest, minor wounds, or gas. Patients in the preoperative surgery were taken quickly into X-ray and on to the operating theatres. Those in resuscitation would need surgery—but must first be made stable. A further diagrammatic arrow led into the postoperative and evacuation wards from which the gas and minor wounds cases would have been early transported to the general hospitals of the rear. All this rationality in the diagram seemed to contradict the medical officer’s allusion to possible chaos.

Now, look here, he said, at the ward marked “Resuscitation,” for those suffering wound shock.

They listened to him talk quite graphically—and even with narrative force—about how in shock the peripheral vessels of the body could not contain fluid; about violent variations in blood pressure; about coronary embolus; about the rapid pulse that then became almost imperceptible. In the worst cases a transfusion of isotonic fluid and blood plasma could be given. Or direct donations could be made by a paraffined glass tube between a donor vein and the recipient vein. Each orderly, each nurse, each doctor would be blood-typed at the clearing station pathology lab in case of the need for a transfusion.

Indeed, glass transfusion devices—needles, bottles, corrugated tubes, the latest gear—lay on a table by the diagram waiting to be demonstrated by the matrons. But staff engaged in resuscitation—the medical officer continued—should be prepared for death to occur in patients without warning and despite the best efforts.

As the Rouen women left the tent for their buses and took their minds off wound shock to contemplate their leave, they saw Freud talking to another woman. Freud had volunteered from her hospital at Wimereux and now greeted them with her usual careful intensity. She was still a grave personage. The theatrical Karla Freud remained hidden. But she joined Honora, Leo, and Sally at a table in the ferry from Boulogne to Dover.

So, said Honora, there’s ten days of muck up and then we’re chucked in the deep end.

As long as a person can keep afloat, said Freud, the deep end’s the right place.

Freud’s eyes glimmered with the promise of pride.

So I’m very happy, she announced. And I’m happy to see you too.

She seemed almost like the old Freud, and was pleased too when they met up with her again in their London hostel—the grand Palmers Lodge at Swiss Cottage. The location was stimulating—Piccadilly and Green Park just a short train ride away, with Fortnum & Mason and its fancy tearooms, and then a stroll on to the theatres of the West End!

An English officer with sleeve ornamentations—which showed he belonged to an ancient British regiment that probably fought at Waterloo, if not Agincourt—had spoken to them before the show and insisted on bringing them champagne at the interval. This gave him the indulgence to wink at his companion officers and ask, This is a British show, this one. Isn’t it?

They were attending a performance of Chu Chin Chow, a phenomenon of the stage, it was said. They had let build in themselves a nationalist radiance at their connection with the most famous show in the West End—for the author and leading actor–singer was Oscar Ashe, an Australian. This was the show men were advised they had to see in case they were killed before their next leave. The War Chest Club across from the Australian Headquarters on Horseferry Road had bought up the tickets and sold them cheaply to those on leave. The only disadvantage to visiting Horseferry Road with its ugly barrage balloons floating in its grimy sky was that yellow-faced munitions girls—pretty despite the tinge the picric acid in the shells they made gave their complexions—waited around there to make extra money out of the young Australians emerging with their leave pay. But the benefits of Horseferry Road and the War Chest Club included the cut-price delight they were now enjoying at His Majesty’s Theatre. They behaved like girls who hadn’t seen the apocalypse. That was the way the soldiers behaved too. They shared a box of chocolates between them—Freud and Honora and Sally, Leo having been taken out to a dinner by Captain Fellowes. They absorbed the fantastical shifts of light and scenery and let the music reduce the world and its clamor to a string of gloriously vacuous tunes and primitive sentiment.

And then, this champagne in the interval. Honora rebuffed the offer of supper from a young officer. Lionel Dankworth—the angular and kindly soul from Lemnos—was due for leave and would come and meet her in London. This put her in hectic spirits.

And so the enchantments of the evening played themselves out and the officers took them to supper collectively—all on the strength of their sharing a continent of birth with Mr. Ashe.

Freud joined them again the next day for a meal at Mrs. Rattigan’s Anzac Buffet in Victoria Road—Mrs. Rattigan kept a separate dining room for nurses but made officers and men mess in together. They were all sitting in the lounge afterwards to discuss whether they ought to take the ferry up the Thames to Hampton Court when they saw Sergeant Kiernan across the room engrossed in a copy of the New Statesman. Except that Kiernan was now an officer, with his hat and swagger stick on the chair beside him. They moved en masse to greet him, though Sally noticed that in approaching even decent fellows a darkness—something other than complexion—came forth in Freud’s eyes.

Well, said Honora. What’s a Quaker doing dressed up as a lieutenant?

He rose. He looked well in his uniform—plain as it was and issued by a quartermaster. It was certainly a variation from those of the men they’d met last night. It owed everything to standard issue and little to Bond Street.

Ah, he said, with lowered eyes and a smile which was not quite apologetic. I’ve joined the respectable classes.

He raised his face then and looked directly at them in turn. He said, All the women of the poor old Archimedes.

All the poor old women of the Archimedes, Honora corrected him.

Nonsense, he said. You all look marvelous. Have you sung for the mess, Nurse Freud?

I’ve lost the knack for singing, Freud told him, closing off that subject.

Sally asked him how he had been elevated to this eminence, a first lieutenant. Two pips on his shoulder. Would you call it a battlefield promotion? she asked him.

No, he said, I’d prefer you didn’t. I was working at a casualty clearing station at Pozières and we all ran out of equipment and dressings. Everyone cursed the supply officer and there were complaints that he left the regimental aid posts and dressing stations even worse off. I spoke frankly to a surgeon about it. Next I knew they sent me on a two-month course in England. Here I am. Medical supply officer for a casualty clearing station.

They wondered aloud which one, and he told them.

What bad luck, said Honora.

Theirs bore a different number.

But maybe you could come across to us someday and give us lessons in French history or something else as grand.

I’ll be too busy with my stores. All those lovely bandages, all that potassium manganate.

The tail of his coat bobbed and seemed a little short on him as he murmured with laughter.

My boat train leaves this afternoon, he said. Yours, I take it, doesn’t. You don’t look like women about to go back.

He gathered his hat and the unaccustomed stick. He didn’t make a convincing officer. The others went out into the vestibule with surprisingly little comment.

He asked Sally, I wondered where your sister was?

It’s a simple address, she said. The Australian Voluntary Hospital, Château Baincthun, via Boulogne.

She spelled Baincthun for him.

That afternoon—probably by the same boat which would then return Kiernan to France—Lionel Dankworth was arriving in London. He had booked a room in a hotel near Victoria Station and had written to Honora asking her to invite them all to come as his guests to a supper for which he had reserved a private dining room. So the afternoon ahead lay glowing with possibility. Amidst a horde of Australian and Canadian soldiers, they prowled Westminster Abbey looking for the tombs of the renowned. The busts and elegant slabs and the remembrance plaques didn’t seem to them to be a promise of death, but called up ideas of an amiable world—one balanced between life and an appropriate vanishing remote from the disorder and imbalance of where they came from.

They got to the hotel in Victoria around six o’clock. Lionel Dankworth was already there—waiting for them in a tearoom and accompanied by two friends. Honora ran up and as he rose gave him an intense, unembarrassed, almost motherly hug while his hands wandered uncertainly around her shoulders. They all went off then to the private dining room, where a massive table was set amidst walls heavily padded with velvety scarlet wallpaper. Lionel distributed his two fellow soldiers amongst the women. They were lieutenants from his company. It didn’t take too many seconds of slack conversation for their eyes somehow to wander off as if they were all at once reminded of something they had to do the next day and which mustn’t be forgotten. After the soup—a lobster bisque—Lionel was urged to his feet by Honora, who sat beside him. As he did it, she merrily tapped a knife against a glass to call for order. He was tall but had filled out at the shoulders, a man of obvious command yet one who was nonetheless nervous for the moment.

Ah, he said.

There was a gap during which he looked at the table setting in front of him.

I take this liberty, he continued, or at least Honora told me to take it, because she was of the opinion that the speech ought to be delivered now instead of after the beef.

He coughed.

This means she wants her life settled on course earlier than it would have been if we had followed the normal pattern and waited for one more dish to be served.

They all gave an anticipatory laugh.

As she rightly said, we Australians don’t tend to follow the set-down pattern. So I just wanted to announce on my own behalf but above all that of my very beautiful friend here, Miss Slattery, that we are from this moment engaged. And therefore doomed to marriage. Or at least I should hope we are.

He produced a ring from one of the huge pockets of his uniform jacket and lifted her hand and put the ring in place. Everyone in the room stood and applauded. For Honora could look after herself in a marriage, Sally believed. Honora radiated a sense of achievement and raised herself as high as she could and kissed Dankworth’s mouth through closed lips. This kiss seemed to signal the end of all furtiveness. It also exposed Dankworth’s mashed but functional ear to their gaze, but there was chastity in those closed lips. The two were mobbed with warm wishes and congratulations as, one by one, their friends came up to them. Honora began to weep.

After the beef, Honora ate her flummery left-handed so that the ring could be seen and to enable her to hold on to Dankworth’s hand with her right.

At the end of the evening—after they had waited in the lobby to allow Honora and Lionel a little while on a secluded ottoman to exchange a few sentiments and further embraces—Honora went back with them by cab to what she called Hardtack Castle—Palmer’s Lodge was named after Samuel Palmer who, with Mr. Huntley, produced the tooth-breaking biscuits consumed at the front.

At the Peak of All Mad Things

These were even more bitter days at Château Baincthun as—with less hope than the previous year, but with a few shared and dutiful toasts offered in the messes, and one uttered in Erse by Doctor Airdrie—1917 began. It became apparent quite suddenly that the work and the winter were wasting Matron Mitchie. Her presence as well as her frame had thinned. Naomi saw her display irritability at the English Roses over wounds that had not been dressed for two days. It was partly a sense of impotence, a flare of frustration. Mitchie could not get around all the wards in a day. The gardens and paths between the house and the hut wards were so frozen that only sure-footed nurses and patients could walk there. Sometimes in the bleakness and transfixing cold, honest snow fell and consoled the earth—but blocked Mitchie further.

In this dim light and under the breath of what everyone said was the worst winter in this modern century, nothing had color and everything was demanding. And in the midst of such an undistinguished day, as Naomi supervised debridement and irrigation and the massage and anointing of lamed men, an orderly came to tell her there was a telephone call for her downstairs.

Access to the telephone seemed less strictly regulated under Lady Tarlton’s regimen than it would have been in general hospitals. Here it was taken as a given that boyfriends on leave could briskly inform this or that frost-nipped, red-cheeked young woman of the Red Cross or this or that Australian nurse that they were in the locality. But when Naomi descended to the august telephone in the hallway, she feared for Sally. She had got a note about the casualty clearing station business from her sister and it sounded safe only by a margin.

Hello, Kiernan here, said the voice she heard. You might remember me? I am a most accomplished ship’s newspaper editor.

Sergeant Kiernan?

His voice had that old color in it and the spaciousness of a translucent ocean.

Are you well? he asked.

Yes. A little cold.

Of course. Are you overworked?

Everyone here is. But you?

Things have changed a little with me, he told her. And your sister does not approve. I met her in Horseferry Road, and she and her friends were very judgemental. You see, I have accepted the King’s commission. But I’m totally unconvincing in the role, so maybe that excuses it.

He told her that he was on his way to be supply officer at a casualty clearing station. Sadly, a different one than Sally would be attached to.

But, he continued, of course nothing is distant from anywhere else here. Did you know the entire British line is barely more than a hundred and twenty miles? Melbourne to Beechworth?

A great deal of slaughter in a little space, she agreed.

Just the same, the roads up there are impossible. So in effect that makes distances greater. I’m in Boulogne right now with most of the officers and men of my unit. What we’re waiting for, I don’t know. But I wondered if I could come there and take you for a picnic? It may need, however, to be indoors.

There was no clearly viable picnic place inside or outside the château. It was agreed they would meet in Boulogne. Somehow she switched shifts with the most senior of the Red Cross women. When Lady Tarlton was asked to ratify the matter, she insisted on providing the big black-and-white car Mitchie and Naomi had once been so overwhelmed by. And—of course—the middle-aged Private Carling to drive it.

Naomi dressed in every item of her gray-skirted, gray-jacketed and overcoated uniform she could put on. Her gloves were ungainly but necessary. She regretted her button-up shoes would leave her feet a little cold. But to such a meeting—to which she looked forward so much—she could not wear gumboots or borrow cavalry ones.

Kiernan was waiting at the British Officers’ Club in Boulogne. Carling had a hard time getting there since fog had blotted out the country roads that led to it. The occasional wagon with its hunched farmer atop would appear out of the mist to test Carling’s braking and heart. But once in town the aged private knew precisely where the club was. He said he would be waiting for her from three o’clock, but she was not to hurry. For, he said, she’d worked too hard and was entitled to a little time to herself.

Kiernan was sitting in a chair in the lobby of the club and reading a small, leather-bound book from the club’s library. He put it in one of his jacket pockets—they were baggy enough to serve as a traveling library. As he had promised, he had all the looks of a man who’d been promoted from the ranks, including an awkward uniform. And his greatcoat—when the elderly Frenchman behind the desk fetched it—was the normal, graceless Australian army greatcoat.

Would you like a moules and fish place? Or would you prefer beef?

In this weather, said Naomi—of course remembering her meal with Airdrie—I suggest beef.

My exact instinct, he said. I’ve asked the concierge about a good place. Can you stand a walk?

Out in the dim day they spent their time further informing each other of their careers since they had last met. The phenomenon of Lady Tarlton figured large in Naomi’s account.

I have nothing to tell you in return, said Kiernan, that isn’t banal. But are you engaged yet to that pleasant fellow—Shaw, was it?

Of course not, she said.

That “Of course not” emerged from her barely without thought. She knew at once she didn’t want any idea of engagement to Robbie Shaw to make Kiernan too respectful or distant. So now it was apparent. How criminal that she hadn’t told Shaw himself definitely yet! How criminal if she didn’t do it as soon as she was back at the Voluntary.

He said, I’m sorry if the question was an intrusion.

The restaurant recommended by the porter at the club proved a long walk past bleak parkland. He apologized maybe once too often. But she emphasized she was happy. And she was. They saw the sea and the wet beach stretching out to a barely visible tide. A Blighty boat making its slow way out there was rendered black in outline by the uncooperative light of the day. This was all no better climatically than the day Dr. Airdrie had taken her to town. But it was different in every other aspect.

They reached a hotel she knew from her French experience could be called “Third Empire” and climbed the stairs to the warmth of its restaurant. The windows were opaque with mist but a fire raged in the inglenook and the light was warm. There was a surprising crowd of people here. Many but not all were soldiers. She and Kiernan were taken to their table by a plump, confident, full-bosomed woman who seemed part of the room’s grace. Naomi felt a sudden enthusiasm for conversation that the day outside had not encouraged.

So you’ve gone from the ranks to first lieutenant, she remarked as they were seated.

Oh, yes, your sister noted that too. But it was thought that a supply officer must of necessity have a certain authority.

Do you like it? Military rank in itself? Be honest now.

Do you like being a matron? Sally says you do.

I am only a matron by default. My rank is still that of staff nurse.

He thought a while. Actually, I do like a little rank, he decided.

For its own sake?

Almost certainly. Vanity of vanities… Quite a confession that is, isn’t it? But the eye of God doesn’t penetrate this mist.

Has your rank changed the way you talk to people though?

I always thought we talked well. But it’s true that rank changes things a lot. That’s why some men reject it. Better men than me have done so.

They may know they won’t have power over shrapnel and the rest, whether they’re commissioned or not, she argued.

Yes, but they have power before the bullet hits.

Look, she said, relenting, Don’t let me tease you. I know why you took your commission. So you have more power to do sensible things. But what interests me is whether you’d have asked me to lunch without those two pips on your shoulder?

Well, I wouldn’t have had the easy means to call your château. I would have had to get a lift out there. Or walked. But I would certainly have come.

This skirted the edge of a particular kind of intention. It was—she was surprised to find—a not unwelcome one.

But now, he said, I must splash around my lieutenant’s pay while I have it. It is an honor to flash it around on such a lunch as we are—Deo gratias—about to receive. And—this is not only understood but normal—my shout!

Naomi nodded. I’ll accept, she told him, because we don’t often get paid out there at Baincthun. They want us to come to Boulogne to sign for it.

Maybe you should call into the pay depot this afternoon, he suggested, winking.

When had winks joined his repertoire?

A man came with a board of special dishes but they ordered the soup and then the pork with cider. A specialty of Normandy, the waiter assured them.

The Normandy beyond the windowpanes today looked as though it totally lacked specialty.

Would you like wine? Kiernan asked. I am afflicted with teetotalism.

I believe I can get through lunch without Bordeaux, she said.

They ordered Vichy water. The waiter left.

I was delighted to meet your sister in London, Kiernan told her. Because you have been on my mind since I left the hospital ship in Melbourne. That article you wrote remained with me. It showed…

He gestured, looking for a definition.

It showed a spirit, he decided. A humane wisdom.

And then you went and got it published in the Herald, she complained.

And the Age. But that wasn’t me. Maybe it was one of the chaplains.

But you know I hate praise.

I do. You always say, “I’m a cow-cocky’s daughter!” As if it gives you an exemption or something.

It ought to, she assured him. So before we get on to all the flattery men seem to think a meal in a restaurant requires, let me warn you off. It’s obvious to me that you are an educated man. You are far above me in every aspect. I am—apart from nursing—untutored. “Humane wisdom.” My God! Please, don’t you start on all that stuff.

She was halfway joking—or being serious in a way that sounded falsely stern. She both meant what she said and feared driving him off. There was a kind of flattery she wanted. But she couldn’t define or imagine what it was.

He spotted the emphasis in “don’t you start.”

Other people have started on what you call “all that stuff” then?

Not many. But you ought to know better. I can see you’re still working yourself up to the usual stuff men go on with at the sight of a menu. And I don’t want you to. That’s straight. You are a friend. Be a friend and don’t carry on.

I am a Friend, he said. With a capital F. Lady Tarlton’s family—the Hennings—were Quakers too. Did you know that? What she’s doing is typical Quaker work.

I’m not sure she’s Quaker anymore. I’ve seen she likes gin.

I speak of a tradition, he said. The Society of Friends is a very broad church and sometimes it takes in gin. But—getting back to the start—you must face that what you wrote about the Archimedes gave honor to those who drowned. Apart from that, I know you are a good nurse. These things are not nothing. They are not a vacancy. And I know you don’t like it, but there is reserve. It is a reserve of temperament, I know. But it also comes from experience. So that’s about it. You can start chastising me again.

She smiled—delighted with what he said—and shook her head.

About Robbie Shaw… I seem to have been maneuvered into saying half yeses to him. I’ve been weak about it. If a person could remain engaged forever and satisfy a fellow, that’s what I’d do—as a pure favor. Of course, when he’s present—and he has a strong presence—it all comes close to making sense. But overall it makes no sense at all.

Their meal arrived—served with a certain incomprehension on the waiter’s part that anyone would eat such a dish without accompanying wine. But Boulogne was used—as a Channel port—to dealing with eccentric and wrongheaded British behavior. They ate with a winter ravenousness and went on to sauce anglaise and then had coffee. Outside, the day drew in haggardly upon itself. Carling would be coming soon.

Naomi tried to get to Boulogne to see Lieutenant Kiernan every two or three days during the next ten while he and his medical unit remained there. Since she didn’t want anyone remarking on her journeys, she would often wait at the gate by the road of frozen mud for a French farmer driving his wagon of produce into the city.

Allez-vous à Boulogne, Monsieur? she would ask. She did not even know if she had the phrase right. On the last of her three visits she was given a lift by two Tommies, who appeared out of the mist driving a khaki tractor. Glowing with anticipation in the freezing air, she arrived in town standing on part of its superstructure.

During their meetings thus far they had not touched each other except to shake hands. At this farewell meeting she agreed to walk with him in weather still not suited to it. For privacy’s sake they stayed outdoors and spent an hour and a half standing at the sea wall above the high tide, listening to the waves slap and rattle the shingle below them. Utter craziness—to stand and talk in such a grim bowl of half light above a grim ocean. Yet it was also perfect. They had the opaqueness and the cold to themselves. Their shoulders in overcoats touched—there was a degree too of half-intended pressure involved on both their parts. When contact with a man was managed at such a pace—a shadow of a quarter-inch at a time—it seemed it would take a lifetime before there was anything like an honest holding. Things must be moved along, she concluded for the first time in her life. Kiernan could not be trusted to do it at the pace the times demanded.

Before she could he gave her further motive. He said he was unsure—as everyone was—about future leaves. But—though it was not his business—he would come back and find out how she stood with her prospective fiancé.

I’ll be posting a letter on that matter, she said.

To me? he asked with all the teasing leisure of the implicitly chosen man.

If I’m to write to you, I’ll need your address.

“Third Australian Casualty Clearing Station” would find me, he assured her. Oh, and you’d better add “France.” Though we might be in Belgium for all I know.

I’ll be telling Robbie Shaw, said Naomi out into the fog, that I’ve decided I can’t condemn him or me to all that misery and disappointment just because of some sense of honor.

Ah, he murmured—and coughed.

Stuck for words are you? she said. Usually you fellows want to make all the declarations and use all the adjectives.

There are many adjectives I’d like to use. But you’ve warned me off.

Well, then, I’ll do the job. You are a noble soul, Kiernan. I would in fact go nearly anywhere for you. I don’t mean where you’re going now. I mean generally and for good.

He coughed. Good gracious, he said. Give me a moment. I’m outflanked and flustered.

He kissed her cheek and she turned and kissed his—a kiss far more rationed on both their parts than she would have preferred.

Gosh, he said. We’ve still got time to have champagne.

This is enough, she told him. Anyone could have champagne!

They listened for traffic on the promenade. Since there was none, they crossed it clamped close by held elbows. They came again to the apartments, hotels, restaurants, and shops along the front. He kissed her on the point of the cheek and at greater length.

It is quite a changed world indeed, he told her, in which women have the courage to say what must be said.

She had to return to duty. He signaled a cab that emerged from mist. They traveled together through its opaque grayness to Château Baincthun. The cab would need to take Kiernan back to town, and she told its driver to stop at the gate. Kiernan seemed to understand she did not want to take him further. She wanted him to be secret yet. She chose to arrive alone at the château—she knew mist would protect her as she approached it up the frozen driveway under the enhanced murk of the elms. He went a few steps with her and kissed her again in a way she considered more satisfactory and which promised less cautious experiments eventually. He murmured, There is nothing a person can say at a moment like this.

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:

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.

That was the sort of thing Condon wrote—not things to be embroidered on battle flags, or promises of an early close. Charlie defined a state of being and that somehow consoled Sally more than the hollow assurances she heard from others. The Kellys brawling and the miners arguing politics made the trench like something domestic and tedious. That was what—for Charlie’s sake—she wanted it to be.

A convoy of Ford motor ambulances arrived outside the admissions ward on the very first evening at Deux Églises and before all was ready. Duckboards were not yet laid down in the big marquee t o make a floor. The question of how many cots were needed was still being debated between the chief medical officer, Major Bright, and the matron—a seasoned-looking, robust woman named Bolger. From the numbers of ambulances appearing that night on the frozen road outside, it was now clear that if this was the season to let the armies settle into their miserable lines and simply outwait the cold, the generals had not taken the message.

In the great bare-floored admissions marquee, the neatly made little man Major Bright, wearing a surgical coat, moved about energetically with the ward doctor and inspected the men laid down on cots or on the ground. Bright walked around the tent of perhaps forty stretchers giving brisk instructions for the disposal of the stretchers. He needed to clear the tent so another forty or more could be brought in.

For the early phases of arrivals, a large number of the nurses, including Sally as a ward sister, were there to deal with what must be dealt with at once—hemorrhage or agony or the coldness of shock. Other nurses waited in the wards beyond this great tent in which the needs of the harmed would be decided. So from their tables stocked with medical equipment—from dressings to opiates to hypodermics and sphygmomanometers for blood pressure, which in the stretcher cases who had survived the ambulance might well be diving fatally—nurses moved under the measured orders of Major Bright, calm Matron Bolger, and the ward doctor to inject morphine or to fill in names and conditions and dosages and the ward destination of each case. Orderlies carried the uniforms and kit taken from the wounded and hurled them into the tented gear room attached to the main marquee, which was drenched in electric light from a generator thundering outside.

Some men brought into the reception tents were found by this hard light to have died on their stretchers and were taken out to the morgue shed. The gray, ageless, unseamed faces of the chest or stomach wounded raised in Sally the ridiculous but angry question of why they had been carried so far to die, as if the surgeons further forward at the main dressing stations—and the stretcher bearers—had deliberately passed them down the line rather than deal with the deaths themselves.

A small mess annex opened out within the marquee. The walking wounded—wearing tags which said “D”—were given hot tea and cocoa. Men with “NYD(S)”—the “S” signifying not physical but psychic shock—pinned to their uniforms by dressing station doctors stood shuddering amongst the walking but could not be trusted with scalding fluid.

On the main floor there was an attaching of labels. Bright and the ward doctor moved about allocating “A,” “B,” and “C” to the stretcher cases—but other labels were also attached—with notations reading “Urgent,” “Abdomen,” “Chest,” “Spine.” Sally remembered having read such scrawled notes pinned to men arriving in Rouen. A nurse must admire the system, though it was one whose structure was under great pressure from the time the first raving head-wound case was laid on a cot or the ground and a deathly abdominal case was placed beside him, and staff nurses rushed in to stem sudden hemorrhaging.

Sally found herself taken back also to the Archimedes—the fetidness of uniforms or bits of them—and the stink from souring blood and that general stench of wounds turning towards sepsis or gangrene or gas gangrene. There was also the threat of panic in the air, lacking at tidier Rouen.

Supervising the movement of the nurses and having now the eminence of being a sister—the subaltern of a matron—Sally had asked to be appointed to the resuscitation ward up the slight slope towards the tent she shared with Honora and Leo and Freud. Her motives—apart from the fact that new methods were used there—were not fully apparent to her. As soon as men began to be taken there she would need to leave the admissions tent and go with them.

The night outside—when she left the admissions hut—carried intimations of madness. There were continuing barrages at the front and planes could be heard overhead. Sally had charge of two young staff nurses who walked with strange calmness beside the stretcher of a chest wound being carried by orderlies to resuscitation. His blood pressure had plummeted and they were in a hurry to get him into a place of floorboards and stoves. They laid him on a bed and piled on the blankets. Sally cannulated his arm while the young nurses set up a frame and hung from it a saline solution they connected by tubing into the vein. The orderlies then covered his body with a canopy to retain all warmth. A little double Primus burner with a metal dampener on top of it to give safety to its flame was lit by an orderly and placed in a concave space at the bed end. And now all else must wait. A ward doctor appeared and the canopy was lifted so that he could consider the man’s pulse and ponder whether he would need to give the patient blood by transfusion. Plasma was promised, he said, but had not yet arrived.

Sally was busy in the resuscitation tent for twelve timeless hours. By then the numbers to do with wound shock—the expectations of anyone working there—had been established. There had been seven who could not be revived and eighteen sent on to surgery—where their fate would be a matter of margins. Four cases remained in the ward—their organs plugging along on the fuel of low blood oxygen.

She connected a healthy orderly’s blood flow into that of a threatened case through a glass connector tube. She saw lesser wounded men turn up to ask reverent questions about some of those the resuscitation ward had handled. And then it all stopped. Nearly everyone except some thoracic cases had left for the base hospitals by ambulances. More patients might come that night. But until then there could be sleep.

The name that Sally began to hear this time from the walking and those with conscious speech left to them was Bullecourt. The parents of soldiers would not have heard of it. A month before, soldiers themselves would not have heard of it, or that the village of that name had been subsumed into the great defensive line named after Prussian General Hindenburg. Nor was Bullecourt over swiftly. A number of crowded convoys had arrived at Deux Églises and been “cleared,” the men sent off with their records and X-rays. But still three Australian divisions—amongst whose numbers were Lionel Dankworth and Charlie Condon—were in place there and ready to advance again.

There were other meaningless names she would hear from the shocked and the wounded—from that portion of them that was talkative. Le Barque and Thilloy, Bapaume and Malt Trench, Lagnicourt and Ecoust, Doignes and Louverval. Time accelerated at Deux Églises. The passage of men, the evacuation of most cases by motor ambulances lined up in the lane or on the road to Deux Églises—all that had become a rhythmic phenomenon. The relief came on nights when there were fewer arrivals, or even from the closure for a day or so of the station.

Nurses were in the meantime rotated ward to ward—the aim being that they would learn all the medical functions of this endless war. Freud clung to her theatre work—assisting a Captain Boyton from Chicago who had become a member of the Royal Medical Corps to honor his British mother and who had somehow ended up with the Australians.

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.

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.

Spring and All Its Follies

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.

They were all so close to the earth as to give Sally a sense of their impossible speed. The German aircraft now headed northeast. But it took a little time for its pilot to achieve his full, desperate pace. She heard the British machine guns prattling away loud and harsh. The German turned and dived—trying to lose himself in terrain or the trees along a canal—and the three British planes clamored on his tail. And then came a detonation that vibrated the rural air and was distinct from the artillery background. Beyond the village a cumulus of black smoke arose. The grin of the young fellow who’d waved at her was consumed by fire. Some orderlies grabbed an ambulance and raced away to bring in the two Germans, but they were both dead. And just as well—for their faces would have been smashed to fragments on impact by the coping of their cockpits and the butts of their machine guns, and the rest of them burned.

The meeting of eagles above Deux Églises—the fact the man had waved, gallant and amusing while seconds from death—showed her yet again that Charlie Condon, who possessed grace and style of a much higher order, must surely be in someone’s sights. It was possible to deny it during hectic duty. But she could become immobilized for an instant on the pathways and distracted by anxiety even when entering the wards.

I have been deluding myself, Honora all at once confessed to her companions that evening at their dinner of army stew and beans and good bread. Would they search the body of a putrefying man?

Her use of the word “putrefying” shocked them. They would not have believed Honora would admit putrefaction to the catalogue of her possibilities for Lionel Dankworth. It is very likely, she said, he is buried with my letter still on him. There’s something of me, of my hand. It means that he has a little monument in his pocket.

The nurses looked at each other.

Yes, said Leo, whose beloved Fellowes was working at a clearing station thirty miles off. And he’ll have more monuments in the end.

At this time Germans were being brought in. Some walked. One of them—Sally would remember amidst the flux of cases—had a pitiable bayonet wound to the sternum. It crossed Sally’s mind to wonder if Honora might be vengeful with them. But from what anyone saw she was businesslike and attentive in a normal sense. Why would you expect otherwise? Sally asked herself. But then she noticed that with the German walking wounded Honora sometimes briskly removed their jackets and exhaustively searched their pockets—almost as if there might be something sewn in the seams. She did not ask their permission, and they submitted to her search with a frown. She would obviously search the entire German army—all without hatred—to find the one who had her letter and thus knew Captain Lionel Dankworth’s place on or beneath earth.

Naomi had not expected or wanted a reply from Robbie. But one arrived, in a Comforts Fund envelope from which she could tell it had come through the army postal services in France. Her impulse was to leave the thing unopened, but there was a sense in which she was too busy to develop any habit of delay.

There was first a rush of shame when Naomi read this. It was followed by anger at Lieutenant Shaw’s moral haughtiness. He wrote as if she had as good as been engaged to him. That was his delusion. She walked the wards directing the work of the English Roses but rage would take her in the midst of sentences and she would forget their purpose.

What dosage did you say? an English Rose would ask, and Naomi would need to begin again.

But within a mere handful of hours, she was overtaken by a sense of reprieve. She had sidestepped the obvious but most lethal marriage. Kiernan had helped her do it.

As Naomi savored freedom from poor Robbie and anticipated a letter from Kiernan, Matron Mitchie had caught a cold which developed very swiftly into pneumonia. She gasped and became distressed about some jangled, fearful terror of childhood or girlhood. Or even of the Archimedes. The Archimedes must be there, Naomi was sure, in Matron Mitchie’s delirium, since Naomi hadn’t been able to eradicate it from her own dreams.

Doctor Airdrie was the one who diagnosed Mitchie’s condition. Major Darlington also visited Mitchie and took her vital readings and weighed her general condition. Lady Tarlton sat by her bed reading softly to her while—in her own fevered privacy—Mitchie rattled away at phantoms. Even while levering herself about on walking sticks, Mitchie had mesmerized them into the belief that her energies had never been diminished. After this, Lady Tarlton muttered to Naomi, she should be sent at least to England to be built up. She should then go home, wouldn’t you say?

Lady Tarlton looked like a woman due for a collapse herself. Her face had been pinched to thinness by the winter. The spring had not yet fully restored her. She remained recklessly devoted and palely beautiful. Her gloriously disordered hair flowed from the French mountaineer’s cap she wore for warmth. Her arguments with generals had still taught her no subservience. She was talking about starting an Australian Club in Paris this coming summer. Because whenever the boys went to the capital from the trenches, they had to hunt around for accommodation. They were left to the mercy of the YMCA, she said, and hung around on the pavements outside estaminets and the tourist sites trying to convince themselves they were having a good time.

Lady Tarlton had been to Paris looking at buildings, seeking help from generals and making small progress. Her contempt for some of them was probably mutual, but her certainty she would override the generals of the rear was still girlish and bracing.

Floating about the wards, she was willing to talk about her battles with generals in front of anyone, and the Australians loved it—all her lambasting of the heroes of the desk. You’d think, she complained one day in that airy, nose-high, chin-jutted way of hers, I had asked them to open an Indian brothel.

Darlington remained her helpmeet. Not only did he serve his long hours in wards and perform surgery as sepsis bloomed in wounds or limbs were deformed in their healing, but he filled in forms, wrote letters, and then spent time examining tissue from the living and the dead in his pathology laboratory downstairs.

Naomi continued to meet now and then English nurses in Boulogne or Wimereux who had heard of Lady Tarlton’s Australian hospital and thought of it as an amateur affair run by eccentrics. The place was rendered more laughable because gossip of the rumored love affair between Lady Tarlton and her senior surgeon was no longer confined to the château. The fact was that their own surgeons and doctors encouraged their nurses to believe Château Baincthun a farce. A nurse she met in Boulogne asked her, Isn’t there a crackpot doctor there who wants you to wear a mask all the time?

It was the sort of question which called up instantaneous loyalty in Naomi. I’m sure it would be interesting for you, she said, to see his figures on sepsis.

But it had to be admitted he had the cranelike gait and the fixed eye of at least a highly argumentative fellow. He and Lady Tarlton shared that same air of having to push down walls to make the world see the self-evident things they saw.

Soon after Airdrie’s diagnosis, Matron Mitchie’s breathing grew very labored and her temperature went to a hundred and four degrees. The struggle reached a level where she should have surrendered—but of course she would not. This did not mean at all—Naomi knew—that she would live. It meant only that she was willing to endure a terrible death. There would be no sliding forth beneath an easeful cloud of morphine for Mitchie.

By the end of May, her pneumonia had broken. Now she appeared elderly. Her wrists were purple and thin and her fingers trembled as she reached for a teacup by her bed. Naomi could not be spared to sit by her for long. She was now their chief ward sister and—in fact if not in title—their matron. The idea that she should be in receipt of a matron’s instead of a staff nurse’s pay fortunately amused her rather than rankled. All industrial unease of that sort had been somehow washed from her soul. The reward of being prized by Lady Tarlton and trusted by Major Darlington—that’s what she looked for.

At last, a letter from Kiernan!

He then nominated dates on which he would have leave in Paris.

It was instantly apparent to Naomi that what Kiernan wanted was what she wanted. She believed in that formula—“thoughtful yet not binding, sensible and not loud.” It was easy to tell Lady Tarlton she wished to meet her fiancé (the term “boyfriend” was fatuous) in Paris and that it was important to his religion that there be a ceremony of betrothal.

You have a fiancé? asked Lady Tarlton.

I’ve just received the suggestion by mail, said Naomi.

A ceremony? Is he Jewish? asked Lady Tarlton.

He’s a member of the Society of Friends.

Quakers, she said. How fascinating. My family, of course, were Friends. I, however… I’m afraid I let it go. But, though human, they’re not given to as much hypocrisy as the others, you understand.

Naomi took the afternoon train from Boulogne to Paris and found her way to the British Nurses’ Home, which was an ornate place facing the ordered spaces of the Champs de Mars. For the purpose of betrothal, Lieutenant Kiernan had been given one day’s leave and collected her—as a telegram had promised—at nine o’clock on the Sunday morning from the front of the nurses’ home. She felt the unsullied and irreplaceable joy of seeing him. There was no sense in her of being conscripted for some alien ceremony. He wore a brown suit—it was the first time Naomi had seen him in civilian mode. So dressed he seemed a novelty and—even more—as if a dimension had been added to him.

I wouldn’t impress them if I turned up in uniform, he told her.

Should I have worn something else?

Oh, no. Nurses are obvious noncombatants.

Their cab took them across the river. It was starting to be a splendid, still morning and the river swept away silver-green as the taxi made for the region named Montparnasse. The cab driver was not certain of which alley off the Rue de Vaugirard to drop them, but at last a point was selected and Ian helped her forth onto the pavement and paid the driver.

I think it’s just along here, he reassured her when the cab was gone. This is it, I’m sure, he said, pointing down a cobbled entryway. My informant told me a double wooden door painted black.

They found such a wooden door where Ian Kiernan had expected it to be. But the rooms above it showed no sign of life. Naomi was content with the hour, and delighted simply to occupy the place beside him. They smiled at each other. She took off one of her leather gloves just because it was a warm enough day, and he lifted her bare hand and put his lips to it.

Be careful you don’t catch anything, she said.

Right you are, he said, but shook his head. It’s very Australian, he said, to debunk a man’s kiss. I hope you won’t feel obliged to do it in subsequent instances.

A spry little man of about sixty years, wearing a good-quality alpaca suit, an upright collar, a somber tie, but with kid gloves on his hands and a fashionable cane under his arm, came down the alley. He had already seen them and adopted a smile and increased his pace.

He looks like Billy Hughes, she whispered to Ian.

Sedgewick, the man said as introduction. You must be Brother Kiernan. How amazing that there are Friends in a place like Melbourne.

Naomi thought the same could be said for Paris.

I am the registering officer and the clerk for today’s session. We have perhaps twenty-eight members. But sometimes we have surprise arrivals—Red Cross people who are Friends. There are also some Quaker ambulances… You have both brought your records? Good. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind my keeping them until after the meeting.

Sedgewick unlocked one leaf of the double doors and they followed him up a steep staircase to a bare room where benches faced each other. There was no altar, no pulpit, and no enforced or pious silence. Sedgwick continued to converse. I’m afraid most of us are French, so the meeting will largely be in French. But the Committee of Clarity are all Anglophones, and obviously I include myself.

And this Committee of Clarity? asked Naomi.

Kiernan put a reproving hand to his forehead. Heavens above, he said, I didn’t explain that.

He turned to Sedgewick. It sounds like the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution.

Sedgewick uttered a small sequence of sounds that added up to a laugh. It is a group of three, he said, who ask you merely if you are interested in each other as partners for life.

The other Friends began to arrive—modern-looking men like Ian, some older men, a number of women soberly but not unpleasantly dressed. Women’s hands were kissed in the French manner. Men kissed each other on the cheek. They all welcomed Ian and Naomi in that manner and sat them on facing benches on either side of the room. Thus Naomi expected that when the service began the other women would be separated from the men. But men and women were mixed on the benches. In hers and Ian’s case it was therefore a symbol of apartness—their betrothal had not become formal. There was to be a ritual distance between them.

Suddenly—and by some signal Naomi did not see—there was a silence for inner prayer.

O great God, Naomi intoned within herself, who is far beyond the battlefield, too kind to be close to it, too far to be blamed for it, take my thanks that I’ve been brought here by this noble man.

Someone began to speak in French. It was a man, but not Sedgewick. He went on praying for peace and brotherhood in a calm voice. A woman took up immediately after him. And then another woman—and so it went. Apart from hymn singing, she had never heard women make so much noise in church. An hour passed and betrothal had not been mentioned. At last Ian was nudged by Mr. Sedgewick and rose to progress to the middle of the floor, holding out a hand for Naomi to join him. She did so. She felt that her face blazed before these strangers.

Sedgewick stood and stated that Monsieur Panton, Madame Flerieu, Monsieur Gosselin, and he himself were the members of the Committee of Clarity on this matter. The committee swapped seats with others so that they could all sit together on a single bench. Allow us a second to study your papers, said Sedgewick.

Madame Flerieu—thin and fine boned—started a robust discussion about something. Mr. Sedgewick answered, gesturing like a Frenchman and adopting that throaty Gallic seriousness. The two other men had their say as well. At last Mr. Sedgewick looked up at the two candidates.

The question is, he explained apologetically, whether your work, Mr. Kiernan, could be seen as redeeming lives or preparing them for further military demands.

The woman—Madame Flerieu—was clearly the one who had taken this line. So, thought Naomi, this committee business is more serious than old Sedgewick implied.

I have had the same doubt myself, Ian said. I provide medical supplies and surgical equipment. There are Quaker ambulances from America working in the field and what might be said of me could be said of them as well. It is the ancient question of trying to do a small good in a devilish world.

Sedgewick appeared happy with that answer, but Madame Flerieu said in English in a reasonable but intense voice, Members of the ambulances of the Friends do not hold military ranks.

I confess that is a question to discuss, said Ian.

And Mademoiselle Durance holds a military rank. Do you not, Mademoiselle?

I work in a voluntary hospital. I believe the Australian army has forgotten me.

Sedgewick held up his hand and shook his head benignly like a man quelling unease.

And you intend to marry?

As far as Naomi could tell it was the first time anyone had actually used that verb aloud.

She said, Yes. If Ian intends to marry me.

Of course, said Kiernan. Of course I do.

At times convenient to you both, are you able to meet again with the Committee of Clarity? asked Sedgewick.

I’m sure we will make the arrangements, said Ian.

Sedgewick asked, Does Miss Durance have any concern about such a requirement?

Naomi said she did not. But—as she told them—given her duties at the Voluntary Hospital it would take some skill on both their parts to make their leaves coincide.

So it is your will before God, Ian Kiernan, to take Naomi Durance as your betrothed with a view to marriage?

Exalted by her re-creation as a woman betrothed, she heard him agree. Then Sedgewick asked Naomi the same question and afterwards she could not remember having given an answer.

So the betrothal is initiated, said Sedgewick. And may God turn his face to you.

Naomi felt in that second that the solemnity and casualness of the ceremony gave it unrivaled hope, and a sense of liberation, not of bonds. Here—in this room vacant of all but two dozen residents of France—lay a definition of marriage so particular as to mark Ian and herself off from the bad luck and ill will of other alliances. She was sure of it.

The clearing station had quickly spawned its own graveyard, which lay across the shallow valley and a few steps north towards the village in a field one side of which was a farmer’s ditch. Night duty was a time when young men yielded up their souls. Orderlies carried bodies to the morgue hut from which in the morning they would be placed in coffins and carried across the Deux Églises road to the site where a padre from a unit resting out of the line—and a burial party ditto, along with a bugler or bagpiper—would give them their final rites.

Everyone seemed to take this growing crop of white crosses as a given and nothing to distract a person. Only sometimes—as the summer came on—did Sally notice in temporary shock that amongst the hollyhocks the place had grown new suburbs. Farmers and their wives ploughed and planted in the fields all about and were as indifferent to the raucousness of the front and to the field of crosses as were the nurses and orderlies.

Dr. Bright’s Sunday picnics—held in a field on the slight ridge above the casualty clearing station—had grown since the spring and included English doctors and nurses from the British casualty clearing station across the road to Bapaume. Almost inevitably a surgeon from the British clearing station had brought a cricket kit. Thus Test matches—Australia versus England—were played. Nurses and middle-aged doctors leapt to catch hook shots at square leg and crouched to fumble at snicks in slips. But at least they had encountered the rich, dark soil and the irrepressible grass. Sally, however, took a big catch in the position she believed they called square leg.

Sister Durance, called Major Bright, take the slips with me.

For he was standing near the wicketkeeper.

I don’t understand, said Sally.

Slips, here. I’m first slip, you be second. I see you’re a good catch. Advance Australia Fair. Come on!

She moved grudgingly to take up the position and saw Honora was profoundly asleep under the tree on the ridgeline and was not engaged at all in the game but seemed in fact sedated by it.

You see this young chap? Major Bright asked Sally confidentially, pointing to an Australian gunner they’d found in an estaminet in Deux Églises and recruited for their team. He’s a leg spinner. So be ready for a catch. It won’t be fierce. Ball off the edge of the bat. A lollipop catch.

The English orderly at the batting crease met the Australian’s less than distinguished delivery and belted it across the field so far that it disappeared over a hill.

My God, said Bright, they’re taking it seriously. That’s a bit rough.

He stood straight and inhaled.

I hope you don’t mind my asking, Sister Durance, he murmured as beyond the fall of land Australian and British orderlies and two nurses searched the grass for the cricket ball. But I would be grateful if you kept an eye on young Slattery there. It seems to me that the word of the bureau in London, and of course of our glorious military authorities, is uniform. And she is the only dissenter.

Yes, said Sally. But her work stays solid.

Of course. But she writes too often to the bureau, and she continues to do so, even though they have nothing to tell her. She seemed to be over the loss, but she’s reverted. She needs a long leave, and a chance to find the means to accept that her fiancé is dead. I am not asking you to be a spy. But there are so many letters to that bureau, I assure you—nearly daily. More—I confess—than I have actually sent off.

There were rumors Major Bright was more affected by Honora than that. There did exist, however, fifteen or more years’ difference.

Please keep an eye on her. Just to see signs of stress or of the… the abnormal. She refuses to leave here; I have no grounds to make her. But she should be observed. In case…

Sally said she would do her best in this matter. On the rim of the slope a nurse had found the cricket ball, and this was a pretext for jubilation and cheers.

A Summer of Stubborn Matrons

In the garden on a suddenly blazing day when men sat in scattered light by oaks and elms and read books and magazines—with Matron Mitchie dozing in her wicker wheelchair—Lady Tarlton took Naomi aside.

Our friend Matron Mitchie, she confided, has had an X-ray in Boulogne at Major Darlington’s insistence. There are damp spots on her lungs. She is suffering from tuberculosis. It’s urgent that she go to a sanatorium down there in the south, and take ship to Australia as soon as she can healthily do so. I am trying to recruit an experienced sister or staff nurse from Étaples or Wimereux or Boulogne to special-nurse her. Because you notice that three of our volunteers left during the winter to return home? But I can hardly blame them.

Naomi thought that given the rigors of the work and of the château as a building three departures was a modest number. At the news of Mitchie’s consumption, she thought at once of the sinking of the Archimedes. It was as if that cold and shock had caught up to her at Château Baincthun.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Lady Tarlton went on, she is refusing to move. A tear emerged in the corner of one of her eyes.

I fear she might have no family back there. And yet out of English reticence I don’t ask. I think you can ask her. And use your best endeavors. She must go, says Major Darlington, if she is to see her senior years.

That night Naomi intercepted the volunteer who was carrying a meal from the kitchens to Matron Mitchie’s room on the first floor. The girl was masked, according to the strictures of Major Darlington. Dr. Airdrie had told everyone that Darlington was about to publish an article in The Lancet on the connection between bacteria in nurses’ throats and sepsis, and on the whole issue of masks on or masks off. This—everyone felt—would validate the Voluntary and Major Darlington and Lady Tarlton and themselves.

I’ll take that meal to the matron, Nurse, Naomi said.

Would you, Sister? asked the girl in an elegant, tired voice. She was a sturdy young woman who had once well-meaningly said to Naomi, Your soldiers are extraordinary in their patois. And Naomi had said, I doubt they’d know what patois was.

Naomi took the meal from her but did not don a mask. How could you have a heart-to-heart with Mitchie through a mask?

The matron’s room—into which she was bidden after knocking—was a little larger than her own. The French owners who had fled the war had at least left their thick curtains behind—and in Mitchie’s room they were drawn. But the room was simple apart from that—an iron bedstead, a dresser, a lowboy of painted pine, a little bookcase made of pine. Matron Mitchie in bed wore a mobcap and her hands were folded across her stomach, her bedclothes neat, her prosthesis with its shoe on its false foot beside her bed. The matron grinned unambiguously and broadly at seeing Naomi.

Come, she said. You can put down the food and tea there. I’ll have the tea first. As for the rest, my appetite is not… But tell me—your visit to Paris?

Naomi found herself without embarrassment relating their meeting with Mr. Sedgewick and the other Amis in Paris.

When she was finished, Mitchie declared, I always liked that Kiernan. He was a good egg from the start.

I am so sorry to hear about your problem, said Naomi.

Problem?

Well, that you have some consumption.

Some? asked Mitchie, mock sneering. That’s not a very accurate medical assessment, Staff Nurse Durance. I wouldn’t mind betting that blabbermouth Lady Tarlton told you all about it. And sent you to plague me into going to Marseille. I simply won’t. I am better than Major Darlington and Lady Tarlton think.

Naomi said, You argued you were better than you were to get here in the first place.

Mitchie said, Is there soup on that tray? Place it there on the little table. I might have some.

Would you like me to feed you?

I’m neither a baby nor in my dotage, thank you. If I go to Marseille, they’ll have me on the Australia boat before you know. And so to a sanatorium out in the Dandenongs. I am not a sanatorium dweller. It’s not in my nature. Besides, what is so precious about me that I should be taken out of France? The countryside is weighed down by young men who need to be sent home. I’m tethered here by the same things as you are. So let’s have no argument. I really mean it. Let’s have none.

Namoi set her up with her soup.

Good soup indeed. Some of those English Roses can actually cook.

It’s none of my affair, said Naomi, but I wondered if you had a family to look after you in Australia?

Here we go! said Mitchie in disgust. A family? I have a brother in Tasmania, since you ask. But he’s totally unsuitable as a tuberculosis nurse. I wouldn’t call my brother a relative in any meaningful way. I am as good as forgotten there. Anyhow, it seems that I have been here forever. Even Mudros is distant—and Egypt’s distant beyond belief. This is my home and I won’t be thrown out of my home. Lady Tarlton owes me her loyalty on this, rather than going around enlisting you all to evict me.

You should never have come to France in my opinion, Naomi said. But I know you’ll argue otherwise.

So would you if you were in my position. You wouldn’t want me to have missed out on meeting Major Darlington and all those well-bred English gels? Would you? Truth is, there is no rest for anyone until it’s all over. Unless it’s the sort of final rest they dish out in Flanders and on the Somme.

She handed her unfinished soup bowl back to Naomi. Naomi put it on the tray. The tubercular cough set in and Mitchie covered her mouth with an old towel. The spasm built to a paroxysm and then composed itself.

Don’t gawk at me. I’m not spitting blood yet. Well, not much.

I won’t gawk, Naomi promised.

But do not raise this business again if you want to be my friend. I say this not only to you but to Lady Tarlton too. So enough of it now! Remember this—in helping that woman out, that Lady Tarlton, I hacked all around the bush in third-class carriages and on bicycles and the back of trucks and by horseback. Setting up bases for our bush nurses and visiting them so they didn’t feel lonely and leave us and go back to the big towns and cities. Lady Tarlton did not want any praise for the scheme, but it was her name in the newspapers. Well, her name deserved to be. But I was the one on the bike. I was the one who got saddle sore. And now I deserve her consideration too. I am not to be shunted off to the south. This end of France is where the war and the grief and my friends are, and this is the end I’m staying at.

Matron Mitchie sipped her tea and her lips curled and she frowned. It’s gone cold. I made too long a speech, damn me!

I’ll get you more, Naomi offered.

You’re too busy, Matron Mitchie ordered. Have one of the gels do it.

Naomi said, I’ll get some more. For now, have plenty of rest.

That sounds like condescension to me. “Have plenty of rest, dear!”

For God’s sake, don’t be so sensitive, Naomi told her smiling. A person would think you were a Durance.

Under the spur of her concern for Mitchie, Lady Tarlton thought about a villa on the cliff top at Antibes—between Marseille and Nice—owned by her husband’s family. It was staffed by servants Lord Tarlton’s brother-in-law had been too distracted to let go for the duration of the war. An entire domestic establishment down there thus awaited a convalescent Matron Mitchie. The proposition Lady Tarlton kept bluntly running with Mitchie was that in the south—where there was a North African sun and North African breezes—she would get better. Here she would die.

When Naomi visited her room, Mitchie complained of this further attempt at clearing her away from the Château Baincthun. The disease was eroding her and turning her pallid, thinning her skin to tissue, sharpening the bones at the points of her cheek, and narrowing her nose to a blade.

She thinks I want to stay out of pure vanity, Mitchie complained. I want to stay because this is the place and there isn’t any other.

It seemed to Naomi that Mitchie had the talent and force of temperament to make a community wherever she went—and in the south of France no differently than anywhere else. Lady Tarlton had already found a reliable and pleasant Red Cross nurse to go to the marvelous, all-healing south with her, and had also organized some orderlies to travel with them to Paris and transfer them to the train down to the south. But it seemed that to Mitchie the supposed date of her departure hung over her like an ax and distressed her so much that one night Dr. Airdrie had to sedate her with lithium bromide.

By the evening before the departure Matron Mitchie had become a plaintive shadow of that figure Naomi had once seen on sticks and a prosthetic leg rising up the gangplank of the Melbourne-moored troopship, bent on Europe, the cockpit, the center of all matroning. Naomi began to wonder if the threat of leaving the château was not doing Mitchie more harm than good, and she went searching for Dr. Airdrie. She found her writing case notes in her office. Her handsome long nose was red at the tip from cold, and her hands mittened, though it was meant to be spring.

You must talk to Lady Tarlton, Naomi urged her after greetings. This going-south idea is doing no good at all.

That may be so, Airdrie admitted and reached for a cigarette. But convincing the boss lady is another thing. Look, Mitchie will be hunky-dory once she gets there.

It makes good sense medically, said Naomi. Except Mitchie has a real dread.

What is there to dread? asked Airdrie. I wish she were sending me.

Yet Airdrie could tell Naomi would not let the question rest.

I’ll go and see Pretty Polly myself, Airdrie sighed. But you come too.

They went down the corridor and knocked on Lady Tarlton’s office door. The young London Red Cross woman who worked as her secretary opened it. Lady Tarlton was at the desk frowning over documents. The office looked cluttered at first view—there were piles of paper around the walls, for example—but it did not take long before you saw they were organized, that each individual suburb of paper beneath the citadel of the desk had been deliberately assembled by the secretary and put in folders by alphabetic order and held in place by paperweights. Here were bills and requisitions, rental agreements, invoices for repairs and food and heating fuel and linen—some supplied by the military, some supplemented by her own purse and that of the London committee to whom she must send proper accounts. She looked up and greeted them with her normal flustered warmth.

Naomi and Airdrie did not sit. Naomi frankly made her point about Mitchie. When she was finished Lady Tarlton sighed a long, musical sigh. We must go and see her then, she said at last, dropping her pen and fetching up a shawl to wear in the corridor.

The door of Mitchie’s room was opened by the English nurse meant to accompany her to Antibes. Mitchie greeted them with something like sullen disgust. Here we go! she said, casting up stricken eyes. The bailiffs have arrived!

She began to cough horrendously. Lady Tarlton sat on the chair by her bed and took one of her hands. Mitchie grudgingly permitted the grasp.

What’s the trouble, old friend? asked Lady Tarlton. I have only your welfare in mind.

That’s a fine excuse for torment, said Mitchie.

I feel I’d be guilty of murder if I did not send you off, Mitchie. Everything’s so damp and changeable up here.

Mitchie’s cheeks flared an angry, tubercular red. She tossed her head wearily.

If I were lying on a stretcher with my intestines hanging out, you’d have some idea of what to do for me. You’d listen to all I said. I am not in that condition and so I’m shorn of a voice of my own. I’m patronized and patted on the head and told I’ll be taken—by orderlies!—to a train, and put on it like someone who’s overstayed her leave.

The other thing, Mitchie continued, breathless but unlikely to stop, the other thing is that I am considered to be simply stubborn—like an old woman, or a four-year-old. I can be cajoled and humored, and treated with force if all that fails.

My dear friend, said Lady Tarlton. There won’t be any force.

I’m glad to hear it. In that case I won’t be going.

Lady Tarlton was silent, and her eyes looked bleak.

I have potent motives to remain here, Mitchie reiterated, believe me. Just because I don’t blab them, it is no reason to consider me a pigheaded old biddy. For example, will I get the official casualty lists at this Antibes place?

No, I hope not. For you, it’ll be as if the terrible ruination here doesn’t exist.

But this is all that counts. This is the world. The ruination, or whatever.

For dear God’s sake, Lady Tarlton honked. You’ve done more than anyone else could in this snake pit. You are an amputee with consumption. And even at the risk of offending you, I will not be guilty of your particular murder, my dear friend.

Mitchie slumped and began to weep with an obvious, chastening rage. That quelled them. That quelled Lady Tarlton too.

Damn you all! she yelled, and then lay panting. I have a son. I have a son who arrived here last spring. I have a son about to turn twenty-five years and he tried eighteen months ago to be taken as a soldier and at last, to hell with them, they did take him. His battalion is in this push. And I’m to sun myself somewhere in the distance? Damn you! Damn you all over!

Her tears stopped now as she realized she had seized a small corner of Tarlton’s authority and sureness.

Oh, it was all a mess in those days. There was no chance of marriage. I had to leave the little boy, you see, with my mother. But now my son knows I’m his mother. I met him in Boulogne and he was… he was just such a template of a boy. And I won’t leave him now. I won’t be dragged away by your orderlies or by provosts or any other bugger.

They were all silent. Nothing more conclusive could be said. Lady Tarlton looked at her two companions.

Major Darlington would be angry with us, she said. He will have us all wearing masks around you if you stay here.

I wouldn’t mind that, said Mitchie. I would rather stay here with masked friends than down there with barefaced people I don’t know. And… my boy!

Naomi swallowed. She knew it was all settled now. Lady Tarlton had given up Antibes.

I’ll go and get you some tea, Naomi said.

Good girl, said Mitchie—but like a reproof for having extended her duties to the menial. You go and do something like that. Bullying doesn’t become you.

Well, said Lady Tarlton as Naomi left the room yet could still hear. It looks as if we must cancel the travel plans. On the other hand, Mitchie, you must damn well promise me not to die.

If he lives, Mitchie told her, then I’ll live.

Making the tea, Naomi absorbed the revelation. She had thought of Matron Mitchie as a universal aunt. That she should be directly maternal hadn’t occurred to her. She returned to the room tentatively with the tray. For the anger which had been in Mitchie was unfamiliar and full of risk for emotional novices.

When she got back to the door there was silence inside. Lady Tarlton and Dr. Airdrie had obviously retreated. Mitchie called for her to come in and her voice retained no trace of anger. Once Naomi was inside and had poured the tea, Mitchie ordered her to sit down. Naomi saw that the matron was drying new tears. But they did not seem to be the tears of helplessness.

The father, she said, is a surgeon. At that time he had recently arrived in Australia from Edinburgh. Newly minted, newly lettered. Fine featured and very gifted. He was sure of what he knew but didn’t bully people with it. He was also certain of what he didn’t know and did not try to move into those areas. So he seemed a fine man. Men can be fine in all areas except one. He had arrived in Melbourne as if he was a single man and was rather quiet about the fact he was already married and his wife was waiting for their child to be born and to mature a little before she too took ship with it. And to be honest I wanted to believe he wasn’t already taken. He never told me straight out he was. He seemed too… young and singular and new made to be a married man.

Afterwards, I went home to Tasmania, pretended to be a widow and gave birth to the boy in Hobart. My mother—she was a brick, a true woman. My father pretended it wasn’t happening. But my mother stuck close to home and wrote to friends that she was the pregnant one—what a surprise! She was forty-five but one never knew! And we stayed together all through it and when the boy was born in a hospital she took him home with her and raised and presented him as her son. And so I became his much older sister, as far as the world was concerned. And my son believed it. The whole arrangement was a sort of cowardice on my part. But the other thing is—I wanted to save the boy from the stain of being a bastard. And when I went away to work and left him with Mammie… it was for him but it was for me too. Whenever I saw him it was a joy and a reproach, and I didn’t like reproach as a full-time business. You see now what sort of girl I was. How stupid and how shallow.

When I met the boy in Boulogne early last spring and I told him the facts, he was angry—he stormed out of the café where I told him, and I went back to my billet in town. But he sought me out later in the day and he had this forgiving sort of frown when he saw me and he put his arms around me and began to cry. What a dear boy! He was still dubious about it, I could tell. Trying to switch his whole compass around so that the needle pointed to me. But if I went to this Antibes, he wouldn’t be able to visit me down there. And if anything happened, I wouldn’t be in reach of him.

Naomi put out her hand and—after hesitation—laid it on Matron Mitchie’s.

I think Lady Tarlton is convinced now, she said.

I’ll tell you what, said Matron Mitchie. She’d bloody better be! Nor do I care who in the hell she tells anymore!

Mitchie could have been talking about an enemy.

In May a flood of men came down to the station from the morass. Nurses noticed the wounds had altered subtly—they were an hour or two older, since the front had gone forward. There were rumors that the casualty clearing station too might be moved some further miles northeast.

The terror of the front these days was borne in on Sally by the hollow-eyed stretcher bearers, who sometimes came directly from the line to the clearing station and then found a tent or hut and took a cup of tea and were felled by sleep on the fringes of some ward. The bearers had extracted men from the mired trenches and carried them against the traffic of food supplies and ammunition boxes and wire coils. The stretcher bearers with their burden of maimed soldier tottered on narrow duckboards, which felt like a raft at sea—or so one of these men told Sally. If pushed off the path, they and their wounded man might sink into muck that seemed to stretch to the earth’s core.

There was a new gas now—mustard gas. It did not cripple the membranes and crimp the alveoli. It burned all membranes instead. It burned the eyes, the face, the mucous membranes, and the walls of the lung. The mustard victims arrived at the gas ward stripped naked by the orderlies in reception and carried on a clean stretcher in a clean blanket. For the oily vapors of the chemical yperite which had entered their clothing could burn them through fabric.

Sally—now rostered in the gas ward as part of the earlier-proclaimed broad education—supervised nurses and orderlies here as the victims’ entire bodies, even groins and armpits, were sprayed with sodium bicarbonate. Other nurses hurried to them with steaming bowls of sulphates and sodas to inhale. If men could still not be comforted, and believed themselves drowning in their own lung fluid, the orderlies and nurses rushed oxygen cylinders and masks to them. The nurses did what could be done to help the naked and blistered, gasping men to gargle out the poison, to wash it from their noses and eyes. But the bodies of the gassed themselves exuded the poison, and every quarter of an hour nurses must go outside and take the fresh air and cough their throats clear of the communicated venom.

Bright remarked to Sally one night on a hurried visit that the pain in the head of a mustard-gas patient was as though acid-laced water was invading his nasal sinuses not once but continuously. This sense of drowning caused the wide-eyed distress she saw everywhere.

In the end they might be given chloroform or morphine to ease their burning membranes and their panic. The ward doctor more than once told Sally to cut open a man’s arm to reduce the volume of blood crying out for oxygen. When a man’s heart failed from edema—that inner drowning—Sally and her nurses reached for syringefuls of reviving camphor and pituitarin to revive the fellow.

One evening when the motor ambulances arrived and the transfer of patients from the admission hut to the gas ward was in progress, she was walking behind a victim, accompanied by an orderly with a Tilley lamp. She had visited admissions to assess how many more men they could expect in the tented ward. The sounds of the night were the normal background symphonics and shouted commands. The huge penetrating noise came from above in an instant. She heard the plane descend as if it were intimately dedicated to her, and she opened her mouth to warn the men. But all voice and hearing ceased—or was absorbed into something vaster—and the air was taken from her and she was thrown backwards with a ruthless force. She tumbled without dignity or hope—taking breath in the middle of her flight and having it jolted forth again as her hip crashed to earth.

She lay on earth where time was canceled. All lamps out, all lamps out! she eventually heard an orderly sergeant yelling.

The turning off took a little time. She could see the shattered lantern she had been following lying some distance along the gravel path and an arm and hand still holding it. It had been hooded with a metal flange but somehow the night flyer had seen it and taken to it in the utter bliss of attack. Parts of the first bearer and of the patient they had been attending to were scattered in gobbets of flesh in a crater beyond the dying lantern. The second orderly had a cut to his face and sat dazed where he had landed. He and Sally had been leaves blown in a happier direction.

She got up amidst a rain of grit and in a terrible acidic stillness which wasn’t like quiet at all but which assaulted the air and rang in the ears. She could hear more planes close above. Was it virtue or fear that sent her running towards her ward? The shadow of the Church of England padre—who officiated regularly on the hill and worked in between as an orderly—emerged from it through the double black-out curtains and grasped her.

You must find shelter, Sister, he shouted.

The suggestion made her furious.

No, she said, I have to stay in the ward.

Jostling past both of them from within, Honora Slattery went towards the trenches with a blanketed patient over her shoulder. That seemed absurd. But Sally lacked the mind to be sure whether the sight was odd or normal. She ran into the usually dim-lit ward—bright now, since one of the Tilley lamps had shattered and set fire to the flooring. She fetched a blanket, and she and the ward doctor smothered the flames. Some men who should not have sat up were doing so and looking about with piteous eyes and shouting. The bombardment had jolted their system into life and activated their breath. Further detonations not so far away showed that planes were probably trying to destroy the barrage balloon depot—since pilots hated those contraptions.

I’m with you! she called to the patients, though she could not quite hear herself and would later think the declaration melodramatic.

Go to the door and see what you can see, the ward doctor dementedly told her.

She rushed to the door and pushed through its two flaps as if she could read from there the intentions of the planes, their number, and the likelihood and path through the air of more bombs. In the open night between the ward and the trenches, perhaps a dozen weeping men staggered about the yard and along the paths. Others knelt or cast their arms wide and raved or screamed. NYD(S).

She saw Honora emerging now from the thoracic ward—why had she gone there?—with yet another man on her shoulders. What are you doing? Sally—clearheaded now on the subject of Honora’s lunacy—called out to her.

I am putting patients in the trenches, she shouted back. I put the first one in and he turned out to be a German. Imagine that!

She had mad purpose in her eye—she would carry every man in all the wards into slit trenches if she could. From within the gas ward Sally’s own orderlies began helping their patients past her and to the shelter of trenches and dugouts.

Honora ran on. Sally turned back into the gas tent and passed the remaining wide-eyed nurses and orderlies, who were aware something momentous and ill defined had occurred. The ward doctor was with the gas cases who could not safely be moved. Two nurses were going about placing basins over the heads of the patients. It was a halfway rational idea to save them from shrapnel and it possessed for the nurses the comfort of acting to defy events.

The ward doctor told Sally something had happened near the theatres. They could smell the chloroform, and mixed with it was the penetrating stench of ether. If there was a fire out there then all the gas cases would need—whatever the results—to be moved.

Sally joined a nurse who was already at the rear door of the tent. From the hut steps they saw the surgical theatre hut begin to burn. The air was anesthetic from the shattered bottles of chloroform but it was the ether supplies that were burning, releasing vapors that the fire instantly sucked back into itself.

Sally heard people lamenting. Someone shouted, The hoses aren’t working! A bucket line of nurses and orderlies attempted to stanch the flames. Were surgeons, theatre nurses, patients caught in there? Water wouldn’t do anything, she knew. Earth or sand was needed to quench blazing ether. It was now that she reachieved her reason fully. She turned back into the gas ward and shouted without reference to the ward doctor that nurses and orderlies must hurry all possible cases into slit trenches.

You go, Sister, said the ward doctor.

No.

You go! he roared. I’ve sent off all the other nurses.

All right, she said. She would be a free agent once she was out in the night.

As she stepped forth she heard another inhuman impact some distance off, but it was not close enough to bear her mind away. She began pushing and dragging demented, howling, praying men towards trenches they did not want to enter. She thought of the thoracic ward and crazed Honora.

A Klaxon which had not rung at the start of things to warn anyone sounded now to reassure everyone. Silence all at once finally manifested itself like the clap of a great hand and stunned the earth. Voices and even yells were minute within it. The air was full still of the stench of the theatre fire and the embers seemed to fall like an incandescent snow.

Sally heard men’s plaintive voices from a half-collapsed tent. Inside, Honora was lifting patients back onto beds, one bleeding from the ears from a nearby detonation. Am I too? Sally wondered, and began to help. Orderlies arrived to readjust the tent poles. At last, according to some dazed, unspoken accord between them that their job was done, she and Honora left the restored tent. The remaining heat of the theatre blaze wafted across the station. Sally set out back for the gas ward and skirted her crater—the one which held unscannable fragments of the gas case and an orderly. She saw Freud and Leonora coming from the lost fight with the fire, walking towards her and the untouched thoracic ward as if no shock had overtaken them and as if on normal duty. They stepped carefully but without amazement around obscure body parts that covered the paths and other spaces. As Leonora reached Sally, she said, An orderly told me. They blew up the morgue. What a triumph, eh?

Some NYD(S) were still wandering the station—quivering and dazed or making speeches—and it turned out an orderly had chased one down on the Deux Églises road. Orderlies retrieving such men were leading them back to their ward by the hand and shoulder, brotherly to a degree which caused Sally to shed tears as she returned to the gas ward. She wondered how it had been in the resuscitation ward during all the noise and fire and with the bombs making their random and absurd choices.

When day broke there was time for the nurses to return to their mess, glimpsing beyond the wards—more clearly now—the two-thirds-burned-out theatre hut. By accident—so Sally understood from Freud—it had been near empty at the time. The surgeons were in the admissions hut. Two orderlies had been blown wide.

At their mess table the women bolted down sugar-laced tea and ate bread which they doused in Queensland treacle as if to reembrace their dear, safe, sleeping home continent. Major Bright came in after beating on the door and told them with a mannish innocence and irrelevance—almost touching—that he had recommended them all for Military Medals. Those who stayed in their wards or had worked at the fire or had mercifully dealt with others or had placed tables or basins over men to make them feel safer or had put others on the floor and beneath their beds—even as orderlies yelled at them to get into the trenches. But, he said—as if it were a great concern arising from that mad night—it was a military lottery that would define who got the decorations.

They listened because he was such a good man. But military ambition burned very low in the women. It was amusing to Honora that the man she had carried from the chest ward was not after all a German but an English captain—and not only an Englishman but a German-speaking, renowned novelist named Alexander Southwell, the nephew of one Lord Finisterre who had been formerly a British cabinet minister. It was idly assumed that if there were medals they would go Honora’s way. But the chief remark her act attracted was wonder at how a woman of five foot six inches had—in the fury of the moment—carried a six-foot man, limp and awaiting chest surgery, from his ward to the trench.

It was an issue which did not delay Honora in the least as she went back to duty immediately after breakfast. She was all business. The mere sentiment of compassion had left her. She pursued it all in a fierce, mechanical way. There was something to do with Dankworth mixed up in it.

Let her go, Matron Bolger said. I’ll fetch her back for a rest in an hour or so.

Sally went back to her ward too but returned to the mess for a cup of tea before collapsing. Most of her gas cases had been moved to evacuation ambulances. Now it was up to the base hospitals to soothe and save them. Rest lay ahead since nothing could happen until the surgical theatres were resupplied. Honora returned with Matron Bolger—you could hear their chat before they reached the tent.

Karla Freud also arrived. She had been helping in the evacuation ward that morning—attending to men as they were loaded on rear-bound ambulances. Entering the tent now, she saw Honora and Sally and a few others—Leo too—and stood contemplating them. Honora was writing something on the card table—they all feared it was to that bureau and that the blasts of the night had unsettled her again.

Look, you’ve probably heard of my surgeon, Karla Freud stated. Boyton. He’s an American from the British Medical Corps transferred here. Well, you can stop speculating. It’s all true. I’m letting you know in case anything happens. Both of us might have been incinerated together last night, and weren’t. That means there are two reasons why my friends from Lemnos can stop thinking, “Poor old Karla.”

Then she sat down. Sally did not know whether she was supposed to congratulate her or be silent. Are we all suddenly mad? she wondered.

That’s good news for us too, said Leo—exactly the right answer. I hope you have a happy life.

All right then, said Freud. Thank you.

And so? asked Leo. A few more details, please.

His mother’s English, father’s American, his practice is in Chicago. He’s not Jewish and that means lamentations will be uttered in Melbourne. But in Chicago I won’t hear them. Only thing…

She winked here.

It’s the end of my dreams of the stage. Women are fools. We can’t help offering ourselves up. Living sacrifices. That’s us.

She turned to Honora, who was back-on at a side table writing her fluent letter.

Honora, she called in a frank but soft voice. Honora, dearie! Listen to me. He’s dead, that kind picnicker from Lemnos. He’s dead. He doesn’t deserve to be, but he is. There aren’t any more theories you can make up. No more letters, for God’s sake.

Honora ceased writing but sat rigid and without turning. Freud moved to her and put her hands on those stiffened, raised shoulders. But a particular sound—of air being shredded—arose again. The Klaxon began to wail. The planes had returned and could be heard, low and fast. Sally stiffened to withstand the first jolt of a dropped bomb. The women rushed outside—they could not help themselves. When the reverberating explosion came—though it must have been a kilometer along the road—it threatened to loosen Sally’s bladder. An orderly sergeant came yelling, Dugouts, ladies. Not wards! Split trench and dugouts!

But Sally ran to the resuscitation ward to see how many of last night’s cases were too damaged to be moved. There was nothing to be done for these men, but she wanted to know the numbers. Two pale-faced staff nurses were there, looking startled but steadfast. They had been tending perhaps four cases of whom any informed assessor would say at least three would die. The way the girls stood—so professionally, with their hands half folded in front of them—reminded Sally of Karla Freud’s phrase. “Living sacrifices.”

Yet she too was willing to lose herself.

At her suggestion the three of them did the basin trick—the near-comic business of covering the patients’ faces. It was ridiculous, an exercise in flimsiness and capable of adding to damage. It would be laughed at later. But it seemed a serious duty now. Anything more—to move them beneath their beds—would certainly finish them. For these were men too far gone to survive the journey to the remaining operating theatre, let alone the anesthesia once there. But the idea they would die without nurses present was abhorrent. Meanwhile the Archies provided the continuous rhythm like minor instruments, the screaming descent of those explosive cylinders adding in the symphonic climaxes.

Sally uselessly took a hand of one of the patients—gently, as if feeling for a pulse. As she stood she saw Major Bright in the doorway. Will you, for God’s sake— he yelled. But an explosion along the road made him repeat it. Will you, for God’s sake, go to the dugout? Sister Durance, set an example, for God’s sake!

Her two young women stared at him without comprehension.

It is General Birdwood’s order, he roared. She waved the two girls to follow him. She wanted urgently to urinate and feared that if a bomb came near she might be concussed into this indignity.

Bright ran at their side, shepherding them to a slit trench, helping them jump down and leading them along the trench to a dugout—a covered structure Sally had never entered before, a dark pit thickly roofed with timber and loads of sandbags. As she went in, Bright held her elbow. His face was red. You have years of training and I have years more. How dare you risk all that!

There were a number of nurses inside sitting on benches. Honora was one of them. There was Freud, who had so recently tried to cure Honora of her delusions. And Matron Bolger.

Honora cried, Matron, this is an absolute bulldust order. The men hate us going.

These are today’s men, the matron told her. Who will nurse tomorrow’s men if you get blown to shreds?

Honora looked sullen. The matron took out a book from her pocket. She patted it with her hand and yelled against the continuous but blessedly distant explosions of bombs. If you do not come here when the Klaxon goes, she told them, it is very likely they will move us out of the casualty clearing stations. The general says he will not have us in danger and will move us if we expose ourselves to the Taubes. You understand?

She waved the book in her hand. For now, she announced, I want you to pay your mess bills. Don’t tell me you don’t have money on you.

She opened her book and began to go through the amounts each nurse owed for sherry or lemonade or ginger beer or wine or brandy, and made arrangements for payment—whether or not she received it then and there.

A titanic detonation of the surface above their heads occurred—as these things did—without introduction. They were jolted against each other by the brutal and bullying sound and then drew together and found themselves half deafened. But the matron continued to read.

Slattery, eleven shillings and sixpence. Freud, twelve and eight-pence. Casement, eighteen and seven pence—a lot of extra chocolate bought there, Casement…

The Klaxon declared temporary safety had returned long before the matron was finished. But in successive days the sound of aeroplane engines made daytime sleep hard and a woman could not take sleeping draughts at night for fear ambulances would arrive. After the sun had set, the enemy’s aircraft traversed the sky indiscriminately—unable in darkness to tell a baby’s cradle in Deux Églises from the enormous British gun now rumored to be emplaced a few miles west.

There was nothing worse on those summer nights than abandoning the startled, wide-eyed boys—those conscious of the raid but unable to be moved. But nothing was secretly and guiltily better than leaning inwards to listen to that older woman—the matron, the plausible aunt—reading her sums above the varying racket.

These Abnormal Days

These abnormal days Sally breakfasted after night duty in ten minutes. Then she slept till perhaps half past ten in the morning, when a sense of urgency woke her and sent her back to her ward. But at one of those dawns of rushed breakfasts she was interrupted. There’s a fellow here asking for you, a staff nurse told her.

At once she knew. Charlie Condon. If it were him he could annul all the awful days and nights—though that this would happen was merely a notion. She went outside and on the path by the resuscitation hut saw him. He was leaning against the building and a bike was propped up near him. She noticed first that his face had grown somehow older. The features had hardened. It was the face—she thought straightaway—of a knowing warrior. She sensed that he could not only suffer anything imaginable but that he might do it too. It was a greater surprise to see him in this new form than it was simply to see him. He is another man, she considered, as I am another woman. Can we still converse? She dearly wanted to.

Oh, he said, almost as if he hadn’t expected to see her. This has really turned out well. I’d heard you’d been bombed and—I’ve got to say—I was pretty worried. Since we’re in a rest area just now, I borrowed this bike and rode down to see if you were all right.

“Down,” she noticed. That must mean he’d traveled from further north.

Charlie, she said. So kind of you. We’re all top of our form, except not a lot of sleep.

Yes, he said. That’s the way it is up there too. Makes a person a bit crazy, doesn’t it?

But you… you look…

What? Uglier?

Are you still an artist?

I’m a sketcher still, he reassured her. Do you know, a kiss would give my talent wings. But not possible here, I suppose.

Come and have tea, she told him.

If no ambulance convoy came in before full light they would be able to have a decent talk. And these plain words—these words of no merit at all—seemed the best ones to exchange with a man who must have the terror of the front fixed in his brain. And who had ridden a bike—how many kilometers?—to check if she was safe.

They went into the mess hut.

I can get you whisky, she offered. If you’d like it.

In fact, whisky, stout, brandy—they were all there for the having these days. Nurses could decide that a given patient needed something, and it was there in the pantry. They had begun to use a lot of it in the NYD ward. In a sane world whisky or brandy should not be administered with opiates. But in this world a quick effect was more important.

He said, Whisky would not go amiss by far.

Wait a second, she said, holding up a finger knowingly. She went and fetched him a tin mugful and brought it back. This simple function delighted her beyond measure.

If the matron should come in, she said, pointing to the mug she put down, we can pretend it’s tea.

She poured herself tea and offered her cup towards his.

Your very good health, she said.

She assessed him again. She dared not think that—after all this—he looked like a man who might come through. But that was the case. He always gave her that impression when she saw him, though not when he was away.

It’s a great relief to clap eyes on you, she said.

Relief? he said.

Of course a relief. Here we only see the wounded. It seems—though it can’t be true—that all men must be wounded sooner or later. But tell me again—the sketching… ?

I’m doing a bit in the rest areas. But there’s nothing to sketch up there now. A limited palette, you’d say, for painting as well. Black and brown and slimy green-yellow. Not the stuff of aesthetics. The whisky is very good.

Tell me. How far did you cycle?

I don’t know.

He pointed vaguely northwards. It was good for me. And I won’t insult you by saying I haven’t thought of you a lot.

I’ve been concerned for you too.

He smiled into the mug of whisky. Come on now. Aunts can be concerned. And you’re not my aunt. I will accept something such as, I’ve been thinking a great deal about you too, Charlie. Or else, I haven’t given you a blessed thought.

It’s so hectic here. But I fear one of the men on stretchers might be you. You’re on my mind a lot.

Ah! said Charlie, who had wanted to hear that. On your mind a lot. I’m pretty gratified to be told that, Sally. That’ll suit me.

She was aware of nurses moving busily about them now—fetching breakfast plates and giving the banal nods and winks. Would there be more winking amongst them—and smart-aleck rolling of eyes in her direction—when Charlie Condon was gone again? Well, of course. That price must be paid.

I have a belief that if I think of you too much something will happen to you.

Well, no fooling you clearing station girls. You know enough to know there are some days a man can’t believe he’ll live. And nights, ditto. And if you live through the day and night there’s another impossible day and night to come. Yet… there I was this morning. On my bike. You can’t overstate how important this journey was to me.

It brought Sally herself a kind of exaltation to hear a sentiment like that.

I’m pretty impressed myself, she assured him.

The tent was near empty now. The others had got over their whispers and decided to give the two of them a time to themselves. Charlie reached for her wrist and she wished something more vigorous would happen. But it wasn’t possible there.

I’ll need to be back by seven o’clock this evening. That means I must set out on my bike about half past three. Just to be sure. The roads get a bit chancy towards dusk and there’s a lot of traffic.

It was as if he were explaining why the hand on wrist would have to do her for now.

It’s a pity, he laughed, a photographer from the Macleay Argus doesn’t come in now and photograph us. The two brave Macleay warriors.

She said, It’s hard to believe the Macleay still exists.

But unfortunately its waters now suddenly flowed back into her, washing along on their surface the still not fully absorbed ending they’d given their mother. It had all come back sharply, as she knew it must. No quantity of massacre could reduce it to a small taint. And Sally knew Charlie must be told about it if he intended to take the more energetic journeys she wanted him to take to keep tracking her down in the French or Flemish countryside.

Oh, I’m sure it’s still there, she heard him say. It’s determined, you know. The earth maintains a great indifference to what we do. When you come back to an area of fields like the ones round here, you understand that the mire up there is just waiting to break out into pasture again. It won’t happen this year—it mightn’t happen for another ten. But in the end the tendency won’t be repressed. There’s greenness waiting under all that slime.

The matron appeared briefly and said, Good morning, Sister; good morning, Captain. It was then Sally saw the nuggets of insignia on his straps which showed him to be that. A captain.

He whispered, Don’t be impressed. The way things are just now there are fifteen men to a platoon and sixty to a company. But they are building us up with new blood. Forcing old hands like me up in rank.

New blood? she asked in horror.

I could have chosen better words, he conceded.

They decided to walk to town past the cemetery and a barley field which a farmer—gambling against a movement of the front line—had bravely planted. The road entered the town from the south. A two-storey official building near the mairie had a shattered roof, but people moved normally in the streets. Big-bosomed farmers’ wives shopped and talked to each other in the open day.

I love these little towns, Charlie told her. I keep sketching them. But don’t worry, I won’t be sketching today.

He held out a hand towards the landscape on the edge of town.

You know, I look at all this, so very nice, very ordered. Farmed for thousands of years. And it does call up by contrast where we’re from. I mean to say, what a valley, the Macleay! It’s a valley that deserves a great painter. It’s a place that almost defies a person to become a painter. It says, Come on, have a go, you useless hayseed! And it would explode Cézanne’s palette. He’d have to go reaching for the tubes of paint he doesn’t use here. That’s what we’ve got, the Australians. We’ve got the place but we just don’t have the artists. Up here, gloom and—admittedly—subtlety. And artists? My God. They’ve got wonderful artists to burn. I had leave, by the way, and went to all the galleries.

We saw the Louvre, said Sally. But we didn’t see enough. We didn’t bring the right eyes to it. Look-and-laugh sort of stuff.

Well, said Charlie, grinning, look-and-laugh isn’t bad. I would be happy if in fifty years girls looked and laughed at something of mine. What amazes me is that up there at the front, you have… Well, you know what’s up there, you deal with it daily. Then just fifty miles southwest down the road, acre after acre of pretty astounding rooms. Then the Salon—and someone took me to the Salon des Refusés—the paintings that before the war hadn’t been accepted for the Academy. That was an education. Even the rejected are brilliant. In fact—as someone mentioned to me—it’s the brilliant who get rejected. It all has a funny effect on your ambitions, you know. Part of you thinks, all right, all you’re fit for, Sonny Jim, is to go back home and illustrate the covers of adventure papers and boys’ magazines. And another part thinks, I can do something like that!

She said, From what I know, at least you’ll give it a great shake.

If she was sure he would exist to take what he had back to Australia and try to see where it fitted in the fabric of the place, she didn’t care too much what difficulties he had fitting it.

I want to give it a shake, he said. Yes, I’d like to. Mind you, one of the war artists I met took me to see some of the new schools—even this crowd called the Vorticists—who are full of a kind of dread, as if everything is going down the gurgler. That seems a reasonable enough idea for these times. But what confuses me is how to take any of it back to Australia. It’s all so different from here. It’s not Europe. It’s non-Europe. And always will be.

They turned into an estaminet of paneled wood and dim glass windows. A townsman and his wife drank together at a table. They were not handsome, but they provided Sally with a parallel to the joy she felt at sharing a table with Charlie. Charlie ordered red wine. She would drink it too, so that they experienced simultaneously its rough strength against the roots of the palate.

Two farmers came in. Both saluted them informally—giving them the credit for being defenders of the township.

Charlie took a deep draught of his red wine when it arrived. She also took a mouthful of this fluid, still mysterious and acrid to her.

Of course, he continued, there’s no substantial difference between us and French people, except in us a kind of innocence. But do you think those farmers over there are giving a hoot about Verlaine or Seurat? They’re just cow-cockies too. So I think the day’s going to come for Australia. Just a bit of a wait, that’s all.

It was a tender hope and she smiled at it. She thought then—as he finished his glass—something so alien to her and as utterly surprising in its arrival as the Taubes. Yet Honora had said it once about Lionel. If I had his son, he could not be lost entirely. And then, if he weren’t lost, there’d be two of them. Men with glittering spirits.

She said, Do you have leave soon?

He lowered his eyelids secretively.

There’s a big stunt on. But… I think by November, maybe some leave.

She noticed they had both drunk their raw red wine down. She had unconsciously kept pace with Charlie. He called for more. With the recent whisky and now this wine, he had become a drinker. It was said they did drink at the front—it was taken for granted there were things best done when a man was part soused.

Listen, she said, I don’t know who Seurat is. I would like to go to Paris and see the paintings with you.

Sally, he said, his face reddening as if he knew she’d read him too accurately—his zeal and desire. I would be so delighted to take you if we could make our leaves coincide. I’ll lecture you mad, the way I did in Rouen. I’ve become an even more obnoxious know-all.

Suddenly it was time to order some stew and bread. When it was eaten they strolled back out of the town. At the crucifix at a shaded corner—the one before the Bapaume Road—he pulled her to him urgently and precisely as she’d hoped and in gratitude she took up the full vigor of the kiss and reimposed it on him, meeting him six-tenths of the way to show that he could hope for something reciprocal. It went on so long as to have the feeling of being a solid entity. If a farmer had appeared on a cart, or a British truck driven down the road with whistling Tommies, it would not have let itself be dissolved.

But there came up again that almost automatic feeling of temporary disqualification from joy. The closer she got to him, the greater the demand to tell him the size of what she’d done. She didn’t disengage herself so violently as to puzzle him or disappoint him. She simply turned her head to one side—as if for breath.

I am on duty tonight, she told him. And you have a long ride.

But we’ll go to Paris?

I hope so, she said. For she did hope so still. Despite the care she had taken not to leave him confused, she could see he was a little confused. But it would not be a jaunt. He would be tested there. She would be.

Well, he told her. It’s back to the bike for now.

He mounted the framework of the cycle and put a boot in one of the stirrups. She could tell once more she’d confused him. So she said, Charlie!

He looked at her and was expectant.

There’s no question, she said, that you’re a man amongst men.

What does that mean? he asked, smiling. Because it doesn’t mean much when you’re in an army.

Well, she said, it means my love, that’s what.

He grinned madly. It was what he had cycled all the way in hope of.

Well, he murmured. That’s a big admission for a girl like you.

Malice Without Ceasing

Freud confided in Sally. She believed that unless Honora now fell apart there would be no putting her together again. The collapse came. Honora was sleepless and working a continuous shift. Then she entered the phase when she would prop herself powerless against the door of a ward and look at the beds with an anguished frown and be stuck as if paralyzed. It was as if all the wounds appealed so equally for her care that she could attend to none. Her overcommitted body smelled of stale summer sweat. This or that nurse would come up to take her by the elbow and fetch her back to the mess tent. But she was hostile to help and would shake herself free.

At last Major Bright himself came, and on his restrained authority she left her ward in the hands of Sally and Leo, who had washed her and packed her things for her. Sister Slattery was being sent back to Rouen for a rest, Bright told them. When her bag and valise were ready, he helped her to a car. She moved like someone elderly but was half dazed with barbital. Freud, Leonora, Sally, and the matron kissed her good-bye through the car window.

The revelation was that Bright intended to travel with her and then be back by evening for the hours when convoys generally came. He was going around to the car’s far door when he met Sally.

I am no mind doctor, he said to her, but it is not just the matter of her fiancé. What happened to him has been made graver by what she’s seen here.

To Sally it seemed as if he thought he must defend her from people who thought the best of her in any case.

Bright climbed into the car’s backseat and adjusted a travel rug across Honora’s lap. He had the demeanor of a servant. Could the scale of her grief have entranced him? After the car had disappeared, Freud said, He wants her well—amongst other reasons—so that he can talk to her. He doesn’t want her mad grief to put her forever inside the walls—a nun or a lunatic.

Bright was back by the evening. And the convoys did come. This late summer and early autumn assault—gambits designed to bring peace by Christmas and consecrate the numbers 1917 forever in the minds of the human species—were said to be a success. Yet it was hard to judge it that way from the wards of Deux Églises. If these bodies equaled success, one could not imagine the formula of defeat.

But then there arrived suddenly a night when the earth froze again and this time the war appeared to pause to mark the change of climate. Summer now seemed to have lasted mere days, all its chances quickly squandered. In the resuscitation ward—to which Sally had returned—she and the nurses wore balaclavas and the cap comforters the soldiers wore, and had hot-water bottles placed for them on their trolleys to warm their hands before they touched a patient. When the hot water from the bottles went cold and threatened to freeze, it was boiled again for cocoa or Bovril.

Her third winter of war was established now. Amidst the wetness of days and the iciness of nights a letter from Charlie Condon arrived. It nominated the dates of the leave he believed he could get to meet her in Paris. She was grateful the letter did not have to chase her. For there were more rumors their clearing station was to be moved northeast into Flanders towards that curious town named Ypres—which officers pronounced “Eep” and soldiers “Wipers.”

She took the letter out of the mess—where it had been delivered to her—and read it standing under a pewter sky on a frozen ground. Of course—observing herself as if from a distance—she took the luxury of weeping in the usual plain way. Tears were a necessary river in the case of her and Condon.

But there were other reasons for these tears. He’d come through again—just a few coin-sized bits of shrapnel near the shoulder blade, he wrote, and a few on the hips. Metal had, he said, kindly avoided his spine. She knew spines metal had chosen to enter.

And so it was set. It must be said to him. The plan to murder a mother was not diminished by the plans to murder divisions of men. Trustworthy Nurse Sally Durance had pilfered rescue, designed it to seep all the way to her mother’s heart—her gracious and unsated heart. But Condon would not be told the Naomi part. I planned murder, she’d say, and would have done it. That’s what I’m capable of.

Under the frosted, sullen sky, Sally understood that part of her still belonged to that sickroom twelve thousand miles away. That it was as close as the resuscitation or gas wards. And thus she could not prance around galleries with Charlie as another girl might. Even if—when she told him—doubt would afflict him and she might find herself back safely and terribly on her own.

For three minutes the hope and uncertainty of the coming meeting kept her out there in the cold. Then exhaustion and shivering drove her inside and to her bunk. It lay in the new-built nurses’ hut, divided into rooms for three or four women set on either side of a central corridor. Even here she had stuck with Freud and Leo. To hell with being called cliquish. She slept profoundly through artillery and aircraft grinding their way to the sky’s apex and then rose to savor Charlie’s letter and its promise of grace. Until a four ack-emma clanging signaled a new convoy had arrived and the sharpness of self was submerged again by busyness.

Later in the day she spoke to Matron Bolger and wrote back to Condon with the dates offered her by that sturdy woman.

In the first days of December they were told the clearing station was being moved—with all its instruments of operation and mercy—away from Deux Églises to a place not yet announced. Sally had her trunk packed in case the move occurred while she was in Paris. She took a smaller bag to the capital to meet Captain Condon. She caught a truck to Amiens—one of the eight-tonners that supplied the clearing station. In the train from Amiens to Paris she slept—but woke in time to team herself with two Canadian nurses as unwilling as she was to negotiate the Métro with their luggage and willing to share a taxi fare from the Gare du Nord. They had time to compare notes briefly. The Canadians worked in a hospital near Arras and had had a tedious journey down to the train. Their faces looked a little hollow—they had the drawn look of women overworked. Do I look like that too? Sally wondered.

The taxi took them to a Red Cross hostel for nurses in Rue de Trévise—one of the Canadians was from Montreal and could thus tell the driver in French that it was close to the Place Vendôme. And—she confided under her breath to the others—the Folies Bergère. Charlie would not arrive until the following morning, so Sally accepted their invitation—as they were being given the keys to their reserved rooms—to join them in the plain dining room that night. They’d hit the town tomorrow, they said. After a needful rest.

Arriving in the dining room a little after six she saw her companions were already at a table. Its linen was fresh and solid-cornered with starch. There was one other woman at the far end of the room and—alone at her table—she seemed well advanced on her meal. Her back was to them. Even so, her shape and the way her shoulders moved minutely at the duties of devouring bread and casserole were acutely familiar. Sally was shocked but immediately filled with a sense of intrusion. It was obviously Naomi sitting there, maintaining the downcast, chaste gaze of a woman eating alone in public.

She must first tell her new companions and excuse herself. She crossed to them and said, I’m a bit astonished. My sister happens to be over there. She hasn’t seen me yet.

They wanted to know where Naomi was working.

In Boulogne, said Sally.

You’re welcome to join us, said one of the Canadian women, but we understand if… Not a lot of chance sisters get to meet and talk about home.

That’s what we’ll do, Sally thought. We’ll talk about home. We’ll talk home squared or to the power of three. We’ll get it settled.

Naomi had by now heard the voices and risen from her table. Sally felt a gust of affection at the solemn, peaked, mature features.

I have leave, Sally told her stupidly. Naomi clasped her arms around Sally and Sally did the same in return. It was so much easier now.

Naomi led her by the elbow to a seat opposite her own place and then—overcome with the hilarity of the coincidence—bowed her head down onto Sally’s shoulder like a confiding schoolgirl.

Well, said Naomi when they had sat opposite each other. You obviously need building up—a tonic.

I was thinking the same about you.

Oh, everyone works themselves too hard at the Voluntary.

I’ve got a week’s pass, Sally told her. What about you?

Two days, said Naomi, waving at one of the Red Cross volunteers who served as waitresses at the hostel. A pity it’s so short.

I’m meeting up with Charlie Condon tomorrow. He’s going to show me the galleries.

That’s wonderful, Naomi said.

What about you?

Ian Kiernan’s coming tomorrow and we’re going to see our Committee of Clarity.

Sally had never heard of such a thing and shook her head.

I’m sorry. I presumed I’d told you about it. It’s the committee that’s overseeing our engagement.

Your engagement?

Yes, I told you in a letter.

I didn’t get it, complained Sally, though she knew she sounded rancorous—especially at the postal corps. Then of course the true force of the news struck her.

He’s someone worthwhile then? she asked, anxious that her grand sister might be eroded.

Naomi laughed. You know him, she said. You know the man he is.

Yes, Sally admitted. A sturdy sort of bloke all right.

And… despite its highfalutin name, this committee’s job is to make sure we’re… genuinely keen on each other.

Sally watched as Naomi laughed at her own use of slang. Naomi was very happy. How could she manage to be so simply happy with Kiernan and their engagement when she’d used the hypodermic that night? If they could talk about it, Naomi might be able to instruct her. Sally could not eat her soup when it came, though she inspected it at considerable length.

What’s the matter, Sal?

Do you ever think of our mother? Sally challenged her. I mean, think of her as more than the dead we see each day?

Of course. I forget for an hour. But she returns. I was with her when she went. Many would think that grief. But it was also a privilege.

Enough of that, Sally decided. You heard of Honora? she asked.

I did. And I think any of us could end like that, with a bit of bad luck.

But it was back to the main question. Will you tell your Committee of Clarity that you gave her the injection? Sally said. Or wouldn’t they understand?

She looked up now and saw what she thought was confusion on Naomi’s face.

And have you told Ian Kiernan about it? Sally asked.

No, said Naomi. Sally…

I’m going to have to come clean with Charlie… I can’t have him not knowing. That would poison us. I’ll take the blame for planning the business. No mention of you. Because I always intended the whole thing even if it was you who stepped in—purely out of generosity. I’ve never thanked you—I couldn’t manage it till now.

Naomi was doing a good act of mystification.

You’ve got nothing to be grateful for, Naomi said. My God, you should see how you look, Sal—like the starveling coming home. Please eat that. You’re scarecrow thin.

What does that matter? The thing is, I love you and I hate you for taking up the burden. For doing it.

Hold hard there, Sally. Doing what?

Sally lowered her voice. Killing her! Killing her. I know you found my little treasure of morphine. You knew what I meant to do. You took it on yourself to do it and you ground up or poured out what was left. That’s a reason I started behaving as if I couldn’t decide whether I should love you or hate you—be near you or stay clear.

Just wait a second, murmured Naomi. And by the way, the Canadians are staring at us a bit.

Do you care about that? asked Sally in a whisper—though a fierce one. And bile did rise now. Such a stupid small thing? You and I killed our mother, and you’re worried about bloody Canadians!

There was a demonic fury in Sally because all Naomi did was lower her face. No sudden rising from the table. None of the outrage Sally had foreseen and now wanted.

I did nothing, said Naomi calmly. She had taken Sally’s hand again. Our mother just died. That’s all. I don’t know why it was that night of all possible nights. But—pure and simple—she died.

That can’t be true. You took the weight of it off me.

No. I came on your secret supply amongst the linen—it was exactly where I’d hide such a thing. And I could have used it if I had your bravery. And your love—let’s not deny that. But she just died. And when I made my fire that morning, I ground in the morphine with the rest—with the rhubarb tonic and the bromide and every other bottle and useless cure.

At this claim Sally covered her face with her free hand. Naomi said with a sort of unanswerable emphasis, Listen to me. I told you the way she died and that I was there. I’ll tell you again. Mama died, pure and simple.

Sally began shuddering. It was like the shaking out of devils in camp meetings.

My God, I should have told you, Naomi admitted. I didn’t know how it weighed on you. I could tell you stories… a kid who collided with a tram… The thing is, they insist in certain cases we maintain life whatever the pain—as if that isn’t a sin and taking action is.

If their mother died—just expired of her own free right, the organism itself renouncing further pain—Sally was not an accomplice except by desire. That awareness—if Naomi could be trusted, of course—shrank the tumor. It did not excise it though.

Have you ever thought of doing something like that here in France? asked Naomi.

But these men are strangers.

One of your closest friends—I won’t say who—told me when I was at my lowest on the Archimedes that she solved a fatal hemorrhage on the operating table with a lethal chloroform dosage. It’s easier to do than with ether. I’ve often thought of doing something like that here. But amongst all the damaged boys we’re faced with, I’ve never had that certainty I had back then with that case involving the tram…

Further down the room the Canadians had got up from the table. They called a cheery good-night. They realized, of course, that something of moment had been argued between the sisters. They wanted to let them know it didn’t matter to them and also to reassure them falsely that it hadn’t been noticeable. When they left, the Durance sisters also got up and clung to each other. They grabbed each other’s shoulders with the pressure of crimes committed or projected and now confessed.

Later—when they were going upstairs themselves—Naomi helped Sally along and held her by the shoulder as if she were an invalid.

Now, Naomi ordered her, put your mind on the normal things. Go round town with Charlie Condon, have a meal, have a drink. Would you like to sleep in my room tonight?

No, Sally told her. She could think of nothing worse than fitting her new set of confusions and certainties into the one bed with her sister. They stopped in front of Sally’s door.

Sally said, I think I believe you.

Naomi took her by the chin. Have no doubt about it, she commanded in a lowered voice. There are only two choices, you know. Either die or live well. We live on behalf of thousands who don’t. Millions. So let’s not mope about it, eh?

In the end Naomi went in and sat with Sally until she was asleep.

Yet when Sally woke in the morning and found herself alone and weighed whether she would flee from the capital, she found that even more she wanted to meet up with Charlie on any terms. The things Naomi had told her altered to a near-tolerable level her own truth and her accepted version. There was no doubt that something had healed in her during her profound night’s sleep, as she lay deeper than the Archimedes for hours on end—looking up to a descending hull and horses and bandaged men from her finally ascendant angle. As she washed herself that morning she felt that she was simply one more woman of distinct crimes and valors. She thought, Yes, I shall have breakfast with my sister.

Charlie Condon—arriving from the Métro and presenting himself at the front desk in his trench coat—was much enthused to meet Naomi when Sally introduced her. He still had that look of unbreakability and had taken on the same kind of agelessness as Naomi.

I remember you, he said, when you seemed so much older and grander at school.

Again, plain conversation shone in the air. Charlie asked if Naomi and Ian—who had not yet arrived—would like to come with them to the galleries. First stop, the Louvre, he said, and then a few other places after lunch. We’ll have buckets of fun.

Naomi explained that there was an appointment they had to get to. Charlie said then he had made a dinner reservation at a restaurant another officer had recommended to him.

He’s good at reservations, said Sally.

Charlie thought he and Sally might go there and dine in the officer’s honor, for the poor fellow had “taken a knock,” as soldiers said—had been lethally wounded. Charlie sat down at a table just inside the door of the nurses’ hostel, pulled out his fountain pen and wrote the name of the restaurant. L’Arlésienne.

Within walking distance, he said, scrawling the address.

He and Sally emerged into the street now. On the walk towards the Palais Royal and on to the Louvre, he told her, We’re going to see the old rebels before lunch. After lunch we’ll see the young rebels.

He hoped aloud that it was possible to get at least a sense of the place in three hours or so. Fra Filippo Lippi first. Titian and El Greco—Titian born earlier and a breaker of the mold. In this place Condon reduced them to something like acquaintances who happened to dispense their thunderbolts of color and light. And that was it, as he pointed out. Yet he had read a tract about art being tone and said he’d been annoyed by it and felt that if he’d followed it he would be hamstrung. But light. To transform color into light—that remained the chief doctrine.

They went to Velásquez and Goya. There was one more recent artist he loved—Delacroix. Sally did not tell him that—with other nurses—she had once walked past Delacroix with barely a glance. She wondered if she would ever get sick of his discourses. Why would she when she wanted him to have the chance to continue them for a lifetime? He didn’t preach or lecture though. He carried his knowledge with a sort of boyish excitement instead of with vanity. He was an enthusiast. His eyes shone. If there was a percentage of vanity it was the appropriate one. The major percentage was of delight.

He took her to a room she had not known existed, and in it they found the world encompassed in the space of a small meadow. Entranced, Charlie pointed to the way yellow was applied throughout the compass of the huge Delacroix canvas called The Women of Algiers. She saw then The Shipwreck of Don Juan. It gave her pause. Yet it was somehow a consolation for the Archimedes. At the one time it reduced the Archimedes to the scale of other tragedy while expanding it to the size of the globe. Delacroix’s self-portrait looked out at her with certainty and penetration. Charlie and Delacroix and the rest—she believed—were conspirators at the business of rescuing her as they had rescued others as well—unworthy and lucky people had walked this trail, salon to salon.

From them she was fortified for a momentous lunchtime.

At this hour of Sally’s highest eagerness, Naomi and Ian sat again on facing benches in the plain Friends meeting house with Mr. Sedgewick and his committee members, the meeting having begun with the usual period of silent prayer and reflection. Was it that her sense of the world had swung so thoroughly in the same direction as that of Ian, or was it a genuine spiritual instinct of her own, which made her feel that she could inhabit this silence very comfortably and that God—who was not in the war—was in the silence? Other religions began with certainties and pronounced them from the start of their rituals. The Friends seemed to have no certainties and humbly waited for the voice to emerge. These people did not seem to anticipate or even feel sure that anything would grace them with a visit. That attracted her. She had never been in an uncertain church before.

It had then been like last time. Madame Flerieu spoke first, addressing God—as Naomi could now both sense and tell from the French she knew—and then beginning to discuss “these two young persons.” Then Mr. Sedgewick spoke—also in French. He remained sitting with his face forward, his eyes placid and fixed on no one at first. Then his gaze settled wistfully on Naomi before moving across the room to take in Ian.

He said to Ian, Forgive us for speaking in French. Madame Flerieu wishes you to know that she does not ask these questions out of malice or judgement. She wishes to know more clearly than last time whether Friends are granted military exemption from conscription in Australia, and if they are granted exemption, then—so to speak—why you find yourself here?

Ian showed no irritation, though even Naomi could see there had been an edge to Madame Flerieu’s earlier speech and was not convinced there was no judgement there.

He had made his religious position known to the recruiters, he said, but he must also make one other thing clear—he had not been conscripted. The Australian army did not have conscription as a policy. The idea of compulsory enlistment had been twice voted down by the people. So he wore this uniform voluntarily. He and Miss Durance, he said, had earlier discussed the question of whether they succored men who were finished with fighting and were forever on their way out of battle, or whether they helped repair them so they could be sent back into the field. The generals wished the latter. But the horror of wounds ensured that to a large extent their work was with the former—healing those who would never be able to soldier again.

He was not evading the question or the responsibility, he said. But many Friends were merchants, engaged in shipping and purchase and sale. Were they sure that all their contracts were with men not engaged in business to do with the war? In matters of business, any Friend would do his utmost to ensure the probity of their dealings, but it could not always be proven. Is the help that those Friends who are not in uniform give to the unfortunate throughout the world not influenced by the same uncertainty? That they might—by their compassionate service of food and other forms of succor—help strengthen soldiers for the fight and preserve unjust governments from the discontent of the populace?

Madame Flerieu had seemed to an anxious Naomi near unanswerable. But in the field of discourse—as strange an image as it might be—Naomi thought he was putting Madame Flerieu to the sword. And he was not finished.

Our work cannot always be perfected, he continued. Did I become a medical orderly from vanity? It is possible, since the vain always deny their conceit. But I became one as a Friend too. As for Miss Durance—though as shocked by war as I am—she was not a Friend when this war began and may not ever become one. She was not in her soul in 1914 subject to the same restrictions as I was. She operated within her conscience. What more can be asked?

She was shocked by the phrase, “She was not a Friend.” She was shocked by his extolling of her conscience when she’d embarked on her war nursing not on principle, as Ian had, but with insolent self-regard. Sedgewick summarized what Ian had said for Madame Flerieu’s sake in French which was more exuberant and swift than his careful English. A lot of Englishmen Sedgewick’s age would have cleared out of Paris, she thought—during the Battle of the Marne so many months before. But he’d stayed here—in this capital which was never quite safe from the enemy’s ambitions—with his Friends.

Madame Flerieu remained uncertain, it was clear. But it must be said that she looked at them with intelligent rather than rancid eyes. It was as if she had asked what vanities moved her? But in the end she did not seem to wish to be the obstacle, the religious harpy. If empowered by some more hating and embattled creed, one could imagine her becoming so. Hence the impulse arose in Naomi to tell Kiernan, To hell with Flerieu! Let’s just get married by an army padre.

Mr. Sedgewick yet again consulted his fellow committee members in French. It was agreed between them that as was normal—when they could all next meet together—Naomi and Ian would merely be asked to announce their fixed intentions as a formality and could then be married by Mr. Sedgewick. On the same day, if they chose.

At the door Mr. Sedgewick seemed to want to let the others go on their way and keep Naomi and Ian back. Indeed the others did go. You understand, he said then, Lieutenant Kiernan, that you are not being subjected to some abnormal scrutiny? But you answered well, I must say. We can behave as perfected men and women in a perfected world. The perfected world seems far off now. May I take you for tea?

He led them two blocks to an apartment building and—having spoken jovially to a concierge—ascended three flights of stairs with them and led them into a large apartment with a view over rooftops to the ÎIe de la Cité with the cathedral set on it. He said, as he brought them tea that Naomi considered to be rather pallid, It is as well, isn’t it, that this is the war to end all wars? According to the American president you will never be faced again with the choice you faced four years ago.

That reminder of war’s end combined with the pale tea became like intoxicants and she smiled across at Ian to hear this global promise uttered by their friend Mr. Sedgewick.

After Charlie and Sally emerged from the Louvre, they walked south to the icy river, which seemed to threaten to freeze solid, and stopped at a café and decided to sit inside by a window. The air had cleared to a silveriness beneath which Sally was sure many utterances not normally plausible could be made. They both ordered tea, though Charlie felt—like Naomi—that the French didn’t make it properly. But Sally had suggested they wouldn’t touch wine until that evening—for fear it would blunt the sight, she said. This seemed to be no problem for Charlie. He did not drink today as he had when he visited her at Deux Églises. Having delivered the tea, the waiter took their lunch orders.

Sally was ecstatic and frantic at the one time. As soon as the waiter left she felt she had to speak to him, as if it would be impossible once the table was cluttered with food, cutlery, cups, glasses.

There’s something I have to tell you, Charlie, before we go any further. Because it’ll change what you think about me. And it’d be cruel to wait till later. I will not put forward any special pleadings in all this—I’ll tell you how things happened. My mother was ill. It was cervical cancer. Do you know the disease, Charlie?

No, he said. I haven’t even heard…

It’s a vicious thing.

Yes? asked Charlie. He looked confused. After all his certainty in the gallery, he was for the moment lost.

The simple truth is—my mother told me she wanted to die. It was something she repeated and that was very unlike her. In the end, when it had all got beyond bearing and she was pleading with God and me to let her die, to make her die, I stole enough morphine to put her to rest. But she died, you see, anyhow. Of her own accord. Without me having to use it. Just the same, you’re with a woman who intended to murder her mother. I could say it was mercy. And others could say it too. Naomi says it. But that’s it. How does that match up against Delacroix? Or how does it match up with whatever picture you have of me? But you must know if you want to know me.

He had been frowning through this.

What do you want me to say? he asked. Do you want me to stamp out of here in outrage? You want me to recoil in horror? Is that it? To flog you out of the temple or something?

I was hoping you wouldn’t.

But you were a merciful daughter, for God’s sake, he murmured.

Well, you had to be told, that’s all. Because I am sure you’ve never even dreamed of doing what I had plans of doing in those days.

He shook his head. Then he started kneading his cheek as if he had a toothache.

O Jesus, he said privately. O Jesus Christ.

She didn’t know what this invocation meant.

Let me tell you something, Sally, he said suddenly and in a colorless voice. She could see his teeth. They were not quite locked together but seemed for the first time ready to bite. And there was a rictus.

Imagine this. Imagine a man who went out on a patrol last night and got somehow stuck out there, wounded, thirsty beyond belief, in pain without morphine, hanging on the wire and calling to us in our trench. Calling, “I’m here!” Calling, “Help me, cobber!”

Say we go out before dawn and try to reach him, but we can’t—indeed some of us are killed and wounded trying. And the enemy in their trenches lets the poor bastard hang there through the early morning and they call out to us in primitive English to come and get our friend. If we tried it, of course… Well, you can imagine. A feast for the machine-gun nests. And our mate out there is still calling to us. “Just need a bit of help,” he might call. Do you think we let him hang forever? Do you think we don’t do what I would like to have done to me if I were there crucified on the wire? Do you think we go on listening to him plead forever?

I’m sorry, she told him. It’s shocking. Even so, I have to say this and you have to hear it. That man is not related to you by blood.

No, he insisted. She was suddenly astonished that he was close to tears. But he’s the one we’ll always remember. Even if we get to be old men, we’ll never shake him off. And I say “him” even though it’s really “them.” So why shouldn’t I be angry when what you are telling me is a… Well, not a little thing… but nothing done. An unfired bullet, for dear Christ’s sake?

She watched his anger. In part, it fascinated her.

There may come a time, he said, when you will need to reassure me that what I have confessed was nothing at all. That it was compassion, not murder. For Christ’s sake, you must take that same medicine now.

I told you because I can live with the thing if you can. The murders and the killings of mercy have both brought it down to size. But the size is still big. It can be borne though. I can be a happy woman for you. It’s my ambition.

She was in fact feeling exalted. She barely doubted she could fly above the cold river.

He closed his eyes briefly. Opening them again, he said, All right, you’ve told me. And I’ve told you. There’s an end to it for now. I can’t guarantee what I’ve told you might not sometimes seep through and poison an hour. But it won’t poison my life.

Nor mine, said Sally. Neither of our tales will.

Bitterly amused now, he said, If I’d known you were going into all this stuff I would have insisted on wine.

It’s not too late. You could have brandy.

And then their croque-monsieur arrived. They fell to it with all the ravenousness of the redeemed. They said little as they ate, his head frequently down, though once he raised it and smiled broadly at her and shook his head just a fraction one way or another. Cognac, he asked the waiter then. It came quickly. He reached out and held her hand as he downed it. He shook his head.

I’m very slow, he confessed. You wouldn’t have told me about all that unless… Well, unless.

He waved his free hand in the air a little, trying to define the word.

I’m so very flattered. That’s what I should have said straight off. Instead of all that stuff about men on the wire.

He finished the cognac with a gulp. He smiled.

You’ll come with me this afternoon then? he asked.

Yes. With a lot more ease than this morning. Not that I didn’t…

I know. You liked it. This morning we saw the world as it would like to be seen. This afternoon we have the reality of the world. We’ll see the world as it is and the way it will become. When you see some of the work of these new chaps, you’ll wish you were born French or Spanish.

During their exhilarating afternoon at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, whose motto was “No juries, no prizes,” Charlie declared himself nervous that Kiernan would at dinner prove a temperance man and exhibit piety. Sally was able to reassure him. The dinner at L’Arlésienne went delightfully—with Ian himself drinking red wine for the special occasion. Sally and Naomi spoke to each other in an easy way that made Sally remember conversation between them could be blessedly ordinary. The acrid, murderous weight—capable of souring a lifetime—was gone in a day to be replaced by something that could be borne through a lifetime. None of them talked about their particular work—though Kiernan did digress into the organization of clearing stations. Some aspects, he argued, could be better arranged. The stores hut should instead be dug into the earth because without that… well, they got the message. One hit by a Taube and nothing for the wards. And in some of the stores there were—yes, even in these terrible times—signs that a few officials were in the business of war procurement, who were either asinine or had done special deals with suppliers. How rich some people were getting from all these dressings and pharmaceuticals and equipment! he said. How rich from syringes that sometimes fell apart.

But how far it had all progressed since Egypt and the Archimedes, Naomi asserted.

Under the influence of unaccustomed wine, it came to Sally as a fancy that the three of them had been cast into the sea and delivered just for this dinner and as company for glorious Charlie.

Meanwhile Naomi reported on the Committee of Clarity and the enduring suspicions of Madame Flerieu, and explained who “dear old Sedgewick” was.

Hungrier than she ever had been since she went to the clearing station—hungry as the reprieved always are—Sally ate liver and pork like a woman who might one day get plump.

Lady Tarlton’s château was decked for Christmas and kept warm at least in patches by army stoves. Naomi and the nurses made up Christmas boxes for each patient—simple things such as chocolate and tobacco, shortbread, a writing pad. Symbols of homely renewal. She had bought Matron Mitchie some lace in Boulogne. This was one of those Christmases Naomi had read of—when joy is a simple achievement. Her sister now wrote to her weekly and Ian at least each second day. Yet even with the Americans now in France, no one dared speak anymore of the coming year as the conclusive one.

Two days after Christmas, Matron Mitchie got a telegram. Her son was in the hospital at Wimereux with gas inhalation and pneumonia. Mitchie struggled upwards without anyone knowing and was largely dressed and—with prosthesis strapped on—ready to travel when Lady Tarlton found her grinding her way along the corridor.

Lady Tarlton knew by now that she should not thwart Mitchie. She pressed an extra comforter on her and adjusted the collar of her coat and summoned Carling. He was to get the Vitesse Phaeton ready to go to Wimereux. When that was settled, Mitchie asked Naomi to come with her. With difficulty Mitchie was helped downstairs and into the vehicle. She had the idea, she told Naomi once they were inside the great car—where even the smell of the aging leather was a cold exhalation—that she might get her son transferred to the Voluntary once his symptoms eased.

When—through an icebound landscape and out on to the coastal road—they reached the hospital at Wimereux, it looked huge and deliberately ugly under a foul sky. Its grounds were littered with patches of dirty snow, the decay of a glittering Christmas snow of two days before. Carling left them in the car as he made inquiries as to where the boy could be found, and then they rolled down the long and frozen streets between huts—no boys brought out to be exposed to the sun today—until they arrived at the gas ward where young Mitchie was located.

Naomi watched for ice patches as she aided Mitchie from the car into the ward. It was at least warm in there. Nurses had insisted on the season and strung tinsel around the walls. They found Private Mitchie with pads dipped in sodium bicarbonate on his eyes. His skin looked reddish and the ward sister mentioned edema in the lungs and a temperature so high that he had been very deluded—even leaving his bed sometimes.

When Mitchie sat beside him he did not seem to hear the scrape of the chair. He had a square face that was slightly smaller than one would expect for the spacious head behind it. Mitchie began stroking his red, gas-stippled hand with one finger. To Naomi his situation did not look or sound good. Oxygen was wheeled up to him and the mask was put on his face and, for some reason—perhaps because of the way oxygen forced itself into him—the rasping of his breath seemed more intense now than it had before. A nurse took the pads from his eyes in the hope he could see and converse. But he seemed to recognize nothing.

When the young ward doctor came around, Mitchie identified herself as the patient’s mother and calmly discussed his case further, raising the matter of a tracheotomy and warm ether vapor being pumped into his lungs by way of it. A nurse arrived while they talked and further bathed his eyes with the pads before replacing them with new ones. He flinched and waved his head. He had presented himself at an aid post later than he should have, the doctor told her, and had done so while already suffering pulmonary distress. The combination must have been an alarming experience. But—the ward doctor said—he had his youth and robustness to fall back upon. This was exactly the sort of medical commonplace Matron Mitchie would have uttered to parents in the same situation as she was now. Naomi noticed she invested her attention in every word as if it would need to be subjected to a later analysis—as if there were subtleties of meaning there.

When the doctor was gone, she had a further conversation with the ward sister, during which she suppressed her cough as best she could. The handkerchief she held before her face was doused with eucalyptus oil and she interposed the saturated fabric between herself and anyone else, in case they read the telltale pallor, rose-petal cheeks, the stain of blood on the lips, and sent her away.

From that afternoon Naomi alternated with one of the English Roses in accompanying Mitchie to Wimereux every second day. Naomi was with her on the third afternoon when Private Mitchie’s temperature began to fall. He was sleeping when they arrived but woke when the nurse came to give him oxygen. Through cracked lips and with breath he did not really have, he said, Big Sister. It can’t be you.

Well, it is, she said, standing up and kissing his blistered forehead. But you know, don’t you, it isn’t Big Sister anymore?

He frowned. There was no complaint there, however.

He said, Force of habit. I’m feeling better.

You weren’t taking care of yourself up there, Mitchie reproved him.

I was, he said and then winked, but I gave the servants a day off and they left the gas on. Buggers!

He laughed—choking—and his eyes watered so that he needed to close them. Mitchie had been laughing with him—crying also—and the shared jollity threatened to strangle her too.

That doesn’t sound good, said the boy, nodding towards her.

Don’t you worry about me, she said. It’s just a winter cold.

He fell asleep again and after a while Mitchie and Naomi left.

The next time they went there, Mitchie asked Naomi—with more apology than Naomi was used to—if she would mind having tea in the nurses’ mess while Mitchie went alone to the ward.

Naomi sat there for an hour and a half, reading Punch and being interrupted by jovial questions from other mostly Australian nurses, who wanted to know about the Château Baincthun—of which they had heard all manner of rumors. That it was a club for officers really, and that it was somehow a loose place. They didn’t mean her, but by and large…

By now Naomi had learned to talk like other gossipy women in situations like this—she became an imitation girl, even though she’d barely been able to handle such impersonation in her earlier life.

I wish it was an officers’ club, she told them, and we were all club floozies. But it’s like any hospital. It has all the normal wards and departments. The work is just as long-winded as yours. We have surgeons, ward doctors, nurses, and orderlies and a pathology lab. All you’ve heard is nonsense. As for Lady Tarlton, the Medical Corps had to build your hospital. But she built the Australian Voluntary out of pure kindness.

Ah, said the women of Wimereux, it’s good to get that cleared up.

And then they began to decry the failure of the conscription referendum, which would have forced new men into the frontline. Naomi knew all the arguments both ways. Could conscripts be trusted? Could the unwilling? And the contrary arguments. The British and Canadians have conscripts. And conscripts would allow our fellows longer to recover and longer leaves. Naomi’s secret argument in response was that all those who arrived would anyhow be fed into the furnace, without any break for the ones already there.

She was rescued by Carling’s arrival at the door telling her that Matron Mitchie was already in the Phaeton and ready to leave.

She followed Carling, the ice crunching beneath their boots. The light was nearly gone, and a high wind rattled the slimmer branches of the leafless trees around the hospital perimeter. She found Mitchie in the backseat sobbing without pause and taking jerking breaths between furies of grief.

He began to choke, she said. It’s unfair. The pneumonia’s gone and now this bloody mustard gas! The doctor came—they used the hot ether device. It was horrifying. Poor boy. Breathing again though.

It will take him a day or two, said Naomi meaninglessly. Then he’ll be all right.

He called out for my mother to tell him he’d be all right. His eyes were searching for her. He didn’t call for me.

Naomi embraced her and pulled her into her own shoulder. He’s still getting used to it, Naomi said.

Matron Mitchie could not however rest there in Naomi’s caress. Coughs racked her, and she turned her head away. The coughing grew cruel—as was the norm for Mitchie. In her desperation she near shoved the eucalyptus handkerchief into her mouth—as if its vapors could choke her disease.

They were partway home, amidst meadows and copses where ice delineated every bare branch. As they entered a dip in the road quite close to the château, Naomi felt the iron fabric of the car take up a new kind of motion, a glissade which the wheels seemed to her to follow—as if the chassis would otherwise tear itself away from its axles. As she watched, the hedges on her right-hand side slid away at angles and almost graciously the limousine turned its nose into the hedge on the left, pitched itself on to its side with a frightful steel whack and then, with a terrible howling and grating, slid endlessly on its side along the road. The glass of the window below her was shattered and road replaced open air, and Naomi hung by a leather strap for an instant before she was flung forward and downwards beyond all control. In her own gyrations she saw Matron Mitchie flying also and at one moment Naomi collided—brow forward—into the heel of Mitchie’s unyielding prosthetic foot. Then Naomi’s head found a sort of permanent harbor in a fixed bolster on the seats that had been opposite her. Far too late the shrieking slide ended. At last—in stillness—she moved her head from between the seat and arm bolster, within which she had been expecting her neck to break, and looked at the skywards door and at that side of the car which had now become the roof. A grudging light was still in the low clouds and she yearned to climb out and greet it. But she turned her head and saw Matron Mitchie. Her feet—the true and the false—were both now unshod. She was head down to the shattered window and—through it—to the road. Carling climbed over into the passenger compartment. His face was bloodied but he was frantic to bring rescue.

He reached down past Matron Mitchie’s disordered skirts and lifted her by the waist. Naomi helped him pull her upwards. There was copious blood, of course. But what was worse was that her brow had been flattened and seemed to have become part of her skull.

Do you think you could climb up there, Miss Durance? Carling asked, pointing to the sky, and push the door open? Yes, use the bolster to stand on.

It was the same bolster that had saved her head.

She dug her remaining boot—the other had disappeared—into a cleft in the wall of upholstery, and turned the door handle and pushed with as much power as she could from such a purchase. But the door was heavy and it reclosed itself.

We need to smash the window, she told him. He lifted and laid down Matron Mitchie according to the car’s new alignment. She seemed limp still, but the damned war gave one a certain faith in medicine, in resuscitation. She climbed into the front seat and came back with the starter handle which was kept in its own cavity. She smashed the window thoroughly with a number of blows. Glass rained down on them. But it was a lesser peril. Then she hauled herself up and out and knelt down on the flanks of the Phaeton.

She had barely positioned herself on the side of the great auto when a military supply truck appeared and behind it an ambulance on its way to the château with a delivery of wounded. They slowed and stopped. Driver and orderlies got out and climbed up onto the wreckage. Naomi’s hands were bleeding and unsteady, so as two of the orderlies clambered up, she surrendered to them the responsibility of getting Mitchie out of the car. She could smell their sweat and their hair oil even as they did it. They lifted Mitchie out and down to two men below. Then they lifted Naomi herself on to the road. The astounding Carling levered himself free and slid down the roof of the Phaeton to the ground.

Oh, he said to the ambulance driver. There’s a lane back there. Go back and turn right and you can get your men to the Voluntary that way.

He came to Naomi wringing his hands and with his face bleeding considerably. He wept. Forgive me, he said. Forgive me. It was ice. It just took the Phaeton away from me.

My God, you’re knocked about, Miss, someone said as the icy atmosphere bit her wounds. She saw Mitchie lying by the side of the road as the orderlies brought a stretcher.

Oh my God, asked Carling. Have I killed her?

No, said Naomi definitely because she couldn’t believe in Mitchie’s death. And, then, contradictorily, It isn’t your fault anyhow.

It couldn’t be thought that with Mitchie’s motherhood unresolved and yet to be savored, she should suffer too lethal a mutilation.

There was an Australian piper at the general hospital in Boulogne. He had learned the pipes as a boy in Melbourne and he preceded the funeral party to the general hospital cemetery. The coffin was carried by six soldiers on leave who had been visiting their girlfriends at the hospital. Most were officers—for what that mattered to Mitchie!

Up the coast—at the other general hospital at Wimereux—young Mitchie was still too ill to process with the others and to honor the woman who had claimed motherhood over him. But a considerable cortege of nurses made their way behind the coffin and the bleating melancholy of the pipes to the pit dug in icy ground for Matron Mitchie. At the head of the procession walked Major Darlington and Lady Tarlton, behind them a brigadier general of the Medical Corps, and behind him Dr. Airdrie and Naomi. Naomi was on crutches from a sprained ankle. Her broken ribs stabbed her as she hobbled over the cold ground, and her head was still bandaged—she had somehow cut it on the glass of the window she’d escaped by. Life was so ridiculous, she knew, that it must be accepted and worshipped as it came. To be saved from the Archimedes as Mitchie was and to find her way back to the world of the walking through all that pain—and then to rediscover her friend Lady Tarlton and a son, and at that point to vanish from the world with her great declaration of motherhood more or less still trailing from her mouth—that was nonsensical! And all just because her skull touched the road during the car’s skid when Naomi’s had been jammed in the upholstery… Well, the absurdity spoke for itself. The disparity between their respective injuries was ridiculous. If God were praised it should not be because there was a plan to the absurdity but because there was a divine lack of one.

A Presbyterian padre read the prayer, the honor guard fired into the sky the Allies still possessed, and then—to some old Scottish dirge, by the piper who roamed in the Scottish manner amongst the graves of the heroes—they all watched Mitchie’s grave filled until the coffin had been covered. With Lady Tarlton and Airdrie, Naomi wept while her side howled with pain from her ribs. Lady Tarlton put a calming hand on her shoulder as she had on Carling’s on the night of the accident. Then she and Major Darlington, Naomi and Airdrie waited there to look at the mound. The brigadier came across to where they stood and confided in Naomi.

I feel great sympathy for you at the loss of your matron. We need all the good ones now. With the Russian Reds out of it, Fritz is coming, you know. Everyone understands that much. Fritz is coming. God knows where and God knows when. But certainly this spring.

He went. Lady Tarlton said, That was almost sensible for a brigadier.

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

Naomi wondered, who would be unlucky when Fritz came?

Bureau of Casualties

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.

We were just about to eat. I was making shepherd’s pie—with a dash of bully beef I’m afraid. You must be hungry after the trip.

Sally admitted she was.

And what a wonderful accident that you’re both here at the same time.

Carradine put her arm through her husband’s elbow. Come on, let’s all continue this at the table. A separate dining room. Did you notice that, Sally? Wouldn’t get a flat like this in normal times.

In the dining room, Sally and Major Carradine sat down at the table. While Elsie was fetching the meal from the oven, the major looked at Sally a second with eyes that were vacant of interest and recognition.

Was it hard to find this place? she asked.

Oh, we’re subletting it from a notary’s family, said Elsie from the kitchen. They wanted to go down south because everyone believes the Germans will take this city.

Do you?

Well, everyone thought they’d capture Paris once. But they didn’t. Eric and the boys will keep them out.

Eric grunted.

The two women talked about each other’s work while Major Carradine looked at his plate as if trying to work out what was sitting on it. Carradine shot him glances as she discussed her fracture ward a few kilometers away. At least with fractures you’re not waiting for people to die. And the new splints and the traction… much better than the old ways. But I think it’s the busiest work I’ve ever done. Do you have a headache, darling?

Eric said in a narrowed-down voice, Why does a man always have to have a bloody headache if he keeps quiet a second?

Now come on, she said, with the fixed smile of a woman who had had her hopes, but now couldn’t predict anything. I’m just worried your dinner will get cold.

He picked up the wine and drank half a glass. If it were to get cold, he told her, it would not hurt it very much. Then he looked away and said almost as if he were disappointed with himself, Oh damn! I’ve done it again.

He got up, set down but did not fold the laundered linen serviette his wife had somehow provided, and left the room saying, Well, sorry, sorry, Elsie. Done it again. Any whisky in the living room?

Yes, she called. The usual place.

Carradine said, He’s actually better after whisky. Can you believe that? They do everything on whisky and rum up there. Whether they’re breeding a race of drunkards we’ll know when this is all over.

Sally said, If you want to go and…

No. I shouldn’t follow him straightaway. He’ll get angry again. I know all the rules by now. But can you believe he passes muster at the front? He must be a different person there. The question is, will he ever pass muster anywhere else?

She put her elbows on the table, made fists and lowered her forehead on to her knuckles. She grieved for ten seconds but there were no tears. Sally got up and put her hand on Carradine’s shoulder.

I’ve sent the longest telegram of my life to his father, said Carradine. If he was to get attention, he’d have to be forced into it by burly orderlies. But they have to take him home, I told his father. England’s no solution. If we put him there, he’ll be back across that Channel in no time, trying to go to the trenches. I know Mr. Carradine the elder will help—he’s coming to England, you know. On a ministerial visit. The trouble is, Eric’s going back to his battalion tomorrow. Surely his colonel sees that something is wrong? Eric’s his adjutant, for God’s sake.

Perhaps he seems normal up there, Sally suggested. Everyone’s temper must be pretty edgy there.

And his colonel’s a man of about twenty-four. In times of peace a soldier was lucky to command a battalion by the wise age of fifty. Now it’s infants with little knowledge of the world. Look, I’ll go and see him now.

Carradine rose. Her food was untouched. Her thinness was more apparent to Sally. She was not long gone.

He’s asleep, she said—relieved—when she returned. Her voice was more like the normal Carradine.

There might be something pressing on his brain, said Sally.

Maybe. His temperature is normal. He doesn’t have encephalitis.

Carradine was captured by a thought then, and said, as millions did, This bloody war! Surely it must be over within two years.

Earlier, Sally lied.

But Elsie returned directly to the subject of Eric. We went to Paris last month. Had a room looking out on the Tuileries. It should have been perfect. But there were headaches, there was anger. “I don’t want to go and see those stupid tarts and their dogs in the gardens!” There was a scene in the bar with a British officer… A little hidden alcove in the dining room was the only place he felt safe enough to break his bread. Oh, if that bloody conscription vote had been passed, we’d have plentiful new drafts coming in. It would be easy to get fellows like Eric out of the line.

Perhaps, Sally ventured, though because they’d be conscripts, he might have to stay with them to hold their hands or keep them in place.

There was a slight flare of anger in Carradine. You sound like all those Labour people. They say even the ordinary soldiers voted against it—they didn’t want their battalions sullied by conscripts. Well, that’s all right, but they’re all dying, that’s the thing. Some battalions are so small now they have to be squeezed into others. I’m sorry if I sound cross. I’m bewildered. But not as badly as him.

They looked to the door which led to the bedroom.

Look, said Carradine, tonight’s been dismal. But you don’t have to go yet.

I won’t, Sally assented. Let’s have some of the wine.

Now, at Carradine’s table on the edge of the spring of 1918, Carradine poured another measure of wine into both their glasses and uttered an opinion she could not have even given respect to a few years past.

Valor is complicated, she said. Sometimes I think the only brave ones are the ones who flee.

Yes, said Sally. Sometimes I’ve thought that too.

I hope tomorrow morning, Carradine whispered, there’ll be a soft-speaking officer and some orderlies and provosts at our door to help him away to more treatment. Eric will scream at me if it happens. And hate me.

She shrugged.

Carradine was nervous about Sally walking back to her hostel in that town so on edge and full of soldiers. But Sally went downstairs and began the journey with relief and in a fever of anticipation for the meeting at the belfry.

The Great Experiment

The next morning at nine o’clock Charlie was a sudden apparition outside the door of the bell tower. She saw him before he saw her. His overcoat was undone, he had one glove off and was smoking anxiously. She could tell somehow—even by his movements—that he was nervous both about the chance of her arrival and the opposite. His skin was as harsh as a stockrider’s, his face thinner and his features even more prominent. But he was clearly the same Charlie who had taught her about light and harbored doctrinal reservations about color.

As she got nearer he saw her and his body loosened, then he walked forward. He put out his arm swiftly and gave her an economic hug. Neither he nor she wanted notice to be taken here, with soldiers and officers coming and going. They both wanted to know about time. When was she due back at Mellicourt? When was he due back up there? It was little more than a day and a half in either case.

What will you show me today then? she asked.

But it’s time I asked you. What do you want to show me?

Well, she said, if you would care to look up you will see a magnificent leaden sky.

Oh, he said, I’ve seen one or two of those recently. They’re tending to proliferate.

Well, that’s about my limit. I’m still learning.

You’ll get talkative enough. After a time.

She liked that phrase, “After a time.”

Haven’t you noticed, he went on, that I always choose subjects on which I can be a know-all, and studiously avoid those on which I am ignorant? Viticulture, say, or stamps, or the workings of the internal combustion engine. I am not a Renaissance man. I play my limited strengths, that’s all.

That’s enough for me.

They both became aware that men were looking across the square at them—ravenous for a gram of their shared fervor.

There will be a great outbreak by the enemy, he murmured, and half the men we see here…

But not you.

Certainly not me. I’ve been sent down here to reconnoiter. In case we have to move when the Germans come. Now, I admit I’ve been studying up the cathedral here just to impress you. But it’ll be damned cold in there. First let’s find a café.

They walked across the square. Her distress rose all at once—with a sort of heat.

This coming onslaught…?

Don’t concern yourself, he said. We’re in reserve for now. In any case, up there or down here, they won’t hit us first off.

How do you know?

Because we’re too good for them, he said simply, without a hint of bravado. They won’t hit the Canadians or the British veterans, he went on. They will hit some poor, hapless British army of conscripts—kids just moved up, eighteen-year-olds with a few good old NCOs. That’s one of the flaws of conscription, you see—men undertrained. Divisions that don’t know themselves.

It was surprising to hear him talk like that—as a military analyst, a role he had never adopted before.

The likelihood of coming assaults was far from being the only cause of her fretfulness. There was as they crossed the square the gravitation of their two bodies. She knew he was aware of it as well—if he hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have been gravitation. They sat a little discontentedly in a café—a pause in their ferocious rapport that had to be gone through. He ordered brandy and drank it without coughing—the coughing at cognac was far in his past. Gone with the choirboy features. She drank the light-colored stuff the French called thé. He reached an ungloved hand across the table, and she took it in her open palm and felt the cold rasp of his. Again, the holding of a hand did not attract the attention of the deity here like it did in the Macleay.

You are the best of companions, he said. Do you want to see the cathedral? I mean, for your own sake. Not so that I can blather on…

There was something dizzying about cathedrals, something cleansing too. They were a sort of Gothic autoclave. But she had seen enough for now. She wanted to be with him in a way that did not have to do with architecture.

Charlie, it’s a wonderful big shape. I don’t know what to say.

Look, he told her, there’s one thing I want to see in case it’s pounded to rubble. Could you stand that? It’s called the Beau Dieu—the handsome God. It’s in the doorway. Do you mind…?

So, she thought, he still has a fascination outside of the larger issue. Or was he nervous and the handsome God a means of delay? She told him, Of course not. I’d like to see it too.

They walked up to the cathedral of mismatched towers and found—between the doors—the smiling stone Christ trying to bring mercy to naked sinners who entered the maw of hell on the inner fluting of that great stone entry. Christ stood benignly between the doors, hand raised in the calmest compassion but also regret. It was not a god of omnipotence but of grief for his children.

And then inevitably they went in. She insisted by instinct—as if to let a kind of longing accumulate—that having seen the Beau Dieu they might as well finish the business.

It was not the exquisite experience of their tour of Rouen Cathedral. But that was not this cathedral’s fault. Their minds were on a different order of meeting. They proceeded down the sandbagged nave and saw fire marks on some of the walls. All the stained glass had been removed. So too had many of the statues from the side chapels. But the altar pieces were still ornate. They both worked at being engrossed by this. But all this huge piling of artful stone, all this steepling, all those vaultings which had resisted the temptation of gravity for so long—these did nothing but delay the aims of this meeting.

In one of the side alcoves—made deeper and more shadowy by the extra heaped sandbags against the main wall—they seized on each other so instantaneously that neither of them could have sworn who was the instigator. There was as profound and languorous a kiss as the place would permit. She could smell the sugary potency of brandy in his mouth. Feeling she had passed through into unfamiliar country where the currency of normal self was not recognized, she said after a while, I was speculating on how long it would take before we reached this point.

He laughed low and close to her face. Not only did I wonder how long, he said, but I made provision, should you wish… I don’t know how to say this. There’s a place north of here. Few soldiers, if any, there… in Ailly-sur-Somme. There’s a decent enough little hotel on the western bank. I’ve booked two rooms and have a driver bribed to take us out there—he thinks it’s just for a dinner in the country. And indeed we’ll have dinner. And then we can come back afterwards or we can stay there.

She rubbed his surprisingly smooth jaw. The same part of the face, she was reminded, that had been shorn off Officer Constable. She must fight that Durance habit still entrenched in her: everything that presented itself to be rejoiced in had to be matched up at once with something that must be mourned and feared.

Oh, we’ll definitely be staying, she told him like a woman who knew what she was doing—the sort of woman she’d never suspected herself to be.

You said definitely? he asked with a sort of disbelief.

Yes. And if you lose so-called respect for me, I don’t care.

Why would I lose respect?

It is only afterwards that conversations of this nature take on their character of ordinariness, of things said before by the millions—as if somewhere in the Book of Common Prayer or some less elevated document there was a prescribed exchange not only of the plain vows of marriage but of those of seduction too. Yet at their congress of two in the alcove, everything seemed new. Sally had an ambition to be a reckless woman—having seen and envied it in others. And now it was achieved, and she was loved by Charlie for it.

We need another café, he told her, as if he could absorb these new things only by taking a seat. Wait a moment, he said. No more for now.

They went out and found one and sat at a table not warmly placed. This time they had coffee.

Now look, said Charlie. His eyes were direct but she could see a color of embarrassment even in that climate-hardened face. This is a fatal or glorious thing I’m asking, he said. Because I’ve booked two rooms, but that’s useless. The madame won’t choose to be deceived. It’s a very different case from the British, who—I believe, anyhow—can choose to pretend that adjoining rooms are proper enough. But that’s beside the point.

She thought now that she might be more eager than he was but could not find a way to tell him that, to tell him to be easy about it. At the same time she liked his nervousness and was fed by it.

I didn’t know that in the end we’d need to discuss all this tawdry stuff, he said. These cheap little deceptions. All this dancing with shadows. I’m sorry for it.

She held his wrist in a way which really suggested, Get on with it!

Why does it have to be like planning a crime? he asked.

Because joy is a crime now, she told him.

He laughed in gratitude but shook his head. His confusion wasn’t allayed at all.

But it’s worse than anything I’ve said, he insisted. There’s a bogus marriage certificate… The French officers make them and sell them to us… When I get there I can say, Madame, the two-room reservation is a mistake… My wife and I need only…

She held her hands up. You needn’t tell me, she said. I leave that to you.

But why does the world make such a rigmarole?

To make people think twice, she suggested.

But they don’t think twice when they want to tear a young fellow’s head off. They don’t think twice about artillery and gas. You can get all that without jumping through hoops. No forgeries, no nods and lies.

That’s an argument you can’t win, Charlie.

He assessed her. He found it hard to believe in her acceptance. Whereas by now she’d got over her own astonishment at her will to go ahead.

If the driver who took them out along the river to Ailly that afternoon suspected their true plans, they did not care, and were pleased to be dropped off by the door of the hotel which was out of the town, in woods through which a path led to the river. Sally sat in a chair in the little parlor and let Charlie conduct the business at the desk. She felt far from abashed. She felt like a woman in possession.

The room was heavily curtained and lined with wallpaper crowded with roses on a dingy background. The bed seemed concave—sagging from the heavy ease people had taken on it over tens of years. It was covered with thick shawls and its pillows were muscular. Sally counseled herself that this was where it would happen. It was to be that arena—that high bed which shorter-legged women would be forced to enter only by unseemly gymnastics but which she could lower herself onto. She felt nervousness—for his sake and hers. She had, however, encountered something of the movements behind this rite in nursing texts. She knew the physiology. She was not quite as ignorant as if she had worked as a typist. She had certainly been untroubled by embarrassment when they signed in with the authority of their freshly minted but faked document placed on the desk by Charlie as casual proof of union. Now, here, he was still the one who was flustered because he thought she might be. He could not be argued out of the suspicion. It seemed he didn’t know this was a test they must put themselves to.

He took off his overcoat and Sam Browne and uniform jacket and hung them in the great sturdy armoire. A meticulous fellow, he made himself busy about it and commented on the mugginess of the room, even at this time of year, and asked her permission to open the window a little. It was stiff and presented him with a test—a swollen windowpane in a warped and shrinking frame. He seemed to be delighted to have to struggle with it. Sally took off her jacket and hung it in the armoire. Someone knocked tentatively at the door—it was a moon-faced girl with a tray of white wine and some grapes and cheese and biscuits. Monsieur, she mumbled and crossed the room and placed her tray on a table by two heavily upholstered chairs. Then—keeping custody of her eyes—she left, waving her hand in negation as Charlie offered her a few francs hastily delved from his pocket. He closed the door behind her.

Would you like some wine? he asked. For the tray offered him another grateful delay.

She was standing waiting in the middle of the room. She had taken off her gray overcoat and jacket—a reasonable thing to do in a sultry room.

Later for the wine, she told him.

Would you like me to wear… protection?

No, our periods don’t come. They did at Rouen. But they stopped again at the casualty clearing station.

But she was faintly willing anyhow to conceive a child in case Charlie disappeared.

She was aware now that she must dictate the terms. She reached for and caressed the side of his face. She had always undervalued touch except as a medical technique. She had discovered its spectrum now. He responded—all fears of cheapness dropping easily away. The wise, harsh, watchful face battle had given him was close. His mouth was of course tentative again at first, until he detected the frank invitation in hers. She uttered a sentence she could not have foretold. It was a sentence of no distinction but phenomenal novelty to her. It asked him to put his hand inside her blouse.

He did it. Again enthusiasm and certainty grew slowly within him. Touch my breasts now, she instructed. The touch brought a kind of convulsion in her stomach and at the spine’s base, a weakness of the upper thighs. This is why a bed is needed, it occurred to her. The lovers are lamed.

You should undress, she instructed him. Behind the screen, if you like. I’ll do my nurse’s work with the bed. We won’t need eiderdowns.

Again she had made him more sure of himself. You say undress? he asked. He seemed to want details on what this meant.

But you’re an artist—you’ve seen all those paintings of love. What do you see there?

Well, nakedness, of course, he said like a schoolboy at last achieving the right answer.

And those army shirts are pretty rough when it comes to texture, she told him with an instructive smile. Unless they’re tailored. And I don’t think yours is.

No sense in getting them tailored, he said. Clothes get ruined up there.

So I’ve noticed.

And you? he asked.

I’ll wear a shift for now, she said with this alien certitude of hers. I’m not an artist like you.

He went behind the screen. In the great ark of the bed she lay on her side in her shift, observing what she had read—in franker romances exchanged between nurses—that etiquette dictated she should not watch him as he emerged. According to these books, if you did not turn away a man might think you were assessing his person, his old fellow, his penis, his prick, his John Thomas—which in any case she was sure he would have covered for now with his hands. She turned to him though as soon as he entered the bed and covered himself with a sheet. Again, it was the question of pace which bemused him. He lay like an untutored log—or nearly so. She realized she might have the jump on him, knowing those technical diagrams from nursing textbooks. She dragged him by the shoulders. His hands with the terror of combats in them went around her as she waited in her shift. She could feel the calluses of his palms abrading her back. She could feel him at her thigh. At once an even more disabling flame and torture entered her body. She knew to part her legs. She never expected to have this instinctive willingness.

Then—as she wanted—he entered her, and that fury she’d been awaiting became possible between them. She had feared this penetration since she’d first been conscious it happened amongst humans. And here it was. It mocked all fear and she felt that marvelous irrelevance of outer worlds and outer populations.

Nonetheless, even now a large part of her mind stood above the bed. It waited just as the courtiers used to hang over the beds of young kings and queens, to make sure that nature—which took its course with peasants and farmers—took its course with Crowns. The point was that to Sally this was not only love. It was also an experiment on the future. This witness in her wished to verify that there was something here—some promise of becoming a single flesh, though not necessarily today. Because today ran the chance of being hit-or-miss. But in a longer run, over time and through regular exercise. He had acquired a more unified mind in the meantime. Large in ambition he now pounded himself into her. There was no end to the profane and delightful simplicity of Charlie as he moved and moved within her.

Oh holy God! he said.

Yes, Sally uttered—but even then she was still the witness as well as the participant.

She heard his magnificent helpless whimper—he could not achieve more than the uttering of animal sounds—and felt the gush of him inside her and heard that strange, boyish laugh as if something difficult had been achieved. Then it was a naked, sated child she held.

Oh holy Christ, he said, to think a bullet could deprive a man of you. Of your magnificent body. And of everything you’ve given me.

She smiled against his face. He kissed her familiarly and at length. All that caution he had shown before had blown away.

She told him with a prophetic certainty, You won’t get any harm up there. Not now I’ve found you.

But she was full of fear nonetheless.

How can you know that? he asked, already three-quarters sunk in belief.

I don’t know how I know.

He kissed her. You have become an oracle, he said.

Her witness—the inner assessor who had hung above this bed—was heartily pleased. Now she had no excuse but to give up mental exercises. Now the witness could withdraw and leave the participants to their chosen sport. Body to body. That, said the departing arbiter, was fine.

Charlie got up and poured some wine. But neither of them drank it. For need had recurred.

Thirty hours later she was in Mellicourt. The question was whether they would recognize the newness in her. But when she went into the nurses’ mess there was another distraction. She found Slattery there—returned—chatting away with Leonora in an easy chair by the stove and giving a good impersonation of never having left.

Ah, Honora said expansively—seeing Sally and standing. She pulled her close. Sally was jolted by a surge of tenderness. Don’t worry, Honora whispered, I know Lionel’s dead. I’ve been working in a head ward at Rouen, and they take so long to die, poor chaps. In the scales of luck or of God’s will, or whatever you may choose to call it, Lionel was lucky.

She said nothing of Major Bright.

After a convoy arrived at six o’clock the next morning, Sally and Honora worked together in the resuscitation ward as accustomed partners.

In that earliest phase of spring, the two great armies were gathered together with such mutual intent that they could not stop even for one night. Visits in force were made to each other across icy ground and thickets of wire. This was a test of blood—apparently the raiders won if they bled less than the raided upon. Prisoners were taken—or if they weren’t, it was considered a failed ploy. And the guns had their own volition with that sound of unceasing hunger for flesh and membrane.

Just as they had over Deux Églises, at night the Taubes came looking for the town of Mellicourt and the ordnance supply depot beyond it. Sally and others knew that one night they would—by accident or malice—find the new clearing station, since it stood near the end of a light railway and close enough to desired targets. The very sound of these machines was a bruise to the soul.

But in daylight and free time, Major Bright and Slattery walked together down the thawing lanes to Mellicourt. Bright was a private man who had to overcome his edginess at being seen as a courter. So he tried to adopt the stiffness of the physician walking the patient. He had led Honora gently to the acceptance of the death of one lover and was probably a bit ashamed to find himself with ambitions to replace him. The sight of Honora and Bright strolling along struck the women as strangely sentimental—a scene from a time before bombardments.

Shirker

From Mrs. Sorley—Naomi could think of her under nothing else but her old name—the sewn parcels full of luxuries continued to arrive at Château Baincthun and lighten the dour cuisine of the Voluntary Hospital. According to a letter she had written the previous autumn, Mrs. Sorley was fretting. Her son Ernest had volunteered that spring and was aboard a convoy for France. It was, she said, not so fashionable to volunteer now that people knew something of the truth of things. “I have been so bold as to give him your address. He is not a bad boy at all. If he should call on you—and if you have the time—I would be very grateful if you could treat him as a relative as I have every confidence you will. I must say you Durances are fine-grained people and he is lucky to have you as a stepsister.”

And so in the first days of spring Ernest turned up at Château Baincthun—a lanky, strong-looking boy Naomi half remembered from the Macleay. He told her he had walked from Boulogne—where he was waiting for the boat to London for leave. He had spent the winter campaigning but as was usual with men he gave few details. In fact, when she was called to meet him, she thought that what he had been through seemed to sit easily with him. Unlike officers he wore no gloves and not even the mittens the orderlies at the château wore. The cold, wet hike from town had not seemed a hardship to him. She took him to drink tea in the room that served as the nurses’ mess.

Sorry if I’m a bit in the way, he said. He did do an impersonation of a clodhopper in his army boots. And when she introduced him to Lady Tarlton, he was shy and spoke carefully, like a questioned adolescent.

It’s my mother writing every week, he explained to Naomi. “Have you seen the girls?” Not that I’ve got any objection to that. Except I know you’re busy…

And he made a gesture to the east, that casual reference to the huge zone of mire and blood. He drank his tea thirstily.

Isn’t it funny to think that after the war we will be stepbrother and -sister? I think it’s a real bargain on Mum’s part. I always thought you Durance girls had a kind of style. Well, as long as you can stand the rough Sorleys…

Have you had any wounds? she asked.

I had the gas a bit, he admitted. The stuff that hangs around and everyone’s hoarse with it. But I wasn’t bad enough to go to the regimental aid post. You know, it’s a shock at first. You go into stunts where you don’t think a fly would live, let alone a man. But somehow you go on fitting yourself in amongst the lumps of lead. We’re doing pretty well up in Flanders. Showing them a thing or two.

When it was time for him to go back to the camp she had a motorcar—not the fatal big black-and-white one—brought round to take him. She did not want him to travel alone on foot in the cold.

They waited on the steps for the vehicle. She asked, Have you seen my sister?

No. But if she’s at a clearing station… It’s amazing who you meet here if you stay long enough. I’ll wait till after Fritz is finished with this big push they say is on the cards. Then I’ll see her.

Hey, you’ve got a lot of authority, he said, winking at her as the car arrived and he got in. The Durances are a step up for the Sorleys.

No. Your mother says that. But she’s wrong.

She watched the car roll away amidst the skeletal trees. Now she had another child to be concerned for.

A strange thing was observed at the clearing station in Mellicourt. Sally became aware of military police arriving and taking away orderlies. Not all of them, but a sampling. They were not under arrest, she was told by the nurses. They were to be transformed into infantry—even if that left the wards shorthanded.

These events had their impact at the Château Baincthun too. Naomi received an urgently scrawled note from Ian Kiernan.

She took the letter to Lady Tarlton. Oh my dear heavens, said Lady Tarlton after reading it. Would you like me to write too?

You’d consider that, would you?

Yes. You must go to Amiens at once and take a letter from me. As if anyone would want to pretend to be a Quaker.

Naomi did not comment on this curious compliment. Lady Tarlton quickly assembled all manner of warrants to allow her to travel. They both knew it would not be a comfortable journey since Amiens was at the very crux of the British position along the Somme and was known to be so by the enemy.

When she arrived in Amiens, after a journey of many delays, and found her way to a military office near the entrance to the station, she was told that the prison was five kilometers north and to the west of the river. No, no transport. She should try to take a taxi.

She went to a hotel and found a lazy porter and risked giving him a handful of francs to find her a cab. The cab driver was told to expect a similar bounty. So in the back of his taxi she set off across the canals and at last through the suburbs and out into the countryside. The prison rose up—a fortress—amidst the clouds of a dour plain and its cultivated fields. Arriving at its gate she tried to persuade the taxi driver to wait. But despite all offers of reward he pretended not to understand and drove off. It was no problem—she could walk the five miles back to town.

She went over cold gravel to the wooden postern and noticed a bell to one side that could be rung by hand. This she took to with a will. A British corporal opened the postern. She told him what she wanted and he seemed amenable and asked her to step inside. She found herself in a gatehouse which contained cave-like offices. First she had to sign in. She had to admit it was not exactly like the oppression of the Christians as depicted in Sunday School. The British NCO seemed quite sympathetic that she’d got herself involved with a shirker.

And you’re the fiancée? a sergeant-major asked from a more deeply placed desk of the office.

Yes, she said.

Good of you to come and see him, said the man.

He said he’d have a word with the captain, and turned a handle on his telephone. He murmured into the machine very confidentially. Young lady here. Wants to see her fiancé—Australian deep thinker. Serving nurse, named…

He cocked an eye but then looked at the register.

Durance, is it? Durance, he concluded. He looked at another roll book on the table. First Lieutenant Ian Kiernan, Australian Medical Corps. Yes, sir.

He came out from behind a counter and escorted her into the yard and along its thick enclosing wall and through a door. They entered now a further room which was utterly enclosed and totally bare except for a deal table and two fragile-looking chairs. Here he left her.

Naomi waited five minutes and grew more and more depressed by the place, and overwrought by its air of punishment—not anticipated punishment either. But punishment already as good as accomplished. Then there was a noise at the door and two military police armed with pistols brought in Ian. He looked identifiably the same Ian as before, but he was inadequately dressed for the weather—no jacket. They’d taken his braces and his belt so he had to hold up his trousers with a fist bunched at his waist.

The guards took up their posts on either side of the door. One of them announced in a voice of triumph, No, no touching.

And no loud opinions, thank you, said the other in his own loud voice.

Ian smiled. He sat at the table. She wanted of course to hold him but when she reached for his wrist, one of the guards said, Miss…

If you’re so keen on the war, why aren’t you fighting? she said to the guard. She knew it was a doomed argument.

Please, Naomi, Kiernan pleaded.

I’ve heard that one before, Miss, said the provost anyhow. From nearly every shirker.

She realized she must concentrate on Ian.

They are so stupid to lock you up after all this time, she said.

Well, now that I am in prison, the Committee of Clarity has every reason to believe in my sincerity, he said. By the way, Lady Tarlton wrote and said she would use her good offices… They gave me her letter because they were impressed by her title. They’re obviously going to use the same argument as Madame Flerieu. It served her and will serve them. If I was a conscientious objector, I shouldn’t have been in the Medical Corps in the first place. Medical orderlies are ripe to be called on to become riflemen, and they are naïve if they enlist and consider that they will never be asked to pick up a rifle.

But the chief medical officer at the clearing station must know your sincerity.

Oh, yes. But there have been French mutinies and even British ones. And our chaps are making an art form of absence without leave. The authorities have to make a stand, you see, and they are not always exact about how they do that.

He turned his head and she could see a bruise she had not spotted before, running from below his right temple and over his cheek and down his jaw. He put his finger to his lips.

Inexact methods, he murmured. But that’s over now. A rite of passage.

The military policemen maintained their silence.

The strict charge is mutiny, he told her. When I get to the court martial, would you find it possible, my dearest Naomi, to be a witness? If they knew that we were pursuing betrothal under the aegis of the Friends…

Yes, she said. You must insist they call me.

One of the military policemen said time was up.

She said to them, Can’t you give him a jumper? It’s cold today.

All the prisoners have a blanket in their cells, one of them said.

She stood as Kiernan was taken out. Alone in the soulless room, she was overwhelmed by a combination of desire and a feeling of revelatory force. The world was after all malign by its nature and not by exception. Or else it was established that it was wonderful but a madhouse. Young men were smashed for obscure purposes and repaired and smashed again. The Friends were thus the criminals in the planetary asylum.

The trial will be in Amiens in March, the sergeant told her on the way out.

On the morning before the trial, Naomi again left the Château Baincthun—this time she had been summoned as a witness and by an authority superior even to Lady Tarlton’s. Lady Tarlton had declared herself ready to go and speak as to Ian’s character. But since she knew Ian only remotely, she was not summoned.

At the end of a tedious railway journey she reached the Gare d’Amiens, just by the cathedral, and had a dreary walk through streets populated by soldiers to the nurses’ hostel. Here she failed to eat a plate of lumpen food. A ferment of concern had her repeating in her head every argument for Ian’s exoneration. The skein of reasons rolled and unrolled itself there almost by its own volition. Just a few degrees more of intensity and she felt she would be in the streets haranguing military men. In such a state—and occupying a shifting mattress—she failed to sleep. She knew that most of the Australians were up in Flanders and that coming down here to the trial in Amiens was probably an excursion the officers of the court martial welcomed. She hoped that would put them in a kindly frame of mind.

A room in the mairie had been requisitioned for the trial and in the morning Naomi walked to that august French republican building with its two wings which made a near-encircling square within which little leniency seemed possible. Mounting the steps, she presented herself to the Tommy provost at the counter. He signed her in and asked her to wait in a corridor. Sitting on a bench, she saw a number of disheveled British soldiers proceeding to trial in handcuffs, to be judged for crimes of indiscipline and inebriation and desertion.

At last she was fetched by an Australian provost who asked her what the weather had been like on her journey and led her down a further corridor and into the featureless courtroom.

She saw Ian first. He stood in apparently good health behind a wooden barrier to one side of the room. He wore a jacket but with no webbing belt. They must have given him braces for the day because his pants seemed to stay up without the indignity of his holding them. There were two officers seated at tables on the floor of the court and then—at the table set on a rostrum—sat three young-looking officers who were to be Kiernan’s judges. She had expected older men. But many of the older men had been winnowed out. The contrast between the judges’ smartness, as worn as their uniforms might be, and Ian, produced a peculiar dread in her. Her eyes fixed on them as she was sworn in by a military clerk of the court and told to sit. They—by contrast—still wrote casual notes and turned around in their chairs to mutter to each other.

Ian’s eyes lay calmly on her a second, and then he looked to his front as if he had earlier been ordered to. He had a young captain for his counsel—a man with the sort of moustache grown in the hope it will cause him to be taken seriously. His military prosecutor was a major and seemed the oldest man in court—though barely forty years. Could these men all be relied on to judge Ian in their own terms? That was the tortuous question. Were there unseen superiors they would attempt to gratify? And though this room in the mairie was bare and lacked the atmospherics of the stage, the members of the court could have with justice appeared in any court-martial drama in any theatre. It seemed a gratuitous matter that a man’s freedom should hang on a ritual like this, with the three immature priests and the acolytes putting on their amateur show.

She was asked to stand in front of the table behind which stood Ian. During swearing-in and all the rest she could not see him. The prosecuting major asked her to outline her own military and individual reasons for having presented herself. Did she know the accused, when had she first met him, under what name did she know him, and in what subsequent circumstances did they meet? He asked automatically and seemed to have no idea how crucial all these matters were. There was a different order of urgency in her answers.

Despite not possessing any breath, she began to give the summary of their long acquaintance which the prosecutor did not let her spend much time on—interrupting details she considered crucial. For example, how Ian had behaved after the Archimedes sank. How could she make this major assess the true weight of these matters? How could he be made to see that it was essential to the globe’s sanity that he be acquitted?

So, he asked, you are now the fiancée of the accused?

She said that they had been betrothed according to the rites of the Society of Friends.

The Quakers? he asked.

That’s what people call them, said Naomi. And then she said, in case the name were an argument against Ian, When I visited the Society of Friends in Paris with Lieutenant Kiernan, I did not see anyone quake. In fact, the reverse was true. It was all calm consideration on their part.

And you are not one of these Quakers yourself?

No. I am not. But I am not averse to them.

Then how would you say this war should be fought? By men like Lieutenant Kiernan? Should everyone be a surgical supply officer or a medical orderly?

One of the presiding officers did remark offhandedly that the prosecutor was being perhaps too zealous and that Staff Nurse Durance was not herself on trial.

You don’t come from a background of conscientious objection to fighting, do you? the major asked her.

I do not, she agreed. But, mind you, the question never arose where I came from.

If you had a son, say, and there was a future war, would you let him fight?

I would try to stop him. I’ve seen so much mutilation… No mother would…

All right, the major said, holding up a hand and returning to his table. He sat and now Ian’s young captain was permitted to ask his questions. She watched his face for the sort of moral force that might set Ian free.

Has Lieutenant Kiernan ever mentioned in your presence his objection to bearing arms?

She was pleased to report he had. Even when we first met in 1915. Once we had become friends, he said many times he wanted to look after the wounded and sick but that his religion prevented him fighting.

And you and Lieutenant Kiernan are survivors of a torpedoed ship, the Archimedes? How did Lieutenant Kiernan behave at that time? Was he at all cowardly?

I would say he was very brave.

How did he demonstrate that courage?

In the water he took control of our party. It was why so many from our raft survived. He kept us together and urged us not to let go. Some men did let go but it was not his fault. When we saw a ship, he let off our flare.

And sadly that was all Ian’s lawyer wanted to know. Ian looked at her with a half smile as she was taken out of the court. She did not intend to go politely. She turned and said, Gentlemen, everyone who ever met him was told. That his conscience would not let him bear arms.

The young officer who had represented Ian intercepted her and whispered, If you wait outside, I’ll tell you the outcome.

The humanity of this cheered her. She waited in a delirium on a bench in the corridor. Here, she surmised, in peaceful times shopkeepers and farmers had sat awaiting decisions on land boundaries and drainage. Her imagination swung between Ian set free and some improbable sentence of years or worse. There was no question but that she too was counted in whatever befell him.

She was aware as she waited of all the futile prayers, including hers, which filled the air—appeals to a deity who did not seem able to stand between artillery and this or that mother’s son or wife’s husband. She felt the uselessness and the silliness of adding her own. Yet it was an unstoppable impulse. She pleaded that the judges became drunk with wisdom and sent Ian back to his clearing station.

The young captain advocate came out of the court.

I’m sorry to tell you this, he said. It’s fifteen years.

The stated span of time made no instant impact on her. Fifteen years? she asked. What does that mean?

It’s the sentence, sorry to say. Everyone agrees it’s rotten luck. But it had to be done. And of course it’s better than… other possibilities. What you said about his bravery when your ship sank… that helped him.

The reality of this toll of years entered her now like a wave of heat. She stumbled. He caught her by both elbows.

Steady on, Nurse, he told her. The presiding officer said you could see the prisoner for a few minutes. Only this: it’s best not to get him or yourself distressed.

Two military police officers took her to a small room where she could say good-bye to him. He was already standing with his hands cuffed in front of him. The officers remained there and seemed anxious above all—like the ones at the prison days before—that no touch should occur.

This is ridiculous, she said to him. Ian, what can I do?

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.

Men Lost

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.

She drifted off and looked across the room blankly for a while.

So that’s the official story, she continued. But there is a real story. And it’s a sadder one. But we are straying too far from your grief.

No, please.

Be assured—we are just beginning our campaign in regards to your man.

But you did say “sadder”…?

Yes. To men in power any woman who tries to deal with them on their terms is ex officio mad. My husband thinks me mad and actually evinces the sympathy of his fellows over me for going native in Australia, for never having the entirely appropriate dress, for failing infallibly to tolerate the primates who pass for society’s leaders as he envisages them. So there you are—I’m announced as mad. I’ve been mentioned in dispatches for it a number of times. And so, since I’m madly importunate with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and particularly towards Major Darlington’s poor upset cousin, the major suffers, you see. They talk about how poor old Darlington took up with the mad woman. After showing such promise! According to them, I am supposed to have been certified in Australia and spent time in a colonial asylum! And here is a man with research he wants accepted by a larger world, with valuable arguments about sepsis—a brilliant man. Yet everyone he talks to is thinking not about his argument, but about his mad lover. You see… And that was why he went. He had to choose between eminence and me.

Even in her own present state of wretchedness and edgy fortitude, Naomi felt the pain of this story, but doubted she could make any soothing commentary.

Of course, said Lady Tarlton, you don’t want to hear this. I have hopes that despite this show of a trial, in the end, soon, you’ll prove to be a fortunate woman. And have your Quaker, if that’s what you want.

But you deserve good fortune too, said Naomi.

Why ever would I? asked Lady Tarlton with a laugh.

Because you’re beautiful and clever and have a mighty soul.

Lady Tarlton laughed. That’s the very recipe—down to the last ingredient—for disaster. You know, when the war ends I might simply return to the old business and be a milliner. That would fulfill every worst expectation that ever they had. And indeed I love it. I loved constructing those confections that women put on their heads. To me the right sort of hat is far more interesting than anything hung in the Royal Academy.

Lady Tarlton began laughing and shaking her head, weighing the world as they all seemed to be required to do these days.

Darlington will now be treated with more seriousness, she admitted. From the point of view of antisepsis it is a day of triumph. Far more important than an adulterous affair. Except I did not think of it in those terms until now. Strange. In the midst of so-called sin we feel we are virtuous yet.

Lady Tarlton found this amusing. Naomi smiled too, within her intent to rescue Kiernan, and sipped the cognac. They sat in the silence of their unlikely companionship and the coincidence of their miseries.

The wounded enemy, captured and questioned, seemed quiet, grateful, and so pleased with the food—plain as it was—that it was clear rations were shorter on their side. But now their brothers were advancing to encircle the food of the west. British battalions appeared at Mellicourt and rested along the streets of the village and then marched up the road past the clearing station to the front to take up the line. Nurses and orderlies who happened to be in the open cheered raggedly as they went past. These men seemed eager in their mass and were placed at a distance from their inner, quivering selves by the overall militant tide running eastwards to meet a contrary current. There was a chance they were mere tokens of sacrifice, that the chief praise they would receive from all history might be those few thin cries of applause from the tired men and women of Mellicourt clearing station.

The patients at Mellicourt were cleared as hurriedly as they could be. No one knew what was to come, but it was clear the wounded and ill would be safer in base hospitals. Gas cases were removed in a day or so, and surgery was restricted to men who needed it at all costs. Any vehicle was likely to be used to move the injured—returning ammunition trucks were loaded up with the minor wounds. In a confusion of orders, two eight-ton trucks were packed up with stretchers and blankets, tanks of oxygen, and unopened cases of dressings and pharmaceuticals, all ready to be removed to safety.

Stragglers appeared—the crumbs of broken units—going west and mixed in with families on wagons or pushing the children and their goods in wheelbarrows. Even wagons hauling guns ground along the roads going west—seeking a new but rearwards position from which to pour down fury on the advancing enemy.

It was amidst all that flurry that somehow Charlie Condon appeared. It was beyond belief that in the great confusion of geographies and movements he could have located Sally. But having presented himself to Major Bright he was permitted to find her in her ward.

Go, go! said the Australian matron distractedly after Charlie appeared at the door of the only partly occupied resuscitation ward. The matron assumed that given the crisis he would not be staying long. Sally went towards him. She could not remember what was said when she got to him—the ordinary things, no doubt. Embracing was a dangerous indulgence to display to her matron and fellow nurses—they both knew that. But on the path they hooked each other’s hand until they reached the mess and a sitting room at the end of the hut which no one was using at this furious hour. They sat together and hauled their bodies close on an old settee which seemed to offer them intimacy but—being where it was, where anyone could appear at any second—could not deliver it. She could feel the mass of his upper body half turned to her. Sitting together wasn’t satisfactory. The whole of a body could not be brought in contact with the whole of another.

This is improbable, Charlie, she said. I’m not saying unwelcome. But it’s so improbable you’d be here.

No, he said, it’s probable. Remember how I was down here on reconnoiter. Now I’m with the advance party from Flanders.

They embraced again. Their mouths were so responsive and knowing of each other that it amazed her and gave her at a calmer level a sense of their destiny, and thus of safety. These seemed the most natural postures now—the postures of nearness which under the pyramids she had thought herself incapable of and had had no ambition for.

Mustn’t worry, he muttered. Our men have always been out in the open and bleeding. Now they’re in the open and, God knows, we’ll make them bleed.

She could tell he was convinced of this and his evoking of vengeance did not shock her. They were his enemy.

There’s talk we’ll be ordered back, she confided. Maybe Corbie, but who could tell? Perhaps the Germans will take Amiens itself, for all we know. I don’t want to see you coming in on a stretcher anyhow. And if you try to turn up and smile at me from a prone position, I’ll be very angry.

I have to go now, Sally, he said.

A high plane of a bed in a curtained room was clearly not going to make itself available to them. This was not the time, although their bodies claimed it was. He stood stooped for a while, since love was ridiculous too. Then he ran out to a truck waiting in the Bapaume Road. His eagerness frightened her. She mistrusted such haste. She felt almost betrayed with the speed and eagerness with which he ascended into the cabin and slammed the door.

Soon after Charlie left, stretcher bearers arrived in ambulances with wounded and told of regimental aid posts and dressing stations abandoned to the enemy with the poor fellows still lying in them. Prisoners who had been put to work under guards making a new path outside the wards were now speaking to each other in very jocular German. They could foresee assured deliverance. Some Gothas overhead began dropping their bombs from low height onto the retreating regiments and French people on the road. At a nearby crossroads two Archies barked at them like toothless house dogs. Morphine protected the worst wounded from knowledge of events. But in many other faces Sally saw an added panic and unrest. For the front from which they thought their wounds had excused them was reaching west to encompass them again.

At four o’clock, when Slattery and Sally were working in resuscitation with eight young nurses—all in the normal attempt to make the patients safe for being moved—Major Bright entered the ward and announced, We have orders to leave. You should pack what you have. Assemble with your luggage in ten minutes. We have to walk to the station, half a mile. There’ll be no one to carry bags so perhaps you will want to leave things.

Sally was appalled. She said she couldn’t simply leave the patients.

Honora said, I’ll stay with them. I am sure the Germans are not the barbarians we think.

Bright seemed impatient with this woman whom he was said to be infatuated with.

I’ve already made the same offer, he said, but it is not to be entertained. We are all ordered to leave.

Then you’ll have to carry me away, said Slattery. I’m not going of my own will.

For God’s sake, Slattery, don’t be dramatic. I promise you that once we’ve drawn back, you’ll be as buried as you want in a cascade of thousands who need you. But all I know is that we’re going west of here.

There were more than thirty nurses—and a number of doctors and perhaps sixty orderlies—who gathered their lighter kit and set off on the clogged road. They hobbled along with their luggage in hand towards the local railhead. Here they had travel warrants to Amiens to present. An orderly led them by a side road to avoid the blocked main, arrow-straight Bapaume–Albert Road. A spur line came to the railway station near the village and as the clearing station’s evacuees converged on it they met thousands of people—and a further vast and undifferentiated crowd of soldiers who had been attracted to it also. The side road they had taken had availed them nothing—this small station built to service local farms was now besieged by an overwhelming mass. There were men not so much in uniforms as in a carapace of muck sitting on windowsills and doorsteps, looking blankly at the commotion. Guards overwhelmed at the entrance gate to the station let the nurses through and onto the platform, where a rail transport officer who looked oddly familiar to Sally limped about blowing a whistle and pointing to the mass of soldiers and civilians waiting either side of the line.

The officer hobbled up to them and said, Ladies, leave your luggage here. The train is said to be due in twenty minutes. Matron, your women may need to fight their way aboard.

He took a whistle hanging from a lanyard around his neck and blew it to direct the guards to keep the rabble off the track. But the last vibrations of his whistle were overtaken by something profounder and more massive in sound. He blew the whistle again and screamed at the nurses. Across the line, everyone! Slit trench, far side!

Beneath the bombers they ran across the tracks and threw themselves into the trenches. They clung close. Slattery and Leonora were beside Sally, who had a brief view of Freud along the trench. Freud was hunched yet somehow looking detached from the peril. While the bombs could scare the deepest atoms within Sally, there was a part of Freud that could not be alarmed.

Above them were sounds more vast, she was sure, than anything that had been in their universe before—enmity that made the walls of earth shudder like a land in earthquake.

Their stocks of thunder depleted, the Gothas at last vacated the air. There were now hollow noises of lamentation from the earth above the trenches, and they climbed out, chastened. Major Bright and other doctors were traveling round in a spot where there were wounded and a mess of dead. Soldiers and men and women lay like winnowed stalks. Inspection showed Sally and the others that a mother and two small children—laid out neat as if for burial—had been killed by concussion. A regimental sergeant-major crossed the lines—a man still in control—and said the captain regretted to inform them that the rail line had been destroyed just a few hundred yards west.

I’m afraid that you’ll have to leave your luggage in the ticket office, said the sergeant-major, which I’ll lock. Then you’d better take off by foot.

They presented themselves to Bright and asked to be permitted to move amongst the injured. The curse was they had no equipment. Sally attended uselessly to a hemorrhaging boy with badges which declared Staffordshire Light Infantry. Some tried to treat with handkerchiefs and other oddments those soldiers who had been hit by shrapnel. In a kind of exasperation and clearheadedness Bright ordered them to get going and threw their bags into the ticket office at the station. They set off along the line—some with hand luggage and some with nothing. They were no longer separate from the beaten troops and the fleeing French.

They made relatively fast time the first mile and then—in a laneway by the rail—there appeared a string of five lorries, rocking over the mud which a few genuine spring days had mercifully hardened. All the nurses were to board them, said Bright. Light was fading as they climbed up as clumsily as they liked. No one expected athleticism from them now.

Many fell asleep under the canopies of the trucks and were woken after a while by stiffness. They alighted into a cold spring night at a crossroads where two British casualty clearing stations stood. The matron divided them into two parties and half were sent to the station north of the road to crowd in with the nurses there and half south.

Sally and the others sent to the south side waited in the nurses’ mess as a brisk British matron had orderlies carry palliasses and blankets for them into the women’s hut. As they waited they washed as well as they could, made cocoa and ate bread. Then they went into the hut—amidst the bedsteads of the British girls—and found their places on the floor and slept.

In the morning as they went from the tent to help in the wards, they saw a new battalion marching in the most splendid order down the road towards Albert. So used were they to disorder by now that the sight of hundreds of men advancing by company seemed a forgotten spectacle. The first time they had seen men move with more than training intentions had been in Egypt in eons past. Those men were immaculate and unsullied and accompanied by music. The nurses thought the music had been crushed by now. But these men gave off a similar air of solidity both as a mass and at the core of each component soul. British nurses standing amongst the huts and tents were telling them, It’s your Australians!

The fact that these were of her tribe and looked unflustered seemed like a curative for the Allied retreat and evoked in Sally and the others a primitive urge for celebration. Hope insisted on rising as it had in the ill-informed spring of 1916. They started hauling out handkerchiefs to wave, unaware for now of this being a commonplace of war and a means to stoke martial purpose. They went running down towards the road swinging them—cheering ecstatically as if this column were not simply a fragment of an army or a mere stone thrown into the maw of a gale but a total answer.

Leonora yelled, Gidday, boys! to them, and the men said, Crikey, it’s Australian nurses. And men roared out that they were going to go and get the dingoes. That they’d show Fritz he shouldn’t have left his dugouts. They’d come down from Belgium (following routes Charlie might have had some role in reconnoitering) to do that. This energy and ferocious purpose they gave off sent the women into a further delirium. Yesterday—the pain of being refugees and powerless. Today—this, the antidote. Now there were trucks, and another battalion, and Australians yelling, Fini retreat, girls! They looked so fresh because they had just left the railway and were full of marching. And if they were maniacs and spat in the face of reality, then theirs was a mania necessary for the morning.

The last of the men and some horse-drawn guns vanished down the road. The madness waned in the nurses and there was sudden wistfulness. Had they seen mere chaff for the furnace? They drifted back across the meadow to present themselves again for use in the wards.

That afternoon many of the English nurses were pulled out towards Doullens but Sally and the others were pleased to be permitted to stay. No ambulances arrived, however, to deliver wounded—only ambulances to take yesterday’s away. And the next morning—despite the dazzling gestures of advance they had seen the previous day—they were ordered back again and packed washed and half-dry undergarments in their valises, embarrassed for their unbathed bodies. But all their patients had at least been cleared off to the rear or to the cemetery across from the road to town—placed just as the one at Deux Églises had been.

Their new station at Corbie shared a crossroads with a British casualty clearing station. Easter had come and gone—swallowed by the emergency. At a church parade in memory of the landings at Gallipoli three years before, an Australian padre declared that this year Easter had a special meaning, given the deliverance of the British Army from annihilation due—he stressed this—to the heroism and Christlike self-sacrifice of those two Australian divisions who were thrown into the hole—sixty thousand or more of Christendom’s finest young men. Even Sally found him irksome in his trumpeting of Antipodeans as saviors of lesser beings. It seemed a simpleminded version to those who had nursed the survivors of almost undifferentiated battles. Behind her, Sally heard a well-modulated English girl mutter, Vainglorious old fool!

But above all, points about who had died and who had fled and who had stood—although the latter had certainly been the Australians they’d seen march by—seemed for the moment beneath arguing about. For this was not the hour for being prideful. They knew the Germans could still come and had not been infallibly stopped. They were themselves just ten miles from Amiens. That told you something of the enemy’s recent territorial success. Besides, the war was not a football match. Points were not allotted. Even in success, points were lost.

At the mess table in Corbie a retreat-exhausted Honora Slattery told Sally she did not believe the rumor—though many people did—that the new influenza striking orderlies and nurses and sending men to the rear had been dreamed up in an enemy laboratory. This was to give them too much credit, she declared.

Just the same, she said further, a woman can’t help wondering…

It seemed now that Major Bright had been forgiven by Slattery for tearing her away from her wounded at Deux Églises—prisoners though they may have become. Slattery confided in Sally that she and Bright now “had an understanding.” He was a disbeliever but a better fellow than most believers, and her parents would just have to lump him—the fact that he wasn’t some rosary-saying, beer-guzzling, bet-laying RC fool from the slums.

Freud—when told—took the news with her air of wise distance.

What, precisely, do you mean by “an arrangement”? she asked with an unnecessary coldness.

It means, said Honora, determined not to answer her plainly, that if there’s ever peace, I’ll wait until the prison camps and the hospitals have been emptied and if Lionel has not been found… Then, we’ll see. That’s the arrangement with the major.

Freud said, My God! He’s a patient man.

Would you want any other kind? asked Slattery. Is your American a patient man?

Sometimes, said Freud. It all grinds along. It is a hard thing to sustain enchantment. Particularly with a difficult woman like me.

Sally began to wonder if Freud would ever recover from Lemnos. She achieved the appearance of steady purpose for long periods and—apparently—in the operating theatre too. But on other days she swung between content and cold mistrust at a pace no one could have considered normal. Yes, it was established. Her surgeon Boynton was a patient man.

At the Australian Voluntary the crisis at the front was visible in the men who arrived by ambulances. The hospital had at a stretch held two hundred and fifty, but now the demand brought in over three hundred. The reported Australian success had not been bloodless—the cocksure Australians the nurses had seen marching that operatic morning, brimful of self-belief, had paid by the thousands. Naomi supervised treatment in the preoperative ward on more than a dozen fractures, face and thigh and even serious thoracic wounds, and amputations which had turned gangrenous or septic and needed to be prepared for surgery. A new young military surgeon and Airdrie worked in the theatres, along with one of the ward doctors anxious for surgical experience and showing none of that nicety of conscience or concern about it that Hookes had once shown.

On a hectic morning towards what would prove to be the end of the military crisis, Lady Tarlton came looking for Naomi and found her directing the Australian nurses and the English Roses. As ever, when she arrived Lady Tarlton had an earnest demeanor. She had taken no more time since her consolatory drink with Naomi to lament Major Darlington. But without Mitchie—and in the light of their combined loss of their men—they spoke to each other like confidantes. Lady Tarlton was not immobilized by sadness and none of her fervors had stalled.

The name of the commander of the newly assembled Australian Corps, she told Sally, a huge one of five divisions, has just been announced. This general is planning to visit the general hospital in Boulogne on his way from a meeting in London back to the front.

I knew him in Melbourne, said Lady Tarlton airily. He’ll be tolerant if I raise the vexed matter of Lieutenant Kiernan’s imprisonment. And, Naomi, we should be strong in the matter—even to the point of offending our hosts at Boulogne.

After his trial Ian had been sent across the Channel and was serving his sentence in Millbank Prison in London with other Australian miscreants and supposed deserters. Millbank lay on the dank edge of the Thames. It sounded to Naomi a cage for pneumonia as well as harm dished out by guards whose natures had been changed by the place. It was always a solace therefore to be associated with Lady Tarlton’s determination. Sentiments such as “even to the point of offending our host” gave Naomi a sweet sense of alliance.

Can we spare the time?

Appoint the sister in charge of the English Roses. You and I are not indispensable, you know.

On the morning of the general’s visit, Lady Tarlton appeared in the front hallway of the château in a full-length fawn coat over her best cerise dress and her long, thin-ankled button-up boots. She looked superb—a true force—and there was no trace of the rejected woman about her. Naomi, of course, wore her dull go-to-town uniform. They traveled to Boulogne in the now faded, dented, imperfectly repainted but functional glory of Lady Tarlton’s vehicle and arrived in time to walk along the graveled paths and visit the grave of brave Matron Mitchie. Where was her son now? In England, they hoped. Or along the Somme or Ancre Rivers somewhere—engaged endlessly in repulsing the enemy, as all the Australian divisions were said to be.

Carling drove them along the familiar road—going slow in the sump where Mitchie had been killed—and to the outskirts of the huge general hospital. The administration building had put out all the flags and bunting for the arrival of the Australian commander. The large shape of a kangaroo done in white pebbles served as a centerpiece of a bed of gravel in the square. Beside this great white image of a marsupial the matron-in-chief welcomed Lady Tarlton—with an air which said she wished there had been some way of stopping her being there. The matron was torn between showing contempt for Lady Tarlton’s well-advertised insistence upon maintaining the vanity of her own private hospital, and the fact that this was British nobility and the wife of a former governor-general of that Commonwealth in whose name they were lined up today around the dominating kangaroo. As they aligned themselves with the honor guard at the main entrance, Lady Tarlton murmured to Naomi, He’s Jewish—you understand—and at the same time a child of Prussians. He was an engineer and very high in the militia and the university senate when my husband and I were in Melbourne. His name escapes me. Excuse me a second.

And she turned to the matron-in-chief who stood beside her and asked, Matron, could you refresh my memory? The general’s name again, please?

General John Monash, the woman declared coldly. Milady.

That’s it, said Lady Tarlton to Naomi, the matron listening in. That’s the name. Monash. Now at his command are more than one hundred and twenty thousand of the finest men on earth! Oh yes, some of them are rough-hewn or not hewn at all. But trees that stand. That’s it. Bravo, General Monash!

The general’s automobile entered the gates and orderlies with rifles presented arms. Young nurses saluted because here was their chief. Their chief and his men—it was said—would lead the armies of salvation and redeem the known world and avenge the sad retreat only now ending. Monash’s men—it was believed especially by Australians—could save the bacon, the beef, the kingdoms of the west. This was the man who had in the emergency driven back the Germans through Villers-Bretonneux. No maidenly yell of approbation could be too strident for him.

He dismounted his vehicle—a middle-aged man heavy in the hips and yet somehow youngish and crisp in movement. He introduced himself to the chief medical officer and then walked along the line of nurses attended by the matron-in-chief. Soon he reached Lady Tarlton. Lady Tarlton! he said with enthusiasm, as they wrung each other’s hands. You and your husband were so generous to me and my wife in Melbourne. I’ve heard of your Australian hospital. I’m afraid that like me it attracts its critics. But since I feel I know you, I say, good for you! Yes, good for you!

I might as well tell you, stated Lady Tarlton, my efforts seem to be an embarrassment to many. Enthusiasm is my great fault.

The general said, If that were a disease, I wish others would catch it. I wish it was of an epidemic scale. As for embarrassment, you know that I am a source of embarrassment too. A mere citizen soldier. And… well, the other thing. And on the other thing, I must again thank you for the invitations to Government House.

She introduced him to her matron—as she called Naomi. An interesting and complicated face, Naomi thought, an activity behind the eyes and an engagement in all around him—in her as well. None of the oafish oblivion of Lord Dudley.

If you have a moment, said Tarlton in a lowered voice, I must ask you about Miss Durance’s fiancé. A medical supply officer, he has been imprisoned for refusing to take up a rifle. And yet he is a Quaker and made his pacifism clear when he enlisted. I am sure you of all people could not stand by and see such religious persecution.

Naomi could see—from a visible jolt in the general’s eyes—that he was not too pleased to be distracted by such a reproach on a ceremonial visit.

Why do you say that I of all people… Are you referring to my Jewishness? If so…

No, no, not that. I mean you as a citizen and a progressive.

Naomi decided to care little for the embarrassment of generals.

My fiancé, General Monash, has been imprisoned in Millbank because he is a member of the Society of Friends and served the Medical Corps and has done so since Gallipoli. To be of service in that regard was his motive for enlisting. But the order that he take up a rifle… that was something he could not consent to.

There was a darkness about the general’s brow. You realize we can’t have people making choices, he told Lady Tarlton as if she were the relay point for Naomi. You must understand above all that our French and English brethren are outraged by our leniency towards our own men when they are so stern towards theirs. I have to say, Lady Tarlton, I wish this matter had been raised in another forum.

Lady Tarlton said, If I were sure, General, that we would share some other forum, then I would choose to raise it then rather than now.

I plead with you, General, said Naomi, aware that she and her patron Lady Tarlton were sabotaging the event but willing to do it if she could simply by those means engrave Ian’s case on the general’s memory. This is a man—Ian Kiernan—who has done good service and is no coward, but a sincere Quaker.

You said Quaker already, the general murmured with some coldness.

May we write to you? asked Naomi. Will you remember us?

Oh, said the general, I think it’s pretty well assured I shall remember you.

Then, thank you, said Naomi. Thank you earnestly, sir.

Yes, thank you, Colonel… no, I’m sorry, General, said Lady Tarlton, with her laugh a little like a shaken chandelier. When we first met, you were…

Yes, said the general, a militia colonel when you first met me, Lady Tarlton. Things change and wars elevate us to heady heights.

And I rejoice in your appointment, General, asserted Lady Tarlton.

Thank you. Excuse me.

And he moved away to visit the rest of the line of nurses.

Lady Tarlton turned to Naomi. I think we did very, very well, she whispered—though the rest of the reception line were at least mystified at why the renowned general had spent so much time with the eccentrics of the Australian Voluntary. The matron-in-chief wore a face drained of all hope. This was to be a meritorious, pleasant, smooth day. She walked on fixedly by the general’s side. But she knew the occasion had been plundered.

The Fever People Talked Of

At Corbie one afternoon Sally could feel what might be the onset of the flu everyone was discussing. At some clearing stations they said it had felled—at least temporarily—one out of three, and in a few, half the personnel. Sally suffered a shiver and a leadenness of the joints and throat ache. She took her own temperature and saw it had escalated in a few hours, which was said to be one of the marks of the thing—rapidity of onset. She presented her symptoms to the matron and was taken to a tented ward where twelve nurses who had caught it were tended by other nurses wearing masks.

One of them said to her, How ridiculous, to have a spring and summer flu when there was no real winter one.

She suffered high-fever delirium in which she was back in the cold-to-the-core water after the Archimedes. And up swam her mother with an unfamiliar smile and said, I can teach you to let go.

Mama!

She was later told she cried that. Were you dreaming about your mother, love? she was asked.

Her exchange with her mother involved gratitude. You knew I had determined to commit a crime and you died of your own will to prevent it.

She also encountered Charlie Condon—he was engaged in painting the wall of a trench yellow and wanted her to admire it.

When she was clearer headed, she saw Slattery wearing a mask. She had come to see her and told her how there had been an advance of some miles and everyone was going partway back towards Deux Églises—the trucks of equipment were loaded again. Amiens and all things holy were saved for now.

A doctor said, I don’t think you have the flu. Your symptoms are not quite right. Yes, you had quick onset, but you caught something else—something that crawled out of the trenches and struck you.

She was taken from the contagious ward and put in a separate room in a medical ward just in case, but soon was permitted to walk around—feeling limp perhaps, but confident of revival. A brief postcard came from Charlie to say he was well, and a long-delayed and redirected note from Naomi, which broke to her the news that Ian Kiernan was in prison in England. The length of sentence took her breath away.

The influenza struck Château Baincthun when one of the Red Cross nurses collapsed. The pathology lab run by Darlington had fallen into disuse and throat swabs had to be sent to the overworked laboratory in Boulogne so that the nature of the thing could be confirmed. The nurse was placed in a separate room and declined with a terrible rapidity, dying in the afternoon of the following day. She was a woman exhausted by work and very thin and the common wisdom was that this was an influenza crafted—like howitzers—to take the young in particular.

She was considered unfortunate, however, because medical reports from elsewhere declared the infection would be widespread but the death rate shallow. Some of the men in the wards—the healthy and the recuperating—caught it. Masks were now compulsory if one was to nurse anyone suffering from the virus. The heresy of Major Darlington was becoming an orthodoxy—at least in this case.

In those early days of this startling new outbreak, Naomi received a further letter—this one from Melbourne. Its letterhead said “Kiernan and Webster, Importers and Manufacturers, Industrial Machinery.”

Naomi had not yet passed on to her own father the news of Ian Kiernan, let alone news of the betrothal sessions or his imprisonment. She did not choose yet to explain the—by Macleay standards—oddity of it all.

Sally stayed at Corbie with the British nurses until a doctor decided she was well enough to take the rough journey eastwards to start work at Albert, where her normal station had fetched up. There were now—said the walking wounded she took to nursing again—remarkable advances accomplished not over months but sometimes in a day or a few hours. In the mess, the newspapers—when she had time to read them—were full of phrases about thwarting the intentions of the Hun, turning back his hosts, stemming his tides. Was all this true? For there had seemed all that spring and early summer of 1918 to be no lessening of the ambulance stream. The clearing station at Corbie felt as she imagined a factory might when orders could not be fulfilled, however industrious the laborers.

So on a warm morning she climbed into the passenger seat of an ambulance to go to Vecquemont, to which her clearing station had been moved. The station was held within the arms of a forked road, and was chiefly a place of tents—a nascent institution. After a reunion in the mess she found out that here too some men were suffering the three-day fever—as people now called it. Or else they said the Spanish flu. What the Spanish had done to deserve the honor of that name Sally did not know. A new ward had to be set up to contain soldiers who arrived with it and orderlies who went down with it.

Be careful, ladies, said Dr. Bright, visiting the mess. Eat well and rest as much as you can.

But Sally could see Honora, Freud, Leo, the lot of them, were all dazed from working day-and-night–long shifts—interspersed by an occasional six or seven hours of sleep.

It was perhaps three days later that Leo—blessed always by sunlight and sturdiness and pursuing the firmest line of destiny of any of them—fell on the floor of her ward as if struck by a blow. This was what the vicious fever did, like the attacks at the front—it fulfilled its purpose in an hour. It ambushed and it felled the sufferer according to its own frantic timetable.

This was considered the worst of luck since the doctors had all decided the influenza was waning. They carried her to the tent which had been set up to contain the earlier victims of the virus. Overnight she declined at a terrible rate into a vicious kind of pneumonia. Someone had whimsically called the first phase of flu—the one Sally had been wrongly suspected of catching—“Three-day Lady.” But this lady raged at a quicker rate. Honora and Freud took turns watching Leonora by day—speaking to her through their masks, taking her temperature and pulse, washing her face, promising her recovery. Sally—considered to be recuperating—was advised not to approach the place. In any case, recovery was the one possible outcome for a young, dazzling girl like Leo, a girl whose life had advanced like a life in a novel, whose inevitable marriage—announced two springs ago—had been delayed by evil events, but was designed to be the long story in which this present condition was a mere few pages. Her development from childhood to affections which bloomed in time into a noble union of effectiveness—that was the life intended for Leo. Everyone could sense it. She would get better.

In Leo’s periods of clarity she remarked that there was pain behind her eyes and in her back. But later the next day her face grew abnormally blue and Honora and Freud saw with alarm a foamy blood appear at her nostrils. Her urine stained her bed and they cleaned her briskly as she moaned and carried on some phantom conversation. Towards evening Major Bright declared that her symptoms had become hemorrhagic—hence the blood now showing at the mouth. She grew comatose and two hours later—while the message of her illness was still on its way to Captain Fellowes—she died.

As well as grief there was astonishment. This girl whose soul was not written on water but on solid foundations had been unable to keep a hold on the earth. This girl was now attached to the malign Somme eternally. She was carried in a procession of every nurse who could be spared from the clearing station, of every orderly, to a grave over which stood a squad of French territorials and one aged trumpeter—all in their helmets and blue tunics. Dr. Fellowes arrived. He wavered and smelled of whisky and mumbled his thanks for uttered condolences at the graveside. Not only was life short but so was ceremony, and the clearing station now demanded the nurses’ return.

This sudden, galloping death of Leonora grieved Sally, who could utter only obvious things such as, “Poor, poor girl. So beautiful, so sensible and such a good nurse.” It was an obvious case of the disrespect of viruses and war for every solid plan. In the civil world lives were foreshortened by accidents with horses or falling timber, by tetanus and peritonitis. You couldn’t help but believe—because the belief took away your own fear—that these victims were the lesser characters of the human tale—Mrs. Sorley’s shadowy crushed husband for one. But it was clear now the influenza had combined with high explosives, the machine gun, and the mustard gas to disprove these illusions. And the numbers who saw this awful affliction as the enemy’s work were diminishing. Germans suffering from the influenza were captured as evidence it was willing to be an equal slayer.

Honora asked Sally one evening in the mess, Do you think this thing is a punishment on us all for allowing the war?

But most of the women—including Honora and Sally—had had considerable childhood instruction in the doctrine of free will. Man chose what to do. Whatever he chose to do, God tolerated it, but might punish it too.

Freud asked briskly, If he didn’t step in to stop it, why does he step in only at the punishment stage?

There was great uneasiness in some about Freud’s opinion. It challenged too much what they had absorbed in childhoods to whose roofs they wanted to return.

Leo’s unplanned death evoked in Sally a horror at the certainty of Charlie’s death—planned as it was, along with others, by the ambitious enemy. She had always been subject to spasms of despair and confidence on the matter, but now they alternated at a hectic rate. His eminence as a man saved him by some lights and doomed him by others. The extra element of this influenza now struck her with an enhanced alarm for him, from which she could not distract herself by the normal means—working to the point of exhaustion.

Major Bright called together a gathering of them around the breakfast table and read a letter from the general of the Medical Corps praising them for the “textbook” workings of the station. There was—it seemed—a formula for death rates in stations in relation to numbers of surgeons, doctors, nurses, orderlies. The equation had shone a meritorious light on them. Mathematics emphasized that numbers—and not a lone tremulous soul—were the issue. That too somehow made everything worse.

July arrived with poppies growing in every spare foot of earth and around the edges of the woods, and news of further developments at the front came to Sally as if they were family tidings—intimate to her. The strangely jubilant lips of the wounded told of a specially and cleverly designed battle fought at a village named Hamel. Here, the Australians and Monash had shown the British and the French how things were done with tanks and aircraft, artillery and infantry—all in the one glorious amalgam. She hoped it was true.

Time thundered in her head and she began to suffer migraines and yellow blotched vision. Major Bright prescribed a draught of codeine for her. On a day when the station was utterly clear of casualties because some administrative error had told the authorities it was full, or else because of some lull at the front—indeed on a day where no artillery could be heard for extended periods of minutes—Major Bright enlivened them by calling another picnic on the edge of the woods a few hundred yards east of the station.

It was a wistful affair at first, for Leo was not there, and hers was a dominant and absorbing absence. But the invigorating day and the poppies and hollyhocks and butterflies grasped hold of them soon enough. Nurses and surgeons and ward doctors sat down beside spread bedsheets fresh from the makers and not yet used in the wards and ate all the good French things delivered up to them by a grateful Amiens—cheese, bread, pâté. When hunger was satisfied the question arose of what people would do after the war. Various doctors announced their plans—returning to practices in bush towns or in suburbs. One said he intended to stay in London to study ophthalmology. Bright declared he hoped to return to the operating theatres of Australia where—he claimed—the standards of practice were at least as good as anywhere in Europe or Britain.

I speak facts, he assured everyone. These are not the words of a jingo.

Freud’s American boyfriend, Boynton, made no special claims that he’d go back to Chicago—when he had volunteered in early 1915, the senior surgeons at Rush Hospital had been so hostile to the idea that he wondered if he would get his job there back, even though he would return instructed by the experience of war surgery. But there were other places he could try, he supposed, even San Francisco, where his uncle was a physician and a surgeon.

Without warning—and like a public announcement not of professional intentions but of the end of the alliance with Boynton—and without waiting for all the doctors to define their plans, Freud spoke up. Well, she said, should the war ever end, I think I’ll stay on in Europe. The reports from Germany—all the illness brought about by the blockade—make me think I might go there.

Dr. Boynton regarded the surface of the sheet on which the picnic items were spread. He knew, Sally assumed, that Freud was wounded in some way and that her goodwill towards him fluctuated. The corners of his mouth turned up in a semirictus that combined regret, bewilderment, and embarrassment.

I am sick of seeing Europe in this particular way, Freud added. I feel I haven’t seen the true Europe at all.

Honora surprised everyone—not least Major Bright—by agreeing it was a good idea. It was as if she did not see Freud’s statement in its real terms but only in terms of a desire for peaceful tourism.

I reckon, Honora went on, that whenever it ends, a woman could live for a year in France on the savings she makes working here.

A glaze came over Major Bright’s eyes too. Was Honora—after all those demented months of hers—unable to read what Freud meant? He had his career to pursue in Australia—he would not be permitted to pursue it here once there were no more wounds. Professional urgency would not permit him to sightsee for a year in France.

Freud got up suddenly from the picnic. Thank you, Major, she said. If you will excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.

They tried to start a conversation again in normal tones, but it could only sputter along as Freud descended the slight slope which led to the nurses’ tents.

Boynton begged them to excuse him soon after.

Sally had made no pronouncements on her own future. If Leo lacked one, all the more might she. So an instinct of reticence—which would have kept her quiet in normal times—prevented her all the more now. The young wounded who reckoned the enemy was dished might carry a sense of communal triumph to the grave with them. Yet she could not feel it herself. And if it did ever end, she thought, I might simultaneously stop breathing. Only the chance to see the artifices of paint in Charlie’s company gave her a glimmer of the afterlife.

As a mist rose, the Ford and Sunbeam ambulances arrived, full of young Germans—dirty faced and bleeding, deflated and staring. The field-gray somber walking wounded of the enemy advanced with extreme caution and—as if trained in medical etiquette—soberly visited friends in the resuscitation ward and on nurses’ orders held up bags of plasma and saline and looked down at their sallow comrades whose martial ambitions were reaching a close.

A letter from England from Captain Constable—the defaced soldier—had chased Sally all over Picardy and now caught up with her.

Constable and his ironic distance from his frightful wound and from the regimen of face-remaking operations that he had endured was as much a tonic to her and Slattery as they had once tried to be to him.

Unexpectedly but in view of a further improvement at the numbers brought up by the algebraic formula applied to clearing stations by headquarters, Freud and Sally and a few others received orders signed by Bright to take leave. Without Charlie, Paris would not offer enough. So Sally decided to try to get to Amiens and north to Boulogne to visit Naomi at the Australian Voluntary before taking the Blighty ship. She had a hankering to visit Captain Constable and to see one of the fatuous West End shows. But on the way she wanted to talk to Naomi about Charlie, and the swiftness of Leo’s death as a sign of the imbalance of things.

The truck journey to Amiens took two of her available hours, and the train for Boulogne left on time since it fed the arteries of the war. In the train she slept almost without interruption in a near-empty first-class compartment of comfortable velvet. She reached the Gare Centrale and signed herself in to the Red Cross nurses’ home and found she could send a messenger by bike to Château Baincthun. Waiting to hear from Naomi, she walked towards the port and managed to reach a lookout on the ancient walls, from which she could see the entire drama of the place. Camouflaged troopships were arriving with soldiers and leaving with wounded and men on leave. Along the beaches bathing cabins weren’t disgorging many swimmers but she saw a man with one leg emerge and hop across the wet sand, determined to encounter the late summer sea.

She made her way back to the hostel along narrow workers’ streets where barefooted boys played rough games and looked up from their little brutalities to see her pass. Future poilus, she thought, who would be sent to fight for the right to their squalor.

By the time she got back from her walk Naomi was outside the hostel looking peaked and concerned. Her face was transfigured when she saw Sally, and the sisters embraced without any complications or reticence or subtle suspicion or begrudging. Now—with all distance between them vanished—they went looking for a café. Naomi, Sally could see, had been altered by the loss of Mitchie and Kiernan to something simpler, more intense and direct. Sally had once thought her complexity would baffle all science. Now Naomi carried on her face a look of the most straightforward joy at reunion, of happiness unanalyzed and unapologized for. She also looked older—or at least ageless—and still thinner. As much as any soldier, she too needed a peace.

I had an idea, said Naomi, once they had ordered their coffee. It’s a beautiful afternoon and the hospital is just five miles inland. Are you well enough to walk?

Sally was tired, but nonetheless felt exhilaration at the idea of a hike. They set off with the sun high and mists of insects tumbling in the air above the crops of wheat and barley that the sisters would see through gaps in hedges and over farm gates. Fields of flax bloomed pale-blue and blowflies troubled the hindquarters of cattle. This country was not as flat as the battle areas—the hedgerows climbed genuine slopes that were steeper than the mere slight ridges for which tens of thousands had died further east.

It seemed to Sally it was a time as far off as childhood since they had walked like this together in country roads. She spoke briefly of Charlie and more of Leo and the untowardness of all that. Naomi talked of the campaign she and Lady Tarlton were engaged in for liberating Kiernan. The many eminent people they’d written to. He had now been sent to Aldershot Military Prison—the Glasshouse, whose inmates were considered unfit for visits. Still, Naomi was trying to organize one. Trying to imagine what his life was like plagued her imagination. What sort of men might guard and bully him? she asked Sally, not expecting an answer. Certainly men who gave him no credit for the Archimedes or Lemnos or service in France.

In any case Lady Tarlton had told her—as Naomi further explained to her sister—that it was likely that, should war end, civil lawyers could be introduced into the equation, men who could argue a case like Ian’s all over again in a world where reinforcements were no longer the constant cry of generals. Lady Tarlton said she knew a number of such lawyers—fellows who’d represented suffragettes. How they would be paid, Lady Tarlton did not say.

Of course, I’m willing to spend my savings, Naomi continued, and Ian’s father is—I think—affluent. And certainly devoted to his son. And I’ve never found that Lady Tarlton makes a boast on which she does not come good. So I have champions and I have possible resources. Well, that’s my rave and I apologize it takes so long. But now, your Charlie. What of him?

There was less Sally could say. She couldn’t broach the adventure in the hotel at Ailly. And the rest was all tedious and uninterrupted anxiety. There was no earthly power to whom she could write on Charlie’s behalf.

He never seems to be my Charlie, she said. First he’s the army’s. Then he’s his own man. It’s because he’s unownable, I think, that I love him.

Naomi laughed. Well, now, she said. That’s you, that’s Sally exactly.

Sally stared ahead, shielding her eyes so that she could scan the road for potential perils. Naomi reached and enclosed Sally’s hand in her own.

Look, she said, as if to distract her sister. It was along here—in that little dip in the road—that the limousine was thrown on its side and went careering. And poor Mitchie…

This kindly and shady summer stretch—with a slight kink before the trees around the château—hove into view. They both inspected the patch of road as if its tragedy could be reread and perhaps adjusted.

Naomi said, I had a visit from Mrs. Sorley’s son. He seems a big, handy boy. Another one to worry about though.

Sally privately thought she would swap Mrs. Sorley’s son for Charlie’s safety any day. Of course there was guilt attached to doing the deal in her head—Charlie for the other boy. As if there was in fact someone to make the contract with.

It was strange when I met young Sorley, said Naomi. We were trying to feel as if we were stepbrother and stepsister—he made the bravest attempt at it, poor boy. He took the trouble to come here in the first place. I hope we can sit down at some time and have real conversations.

Sally took thought and then said, It used to take us Durance girls a long time to get to know people like that. But we’re getting better at it, I think.

Yes. Taciturn, that’s what they call us. Standoffish. Were you aware people called us that?

Not you, insisted Sally.

Oh yes, said Naomi. Me more than you. They never used the word “shy.” Well, I suppose people think, why use a good word when you can use a bad. I think that on balance you’re much better at being social than I am. I felt you got on quicker with girls like Leo and Freud and Slattery.

You must be really bad then, said Sally, and they laughed together at the affliction of their genealogy.

Sally stayed at the château for two days—meeting Airdrie and the English Roses and the military surgeon and the young ward doctors, and sharing Naomi’s room. Sometimes she went with Naomi into the wards to do dressings and irrigations and to make beds. Otherwise she walked men around the garden. The English Red Cross nurses were awed to see an army sister descend to a menial level, and one said, You Australians—you’ll do anything! as if the Durance girls were exceptionally free-spirited colonials.

As they sat in bed, Naomi told her the story of Major Darlington who—went the authorized version—had chosen between the respectability of base hospitals and the favor of other surgeons over Lady Tarlton’s company.

She seems, said Sally, unshaken.

She can’t be defeated. When all this started I didn’t expect her to be here all the time like this. I thought she would just set it going, like God starting the world, and then go back to London to her accustomed life. But she’s labored with us. And when she’s not here, she’s in Paris visiting the club she’s got going there. She belongs to whatever she begins. But after the war—so she says—she’s not sure she won’t just go back and put up with Lord Tarlton and make an end to all the blather and mess of the whole love business. I doubt she’ll be able to though. It’s always going to be in her nature to do exceptional things.

Naomi took her down to the docks when it was time for her Blighty ferry. They kissed like two children reunited in play. An old French paddlewheel ferry painted in its war patterns of gray waited like a cross between a Dickens-style Channel packet and an antique battleship.

I’ll ask at Horseferry Road if I can see Ian, Sally promised her.

It would be marvelous. I’m afraid you’ll be refused, but please try if you can.

A line of soldiers stood back to let Sally—her travel warrant in hand, and Naomi as escort—advance to the gangway. A military policeman checked and approved her documents and she went up the plank, turning partway to see Naomi’s face streaming with tears. So the entente proposed in a palm court in Alexandria three years before was in full operation. Cherishing her sisterhood, she saw to the west the promise of a long twilight in rouged clouds yellow at the edges. It felt to Sally a good and decent thing to live. Even now. Rapture could not be postponed until a more perfect day. Not when a person had a lover and a sister.

The Epsom Hospital in Surrey was enormous and branched out—in grounds that were once the private garden of a rich family. The grounds held a number of huts and a space where men in hospital uniform—the baggy, pyjama-like tops and bottoms with various-colored lapels—were playing cricket. There was something about the energy of the game and the way hands were thrown up when a man was caught out from whacking a ball impossibly high that made her hope Captain Constable had not been hurled with his one eye into the deep end of a game just yet. She followed the driveway to the main house, where they knew she was coming—Captain Constable and she had exchanged mail about it.

A volunteer was sent to fetch him and he came down the stairs wearing military uniform, his soldierhood taken on again. She saw the sutures across his jaw, the not-quite-formed nose, the unnatural glossiness and tightness of the upper lip and cheek. Though she could see something of what he might have been before, what was there was both little and at the same time an undeniable cure. The scale of his bravery regarding the damage to his face had driven her to expect more than this. The surgeons had forced his facial items back in place. The surfaces they had restored were correct in a technical sense but were somehow unmoving and incapable of expression. His visage was doomed to be an artifact rather than a natural phenomenon. Except for the left eye, this face was dead. It had taken two years to achieve this, and this was all that could be achieved.

Hello, Sister, he said exuberantly. I wondered, might I take you to tea in the high street? It isn’t far.

She agreed. They set off on the gravel drive with her arm in his. Reaching the gate and walking down leafy streets he pointed out the grandeur of the distant race track.

That’s where that suffragette threw herself under the hooves of the King’s horse, he said. Just like the boys who’ve thrown themselves under the hooves in the last four years.

You needn’t have dressed for me, she said. If that was what you did.

Oh, he said, after all this time, I’m sick of those rotten pyjamas. They look ridiculous with a slouch hat.

She noticed the wound stripe on the left forearm of his jacket. She thought it underexplained what he had suffered.

They’re sending me home very soon anyhow, he said. So I’ve had to clean up the old kit.

She wondered if the mayor of his municipality would bestow honors on this drastically altered young man, and remembered her sister’s story of the epidemic of suicide on the ship Naomi had taken home long ago. But he was too strong a man for that.

In a teashop in the high street they ordered tea and cream puffs. English cakes were sludge beside French. Yet this big, jolly lump of dough and sugar was somehow the right thing. The waitress did not seem surprised by his appearance. She might have become used to serving such men.

Do you know, said Sally when the tea arrived and the fragrant steam began to have its effect on both of them, if I had to give a prize for my best patient of all, it would be you. It would really be you. I’m not trying to butter you up. I doubt I could have borne what you have.

He laughed a rueful laugh and drank some tea. She wondered if there were nerves in those lips to feel the heat of the drink.

I’m not so good now as I was earlier, he asserted. I’m getting churlish. The thing’s settled now. I’ve got what I’ll have forever. I could handle the disease but I don’t know how I’ll go—if I tell you the truth—with the cure.

You are entitled to be a bit churlish, as long as you don’t overdo it.

She could feel though, very clearly, that he was in a new struggle.

I’ve decided to stay in the old town. Narromine. I’ll work with my father on the station—we run sheep and stud rams. People can get used to me, I reckon, in a small place, where there’s only so many you can shock. That makes sense. To me at least.

But you could go anywhere, she said. I would hate it if you thought you must limit your life somehow.

No, I think I’ll start out at home. I just want to shy clear of the pity merchants for a while. And any special medallions and speeches. The old man will need to fight all that off too—I’ve told him. I don’t want any band at the platform.

They walked back under a pleasant autumn sky that was the color of duck eggs. When the northern European weather took it into its head to be subtle and yet vital at once, it was able to do it with extreme craft, with fifty or so variations of blue and a hundred of yellow.

And so, he said, it looks like it’s going to be at an end—everyone’s saying so, hard as it is to believe. Fritz’s line’s gone.

But he’ll make another, Sally said. There’ll still be no shortage of wounded.

He considered this and then began to stutter with laughter.

What is it? she asked.

When they ask me to write my war memoirs, they’ll consist of one thing. Standing in the wrong place.

This sounded like self-pity at last to her. Though she did not believe he could avoid it forever, she was disappointed.

She told him, I came to England especially to see you. I have to say honestly that when I think of a hero, I think of you. And you know I would not easily say that.

But with me you’re also satisfying curiosity, aren’t you? he asked, half amused. We’re old friends—yes. But you’re partly a tourist, aren’t you? See what the joker looks like now! I’d be the same in your position.

You could drive people off saying that sort of thing, she warned him. I’m far too busy to be a tourist and I’m in a constant state about an infantryman I love who’s still in the center of the storm. And on top of that, I have to try to visit my sister’s fiancé, who’s in prison in Aldershot for mutiny. But, listen, if your position ever seems to be too much for you, you write to me and I’ll write back and come and visit if I can.

And on that basis, back at the hospital they exchanged addresses. Sally wrote down her father’s farm—Sherwood via Kempsey, Macleay Valley, New South Wales—and found it was an address she could not imagine herself ever having occupied or inhabiting in the future. But there a letter would find her.

They said good-bye in the lobby and she was already at the door when he called out to her, You’re too thin, you know. You’re much thinner than you were at Rouen. Don’t let them work you too hard.

Beyond the gate there was a line of tall shrubs. She stepped amongst them and let out a cry like a crow and then stood there while the river of tears flowed out of her, a grieving torrent. After ten minutes of it, she was well enough again and composed herself and went off to catch the early evening train to Victoria.

At Horseferry Road, Sally visited the provost marshal’s office. The clerk at the desk led her into the office of a middle-aged captain, who listened with an open face—neither pretending too much sympathy nor sour with condemnation—as she made her case to visit Kiernan in Aldershot. When she was finished he laid out his hands palm-up on his desk. It’s no use, he said. Aldershot is a British camp, and they play by their rules. We agreed to that so they wouldn’t keep pestering us to shoot our boys.

Numbed by failure, that evening she went to a West End farce with Freud and Freud’s American doctor. At the interval, as Captain Boynton queued to buy champagne for them, Freud said, He’s always taking it for granted we’ll live in Chicago. I’ve even been foolish enough to argue the surgical claims of Melbourne with him, as Bright does. But it seems the end of the earth to him.

It is, said Sally. Believe it or not, it is.

It could be cause for a rift. Or I could make it that. No one need think I’m that desperate to have a man.

That’s not a good reason to get rid of a decent one.

It was interesting that as always Freud would say “have a man” when others would say “get married.” But when Boynton arrived with the champagne, there seemed to be no chasm between them. The American was more exuberantly entranced than Fellowes would ever have admitted to being by Leo. They all chatted briskly and honestly, bantering away.

Do you think the characters in this play know there’s a war on? Boynton asked.

That’s the charm, said Freud. They live in a play where there never was a war.

Sounds like America, he said. But these characters? Their heads are empty of history.

Sometimes, Freud argued, people need a history enema.

The playwright’s succeeded then, said Boynton. He’s a real benefactor of humanity. Give the man a prize.

Whatever in God’s name that is, said Freud.

At which the American hugged her by the waist.

Listen to this kid! he invited Sally.

She was back at Vecquemont within five days. As well as Captain Constable at Epsom, in London Sally had seen at a superficial level sights missed last time. But getting back was what she profoundly desired. First thing, she went looking for Slattery and found her standing at the far end of the gas ward coughing and watching as two nurses applied blister cream to a soldier’s flesh. Honora saw her and—her boots clopping on the board floor—moved fast to meet her.

Is there a chance for a tea? Sally whispered. As she petitioned Honora she leaned down almost automatically and adjusted an oxygen mask on the face of a soldier. His mustard-gas rash called out for ointment. But oxygen was more important. The patient frowned up at her.

It’s the horses, he said.

The man in the next bed—not as desperate for breath—said his companion was right.

The way they begin to neigh and bray and plunge about once those gas shells come landing with a little thud, thud.

He was exhausted by this speech and for what the gesture was worth Sally drew her hand over his shoulder as if she had some power to command his violated organism to operate the right way.

Sally, murmured Honora, Major Bright wants to see you.

Honora led her out of the ward and along duckboards to Bright’s office near the theatres. He was attending to forms and letters. He got up from his desk, and it was by his demeanor—not by Slattery’s earlier—that she understood the news and feared her existence was now void.

It’s Charlie, she said.

Bright held up his hand. Be assured. Alive but wounded. He was at Franvillers but they’ve moved him to the big hospital at Étaples.

But I’ve had my leave, she said. She realized she must sound like a schoolkid.

No. That doesn’t matter. You can see him. It’s been arranged.

What sort of wound?

Bright looked at the floor.

I’m afraid I can’t say. I don’t know anything further. I’m sure it’s minor… He must have been well enough to tell them to reach us here.

So—in a lather and ferment this time—she made ready to travel again and without unpacking caught one of the buses that brought troops from the great depot at Étaples, which the soldiers—distanced by a language from the place—called “Eatables,” up to the rear lines beyond Corbie, and returned with soldiers going on leave. She traveled at the front of the crowded vehicle with blinkered sight, refusing to start conversations, though the officer beside her did his best. She both expected minor damage in Charlie and mourned his death. They traversed through a countryside of townships still rubbled from the battles of March and April and in a landscape chiefly populated—it seemed—by the aged, by hungry children, and, above all, by soldiers. Sometimes as she endured her frenzy in the front seat, the driver would let himself be hailed down by soldiers with leave papers, and after long discussion they would be let aboard. They all moved along the bus and passed the desolate girl in the front seat without knowing that the driver’s slow braking and slow starts made her murderous towards him.

It was late afternoon when they reached the hospital in the base outside Étaples. In the summer evening light—just as at Rouen ages back—German prisoners worked on erecting new huts with all the energy and attention of men brought in on contract. Beyond the hospital lay a terrible immensity of camp, and over all of it a dismal air—a feeling of something ugly getting out of hand. A general look of depression, she thought, was apparent in the guards and the off-duty orderlies walking the streets of the hospital.

She reported to a guardhouse and was directed to the main office of the hospital to find out where Charlie was. Now and then as she waited for the records to be consulted, hope surged in her, and then receded to leave desolation. Once an orderly was called on to lead her, it was a long trudge down laneways. She found the ward, climbed the few stairs, presented herself at the nurses’ station, and asked for Charlie Condon.

Oh, said a young Australian nurse, I’ll take you there.

Is it bad? she asked.

You’re trembling, said the girl. She seemed viciously determined to keep Sally in ignorance. She led Sally down the aisle between beds. Before Charlie could be reached they encountered the ward sister to whom the nurse introduced her. Sally saw on her a particular expression, something, she thought, which did not suggest the utter worst.

The sister led her down the aisle and with a shock she saw Charlie amongst all the unknown faces. He was asleep with a slight frown.

Some shrapnel wounds in the side and hip, the sister explained. But gangrene has set in in the arm. He’s due for surgery.

The arm?

Surely it would be too melodramatic—even for this mongrel war—for an artist to lose his arm? It was a coincidence suitable to the stage but surely not to real tragedy. But on top of that, gangrene.

The sister took his pulse and the nurse found a chair for Sally to sit on. Sally put a hand on his forehead and the pulse-taking woke Charlie. He looked at the ceiling, and then lowered his head and with a slight effort of focus saw her.

Sally, he said wonderingly. He asked the sister, It’s not the fever, is it?

No, said the sister. She’s here, all right.

Aren’t I lucky? he said but without the boyish exhilaration which often took over young men with disabling but not mortal wounds. A Blighty wound, he told her, and the left arm. All I need to paint is the right. Best of both worlds.

His eyes were fevered from the gangrene.

I mean, he told her, I can open the tubes of paint with my teeth.

Sally leaned and kissed him on the mouth—a lover with a lover. The sister did not object.

The sister said, The surgeon has him down for a below-elbow amputation, but it depends on nerve and tendon and the ability to get a good flap. And on the infection. Either way, he’ll still have a stub of wing to wave with, won’t you?

Precisely, Charlie slurred.

She waited until he was taken away and they brought her cocoa heavily laced with sugar—the way at Deux Églises and other places she had fed it to the casualties. After an hour and a half Charlie was carried back stupefied and when the surgeon visited and inspected him, he murmured to Sally that they’d done an above-elbow amputation to save him from the threat of the gangrene. The state of the brachial artery and the tendons—together with the sepsis—warranted above the elbow, said the surgeon.

She sat with him into the evening as they fed him morphine as regularly as she would have and dressed and irrigated the wound, which she wanted to do but was not permitted to. She felt an abounding thankfulness. They were no less prompt or less expert than she would have been. He was an utterly standard case, except that he was Charlie. The nurses found a bed for her in their quarters and at last persuaded her to go to it.

Sister to Sister

Sally left Étaples the following afternoon, with everyone assuring her Charlie was coming on well and already showing himself a robust recuperant. His temperature was down. They boasted they had “caught” the gangrene in time. She would be contacted if there was any change.

On the way back by ambulance, she felt her own fever return—not gradually but in a rush. Her joints were in agony and by the time the ambulance reached the clearing station the fever had her bewildered.

But the poor thing had it earlier, she heard Honora say to Dr. Bright as she lay in the influenza tent where Leo had died. Honora and Bright wore masks.

It’s unfortunate, said Dr. Bright helplessly, but her first one wasn’t the influenza. Honora’s dissatified eyes loomed above Sally. Her mother looked over Bright’s shoulder. Her mother was unmasked and knew that her daughter had drowned in the Archimedes and showed a curiosity about Sally’s process of sinking. Sally had enough mind left to wonder why it was always the Archimedes she ended up with.

Do you have the morphine I stole for you? she asked her mother. The idea was if her mother would give it back now, it would take Sally away into light and air.

It has all gone to young men, her mother told her. And Mrs. Durance put her hands to her own temples as if trying to puzzle this out—the lack of comfort available to Sally.

Sally could feel things happen at the gallop within her. She blazed. Her lungs were bleeding southwards, melting away. She was frightened. But Charlie might come and pour her the sweet wine of clear air.

She’s such a beautiful one, said Slattery to Bright. And Leonora went too. It takes the beautiful.

No, said Dr. Bright. I trust that can’t be true.

Masked Slattery knelt by Sally’s bed at some hour. Her face became as large as a balloon. But she said nothing. My lungs are bleeding away, Sally in the meantime acknowledged, stealing the breath pledged to Charlie, and the delight of lungs filled and expelled. Her mother’s wan good wishes radiated out but could not prevail over melting luck.

The rottenest of luck, said Bright.

Charlie knows my body, she stated. I have opened it to him.

All the Sallys of her acquaintance—the child, the country nurse, the Egyptian tourist, the seaborne nurse, the landlocked one—were torn away like leaves off the boughs of her fever. The thief, the murderer, the sister, the hater, the sinker, the swimmer, the lover, the unloved, the witness of light, the coward of dark, and the binder and rinser of wounds, the daughter fled and the daughter forever. What do I think you do to your friends on the wire, Charlie? Australian mercy comes from the mouth of the rifle. Where is Charlie and his wing, his docked arm? So busy up in a hospital. Not knowing to come once more for a visit and give me back the air.

When air was not returned to her, terror gave way to confusion and it was all dreams and much tumult. It was dreadful how fast the tumult faded, until she let go of all the strings and felt herself choke awhile in a serenity that was A1, first class, not so bad as all that. A woman who wanted to feel more than this serenity would want portholes in her coffin. Ah, ease! It was not hard, after all, to rise—and even Charlie was just part of a mass of people left.

As Sally struggled, the revived influenza struck the Voluntary. Patients and orderlies and English Roses caught the thing and were in a special wing. Naomi too all at once sensed it advancing within her, but for about six hours—from ten in the morning until four that afternoon—denied the symptoms. When one staggered in corridors and was unsure of where the walls were—and the differentiation between them and the floor—then it was time to pay the fever attention. Declaring herself to Airdrie, Naomi was permitted to take to bed in her own room—an isolation ward of one. Her joints throbbed, she vomited the clear broth one of the masked Australian nurses fed her. Through lack of breath she felt a hellish separation from everything, from even the simplest objects in her room—a cup, a book, a coat hanging from a hook behind the door.

An English nurse came in to look at her with arresting but overhuge eyes. She was followed by two masked orderlies manhandling a bed, and two more with a stretcher on which one of the English Roses lay. The girl was gasping hard and thrashed her head continuously, squandering strength. They might both have been the victims of membrane-blistering yperite. At some stage of her fever Naomi was sure they were.

Separated from herself in this plain room, she was aware that another colleague visited her and stood writing on a chart as well. You have stayed here—she wanted to say. No military authority told you. Lady Tarlton asked you and you stayed. Was it to give me back my breath?

Naomi descended from her airless space above the bed to the deck of the Archimedes, where men and women ran about in hysteria. But with an acidic grief in her belly she went looking for Kiernan and her mother, who were both there and not there, who had both stayed and gone. She saw ponies milling on the foredeck as it began to rise.

Shoot the horses! shouted a nurse.

No one is doing it, her mother declared with that wistful smile Naomi had seen in childhood.

Naomi felt the rage she had always had against her mother, who was crying, Nothing can be done, nothing can be done…

Something can be done, Mama! Naomi insisted. Nothing can be done? I killed you with morphine because you said that sort of thing. Sally had taken it from the cupboard in the Archimedes. Sally, the little thief, had put it in place for me. I found it and let the snake run into your heart.

The horses first, said Mrs. Durance, farm-bred and grimly practical, the corners of her lower lip tucked under the upper in resignation. So she went off to attend to those things—the neighing beasts who would not question her, who offered no chance to this victim who made no threats and was content with her own murder.

When the room returned to Naomi, there were still horses in it, raging and panicked. She had time to sit at a breathless table with the gaol governor and plead with him to let Ian out to save the horses. The man was stupid and could not see the urgency which grew in her, the greatest agony of her life. The ship pitched till she and the asinine gaol governor and the men and women and horses slid into the sea which felt of nothing. Thus she went down. Roaring for breath.

1918–1922

Since both the Durance girls knew, without knowing the other did, that there was the smallest membrane between alternate histories of themselves—between the drowning and the floating, between the fevered and the convalescent—it was somehow appropriate that two contradictory reports appeared in the Macleay Valley’s papers—the Argus and the Chronicle.

The Argus read, “Mr. Durance of Sherwood has received the sad news that his daughter Naomi has died of a prevailing influenza while serving as a nurse in France. The Argus and all its readers extend their sincerest sympathies…”

The Chronicle read, “Mr. Durance, a well-respected farmer of Sherwood, has been informed that his daughter Sally (Sarah) has died of a congestive disease while serving our gallant soldiers as a nurse in France. The Chronicle and its readers extend to Mr. Durance their…”

A few days later Mrs. Durance (formerly Sorley) dropped into the newspaper offices. The names had been mixed up, she told them. But that seemed to create further confusion.

The Argus printed a report that said, “The Argus regrets its earlier notification that Nurse Naomi Durance has died in France. It was her sister, Sally, who regrettably succumbed to influenza. The Argus apologizes to the Durance family and again extends its sincerest…”

While the Chronicle declared, “The Chronicle regrets that it was mistaken in reporting the death of Sally (Sarah) Durance of influenza while she was serving as a nurse in France. It was her sister, Naomi, who has died in the service of our valiant young men and of Australia, which this paper chooses to see as a separate entity to the Empire. But, rising above politics, we apologize to Mr. Eric Durance of Sherwood and offer our most heartfelt…”

Thus from the start people were confused. When they mentioned the Durance sisters—as they did infrequently—they were uncertain which of the girls had gone under to the Spanish influenza. It was known that the other one had married a man from Sydney or Melbourne, a returned soldier. One of them had been involved with the Condons, but the Condons were gone from the valley—the solicitor to join his brother’s more extensive practice in Orange. They could not be conferred with on the matter.

The new Mrs. Durance had in a way lost one of her children too. Ernest was not the same boy when he came back from France. He spent a lot of time drinking with other repatriated soldiers at the Federal Hotel and then wandering down to the railway station to chat drunkenly in the refreshment room with any train passengers who were survivors of the war and who happened to be having a meal there during the half hour the Brisbane Mail sat at the station. Ernest had vanished by the end of 1920—off to Queensland, it was said.

So which of the sisters died and stayed in French soil? It was a question anyhow on which people expended some interest, but not a great amount. Out of politeness, they did not ask Mr. or Mrs. Durance.

But taking into account the membrane between alternate versions—of which Sally herself had become so convinced after the sinking of the Archimedes, believing that though she had survived, there was a parallel world of chance in which she had not—we can venture to say that at the end of the Australian summer of 1922 wealthy businessman, part-time painter, and printer of fine books Eddie Horowitz laid on a gallery for an exhibition by Charlie Condon.

When Charlie and Sally had first returned from Paris, the going had been hard for them. Sally worked at Sydney Hospital to give Charlie the breathing space homecoming always required. Paris had been in its way difficult too. But the excitement of beginning there—at the epicenter of art—had intoxicated them for a time. It was strange nonetheless that the British painters, the Americans, and the few Australians lived almost entirely in their own clique. They got together often to talk English or take holidays on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany—and thus to shy away from confronting the great alps of recent European achievement. The Americans were fascinated by Charlie’s missing arm—though rather than pin up his sleeve, he used a prosthesis and a glove over an artificial hand in an attempt to put paid to the issue. The British took missing limbs more for granted. So it was not out of false sympathy that Charlie had two paintings exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1921. This provided the modicum of validation needed for the artist to keep going and for his wife to continue in her original faith. He was also invited to exhibit at the Chelsea Arts Club. Though at that stage Sally had been offered a job nursing at the English Sanatorium in Paris, Charlie insisted that she should not waste her French experience on drudgery.

The parties they went to in Paris could become difficult. Spirits—particularly cheap spirits, which were all they could afford—made Charlie irascible. Then, when they got home to their one-room apartment, there were the sort of night sweats and dreams that all the women of the soldiers of the world endured at secondhand.

Painting French forests and seasides and pastures was an education rather than a career, Charlie began to assert. When it became apparent to him and Sally that the honest and essential thing was to go home, they knew it would not be an easy business. The English artists who went home had the certainty that they could swan back to Paris whenever they liked. The Australians had the greater certainty that their decision was a choice—very nearly—for life.

But within a few months of Charlie and Sally getting back to Sydney, Eddie Horowitz had given Charlie’s French work a cachet and was now trying to do his Australian coastal landscapes the same favor. Cachet in Sydney was not like cachet in Paris. But it would have to do. With the weight of the congealed Australian summer’s heat on them, they rented a flat by the sea in Bronte. As Charlie had predicted, the light in Bronte made Wimereaux and Boulogne look sick by comparison, but still there was a vacancy in the air above them. The imagination had not filled it to the same extent to which those atmospheres had been filled. But then the air of France was filled with the dream of war and mangling, as well as the dream of light.

When Eddie Horowitz first saw Charlie’s work, he introduced him to the Society of Artists in Sydney and the Australian Watercolor Institute. He also tried to get him a part-time job imparting sketching skills to the students of the Teachers’ College and he found him a studio in George Street to share with a number of other artists. The only thing Eddie could not do was cause his business partners—and the businesspeople he invited to the exhibition—to buy Charlie’s paintings and make Charlie’s name.

Charlie was sufficiently impressed by the seriousness of the night of the exhibition opening to have bought a new suit. He understood by now the impact drink had on his behavior and despite the stress of the occasion remained utterly sober that night. He had given instructions to Eddie that in no press—as little as there might be—were his war wounds to be mentioned. He did not want to be written up as a freak—the one-handed artist. I only started to paint properly after I lost the left arm, you stupid bastard, he had cried to an American artist at a party in Paris—and he’d had to be taken home.

So this event in a studio on the top floor of David Jones department store was the punishment and reward for painting. A number of men and women approached Charlie with their whiskies and gins in hand to congratulate him, in an amused but overcheery manner which told him they would not be spending anything tonight. Across the room Mrs. Sorley and Sally’s father were talking to some of Charlie’s friends from the studio.

Standing near them, a man in a good suit seemed engrossed by one of the paintings and he reminded Sally of Ian Kiernan. Her eyes had picked him out because this exhibition was frightening to her, and she looked for echoes of familiarity in it. The man did not look like an associate of Eddie Horowitz, there to please him for business reasons. Sally wished she could have said to Charlie, who was talking to friends, See that man there? Doesn’t he look like Ian Kiernan?

She had not written to Kiernan for at least six months and did not know if he was still in prison.

The man leaned to the painting, stood upright, turned, saw her, and smiled broadly. It was a smile of recognition, a smile from the Archimedes. He strode across the room towards her and Charlie.

Charlie saw him now. They wrung each other’s hand, and Ian kissed Sally’s cheek and stepped back and said, So much like your sister…

I thought, said Sally. I mean, I didn’t know if you were…

We were all amnestied in handfuls, said Kiernan. Thank God, our government didn’t have its heart in locking us away for good. I’m back working in the family business—it is still the family business even though the government tried to acquire it. Now I am totally respectable. All is forgiven.

Are you married? asked Sally, perhaps too quickly.

Oh no, he said.

She was strangely appeased.

He said, I must congratulate you, Charlie. The river over there.

He pointed to the painting he had been studying so keenly. It’s not the Somme, is it?

The Yser, said Charlie, with a smile. And look, I’ve got Australian rivers in the next alcove… the Clarence is there.

Painting the Yser isn’t an act of national dereliction, Ian Kiernan assured him. And if I were to acquire the Yser, I suppose you would think that it was out of friendship or regard for your wounds rather than for its inherent quality.

With a man who could speak Charlie’s fears so accurately, his buying a painting was no trouble, and they all knew it.

Three were sold that night. Eddie declared that was remarkable in this philistine age. Ian stayed till the end and walked out with them as Eddie Horowitz led the way. Eddie was taking them all to dinner at the Hotel Australia—Charlie, Sally, her father, and the new Mrs. Durance.

On the pavement, in the pleasant warmth of a summer’s night whose southerly breeze had arrived, Kiernan said in a lowered voice to Sally, I can never forget her. We were the perfect fellow pilgrims.

He squeezed her hand, shook hands with Charlie, and walked away up Elizabeth Street.

Charlie kissed her ear and said, Ducky.

Ducky had become his pet name for her.

Ducky, I think that went very well.

But the reality that is actually most inhabited and concrete is the one that counts—although perhaps by a mere whisper of a degree. And it was Naomi who occupied the observed world after her sister—through gravest ill fortune—went down. In that reality, Charlie Condon’s first exhibition in fact occurred at the Athenaeum Gallery in Collins Street and was organized by Bernard Favenc, an art dealer and patron. Bernard had been generous to Charlie since Charlie had returned to Australia some months before, drawn to Melbourne by the National Gallery Art School. And even though Charlie had not yet been able to build up much of an Australian portfolio—most of the paintings were of the streaky skies of northern France, the rivers and village streets—better-off soldiers, said Bernard, officer types, might like to have on their walls a village, however rendered, where they’d fought or rested. Get on to painting the Western District later, said Bernard Favenc. There were some Australian landscapes in the exhibition, but Charlie was sure that if any sold, it wouldn’t be those.

In Paris, two-and-a-half years after he had lost his arm and had been required to absorb the news of Sally, Charlie had become infatuated with a broad-faced Belgian girl named Estelle who also had ambitions as a painter.

She sat now on a chair on the exhibition floor by the tall upstairs windows and looked sulky—which was to an extent her normal look and was mysteriously part of her allure to Charlie. Tonight she drank sherry with a fixity which might well be nervousness for his sake. She had lived through a Melbourne summer with less complaint than he expected. They were hard up—though he was doing book and magazine illustrations and she had got work in a dress shop. They rented a little house in Coburg. Before Bernard’s guests arrived, she looked unimpressed, as if the brutishness of the place Charlie had brought her to was about to be conclusively revealed.

Luckily the first to arrive was a Russian artist, an émigré named Peliakov who was a member by invitation of the Arts Society of Victoria. Charlie made sure he introduced him to Estelle—in Paris she had always been fascinated by the émigrés, by the fact that a Russian count might be serving drinks at the George V or attending diners stylishly as a waiter. Now Peliakov distracted Estelle for the moment from the question of what she would do here with her own art and whether the barbarians would buy any of Charlie’s. As he watched her, he felt a sudden certainty that she would leave him, perhaps for someone like Peliakov, and it wouldn’t mean as much to him as it should.

He let himself be distracted from grief and hollowness when some fellow artists arrived. They were half broke, doing teaching jobs or cartoons and book illustrations for irregular pay and were keen for the free sherry. They raised by their presence the question of whether Australia could support one artist, let alone a tribe. A young man and his wife, whom Charlie suspected from their faces to be Eastern European, came up to him, very well dressed, and spoke informedly about his paintings. He made sure Estelle met them and was prodigiously grateful to them.

All at once the gallery—which had been sparsely peopled an instant before—seemed crowded. Bernard Favenc now rushed up with a sweat of excitement on his upper lip. You have met the Castans? The most civilized people in Melbourne. They’re Jewish, you see, and they understand these things. They’re deliberately putting together an Australian collection—no other private person is. I really mean a collection, not just a scatter of things for their walls. And they’ve bought both your Western District paintings. You’re in instant favor, my son. You must go home and pray that the Castans live a long and profitable life.

As he spoke he was pumping Charlie’s real, right hand and then he turned away, and Charlie—he later told art historians—felt a great, prickling sense of being empowered and of having an Australian license to paint.

He was jolted by the sight of acute familiarity across the studio by the door. There—her face sleek and exquisite—stood Naomi like a version of lost Sally. She wore a dress of white and black and a fine cloche hat and seemed to be in such fullness of her beauty that it hurt him to see it. She was smiling tentatively in his direction as if he might not recognize her. The sudden power of his loss made the room and all its urgency recede.

Then, beside her, he noticed, stood Kiernan in a brown suit—no gaol pallor there. His face had obviously seen the sun of freedom in the recent summer. Feeling unsteady, he approached them. Naomi’s arms were out. When he embraced her he could not help but realize that he was feeling the same sort of bush-bred, sturdy body he had too infrequently known in Sally. He heard her sob and would have liked to have done the same himself. When she released him, he saw her teary lashes and her smile. He shook Kiernan’s hand then.

Ah, he said, you’re free!

Naomi and Lady Tarlton argued them into it, Ian said. Once there was peace, there was even less sense in keeping us shut up anyhow.

I have a confession to make, said Charlie to Naomi. The sight of her renewed his spasm of loss. I hope it doesn’t offend you. I have a girlfriend here.

Well, of course you have a girl, said Naomi.

I think she understands—unjust as it might be to her—there would never be anyone… Well, you know.

Sally never grasped her own value, said Naomi. And neither did I. Not sufficiently.

They all stood looking at each other, knowing that the most important matters had been broached. Now, said Charlie, I have to forbid you from buying one of these canvasses. Your being here is enough honor.

Dear fellow, said Ian Kiernan, laughing, Naomi does what she wants, didn’t you know?

He had a sudden duty to introduce them to Estelle. Half turning, he called her name across the room. She advanced towards Naomi and Kiernan and Charlie with the remnants of suspicion on her well-made face. The three of them waited for her in unuttered agreement on the incapacity of things to provide the essential Sally.