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.