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.