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.