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.”
Dear Nurse Durance,
Our son Ian has earlier written to us concerning your process of betrothal. He admires you to a great degree, and we are pleased that he has met a woman who understands his high purpose and who shares it with him, albeit he is now in prison. He has the right to send one letter a month and filial duty caused him to write the first to us. But he wanted us in turn to write to you and tell you that he declares himself to be surviving well. It is a great pain to us as it must be to you to know where he is, in that dank place—I believe it was founded in the middle of last century when concepts of appropriate punishment were even more drastic than they are now. I am a prison visitor here to Pentridge Prison, and my visits have given me an added perspective—I judge the conditions there and wonder how they apply to Ian’s position. Our chief hope lies in the fact that he has a sturdy soul, that he is endowed with spiritual resources, that he understands he is not a criminal, and that we have formed a group of friends—and indeed Friends—to pursue a letter-writing campaign on his behalf. We make what representations we can to ministers and indeed to the prime minister. But we receive nothing but pro forma letters from civil servants pointing out that, the populace having rejected conscription, the Australian army must be entitled to dispose of the services of its members as it sees fit. I hope the men who write these letters are logical and that therefore when the conflict ends, as it one day must, the shortage of men will no longer be an issue and the idea of punishing Ian for the way Australians voted in those referenda need no longer apply. But for the present he writes, “I think my punishment inevitable in the world as it is at the moment.”
Ian insisted we reiterate to you his awareness that you are a young woman and that the responsibility of the young is to their very youth and vigor. He is worldly enough to know that you must not feel forced to become an external prisoner serving time parallel to his own. I know you have probably written to him, but it seems that his correct address is now Kiernan, 27537, Millbank Military, London. We are very proud of Kiernan 27537, for we know other young men in the Society of Friends who began as Ian did and who yielded to the pressure of arms.
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.