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.