One evening when the motor ambulances arrived and the transfer of patients from the admission hut to the gas ward was in progress, she was walking behind a victim, accompanied by an orderly with a Tilley lamp. She had visited admissions to assess how many more men they could expect in the tented ward. The sounds of the night were the normal background symphonics and shouted commands. The huge penetrating noise came from above in an instant. She heard the plane descend as if it were intimately dedicated to her, and she opened her mouth to warn the men. But all voice and hearing ceased—or was absorbed into something vaster—and the air was taken from her and she was thrown backwards with a ruthless force. She tumbled without dignity or hope—taking breath in the middle of her flight and having it jolted forth again as her hip crashed to earth.
She lay on earth where time was canceled. All lamps out, all lamps out! she eventually heard an orderly sergeant yelling.
The turning off took a little time. She could see the shattered lantern she had been following lying some distance along the gravel path and an arm and hand still holding it. It had been hooded with a metal flange but somehow the night flyer had seen it and taken to it in the utter bliss of attack. Parts of the first bearer and of the patient they had been attending to were scattered in gobbets of flesh in a crater beyond the dying lantern. The second orderly had a cut to his face and sat dazed where he had landed. He and Sally had been leaves blown in a happier direction.
She got up amidst a rain of grit and in a terrible acidic stillness which wasn’t like quiet at all but which assaulted the air and rang in the ears. She could hear more planes close above. Was it virtue or fear that sent her running towards her ward? The shadow of the Church of England padre—who officiated regularly on the hill and worked in between as an orderly—emerged from it through the double black-out curtains and grasped her.
You must find shelter, Sister, he shouted.
The suggestion made her furious.
No, she said, I have to stay in the ward.
Jostling past both of them from within, Honora Slattery went towards the trenches with a blanketed patient over her shoulder. That seemed absurd. But Sally lacked the mind to be sure whether the sight was odd or normal. She ran into the usually dim-lit ward—bright now, since one of the Tilley lamps had shattered and set fire to the flooring. She fetched a blanket, and she and the ward doctor smothered the flames. Some men who should not have sat up were doing so and looking about with piteous eyes and shouting. The bombardment had jolted their system into life and activated their breath. Further detonations not so far away showed that planes were probably trying to destroy the barrage balloon depot—since pilots hated those contraptions.
I’m with you! she called to the patients, though she could not quite hear herself and would later think the declaration melodramatic.
Go to the door and see what you can see, the ward doctor dementedly told her.
She rushed to the door and pushed through its two flaps as if she could read from there the intentions of the planes, their number, and the likelihood and path through the air of more bombs. In the open night between the ward and the trenches, perhaps a dozen weeping men staggered about the yard and along the paths. Others knelt or cast their arms wide and raved or screamed. NYD(S).
She saw Honora emerging now from the thoracic ward—why had she gone there?—with yet another man on her shoulders. What are you doing? Sally—clearheaded now on the subject of Honora’s lunacy—called out to her.
I am putting patients in the trenches, she shouted back. I put the first one in and he turned out to be a German. Imagine that!
She had mad purpose in her eye—she would carry every man in all the wards into slit trenches if she could. From within the gas ward Sally’s own orderlies began helping their patients past her and to the shelter of trenches and dugouts.
Honora ran on. Sally turned back into the gas tent and passed the remaining wide-eyed nurses and orderlies, who were aware something momentous and ill defined had occurred. The ward doctor was with the gas cases who could not safely be moved. Two nurses were going about placing basins over the heads of the patients. It was a halfway rational idea to save them from shrapnel and it possessed for the nurses the comfort of acting to defy events.
The ward doctor told Sally something had happened near the theatres. They could smell the chloroform, and mixed with it was the penetrating stench of ether. If there was a fire out there then all the gas cases would need—whatever the results—to be moved.
Sally joined a nurse who was already at the rear door of the tent. From the hut steps they saw the surgical theatre hut begin to burn. The air was anesthetic from the shattered bottles of chloroform but it was the ether supplies that were burning, releasing vapors that the fire instantly sucked back into itself.
Sally heard people lamenting. Someone shouted, The hoses aren’t working! A bucket line of nurses and orderlies attempted to stanch the flames. Were surgeons, theatre nurses, patients caught in there? Water wouldn’t do anything, she knew. Earth or sand was needed to quench blazing ether. It was now that she reachieved her reason fully. She turned back into the gas ward and shouted without reference to the ward doctor that nurses and orderlies must hurry all possible cases into slit trenches.
You go, Sister, said the ward doctor.
No.
You go! he roared. I’ve sent off all the other nurses.
All right, she said. She would be a free agent once she was out in the night.
As she stepped forth she heard another inhuman impact some distance off, but it was not close enough to bear her mind away. She began pushing and dragging demented, howling, praying men towards trenches they did not want to enter. She thought of the thoracic ward and crazed Honora.
A Klaxon which had not rung at the start of things to warn anyone sounded now to reassure everyone. Silence all at once finally manifested itself like the clap of a great hand and stunned the earth. Voices and even yells were minute within it. The air was full still of the stench of the theatre fire and the embers seemed to fall like an incandescent snow.
Sally heard men’s plaintive voices from a half-collapsed tent. Inside, Honora was lifting patients back onto beds, one bleeding from the ears from a nearby detonation. Am I too? Sally wondered, and began to help. Orderlies arrived to readjust the tent poles. At last, according to some dazed, unspoken accord between them that their job was done, she and Honora left the restored tent. The remaining heat of the theatre blaze wafted across the station. Sally set out back for the gas ward and skirted her crater—the one which held unscannable fragments of the gas case and an orderly. She saw Freud and Leonora coming from the lost fight with the fire, walking towards her and the untouched thoracic ward as if no shock had overtaken them and as if on normal duty. They stepped carefully but without amazement around obscure body parts that covered the paths and other spaces. As Leonora reached Sally, she said, An orderly told me. They blew up the morgue. What a triumph, eh?
Some NYD(S) were still wandering the station—quivering and dazed or making speeches—and it turned out an orderly had chased one down on the Deux Églises road. Orderlies retrieving such men were leading them back to their ward by the hand and shoulder, brotherly to a degree which caused Sally to shed tears as she returned to the gas ward. She wondered how it had been in the resuscitation ward during all the noise and fire and with the bombs making their random and absurd choices.
When day broke there was time for the nurses to return to their mess, glimpsing beyond the wards—more clearly now—the two-thirds-burned-out theatre hut. By accident—so Sally understood from Freud—it had been near empty at the time. The surgeons were in the admissions hut. Two orderlies had been blown wide.