It’s the horses, he said.
The man in the next bed—not as desperate for breath—said his companion was right.
The way they begin to neigh and bray and plunge about once those gas shells come landing with a little thud, thud.
He was exhausted by this speech and for what the gesture was worth Sally drew her hand over his shoulder as if she had some power to command his violated organism to operate the right way.
Sally, murmured Honora, Major Bright wants to see you.
Honora led her out of the ward and along duckboards to Bright’s office near the theatres. He was attending to forms and letters. He got up from his desk, and it was by his demeanor—not by Slattery’s earlier—that she understood the news and feared her existence was now void.
It’s Charlie, she said.
Bright held up his hand. Be assured. Alive but wounded. He was at Franvillers but they’ve moved him to the big hospital at Étaples.
But I’ve had my leave, she said. She realized she must sound like a schoolkid.
No. That doesn’t matter. You can see him. It’s been arranged.
What sort of wound?
Bright looked at the floor.
I’m afraid I can’t say. I don’t know anything further. I’m sure it’s minor… He must have been well enough to tell them to reach us here.
So—in a lather and ferment this time—she made ready to travel again and without unpacking caught one of the buses that brought troops from the great depot at Étaples, which the soldiers—distanced by a language from the place—called “Eatables,” up to the rear lines beyond Corbie, and returned with soldiers going on leave. She traveled at the front of the crowded vehicle with blinkered sight, refusing to start conversations, though the officer beside her did his best. She both expected minor damage in Charlie and mourned his death. They traversed through a countryside of townships still rubbled from the battles of March and April and in a landscape chiefly populated—it seemed—by the aged, by hungry children, and, above all, by soldiers. Sometimes as she endured her frenzy in the front seat, the driver would let himself be hailed down by soldiers with leave papers, and after long discussion they would be let aboard. They all moved along the bus and passed the desolate girl in the front seat without knowing that the driver’s slow braking and slow starts made her murderous towards him.
It was late afternoon when they reached the hospital in the base outside Étaples. In the summer evening light—just as at Rouen ages back—German prisoners worked on erecting new huts with all the energy and attention of men brought in on contract. Beyond the hospital lay a terrible immensity of camp, and over all of it a dismal air—a feeling of something ugly getting out of hand. A general look of depression, she thought, was apparent in the guards and the off-duty orderlies walking the streets of the hospital.
She reported to a guardhouse and was directed to the main office of the hospital to find out where Charlie was. Now and then as she waited for the records to be consulted, hope surged in her, and then receded to leave desolation. Once an orderly was called on to lead her, it was a long trudge down laneways. She found the ward, climbed the few stairs, presented herself at the nurses’ station, and asked for Charlie Condon.
Oh, said a young Australian nurse, I’ll take you there.
Is it bad? she asked.
You’re trembling, said the girl. She seemed viciously determined to keep Sally in ignorance. She led Sally down the aisle between beds. Before Charlie could be reached they encountered the ward sister to whom the nurse introduced her. Sally saw on her a particular expression, something, she thought, which did not suggest the utter worst.
The sister led her down the aisle and with a shock she saw Charlie amongst all the unknown faces. He was asleep with a slight frown.
Some shrapnel wounds in the side and hip, the sister explained. But gangrene has set in in the arm. He’s due for surgery.
The arm?
Surely it would be too melodramatic—even for this mongrel war—for an artist to lose his arm? It was a coincidence suitable to the stage but surely not to real tragedy. But on top of that, gangrene.
The sister took his pulse and the nurse found a chair for Sally to sit on. Sally put a hand on his forehead and the pulse-taking woke Charlie. He looked at the ceiling, and then lowered his head and with a slight effort of focus saw her.
Sally, he said wonderingly. He asked the sister, It’s not the fever, is it?
No, said the sister. She’s here, all right.
Aren’t I lucky? he said but without the boyish exhilaration which often took over young men with disabling but not mortal wounds. A Blighty wound, he told her, and the left arm. All I need to paint is the right. Best of both worlds.
His eyes were fevered from the gangrene.
I mean, he told her, I can open the tubes of paint with my teeth.
Sally leaned and kissed him on the mouth—a lover with a lover. The sister did not object.
The sister said, The surgeon has him down for a below-elbow amputation, but it depends on nerve and tendon and the ability to get a good flap. And on the infection. Either way, he’ll still have a stub of wing to wave with, won’t you?
Precisely, Charlie slurred.
She waited until he was taken away and they brought her cocoa heavily laced with sugar—the way at Deux Églises and other places she had fed it to the casualties. After an hour and a half Charlie was carried back stupefied and when the surgeon visited and inspected him, he murmured to Sally that they’d done an above-elbow amputation to save him from the threat of the gangrene. The state of the brachial artery and the tendons—together with the sepsis—warranted above the elbow, said the surgeon.
She sat with him into the evening as they fed him morphine as regularly as she would have and dressed and irrigated the wound, which she wanted to do but was not permitted to. She felt an abounding thankfulness. They were no less prompt or less expert than she would have been. He was an utterly standard case, except that he was Charlie. The nurses found a bed for her in their quarters and at last persuaded her to go to it.
Sister to Sister
Sally left Étaples the following afternoon, with everyone assuring her Charlie was coming on well and already showing himself a robust recuperant. His temperature was down. They boasted they had “caught” the gangrene in time. She would be contacted if there was any change.
On the way back by ambulance, she felt her own fever return—not gradually but in a rush. Her joints were in agony and by the time the ambulance reached the clearing station the fever had her bewildered.
But the poor thing had it earlier, she heard Honora say to Dr. Bright as she lay in the influenza tent where Leo had died. Honora and Bright wore masks.
It’s unfortunate, said Dr. Bright helplessly, but her first one wasn’t the influenza. Honora’s dissatified eyes loomed above Sally. Her mother looked over Bright’s shoulder. Her mother was unmasked and knew that her daughter had drowned in the Archimedes and showed a curiosity about Sally’s process of sinking. Sally had enough mind left to wonder why it was always the Archimedes she ended up with.
Do you have the morphine I stole for you? she asked her mother. The idea was if her mother would give it back now, it would take Sally away into light and air.
It has all gone to young men, her mother told her. And Mrs. Durance put her hands to her own temples as if trying to puzzle this out—the lack of comfort available to Sally.