Sally and some of the nurse witnesses were drawn off to attend to the second case, a man whose jacket hung over his shoulders and whose chest was swathed. Orderlies gave him a cigarette and settled him down as Slattery and Sally came to him. “Shrapnel chest and shoulders,” someone had scribbled on his label. Sally was not sure what shrapnel was.
Now a number of men on stretchers were arriving down the main stairwell bearing filthy scribbled labels marked “1” and “2.” Mitchie and the ward doctor inspected each and directed nurses to them. The colonel and Captain Fellowes and the Archimedes’s third surgeon came stalking for candidates for their operating tables and discussed the need of this man and that with the ward doctor and Mitchie.
To Sally and Honora’s station was carried a craggy-looking young man whose features seemed to draw in on themselves. Under an opened uniform jacket—put on him as if to shield him from nighttime cold—the upper body was bare and his wound in bandages. The orderlies moved him with genial roughness onto a hospital cot. The stench of soured and recent blood, the exhalation of the wound and of excrement and of his fouled remnants of uniform puzzled Sally. It was as if he had been campaigning a year and not a few days. But there was no doubt of the rights his wound gave him. His “1” label had “thoracic” scribbled on it and a morphine dosage in dim pencil. Also—upstairs on deck—Naomi had attached to his bandages a red card to signify the urgency his wound stood for and had scribbled “lower right anterior of the chest with likely pulmonary involvement and exit.” The bandages below his open uniform jacket were dark and saturated. He was unearthly silent and calm and his mind seemed to meditate on this wound which should have killed him by now except that it might have skimmed major organs.
Matron Mitchie went amongst the nurses not yet engaged, telling them there would be twenty-three stretcher cases in all. The finite number was a motivation and a comfort. Sally heard Carradine and Leo Casement reasoning with a man with a bloodied head wound who talked like crazy but in a rapid, unknown tongue. His chatter competed with orderlies’ shouts and dominated the deck and ended with a slur as Carradine stanched his rattle of discourse with a morphine injection.
Similarly Honora arrived back from the dressings room with a hypodermic—a quarter grain. With this boy to command the entirety of her brain, Sally thought for an instant only, and with a little spark of memory and relief, that morphine had nearly lost its history here. It no longer stood for theft or guilt. A small patch of the arm must be cleansed with an alcohol swab and the stuff got into the body of this weather-beaten young thoracic case who had not received any mercy since he was bandaged on the beach. The lifting onto a barge, the lifting off—how had he lived through that?
The orderly assigned to Sally and Honora was a fellow of perhaps thirty-five years with eyes that might have been stunned or else sullen. His name was Wilson. He lifted and adjusted the young body’s posture, dragged away the man’s foul jacket and let it drop to the floor while Honora and Sally soaked the areas near the wound with hydrogen peroxide to dilute the sticky adhesions of dressing to wound. With the man eased sideways and then on his back and sideways again by their helpmeet orderly, by cutting the bandages they found both wounds: sockets of raw meat front and back with the bullet having made its exit five ribs up—the seventh thoracic vertebra as she must write on his chart—and about two inches from the spine.
Sally and Honora looked at each other since they shared a strange hesitation—not that the wound was beyond their comprehension or even beyond their expectation. It was the inadequacy of their functions and small medical rites in front of damage as authoritative as this. The orderly held the boy with gentle force, and Honora cleansed the flesh and the lips of first one wound and then went around the cot to cleanse the exit, while Sally probed with forceps for impurities and fibers. The patient took to shuddering all at once and the orderly—thinking it his duty to restrain him—pressed down on the man’s shoulders. The pallor of the face turned to deep, cyanosed blue. This was the face of the human creature drowning in his own blood. Sally needed a trocar from the central table and by an apparent chance Matron Mitchie was by her shoulder with such an implement.
Mitchie commanded the orderly to let the man lie on his back. Then she drove the wide-bore trocar needle into the man’s right chest cavity while ordering Sally to fetch rubber tubing and a kidney bowl—both of which someone of surpassing wisdom had placed on the equipment trolley in the ward’s midst. Mitchie murmured good girl when Sally, perhaps instantly—because it was all an instant, immune from the fall of seconds—arrived back with them. Blood began to flow into the kidney bowl Honora grasped. Then it overflowed. Let it. It stopped, then flowed again over Honora’s gloved hands. It was hopeless now. The soldier convulsed at an awful length of seconds, and that ended it. Mitchie nodded to Sally and Honora. Can’t be helped, she said. Clean yourselves up, ladies.
They ran to do it. They said nothing as they shed gloves and scrubbed in a basin at a nearby table. Orderlies were to replace these once used. But as a first sign of plans breaking apart, a basin of bloodied water stood unremoved on the table beside their basin.
The ward doctor pointed them to a further patient in their section of the vast barn of white space. They stepped amongst discarded and sullied bandages and scraps of uniform waiting on the deck and reached their new case, his jaw bound up. He must have been forty years when judged from his forehead and eyes, and his eyes were awfully calm. An eighth of a grain to begin with. After the easing off of bandages, bone fragments showed in the mess of the wound. The bullet must still be in there somewhere—netted by bone. What was he doing on that beach and fighting for the heights at his age? It seemed willful idiocy for him to be here—a determination to get away from something such as family or else undignified or uncertain work somewhere.
Captain Fellowes walked by, surgically coated, and inspected the long, explosive mess Sally had revealed and was swabbing, and looked for the degree of tooth and mandible loss and claimed him for surgery. Fellowes must believe that this mayhem could be fixed with screws and wire under anesthetics and with surgical tools passed to him by brave Staff Nurse Freud.
So what have we done for the wounded? Sally had a second to assess. But Mitchie directed them on. Sally was—in a sense—ready. She was bolstered by hearing Honora say to a patient, Look at me. Come. Look. Can you see me, my fine fellow? It sounded as if she were talking to someone concussed in a football match. He looked at her as if he recognized her, she said later, but realized she wasn’t the woman he expected to see and closed his eyes—done with the world of women. He was a man with a stomach wound who by some pointless mercy had not hemorrhaged to this moment. Crying for water he too was taken away to the theatre. Apart from him, the groans were less rowdy than the shrill suggestions of matron and doctor. This was strange and certainly a mystery.
Their orderly traveled around the ward with them wearing the same unreadable face as before. He looked world-worn but accustomed to labor, to lifting loads and digging hard soil. A young officer lay before them, his stomach swathed and wearing a soiled number 1 label from ashore and a red one Naomi had probably put on him. He was writhing and trembling, but with a sort of good-mannered lack of excess. Quarter grain, Mitchie instructed them, as he had not had any morphine—it seemed—since the shore. By the blood at his back, Sally saw another through-and-through wound. But when the dressing was rinsed off she saw a cavity created by something larger than a bullet—a shard of shrapnel, say—and edging from it an unexpected snake of the stomach lining named omentum, yellow amidst blood, lacy and frayed, hanging out of the slashed gut. While not letting go entirely of his surprisingly gentle hold on the baby lieutenant, the orderly Wilson turned his head aside and vomited on the deck and it seemed as if he might let go and clean it before someone of higher rank abused him for the mess. No, said Sally, leave it, Mr. Wilson.