For King and Country (9 page)

Sally stared hard at Dunkley, silently willing her to do something to stop this nasty scene going any further. Dunkley met her gaze, and did nothing.

‘You’re the people who’re bad for
mowale
among your
twoops
, mate, and the Australians came to fight the Kaiser’s army, not to be killed by the bloody
English – and they came as volunteers in a war that hasn’t got much to do with Australia, when you think about it!’ said Lieutenant Hogan, the volume of his voice increasing with
his wrath. ‘The Australian people will never stomach conscription, and you’ll be whistling for volunteers if you try shooting any of the diggers. It’s clinging to your bloody
feudal, obsolete ideas of discipline that’s made the English Army so rotten it’s never achieved one successful offensive in the whole bloody war! Your idea of discipline is to teach men
to salute and then get them to kick a bloody football while they walk into enemy fire, you idiots! And the poor bastards have a straight choice between obeying your damned fool orders or being shot
by a firing squad. The Australian Army’s proved that letting men use their own initiative is the
best
foundation for discipline, not the worst! If any more proof were
needed.’

At last, Dunkley intervened. ‘Gentlemen, please! Behave like the officers you are, please.’ She was doing her best to appear horrified, but Sally had a feeling she’d been
enjoying the argument, until it started going in favour of the Australian.

The porter appeared. ‘Zey are all walking wounded,
n’est-ce pas
?’

Sally nodded. ‘Yes. The other two are in the day room, with all the luggage.’

Hogan went to Maxfield, and gave his right shoulder a friendly squeeze. ‘So long, mate. I wish I were leaving you in better company than these English idiots. When you get home, show that
DCM you won to your Ma, and then throw it on the fire, for what it’s worth.’ He turned to Sally. ‘No offence to you, Nurse. You’re all right, and if your army’d had
better officers, a lot more of your men would be coming home. ’

‘None taken, Lieutenant Hogan. Good luck.’ She offered her hand. He gave it a hearty shake, and marched off singing under his breath, but just loud enough to be heard:

‘Evewy sort of indiscipline, that’s what the Austwalians are good at,’ Knox reiterated, as strains of the song died away. ‘Set of wuffians. I awarded a man field
punishment before I got this,’ he indicated his wound, ‘and no sooner had the sergeant tied him up, than he was thweatened by a wabble of “diggers”, until he’d no
alternative but to let the fellow loose. But deserting’s their weal speciality. They take off by the score. By the hundwed, in fact, on the Somme, and it would only have taken a couple of
exemplawy executions to stop that wot.’ He heaved himself up in bed, and looked in Maxfield’s direction. ‘And they’re the only fighters in Fwance, to hear them talk. Well,
they’re not.’

In Sally’s limited experience of the one or two she’d met on the men’s ward, the Australians were like the pitmen she knew, not the kind to lie quiet under an insult. She
looked towards Maxfield, expecting to see anger on his face at the very least, but there was nothing.

‘Can you imagine what Austwalia must be like?’ Knox went on, to nobody in particular, for nobody answered him. ‘One enormous bloody sergeants’ mess. Fwightful.’

Sally put the soiled bedding in the skip and, glancing up at Knox’s face found it easy to imagine him dishing out punishment. She wondered whether he’d ever sentenced anybody to
death, and had little doubt that he had.

Another officer, a quiet, bespectacled captain who had lost a foot and was in no danger of being returned to active duty said: ‘Of course, we must have discipline, but I must say I think
that stringing men up on gun wheels for hours at a stretch in the sight of their fellows is a very degrading sort of punishment.’

Knox’s face turned puce. ‘It keeps them in the line,’ he barked, ‘and if it’s done pwoperly, they don’t come back twice. The only alternative’s
imprisonment, which gets the culpwit out of the line and burdens other men with an unfair share of his duty.’

‘Perhaps so, but with all the wayside crosses that they have in France and Flanders, I think that tying men up in the attitude of crucifixion gives a very bad impression altogether. It
causes a good deal of resentment.’

‘Wesentment?’ barked Knox, evidently feeling a good deal of resentment himself at that moment. ‘We’re fighting a
war
, and if we have to discipline certain
elements in our own side to win, so be it. It’s a gwim duty, but it’s a necessity.’

‘I daresay it’s a duty some of us have more relish for than others,’ said the bespectacled one, resting his book on the bed. ‘I’ve heard you use the phrase
“exemplary executions” twice, and I can’t help thinking that the sentences meted out often
do
have more to do with deterring others than with strict justice to the
offender, and in my opinion, it’s a very bad thing.’

Knox looked at him as if he were a peculiarly noxious worm that ought to be trodden on. ‘You’re mistaken in your opinion. They serve a vewy useful purpose, and you deserve to be shot
yourself for making such an allegation,’ he blasted.

The bespectacled one shrugged in the mildest manner possible, and returned to his book.

‘Humph!’ Knox snapped his newspaper open, and conversation ceased.

The day room was empty now, and as quiet as the grave. Sally went inside and looked for a record, then lifted the polished mahogany lid of the new Columbia Grafonola, a gift to the officers from
some ladies’ committee or other. She put ‘Suvla Bay’ on the turntable, a record that she’d often heard Hogan play, and listened for a moment or two to the lament, thinking
how queer it was that men with such rough exteriors were often so sentimental underneath.

Too many deaths on August days, she thought, as she walked back into the ward. Poor lads, poor ladies, poor mothers. Poor David, and now her heart would lie in this hospital, where he had
lain.

But Sally’s mood of gentle sorrow was soon dispelled. Major Knox was out of bed with his newspaper folded under his arm and the minute he reached the day room there was a scraping of the
gramophone needle and the lady’s lamentations came to an abrupt halt.

Dunkley had gone to supper and Sister was in the office when Sally stood guard by the ward door to collect the visitors’ tickets and let them into the ward. After that
she sat at the table by the fire to join another probationer who was cutting strips from sheets that people had donated and which had subsequently been well boiled in the laundry. Sally sat down
beside her, to start rolling the strips into bandages.

Most of the officers were too far away from their families to have many visitors, Maxfield among them. His bed looked untidy, the worst on the ward, and he’d made the top sheet grubby with
his newspaper. What if Matron walked onto the ward and saw it now? No one would put it past her to appear during visiting hours, and there was no substantial subscriber waiting to shield Sally from
her wrath.

She jumped to her feet and went to tidy him up. ‘You know, Lieutenant Maxfield, you’re supposed to sit in your chair to read the newspaper. You’ve got printers’ ink all
over the sheet.’

‘Sorry,’ he mouthed.

‘And you haven’t had any of your mixture the chief ordered for you.’ It was still standing on his locker hardly touched, the chief’s pet tonic of raw eggs beaten in rum.
She held it out to him.

He pulled a face, and scribbled on his newspaper in his shaky handwriting, ‘Signed the pledge.’

She smiled, warming to him. Maybe he was a Methodist, like her. But even if he was, he had to take it, to get better. ‘You can’t have signed the pledge,’ she joked.
‘You’re an Australian! Besides, it’s medicine. The consultant says you’ve got to have it. Come on, drink up.’

‘Cruel,’ he wrote, but took the glass from her. She folded her arms and began to tap her foot, watching him gulp the stuff down. He handed her the empty glass, and she watched as the
words: ‘Lovely eyes’ fell from his pen.

A day ago she would have shrunk from a compliment from him, but there was an odd vulnerability about him, and her pity for David seemed to have expanded into pity for the whole world, and so she
smiled.

He pointed in the direction of David’s bed, and mouthed, ‘Dead?’

She nodded, and tears filled her eyes.

‘Shame.’

She nodded again, not trusting herself to speak.

He scribbled again. ‘Clean bed. Looked after. A lot worse.’

She nodded, ‘Aye, I suppose so.’

‘How many from your village killed?’ he wrote.

Enough of this, or she really would be in tears. She shook her head, and fled with the empty glass towards the kitchen, to compose herself. Five minutes later she was back at her post, busily
rolling bandages, conscious of that eye with its peculiar mixture of wariness and pleading, which seemed always to dart towards her, and none of the others.

‘You get your dressing changed today, Lieutenant Maxfield. Will you come and get into bed, please?’ Sally asked him. ‘Sister will be along in half a
minute.’

He nodded, but instead of following her to his own bed, he went over to Knox, dropped the newspaper under his nose and stood glaring at him, as if demanding a reaction.

Knox glanced down at the paper, and then thrust it back at Maxfield. ‘All wight, all wight. Jolly good show, I admit it. I wasn’t talking about you, or men like these. It’s the
sort of filthy animal who leaves his chums in the lurch I’ve no time for.’

Maxfield shrugged.

Sally put down her dressing tray on his bed-table and waited for him. ‘Does Major Knox know you got the DCM and Bar?’ she asked, when he was finally sitting on the bed, and she was
unrolling the bandage securing his dressing. He grimaced and gave another careless shrug.

Gently, gently she began to loosen the dressing, and it lifted much more easily this time. ‘There,’ she said at last. ‘It’s off, but I’ll just leave it in place
until Sister . . .’ but no, here was Sister, almost beside them. Sally picked up the dressing with the forceps and turned her back on Maxfield to put it into the receiver and in that instant
he was out of bed and making for the bathroom.

Forceps in hand, she stared after him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Get back into bed this instant,’ Sister Davies demanded.

Too late. He was already in the bathroom. Sally hesitated, looking at Sister.

‘If he’s gone to look in the mirror, he’s in for a shock,’ she said. A wave of her arm sent Sally after him. ‘Go on, Nurse. You’ll get there quicker than
me.’

She heard a cracked and broken cry, and was just in time to see Maxfield raise his right hand to his wound. She dashed forward and gripped his wrist. ‘Don’t touch it! Don’t
touch, or you’ll get infection in!’

He wrenched himself free and backed away from her, but fearful for his wound she pressed forward, trying to take his hand again, until, backed into a corner he slid to the floor and crouched
there with his thighs pressed to his chest, shielding his mutilated face from her with his right hand, his broken limb hanging in its sling. She dropped one knee to the floor and squeezed his
hunched shoulders. ‘Don’t touch it, or you’ll undo all the good work the surgeon’s done,’ she insisted.

‘Oh, God,’ he croaked. He was shaking, and his breath came in gasps. That, and the warmth of him, and the bony feel of his shoulder made her stomach lurch, touching some protective
instinct in her. He tried to shake her off, prickly, as if he were angry with her, as if his disfigured face were somehow her fault. She removed her hands but stayed beside him, not knowing what to
do or say, until Sister Davies came in and read him the riot act. He got up after that and followed her, this Australian Lieutenant of thirty years with DCM and Bar, as quiet as a lamb, and dashing
tears off his cheek with the back of his hand.

‘Do you think it’ll be all right?’ Sally asked, when Sister Davies took her into the office after she’d finished the dressing.

‘The wound? Probably. I’m not so sure about him though. I think he got a bigger shock than he’d prepared himself for. Still, now he knows. And he had to see it
sometime.’

‘It’s horrible, isn’t it?’ Sally shuddered.

Sister Davies gave a disapproving frown. ‘None of that, Nurse. He’ll have enough of that to contend with when he gets out of here, with his mutilated face that might say to an
employer: “Well then, this is the sacrifice
I
made for my king and country. What about
you
?” People won’t want to be reminded, especially people who’ve
stayed at home and done little or nothing. That’s if he can get anybody to employ him at all. I don’t think many of the young flappers will be flapping round him, either, asking what he
did in the war. It’s plain to see. He had half his face blasted off.’

Sally’s fingers curled round the note he’d thrust into her hand before she’d left him.

‘Me too. Gone.’