A Rose for the Anzac Boys (15 page)

France

4 September 1917

Dear Miss Macpherson,

I hope this reaches you. Sergeant Fraser is going on leave and said he will drop it at your canteen. Keeps it from the censor any rate! I hope you can read it all right too—I had to borrow this pencil off a cobber and it’s blunt as all blazes.

A strange thing happened yesterday. We were ordered to explore part of a captured German trench. They are usually just like ours mostly, but this one was different. It must have taken in some old farmhouse’s cellar, because we turned a corner and there was this spiral staircase going down into the dirt.

Ozzie Baker had a candle and some matches. I went down first. I didn’t like it, I can tell you. The smell nearly knocked me
over. The stairs led down to a concrete cellar with a pile of Germans dead on the floor, all starting to decay. And there was a bucket half full of fat and a copper with the mangled remains of a German.

Well, I felt like losing my dinner. You hear so much about the barbaric German practice of boiling down their dead for their fat. But I had never believed even the Huns could do that. Then here it was in front of me.

Ozzie and Johnno were coming down behind me and making noises about the smell. I was just about to tell them to go back and we’d make our report when suddenly I saw that the corner of the copper had been blown away and I saw things different.

What I reckon is those Hun boys were cooking something in their copper and that was what the fat was for. And then a shell or bomb entered their cellar and hurled one man into the copper and the rest to eternity. It made me remember that Korporal back at casualty and how he was a white man and how easy it is to hate people that you don’t know.

Well, that is enough philosophising for now. I hope you don’t mind my writing to you like this. I can’t write to the family at home. It is not just the censor but they just would not understand. Sometimes I think it is not right to write such things to a girl like you, but then I think about what you have seen which is equal to anything I have seen, and I think of what my mum has gone through too and I think sometimes women are tougher even than us men.

But I am glad you were not in that trench.

I hope you are well and that this finds you as it leaves me.

Yours very truly,

Harry

It was dark when they reached the hotel. They had detoured to see a German tank stranded in a field, the truck bumping over the bomb-ridged earth.

‘Now you come and stay with us in Paris as soon as you have leave!’ called Cecilia as Midge leapt out of the truck, then reached in and hauled out her bag. ‘You will, won’t you?’

There was no use trying to explain that there was no one to give her leave. Nor did it seem likely that either hostess would be there—Cecilia had told her that they were headed up to Brussels to organise the distribution of American donations. Instead Midge waved as the truck rumbled off, then picked up her bag and walked towards the hotel. She had sent Ethel a telegram to say that she was coming, and had asked her to make sure there was a bed for her. No matter how crowded the hotel was, Midge was sure Ethel could organise anything.

The hotel’s geraniums were just the same, the bay tree in its pot, the same ‘
chien méchant
’
¹
sign leading to the courtyard. Back where I started, she thought.

It was almost like coming home.

The days consumed themselves.

A year ago, every face seemed burnt on her memory, every injury, each suffering man on a stretcher on the platform. But now it was as though the whole world was

war and suffering. Pain and mutilation were normal, not remarkable. The days were cocoa, stirring the pots so the milk frothed, slicing the bread, opening can after can of bully beef, the smell forever in her nostrils so she thought she could never eat beef again, even Madame’s
pot-au-feu
.
²

But when the
pot-au-feu
was there on the table, flanked by carrots and tiny pickled cucumbers, she ate it. If she didn’t there would be no energy tomorrow to stir and slice and serve, to harangue bakers and train guards. The hotel meals were the brightest part of the day; not just the food, good even after so many years of war, but the chance to laugh. No matter what the joke it was impossible to laugh on the platform; not with the fresh faces of young soldiers going to horrors they hadn’t yet imagined; the pain-racked faces of those returning on their stretchers. There were Harry’s letters, too. Though they came from the trenches they brought a breath of home.

Christmas came, and the first of the winter frostbite cases. Puddings arrived from England, where Aunt Harriet’s friends had again sacrificed their fruit and sugar ration for months to make puddings for the boys, stuffed with sixpences as well as love. Every Australian had a billy can, too, packed by volunteers back home, filled with chocolate, razor blades, toffee, cans of sardines and potted meat, notebooks, beef stock cubes, socks or mittens. Red Cross warehouses across France and Belgium were stocked with Christmas crackers, Christmas cards, nuts, tins of sweets and garlands to decorate the hospital wards.

Midge had managed to find time to knit Harry socks, and Dougie too. They were a bit lopsided, but they were all she could think to give, apart from a tin of small cakes she had coaxed Madame to make.

Even the station canteen was decorated this year, though not with the mistletoe one hopeful Tommy had offered Ethel.

‘One kiss is all well and good, lad,’ she’d told him. ‘But ten thousand Christmas kisses from all the lads are too much for any girl.’

More fresh volunteers had joined the canteen. Anne’s maid had returned with her to England, and the maid Aunt Harriet had sent had gone home too while Midge was with the ambulance brigade. But three friends from school had arrived to take their places, and the daughter of an old friend of Aunt Harriet’s.

It was an easy day today, thought Midge, as she gave another stir to the copper of frothing milk and cocoa. Stirring the cocoa was everyone’s least favourite job. Somehow the milk always splashed and the cocoa fumes left your face feeling greasy. But she’d been slicing bread yesterday, and serving the day before, so it was her turn with the whisk today.

For once the war seemed far away from their railway station; no uniforms to be seen. Even the far-off guns seemed quiet, with the wind in the wrong direction to carry the shudders across the town. A boy in a rough smock herded half a dozen noisy geese along the green grass by the railway track. Down past the platform a pair of nursemaids pushed perambulators. An old woman
in a tattered shawl carried her buckets towards the village pump.

Ethel bustled over to her and peered down at the copper. Ethel always seemed to bustle these days.

‘No troops coming through today,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a hospital train in the early afternoon, but that should be it.’

‘Only one lot of cocoa then?’

‘Should be plenty.’ Ethel had lost most of her northern accent these days, as though she no longer had time to bother with it. She hesitated, as though wondering where to bustle to next, then added, ‘I’ve been thinking we need to open another canteen, down at Mont Claire.’

‘There’s no train station there, is there?’

Ethel shook her head. ‘The trucks stop there though. These days more troops are being trucked than come on the train. I’ll drive down tomorrow and see the mayor. If we can agree…’

Midge watched Ethel’s glowing face and let the words wash over her. For all Ethel used the word ‘we’ she knew it would be all her friend’s organisation. Ethel might have been a dunce at needlework, and poor at games. But she thrived at organising.

‘You should have been a general,’ she said suddenly.

‘What?’ Ethel stopped her description of the church hall that would make a perfect canteen headquarters and grinned. ‘If they’d let women be generals we’d have sorted out the war in the first six months or, better still, not had it at all. Now look, lass, how about we—’

She broke off as a man in a blue post office uniform pushed his bicycle onto the platform. ‘
Les demoiselles anglaises
?’ he called.

The station master pointed at Midge and Ethel. The man nodded his thanks. ‘Mademoiselle Macpherson?’ He stumbled over the strange-sounding surname.

‘
Oui, monsieur
.’ Midge’s hand shook as she took the proffered telegram. Green…There was only one reason for a green telegram these days.

‘Midge, darling, what is it? Who is it?’

Midge lowered the piece of paper. ‘Dougie. It’s…it’s from Aunt Harriet.’

‘He’s not…?’

‘No. “Severely injured”—that’s all she says. “Douglas severely injured. No 1 Military Hospital, Dover. Come immediately. Aunt Harriet.” Ethel, he can’t be—’

Midge stopped. She had been going to say ‘can’t be dying’. But of course he could. What made her brother different from the tens of thousands—the millions—already dead?

Glen Donal, she thought. What will happen to Glen Donal if Dougie and Tim are both gone? And then the certainty: I can take care of it. I can do it.

‘There’s the passenger train at a quarter past eleven.’ Ethel took charge. ‘You hurry back and pack. I can hold the fort here while you call Millie to take your place. Hurry, lass! I’ll get Madame to pack you a hamper too, or you’ll starve by the time you get to Blighty.’

The men in the next carriage were singing. Drunk, she supposed, soldiers off on leave. There was no first class carriage on this train. She sat crammed between an old woman with a big covered basket that smelled of turnips, and a small pale girl with bare legs, and shoes too big for her.

‘If you want the old battalion,

I know where it is,

If you want the old battalion,

I know where it is,

It’s hanging on the old barbed wire.’

Madame had packed cold chicken. It had been months since she’d had chicken. But she couldn’t eat it. She passed it to the child, who gazed at it like a treasure before she began to eat. Instead Midge watched the fields of France fly by: fields of cows, of cabbages, lanes of marching men.

The land of war, she thought. And I’m leaving it.

But England was a land of war as well. Convoys of ambulances filled the streets, and lines of Woodbinesmoking Tommies, laden with packs and rifles. The railway waiting rooms were now canteens, strangely like theirs. There were only so many ways you could run a canteen, thought Midge vaguely, or feed men reliably and quickly.

Noticeboards—
French Money Exchanged Here for Troops in Uniform Only
—dotted the platforms.

She found a taxi with difficulty, the horse thin and dispirited. Even the people on the street seemed dull-eyed. Notices in shop windows declared
No more potatoes
,
No tea
,
No butter
. A bread shop’s windows were boarded up. Had they been broken by the starving, she wondered.

If only the horse would hurry. She could run faster than this. But people would stare at a running girl, and it was too far to run all the way. All the horses in the streets were plodding. No oats, she supposed, all kept for the horses of war.

She listened to the clop of the horse’s feet. Tim and Doug, they seemed to echo. Tim and Doug and Tim and Doug…

At last the cab drew up outside the hospital. It seemed so solid, so purposeful, after the makeshift hospitals she was used to. She paid the cabbie, then asked her way to Dougie’s ward. It was strange to be a visitor, after working with the wounded so long.

‘Can I help you, miss?’

The man was a VAD. The only other male VADs she’d seen had been elderly, but this man was young. It was only when he offered to show her the way to Dougie’s ward that she realised he was crippled, both legs in splints to the knees, so he walked in a twisting shuffle.

‘In here, miss.’

The room was long and high-ceilinged; proper beds, linoleum on the floors, all as different as possible from the rough tents of Aunt Lallie’s field hospital. But one thing was the same: the rows of beds, each only a couple of feet
apart. The men with faces of pain and nightmare; the brown, black or red of their hair a startling splash of colour against the whiteness of their faces and their pillows.

She found Dougie halfway down the ward. He was asleep. His face looked thinner and it had lost its tan. His pyjamas looked new. Midge wondered if Aunt Harriet had sent them, or if the hospital provided them. His hands lay motionless against the stretched sheet, above the cradle that protected the stump where his leg had been.

There was no room to sit between the beds. No chairs to sit on either. She stood at the foot of the bed for a while.

Another woman sat on the edge of a bed further down the ward. She wore a ‘best’-looking hat, with a small veil and a feather, and shoes that looked like they pinched. The man in the bed held her hand, rather than the other way around, as though he was the one to give comfort to his wife. He too had a wooden cradle under his blanket, but his was larger. Both legs then, thought Midge numbly. How will his wife bear it?

But at least her husband was alive. War couldn’t take back a man who had no legs.

There were no other visitors. Families who couldn’t afford to visit their wounded could take their telegrams to any police station to get a railway pass, and stay at the relatives’ hostel near the hospital. But too often jobs still needed doing, young families had to be tended. Perhaps, thought Midge, there would be more visitors later in the day.

The smell was too familiar. Ironed bandages and disinfectant, old blood and the sweet stench of infected flesh.

Tim, she thought. Where are you? Please, Tim! If Dougie dies…don’t leave me all alone.

A voice behind her said, ‘Here, miss.’

It was the VAD. He pushed a wooden chair towards her, its seat polished by innumerable skirts of women like herself. She sat gratefully, still staring at her brother.

‘Will he…’ That wasn’t her voice, she thought. She forced herself to speak firmly. ‘Will he live?’