A Rose for the Anzac Boys (7 page)

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to knock on every door of the village till I’ve got enough to feed our men properly.’

Midge watched her stride off down the station. Then she lost sight of her as another surge of ambulances arrived. Tired horses showed the whites of their eyes, terrified at the smell of blood. Stretchers were stacked four deep, tied together in a desperate effort to keep them stable, the blood from one man dripping onto those below.

Mix watery cocoa in the coppers, stir and serve. No more bread, or beef. Anne, next to her, ladling out the cocoa, tears running down her face. No time to ask why, or comfort her. When next she looked, Anne was smiling again, the endless practised smile of reassurance.

‘Miss? That’s the last tin of cocoa.’ It was Anne’s maid, Beryl.

‘Just keep adding water,’ Midge said. ‘Any hot drink is better than none.’

‘Yes, miss.’

A year ago, she would have thought that men in agony wouldn’t want to drink. Now she knew that blood loss called for fluid; that shock needed warmth; that just a smile or a hand in theirs could help hold back the terror of pain in a strange country.

War, she thought, was the strangest land of all.

‘Midge! Look!’

Midge followed Anne’s gaze down the platform. A strange procession made its way towards them: Ethel in front, and behind her a line of women carrying pots, or saucepans, or bread or cake wrapped in cloths.

‘Tell this lot where to put the stuff,’ said Ethel shortly. ‘I’m off to send telegrams to my da and anyone else who’ll listen.’

More ambulances, more stretchers, but the food held out now, miraculously renewed as it grew low. A cart arrived with women from the next village, all carrying pots of soup.

‘Miss, a drink, please. Miss…’

‘Miss, my mate. He’s hurt bad, miss.’

Nothing you could do but offer them a drink and some comfort, moving down the line of stretchers.

‘No use giving Snowy none, miss. He died an hour ago.’

Midge looked down at the man’s head she was cradling. His eyes were open, but his friend was right. She put his head back gently on the stretcher, and found something shoved into her hand. A mug of soup. She stared at it, dazed.

‘Drink,’ said Anne. She held out a sandwich too.

‘I can’t.’

‘How long do you think we can go without food? Eat.’

Midge took the sandwich. Ate. Drank.

And more trucks came.

Ethel issued orders, her red hair moving amongst the other women. She had kept one of the coppers for soup and poured them all in together. The soups were all mostly some sort of vegetable, so it seemed to work all right.

Midge worked her way along the stretchers. Smile, she told herself. Smile. ‘Would you like some soup? Let me help you…’

One man looked at her apologetically. ‘I’m getting blood on your nice dress, miss.’

As though that mattered.

‘Do you think you could manage some hot soup?’

All the while, she looked for his face on the stretchers, among the men struggling from the trucks or being carried by their friends. And with every man whose head she held as he sipped at the warm soup, she felt a moment’s lifting of her heart that it was nobody she knew. But Gordon couldn’t be there. He was on leave. And the trains were for the wounded. That was why he hadn’t come. He was on leave so he was safe, and he would come when he could. There would be a letter, or a telegram, already waiting at
the hotel. Yes, that was why she hadn’t heard. He had sent a message to the hotel. She would get it as soon as there was time to stop, to breathe, to think…

‘Miss Macpherson?’

A pair of boots, covered in mud, came to a stop by the side of the stretcher where she knelt. There was blood in the mud.

‘Miss Macpherson, they said you were down here.’

She forced herself to smile at the man on the stretcher, a smile of apology and, perhaps, comfort for a second in a time of hell, before she stood up.

It was the private from the café, with hair like golden grass. The man who’d introduced her to Gordon. Harry Harrison. One arm was in a sling.

She knew what he was going to say before he spoke. She shook her head. But he spoke anyway.

‘I…I’m sorry, miss.’

The world began to spin. She put out her hand, to find something to steady herself, and he took her arm with his good hand. He looked around for somewhere she could sit. But there was nowhere; the platform was crammed with the wounded.

‘Can I help you back to your hotel, miss?’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘What happened?’

He hesitated. ‘All leave was cancelled. He wasn’t able to send you a telegram even. You should have heard him swearing—begging your pardon, miss. But he was that cut up. Said it was your birthday and everything. Then the colonel called for volunteers to cut the wire last night before the push at dawn.’

‘But there was a moon last night.’

Even I know an enemy can see you cut barbed wire by moonlight, she thought. She remembered Tim and Dougie shooting rabbits by moonlight back home. A hunter’s moon.

Harry’s face was expressionless. ‘Don’t make any difference to the high-ups, I reckon. Moon or not.’

‘How…’ She found her voice didn’t work.

He said very gently, ‘It was sudden, miss. I reckon it got a big vein in his leg. He wouldn’t have felt a thing, miss, he was out of it.’

‘I…see.’

It was silly to feel like this, she thought. She had known Gordon for two months. Had met him only once. They’d exchanged sixteen letters…twenty…Perhaps, she thought vaguely, she was grieving for what might have been. The days they’d never have; the man she’d never really know. The man he might have been in years to come.

‘Thank you,’ she said to Harry. Suddenly she saw him for the first time. ‘Your arm! And that’s blood on your chest?’

‘Not my blood, miss. Well, not much of it. Just some shrapnel. I’ve had worse in a scrap as a kiddie.’ He bit his lip. ‘I was with him, you see, miss. I carried him back. I thought he might make it. But there was so much blood. That’s how I know he didn’t suffer much,’ he said again, as though anxious to make the point. ‘He didn’t know what hit him, miss. Didn’t know a thing.’

The horror of what this man must have seen, have done,
washed over her. But she said nothing. There were no words.

‘I’m sorry about the mess on my uniform, miss,’ he said a bit helplessly. ‘I should have changed. But I was that worried about you just waiting here, not knowing. I didn’t think. And it’s your birthday…’

The words trailed away, as though he realised what ‘Happy Birthday’ would sound like on this platform of blood and moaning.

It was as though reality pushed away the horror. Midge said gently, ‘You must be hungry. They serve meals at our hotel.’

He shook his head. ‘I hitched a ride on one of the trucks, miss. I’d better get back or I’ll be charged.’

‘Soup then.’ She led him through the avenues of stretchers to the canteen. ‘Beryl, soup for Mr Harr…I mean Private Harrison, please.’

She handed him a slice of apple cake. It was still warm from a village oven. He took it awkwardly, as though not sure whether to eat it. Finally he stuffed it in a pocket.

It seemed such a small, mean thing to give him. He mustn’t even have slept, Midge realised. He had seen Gordon die, and worse, but he had still hurried here to give what comfort he could. And she had nothing for him but a cup of soup and a slice of someone’s apple cake.

‘How do you stand it?’ she asked suddenly. She shook her head. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. A silly thing to say.’

He looked at her. His eyes were very clear despite the weariness and the mud. ‘Not silly at all.’ He glanced around the crowded platform. ‘I go back home, miss.’

She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Sorry. I’m not one for expressing myself well. I just…well, I keep home in my mind. The hills. The trees. Even the blessed sheep. Sometimes if I can’t sleep, I imagine I’m fencing. You know, digging the holes, seeing the colour of the dirt—the good rich dirt we’ve got on the creek flats.’ He gave her a faint grin. ‘By the time I get the first two posts straight I’m snoring fit to blow the roof off.’ He shrugged. ‘Don’t say it’s not hard, sometimes. Wish I had a photo. I’ve got one of Mum and Dad, but not one of the old place. Never thought of having one taken, I suppose.’

‘I’ve got one of Glen Donal,’ Midge said.

She reached into the bag on her belt and pulled it out. He took it. She shivered slightly as she saw his hand, the black under the nails. Was it Gordon’s blood?

He was smiling now. ‘You know, it could be home. Same hills. Yours are higher but, I think. That snow in the background up there? Same paddocks. Same sheep, almost.’

‘That’s Dougie’s prize ram.’

‘He looks a good ’un. Good chest on him. Look at that nose too. He knows he’s an aristocrat. How many bales—’ He broke off. ‘Listen to us. In the middle of a bloody war—pardon my French—talking about sheep.’

He held the photo out to her.

‘Keep it.’ It suddenly seemed such a small thing to give him, after he had been through so much.

‘I can’t take your photo!’

‘Please. It would mean a great deal to me if you did.’ She tried to find the words. ‘To know it was with you. I…I sometimes think I’m at home too. It would be…well, like sharing it with a friend.’

Suddenly she remembered the chocolate. It was in her apron pocket. She had thought she might share it with Gordon. ‘Here, take this too.’

He looked down at it, embarrassed. ‘Miss, there’s no need.’

‘There’s every need!’ she said fiercely. ‘You were there! You helped him, tried to save him!’

‘Miss, I think you need to rest. Go back to your hotel, just for a while.’ He looked over at Beryl. ‘She’s had a shock. Can you take her home?’

‘No!’ Midge said. ‘I’m all right. Really. I must get on here. There’s so much to do.’

‘I wish there was someone to look after you for a change,’ he said quietly. He took the chocolate from her and held it awkwardly. Then, as someone beckoned from the station doorway, ‘I’m sorry, miss. That’s Johnno, me mate. He wangled me a lift. I really have to go. But you look after yourself. Promise?’

‘I promise. You…you stay safe too.’

‘I will, miss. Miss Macpherson…would you mind if I write to you sometimes?’ Another small, tired smile. ‘About sheep, maybe?’

‘I’d like that,’ she said softly. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Goodbye, miss.’ And he was gone.

31 August

Dear Miss Macpherson,

It was good to get your last letter. It was interesting what you said about how your father weaned lambs at two months old. Makes sense. I’ll tell Dad to give it a try in my next letter home. Ours are bigger-framed merinos than yours, I think. They have to go a good way to find enough tucker sometimes, so I reckon they need to be stronger than yours. But what we gain in hardiness we lose in the fineness of the wool. I think you Kiwis have a lot to teach us about record-keeping though, and that stuff about bluestone salt licks was interesting. I’ve copied that out for my dad too. What does your brother think of dressing with phosphate? We haven’t done it yet but Dad is thinking of giving it a go.

We were to be given a breather last week, just a one-hour parade in the morning and a football match in the afternoon at which attendance was compulsory. But the lads made it known that they didn’t take to watching a ball thrown about. So the colonel gave us five hours of marching instead, just to show us Aussies he meant business. Most of these officers wouldn’t know a trench if they fell in one. They’ve no idea what the men have gone through.

The next day he had us marching again, just for the exercise, nine hours with only a break for a quarter of an hour. The Pommy captain had a fresh horse and didn’t see cause for us to have more time to look at the flowers. We marched through two villages, very narrow unsanitary streets. The farmers here don’t live on their acres but all make a village together. But they seem to do a good enough job of it. We passed some cabbages as big as watermelons and some well-pruned vines in the front gardens. All of this with the noise of the guns behind us or in front of us, it was impossible to say.

Well, that is about all from me. I finally had a day’s leave yesterday and got into town. Me and Johnno found a little shop where the French were Australianised enough to sell
le toast et la bière
instead of
café françois
. I also found
la grande cathédrale
—and six thousand sandbags all around it! You will see how my French is improving! Miss Willis who taught us back at Biscuit Creek would be impressed. Did I ever tell you Mum made me do correspondence school for a few years too? Think she hoped I’d be a teacher or something, but it never really stuck. The farm is all I ever wanted, just like you.

I hope all is going good at your canteen. They give us Anzacs medals sometimes as long as we don’t cheek the officers. I reckon you girls deserve one too.

Respectfully yours,

Harry Harrison

18 September 1916

Dear Aunt Harriet,

Thank you for all your fruit cakes and please thank all your friends in the VAD group too. You should have seen the men’s faces when we gave them cake as well as bully beef sandwiches!

This has been a good week. We received a trainload of other comforts to give out as well, so were able to provide socks and gloves and toffees, and some lucky men also got either a pencil or a magazine.

What they keep asking for though is soap. So if your group is able to do anything along those lines, I know so many would be very grateful. Ethel has written to her father asking for soap too, but he is doing so much for us already I am not sure that he will agree to send soap as well, especially as he does not deal in soap and may not be able to buy it cheaply. Is it rationed now, as well?

Please give my special love to Uncle Thomas, Michael, Bruce, Julia and Grace, and know that I am well and your loving niece,

Margery

It worked, Midge thought, as she held a pannikin of cocoa to the mouth of a man whose empty bleeding eye sockets she would have shrunk from a year ago. More and more these days she followed Harry’s advice: shut her eyes for a brief moment, so a small part of her was suddenly at peace in the eternal world of grass and mountains. A mob of deer flowing down the hillside, the honking wild geese above the river. Even here, sometimes, a breath of snow seemed to waft, not from any French mountain but from home. White faces watched her, set by months of drabness cut by weeks of horror. But now, she was able to glimpse a ram as it sniffed at the spring ewes, or see a hare nibble at the seedlings, its whiskers twitching.

Sometimes she thought of Private Harrison; wondered if he too was watching the same things, remembering the distant worlds they shared, so different and so much the same.

It was enough, mostly, to get her through her shift.

Midge sat at the narrow dressing table in the room at the hotel and pulled her brush through her hair and pinned it up again into its sensible bun. Was that really her, she wondered, that white-faced girl in the mirror?

I’m tired, she thought.

Not just tired from a year without enough sleep, of trying to nap through the daytime noises as they had today, but tired of unvarying routine, of gaslit nights and stretchers, or daylight and fresh-cheeked young men with little idea what they were going into. Winter was coming,
their second in the canteen. Frostbite cases again soon, she thought, as well as wounds.

It was strange to look back at the schoolgirls they’d been only eighteen months before, longing for excitement, to be part of it all, worried that the war would be over before they got to it. It had never occurred to her that the romance would turn into an aching repetition of cutting and stirring, serving and unloading.

A year ago, the feeling of being indispensable had lent her energy. But they had more volunteers these days: friends from school, nieces or granddaughters of Aunt Harriet’s friends, or Lady George’s.

What would she do if she left here, even for a holiday? Aunt Harriet, for all her kindness, was still mostly a stranger. Auntie Lallie was busy at her casualty station.

If Ethel or Anne decided to visit back home she could go with them. But she would be a stranger there too. And Ethel and her genius for organising
was
essential. She’d been up before the others this afternoon, despite the hours they had put in the previous night, to send another host of telegrams appealing for more donations for ‘my boys’.

And Anne…Midge glanced over to where Anne was spreading a thick white paste on her face. Anne showed no signs of wanting to go home.

‘What is that stuff?’ Midge wrinkled her nose. ‘It stinks.’

Anne looked up from her silver-backed hand mirror. ‘Puréed garlic.’

‘Garlic!’

‘Madame says garlic is splendid for spots. She spread
garlic on her daughter’s spots and her daughter was married within the year.’

‘To the fat man who’s a prisoner in Germany?’

‘Well, he probably isn’t fat now he’s a prisoner of war. And that’s not the point, darling. The point is that finally one is almost totally, entirely spot free! Mummy is going to be thrilled. A daughter she can present at court with pride. Of course Mummy is far too busy to worry about that sort of thing now. But still…’

‘Anne…’ Midge hesitated. ‘You’re not thinking of going home?’ Life would be unendurable without Anne, she thought. Ethel was preoccupied, and the others…well, they weren’t Anne.

Anne looked at her in surprise. ‘Of course not, darling.’ She laughed and put her mirror down. ‘One didn’t come to France just for a spot cure, after all. Come on. Madame promised an omelette yesterday.’

‘An omelette! Where did she get the eggs?’

‘She’s been giving the hotel’s dishwater to the widow Bodin for her pigs. And in return Madame gets six eggs a day, of which we are to get two in return for being properly sympathetic about Madame’s bunions and the difficulty of getting good endives with the Boche in Belgium.’

‘She’s not complaining about the endives again?’

‘She is. “The best endives come from Belgium,
mademoiselle
, as everybody knows…” ’

After the omelette was duly eaten, accompanied by thin chicory coffee and a slice each of the heavy sour bread that
was all civilians in France could get these days, they made their way across the road and through the station courtyard to the platform, carrying the clean aprons that Madame’s brother’s sister-in-law washed and starched and ironed each day. The shadows were already turning into darkness; the lamplighter just starting his round through the town.

The platform was empty, apart from the station master’s wife, slowly brushing the cobwebs from the office windows, and a cat, curled up as though war, trains and the imminent invasion of her territory by hungry soldiers was beyond all possibility.

Ethel was at the canteen already, instructing one of their new volunteers in the art of making one loaf of bread stretch into thirty sandwiches. Ethel looked different from a year ago, thought Midge, thinner, every movement quick and decisive as though there was no time to waste a single gesture.

‘Haven’t you sliced bread before, lass?’ she was saying patiently to the new helper. ‘You wet the bread saw first, then you slice from one side, then turn the loaf over and cut from the other side. Otherwise you end up with doorstops, all thicky one side and thinny the other. No, there’s no butter. This isn’t the Ritz and we ran out of marge last week.’

‘Darling, did you have any breakfast?’ Anne asked.

Ethel looked up. ‘Breakfast? I can’t remember. Do you know those blighters forgot to drop off our powdered milk? We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got—halfstrength, or quarter-strength if there’s a rush.’

‘Eat,’ said Anne firmly. ‘Madame sent you a ham roll.’

Ethel took the roll and bit into it absently. ‘You remembered the aprons?’

‘Darling, I always remember the aprons. Now, stop fussing and eat your nice roll—well, your quite nasty roll come to think of it.’

Midge fastened her apron and let the talk wash over her. How many nights like this had they lived now?

Slowly the platform began to fill up with stretcher cases and wounded men. The next hospital train was due in an hour.

It looked like being an easy night, Midge decided. The vehicles in the courtyard were just the usual ambulances, with no trucks or carts roped in to help. No push or major battle at the moment, then. Just the usual stretcher cases that needed to be shipped to England or Paris: men unlucky enough to be caught by stray shrapnel or unwary enough to show their heads above their trench; men with trench foot; the shell-shock cases the army insisted on calling ‘neurasthenia’, denying any possibility that the war itself might be to blame for the screams and terrors.

‘Wuff grff?’

Midge looked up as a familiar doggy figure bounded through the men on the platform. Dolores sat in front of her expectantly, her tail wagging. She had put on weight the last few months, partly from begged cocoa, but also from the crusts the men fed her. No matter how hungry they were, it seemed that a crust was a small price to pay
for the familiar homelike smell of dog and a large wet lick across the chin.

‘You’re going to need a corset if you get any fatter,’ Midge told her. She reached for the bowl they kept for Dolores these days, and filled it with cocoa. At least it kept the big dog from sticking her nose in the men’s pannikins.

Down at the other end of the station Jumbo accompanied a small mob of men onto the platform, their faces covered in damp cloths. Jumbo, Slogger and Boadicea must be picking up gas cases tonight, Midge thought. Mustard gas caused temporary blindness; the only relief was watersoaked bandages over the eyes till the men could get better help in England.

Jumbo settled her men down against the waiting room wall, then reappeared with Slogger, each carrying one end of a stretcher. The girls put the stretcher down by the other men. Jumbo knelt and smiled and gestured up at the canteen, obviously asking if the men would like a drink. Midge nodded to their new assistant.

‘Better start taking trays down the platform—the stretcher cases can’t come and get it, and the men who’ve been gassed can’t see. They may need you to hold their pannikins while they drink too. No need to hurry. Just let them take their time.’

The girl nodded. Her name was Lena, Midge remembered—there were now so many volunteers it was hard to keep them straight. She had five brothers, three in Flanders, two still young enough to stay at home.

‘Hello, old thing.’ Slogger’s voice sounded flat and strained.

Midge held out a pannikin of cocoa. ‘Here. You look like you could do with it.’

‘Thanks.’ Slogger reached out, then looked on helplessly as the pannikin slid from her fingers. The hot cocoa splashed across Midge’s apron.

‘Oh bloody hell!’ The girl suddenly began to cry. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I just can’t help it.’

Midge glanced down at Slogger’s hands, then stared. Even by the dim lantern light she could see they were red and oozing pus.

Jumbo ran up to the counter. ‘Darling, I told you your hands were too bad to go out tonight.’

The tears turned to hiccups as Slogger tried to swallow the sobs, then giggles as Dolores started to lick up the muddy dregs of cocoa. ‘They’re not as bad as they look. Well, all right, they are. Trouble is, one’s hands are always wet and raw, and we’re always handling infected wounds.’

‘How can you drive like that?’ Midge asked.

‘I can’t. Except one has to keep going, doesn’t one?’

Midge stared—at the hands; at the face, white and pinched with cold and exhaustion. ‘Can’t you do the driving?’ she asked Jumbo.

‘Me?’ Jumbo shook her head. ‘Never learned.’ She looked at Slogger helplessly. ‘If Slogger can’t drive that puts me and Boadicea out of action too. We don’t have any spare drivers at all at the moment.’

Midge came to a decision. ‘I can drive.’

‘You can?’ Slogger looked at her suspiciously, despite the pain and exhaustion. ‘Are you sure? Really drive?’

‘Yes. I used to drive all the time back home. In New Zealand.’

Slogger hesitated, obviously unwilling to trust her beloved Boadicea to a novice. ‘Yes, but these roads—they’re not roads at all mostly. There’s mud and ruts and—’

Midge laughed. ‘I used to drive our Ford across the paddocks to pick up a sick sheep! And you should see the tracks about Glen Donal after the rain. I remember when the causeway was washed out for weeks and…well, anyway. I can drive. And I’ll take over if you like.’