concentrated and fixed in place by a flurry of marriage vows. Sally barely had time to think how interesting the question was and how instructive was this line of men whose plentiful sweat smelled little worse than that of healthy men from the camp. Sally swabbed the arm of one who looked ahead, and another who viewed the ceiling and a third whose eyes were lowered and a fourth who wept and who shuddered so that Freud was left to say, Please keep it still, will you?
Don’t cry, Sally told him. This will fix it.
For this boy wanted the vows and not the blight. All the while Freud’s hand reached with a natural composure. Her movements were those of a person unafraid of contagion. But even she, Sally noticed, did not look much at the fallen soldiers who presented themselves, the casualties of the Wazzir, the suburb of hell within Cairo where the berserk arrack liquor and the women selling their diseases for baksheesh were domiciled.
But now they were all lambs before the punishing but necessary wide-bore needle which must be driven in with force, the flesh making its resistance. No one said, Don’t hurt a man, Sister. No one said, Oh cripes, a hornet’s got me. Nothing was said because they had a lie to keep and any utterance might let it out. If—cured one day—they courted some oblivious girl in Australia, they could not utter the news that lay contained in this tent. But solution 606 could give you back your body for the battle or for the distant Australian bedroom where you might sleep a cured man and die as an honored husband and cherished father.
Freud handed the syringe to her after brisk use and Sally replaced it from beneath the cloth on the bowl with a fresh one. In that tent they were party to a military secret. People in Australia didnot know of these first casualties—that there was a desire greater than the desire for battle, that there was a bacterium as yet more grievous than machine guns.
• • •
Ellis Hoyle—with whom Naomi had sometimes promenaded on the Archimedes— was a man not much older than her who had been training in the vast camp out in the desert beyond Mena House and the pyramids. Naomi had asked Captain Hoyle why such displays were engaged in at two o’clock in the afternoon when the sun was—at least for that reputedly more lenient season—most blatant and when light bounced off the gravel and sands to strike the men in the face under the brims of their bushmen’s hats. He said that the generals thought this weather steeled men for unspecified worse things.
In the evening—along with a number of other officers, including Carradine’s husband—Hoyle was regularly down at Mena House having tea with the nurses on the hotel roof or on the veranda. He and his friends—young officers barely converted from their normal callings as farmers, bank clerks, sheep breeders, schoolteachers—arrived by commandeered khaki cars. There was even a journalist or two and a very determinedly jolly young Anglican minister from Melbourne who did not serve as a chaplain but as an infantryman.
Since the nurses were not overworked, they slept adequately and their faces gleamed with the strangeness and ease of things as they prepared themselves for these evening visits from officers. They had time to change into their uniform jackets and skirts and good shoes in case the evening developed and they all had dinner together or went on a jaunt after dining in the mess.
Captain Ellis Hoyle was a tailored young man, an inch too square in the jaw so that you could bet he’d turn jowly when he was older. His mouth was long enough for his fellow officers to nickname him Duck. He was a solicitor from the Western District of Victoria and he spoke as if he loved the area in a way that Sally and Naomi had never managed to like the place they came from.
All the young men—like Ellis—had been to Cairo tailors and had light, well-cut uniforms of fawn which had saved them from the heavy serge the
Don’t cry, Sally told him. This will fix it.
For this boy wanted the vows and not the blight. All the while Freud’s hand reached with a natural composure. Her movements were those of a person unafraid of contagion. But even she, Sally noticed, did not look much at the fallen soldiers who presented themselves, the casualties of the Wazzir, the suburb of hell within Cairo where the berserk arrack liquor and the women selling their diseases for baksheesh were domiciled.
But now they were all lambs before the punishing but necessary wide-bore needle which must be driven in with force, the flesh making its resistance. No one said, Don’t hurt a man, Sister. No one said, Oh cripes, a hornet’s got me. Nothing was said because they had a lie to keep and any utterance might let it out. If—cured one day—they courted some oblivious girl in Australia, they could not utter the news that lay contained in this tent. But solution 606 could give you back your body for the battle or for the distant Australian bedroom where you might sleep a cured man and die as an honored husband and cherished father.
Freud handed the syringe to her after brisk use and Sally replaced it from beneath the cloth on the bowl with a fresh one. In that tent they were party to a military secret. People in Australia didnot know of these first casualties—that there was a desire greater than the desire for battle, that there was a bacterium as yet more grievous than machine guns.
• • •
Ellis Hoyle—with whom Naomi had sometimes promenaded on the Archimedes— was a man not much older than her who had been training in the vast camp out in the desert beyond Mena House and the pyramids. Naomi had asked Captain Hoyle why such displays were engaged in at two o’clock in the afternoon when the sun was—at least for that reputedly more lenient season—most blatant and when light bounced off the gravel and sands to strike the men in the face under the brims of their bushmen’s hats. He said that the generals thought this weather steeled men for unspecified worse things.
In the evening—along with a number of other officers, including Carradine’s husband—Hoyle was regularly down at Mena House having tea with the nurses on the hotel roof or on the veranda. He and his friends—young officers barely converted from their normal callings as farmers, bank clerks, sheep breeders, schoolteachers—arrived by commandeered khaki cars. There was even a journalist or two and a very determinedly jolly young Anglican minister from Melbourne who did not serve as a chaplain but as an infantryman.
Since the nurses were not overworked, they slept adequately and their faces gleamed with the strangeness and ease of things as they prepared themselves for these evening visits from officers. They had time to change into their uniform jackets and skirts and good shoes in case the evening developed and they all had dinner together or went on a jaunt after dining in the mess.
Captain Ellis Hoyle was a tailored young man, an inch too square in the jaw so that you could bet he’d turn jowly when he was older. His mouth was long enough for his fellow officers to nickname him Duck. He was a solicitor from the Western District of Victoria and he spoke as if he loved the area in a way that Sally and Naomi had never managed to like the place they came from.
All the young men—like Ellis—had been to Cairo tailors and had light, well-cut uniforms of fawn which had saved them from the heavy serge the
Similar Books
