by Bruce Scates
‘Names said everything.’ Mark’s fingers stopped at the last of four brothers. ‘Everything that needed to be said, anyway.’
‘And how many memorials like this are there?’
‘In the Highlands you mean, or in NSW generally or right across the country? Thousands and thousands.’ Mark grimaced. The labour of loss piled up around them.
‘I can’t really see it helped,’ she said. ‘Building all these monuments. They didn’t have a grave did they?’
‘That’s the point, Vanessa. Names are all they had.’ Mark nodded towards the west, ‘They reminded them of those real graves – on the other side of the ocean.’
Vanessa stretched her legs out on the stone. Her eyes ran up and down the column. She seemed more pensive than Mark had seen her before.
‘All these memorials, all those names. It must have been thousands of pounds, lifetimes of savings. What about all these men without crosses? Those who came back? That’s what I’d like to know. Crippled, blind, faceless. Who looked after them?’ Vanessa’s voice re-found its confidence. ‘Every penny they spent on stone like this was money needed by their families.’
‘It’s not for us to judge them.’
‘Judge them? Who’s talking about judging? It’s a simple matter of priorities. Who do you value more – the living or the dead?’
Mark didn’t answer. The sun was setting red against the hills. It hung radiant above the ridges, bathing the valley in the last of its glow, poised in crimson glory. For a moment he wondered how many of those men had watched the same sunset from here. Looking out on eternity before it charged forth to meet them. A series of sprinklers from the park nearby sprang into action, spitting warm water into the air, slashing the fields like machine guns. Mark could smell the moisture in the air. Vanessa rose to her feet, wishing she’d never begun the conversation.
‘Time to go then?’
Royal Gardens; Roman Ruins, Alexandria, 1915
Alexandria’s Royal Gardens was usually a thirty-minute walk from the seawall. Maggie took the shortest route and weaved her friend through the bustle of the city’s Arab quarter. It was market day, so their progress was slower than usual. Donkeys, boys and women swayed under impossible loads: baskets of fruit, bundles of cloth, colourful urns and drab wooden boxes resting on head, hip or shoulder. The men, Maggie noted, kept well out of the way playing cards, smoking water pipes, and drinking coffee in any of a hundred side street cafés. They made more noise than anyone – laughing, arguing, reading passages from tattered papers to loudly appreciative audiences. But it was the women that Maggie watched with a curious mixture of suspicion, fascination and envy. The labour of the markets, even the business of buying and selling, largely seemed to be their province, their whole world bound by a narrow path that led from home to market and back again. And yet, strangely, it felt no lesser a thing for that: gliding through the busy streets, their eyes alone speaking, every step shrouded by the sacred.
Both Maggie and Elsie had forsaken claims of home and family. That was the price they paid for a career in the early twentieth century. They met and trained together for several years at the Coast Hospital in Sydney, where they rose through the hurdles of hardships and exams that marked their profession. Qualifying as nurses several years before the war, they enjoyed a degree of independence that previous generations, East and West, would have found unimaginable. Of course the male doctors still bullied their nursing staff and male officers insisted on addressing them as subordinates. But women like Maggie and Elsie sometimes chose to ignore them. They lived their own lives as they thought they should and quietly subverted many a man’s authority.
How they had come to be here now Maggie found hard to understand. She supposed they went to war for much the same reasons as their menfolk: patriotism, a sense of duty, a vague hope of social advancement and a restless quest for adventure. It was something of a thrill just weaving their way through the markets – besieged by sights, sounds and carpet-sellers, treated with curiosity, condescension or contempt by the owners of the land Britain had decided to occupy.
Maggie took Elsie by the arm, shaking off of a street urchin selling oranges and scattering a flock of pigeons. She led her down a narrow alleyway. The street’s cobbled surface was slippery beneath them, polished by the feet of a thousand travellers. Every window they passed was shielded by ornate wooden lattice. Maggie caught a glimpse of eyes peering out from behind the screens: women in brightly coloured scarves and long beaded shawls watched the world pass as they had done for generations. She struggled to hear a fragment of what was being said; not that she would have understood a word of it anyway. They were intruders on the street, barging through the marketplace in much the same way that armies bullied their way across borders. As they entered the side gate of the gardens, the call to prayer rang out above the city. Solemn and triumphant, it had a beauty and a melody all of its own. Never had Maggie heard anything quite so humble and exalted.
The two women walked beside a wall of ancient limestone. They wove their way through rows of palms and fragrant frangipani, flowers all the colours of the rainbow surrounded them. Every smell had a flavour. Elsie imagined she tasted strawberry and liquorish, chocolate and coffee, even the thick syrupy treacle she and Roy gave to favoured horses. Strange, Elsie thought, how smell could trigger memory. Her thoughts turned again to the young man lost in war, neither dead nor alive, almost certainly wounded, inexplicably missing.
‘It’s lovely here, isn’t it?’ Maggie breathed in the perfume and exhaled the fumes of the city. ‘You know when the Sultan established these gardens he stocked it with every flower, from every corner of the Ottoman Empire.’ Maggie chose her words judiciously, determined to lead her friend from worry as carefully as she’d led her through the market. And who could resist the history of so beautiful a garden? Not a girl from the bush at any rate. She pushed a frangipani behind Elsie’s ear, playfully, teasingly, like the first act of a long and elaborate seduction.
‘So, you’re saying this was part of Turkey once?’ Maggie was taken aback by the curtness of her tone.
‘Yes Else, I think much of this part of the world was once.’
‘Then I wonder...’ Elsie paused with an uncharacteristic bluntness, ‘I wonder why we couldn’t just leave it to them.’
For the first time in their friendship, Maggie sensed a kind of rejection. But she was not easily discouraged and hugged her friend. ‘Come on my girl, we’ll have that cup of tea.’ They turned at the last of the flowerbeds and walked towards the tearooms.
The two women were received by a quiet Egyptian youth. He led them to the centre of an arching colonnade and sat them down beside a fountain. Worn stone lips tumbled out their offering, water as clear as crystal, smelling of rose petal and jasmine. A moment later the waiter returned with their order – Indian tea for Elsie, poured from a china pot; a glass of apple tea for Maggie, sweet, golden and refreshing. For several minutes neither woman spoke. They sipped their tea and listened to the playful gurgle of the fountain.
‘What do you think’s become of him, Maggie, tell me, honestly?’
‘I really don’t know, darling. I don’t know any more than you do.’ She looked away and summoned up her courage. ‘What exactly did the soldiers say?’
Elsie fumbled in her handbag. In a hospital notebook she had recorded every conversation, with every soldier over the last few weeks, noting anything that had a bearing on Roy Irwin’s disappearance. Elsie had taken down the words as they were spoken, careful to note any hint of hesitation, any puzzled silence. Most, she thought, spoke honestly, relating the horror of the battle as best they could. Only a few wounded men had refused to look her in the eye. They stared out into space as if it could hide them.
‘Here, it’s all here in my notes. Not one of them saw him killed, not one of them.’
‘But what did they see?’
‘Oh, too much,’ Elsie sighed, ‘and too little.’
She flicked feverishl
y through the pages of the notebook.
‘The last man to see him was a private who followed him into the trenches. There was an explosion, he said, and Roy was wounded in the head. But Roy wasn’t killed. Not that anyone saw. And they all say there’s a good chance he was taken prisoner.’ Elsie’s voice faltered with those closing words. Prisoners posed a risk in any battle even more so when the odds were in the balance. Both women knew what the fighting at Lone Pine was like. Both had seen the wounds it inflicted.
Elsie rummaged again through her notebook and resumed the jolting narrative: ‘Yes, perhaps Roy was taken prisoner. Perhaps, he’s in some hospital somewhere – somewhere in Turkey...’ One hope fed on another, gambling with fate, the stakes spiralling higher. ‘That head wound – he must have lost his memory. And he’s waiting, Maggie, waiting for someone to find him.’ She slammed the book down on the table. Avoiding Maggie’s eyes, she spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘I can’t believe he’s dead. If he’d been killed I’d know somehow.’
Again Maggie looked away. So many mothers, wives and sweethearts had said the same.
‘Yes, but Elsie you must be brave, you must prepare yourself for – for the worst. You and I both pray it doesn’t come to that.’
These words were not new to her. In the ageless plight of the bereaved, the young nurse stood at the crossroads: unable to lay the man she loved to rest, frightened to hope, unwilling to mourn, lost, like Roy himself, in a kind of limbo. And then all the pain came rushing out of her like a dam wall breaking.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she blurted out. Maggie held her tighter and tighter, stroking her stiff matted hair.
In an instant a crowd of waiters flapped uselessly around them. ‘Does madam need a doctor?’ ‘Some water, madam?’ ‘Some brandy?’ A smartly dressed officer pushed them to one side. He tapped the table with his swagger stick as if to wake children from a daydream.
‘Is there a problem here? Ladies!’ The last word was barked like a command. Then the officer lowered his voice. ‘For God’s sake, what’s this scene about? Pull yourself together, Nurse, the natives are watching.’
‘And you think that matters?’ Maggie snapped back. She turned again to Elsie. She was holding her tight enough now to draw the pain inside her.
‘It matters a great deal, madam. And have you forgotten how to address a superior officer?’
He loomed over both of them. The pips on his epaulettes signalled a colonel’s rank. A red band threaded through his collar confirmed he was on the general staff. A monocle in one eye twitched as he spoke. Alexandria or Imbros, a luxury liner off the Dardanelles or a plush office in Cairo was as close as Colonel Bell would ever come to fighting.
Elsie gasped for air. Her sobbing grew louder, more desperate, more pleading.
‘I ... I loved him, I ... love him.’
‘Oh heavens above! – Curtis. Curtis!’ The colonel’s batman scurried in from outside.
‘Fetch the car and take these two nurses back to their quarters.’
‘Y’sirr.’
‘And hurry up about it man.’ The colonel lowered his voice, as if it was painful to be there. ‘This sort of behaviour reflects badly on us all.’
Maggie rose to her feet, still cradling her friend. She looked at the colonel’s face. There was a terrible emptiness there, as if God had forgotten something.
As the two women walked unsteadily away the colonel turned back to his party. Best, he thought, to put such unpleasantness behind them.
‘Colonials, of course, not much one can do, I’m afraid.’
‘Comes of bad stock, Reggie.’ His colleague swallowed the last of his wine. ‘Still, with the Empire in peril one can’t always choose one’s soldiers.’
‘No...’ the Colonel too drained his glass ‘...nor one’s nurses it seems.’ The sound of their laughter overtook Elsie’s sobbing. As they closed the door behind her Maggie heard the colonel and his brother officers calling for their brandy.
The colonel’s driver did as he was ordered and returned Maggie and Elsie to their quarters. But not immediately. No sooner had the car jolted through the garden gates than Maggie began the gentle art of feminine conspiracy.
‘Now, Sergeant, you can’t just take us back to the barracks. It’s really not what the girl needs,’ Maggie leaned forward. Elsie was drifting into sleep on the seat behind her. ‘She’s had a bit of a shock. Lost someone on Gallipoli.’
The soldier seemed unimpressed. ‘We’ve all lost someone there, miss – and it’s Corporal, not Sergeant.’
Maggie feared this was going to be harder than she first thought. The corporal was a small exacting man, a good deal older than herself, polite and reserved. Not the kind to take risks, Maggie reckoned. The car lurched on. The stench of nearby tenements soured the memory of garden rosebuds. Maggie persisted.
‘Oh, I’m sure it will be Sergeant in time, Corporal. It’s just that I doubt the colonel needs the car immediately and all those other officers had cars as well, didn’t they? I just wonder if there wasn’t somewhere quiet we could go for a time, somewhere to take her mind off things. You wouldn’t know anywhere would you?’
Indeed, the corporal did know somewhere. Much of his war had been spent ferrying general staff from one of Egypt’s distractions to another – though not all of them were suitable for ladies. In truth, he wanted to help. The sleeping nurse was probably half his age. No sweet young girl should suffer such sorrow. And Curtis’ compassion was also edged by guilt. Men back at the barracks envied him his job: its comfort, its perks and its safety. He felt only a sense of shame. Half his battalion had been slaughtered at Suvla Bay. Even now, their bones were bleaching white in the sun, corroding in salt-dried earth, unhonoured, unknown.
‘Problem is, miss, I am the colonel’s desegregated driver and I’m not sure his order can be, as it were, countermanded.’ Maggie knew this was an invitation.
‘I am an officer too you know and my rank in the Australian Nursing Corps matches that of a colonel.’
‘Is that so, miss?’ Corporal Curtis suspected it wasn’t. ‘Well, if that’s a direct order...’
‘It is, Corporal.’
‘Very well, miss. Then I would venture to suggest the Roman ruins in the old quarter. Very fine it is, miss, spoken highly of by all the officers.’
‘The Roman ruins it is then, Corporal!’ her voice sang out in a very public triumph. ‘And I will treat you to afternoon tea on the strength of it.’ The corporal blinked in surprise, and the car plunged into a pothole. Corporal Curtis had never before had such an offer, not from an officer and certainly not from a lady. But he considered himself a man of the world and assumed that in Australia things were done differently.
‘Well if you insist, miss...’
The Vauxhall Tourer changed course abruptly, tumbling the nurses and unsettling nearby carts and bystanders. Its left forward wheel bounced over the kerb and it seemed for a moment that car, driver and passengers would career into a street stall.
‘Sorry, miss,’ Curtis shouted above protesting stallholders, ‘but we’ll have to turn here if we’re to miss the market. Much enamoured of their markets, are the Egyptians.’ His voice slowed and lapsed into the jargon of a guidebook. ‘For the Egyptian, you see, the market “fulfils a sochial as well as an ecynomic function”.’
‘Is that so, Corporal?’ Maggie repressed a giggle and tried to nudge her friend from her stupor.
‘Is there much you know about Egypt, Corporal?’
‘Oh yes, miss.’ The Corporal was delighted to be noticed in this way. ‘What I’ve read, miss. And of course what I’ve heard the officers say. Educated gentlemen they are, miss, read the classics they have. Really, you wouldn’t believe some of the stories.’
And so, as the Vauxhall jolted slowly down the city’s ever-crowded streets, Corporal Curtis retold the tales of antiquity; kings with tall white crowns, queens of unimaginable beauty, hawk-headed Horus and the vulture goddess Nekhbet, great tombs, glistening riches and th
e dark terrors of the underworld. Like most self-read men, Curtis’ knowledge ranged the ages with gay abandon, confusing kingdoms, muddling dynasties, contracting the sprawling, Nile-bound geography of ancient Egypt. But in other ways his taxonomy of the ancient world was encyclopaedic in precision. Many an hour he had spent in Cairo’s museum as he waited on the mandatory tours of officers, dignitaries and statesmen. Bent on self-improvement, the former grocer from London memorised one explanatory label after another. Corporal Curtis catalogued deities in the same ordered way he’d once stacked tins, jars and bottles.
Not that the past was a fetish to him. Curtis considered himself a thoroughly modern man and hoped the young ladies could see that. The mysteries of the internal combustion engine were only the beginning. Corporal Curtis took an interest in all the achievements of twentieth-century science and its many more exotic offshoots: phrenology, spiritualism, flight through the air and journeys beneath the sea, the many miraculous powers of electricity. Even so, the ancient world exerted an attraction all of its own. Arrayed in the soft light of the museum, the wonders of antiquity outshone the most brilliant new invention.
‘Hard to say which of the Egyptian deities was the most important, miss, they didn’t have just one god like us Christians. Truth is,’ and Curtis could clearly concede the logic in this, ‘there was a god for almost everything and most creatures, well, they sort of became gods too.’ Curtis mentally retraced his steps through the museum galleries, choosing the deities he thought young ladies would find the most colourful. And he imposed his own order on a universe lost millennia ago.
‘At the top, like, there’s Amun – supreme creator, god of the air and the sun and he’s everywhere.’ A breeze swirled around the cabin as if confirming Amun’s continued presence. ‘Took all forms he did too, miss, could be a ram or a lion even a goose. Often he appears as a long, upright snake symbolising fertility...’
Curtis had recited the museum card without quite fathoming its meaning. Maggie nudged Elsie again and much to her relief found she was smirking. Realising his indiscretion, Curtis plunged to the very bottom of his supernatural hierarchy. ‘Then there’s the gods of the underworld, cruel and dangerous, miss, like Am-Heh who had the face of a dog and was so mean only Amun could control him.’