Solomon's Song

by Bryce Courtenay

  The surgeon shakes his head. ‘No, nothing quite that bad, but you could be a paraplegic, you’d be sent home in a wheelchair.’

  ‘Or it could work?’

  Mockeridge nods his head. ‘Or, as you say, it could work and you’d soon enough be fit as a fiddle, though I don’t suppose you’d be too keen to get back into the thick of things?’

  ‘On the contrary, Doctor, I’ve seen all my friends die while the Turk quite rightly defended his homeland against us. We were the invaders, the enemy who came to take his home away from him. But in France I’ll be fighting against the invaders, the Germans. I reckon that’s different. I must go back and finish the fight or my mates will have died for no good reason.’

  ‘Hmm, I’ve never heard it put quite that way,’ Doctor Mockeridge says. He pauses and scratches the growth on his chin then brings his hands together, his chin resting on the tips of his fingers. ‘As I said, Sergeant-Major Teekleman, it can be a tricky operation, there’s a thirty to forty per cent chance it won’t turn out well.’

  ‘Those are better odds than I’ve had in a while,’ Ben answers, ‘but either save me or kill me, I don’t fancy spending the rest of my life as a cripple in a wheelchair. I’d be no use to anyone that way.’

  The surgeon looks shocked. ‘I can’t do that, Sergeant-Major, I can only do the best I can to remove the bullet whatever the consequences. Are we agreed I should try?’

  ‘Agreed. Thank you, Doctor,’ Ben says softly. ‘Will you perform the operation?’

  ‘If you can wait another week, Sergeant-Major Teekleman?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Mockeridge writes out a prescription. ‘Here, take this to the hospital clinic, it will help with the pain.’

  Ben is operated on a week later and wakes up after the effects of the chloroform have worn off to look directly into the hazel eyes of Sister Atkins. ‘Good afternoon, Sergeant-Major Teekleman,’ she says, looking down at him.

  Ben blinks. ‘I must have died and gone to heaven,’ he mumbles, still not quite in control of his own voice.

  ‘Now, now, enough of that,’ Sister Atkins chides, though her eyes are smiling.

  ‘Am I a cripple or what?’ Ben asks her.

  ‘Cripple? I should think not. You’ll be running around like a puppy in a few days.’

  Ben smiles. ‘This is a surprise. Last time we met was on the Orvieto, do you remember?’

  ‘No, of course not!’ she teases him. ‘There are so many big, clumsy sergeants pestering me.’ She gives Ben a mock sigh, ‘How could a girl possibly keep up with all their names?’

  ‘Yeah, thought so,’ Ben says. ‘Talking about names, may I call you Sarah, Sister? I mean not here, not in the hospital . . . er, other places.’

  ‘Other places? How did you know my name, Ben Teekleman?’

  ‘I had my sister contact your cousin Lucy in Tasmania.’

  Sarah Atkins looks surprised. ‘Just to find out my Christian name?’

  ‘Well, a bit more, really. I hope you don’t think me impertinent?’

  Sarah Atkins brings her hands to her hips. ‘Now what am I supposed to say to that?’ She suddenly parodies her own voice: ‘No, Sergeant-Major, I don’t think you’re impertinent, please go ahead, find out all you can about me, it’s quite all right. Umph! You men are all the same, you think you’re God’s gift!’

  ‘I’ve upset you, I’m sorry, I apologise, I had no right,’ the words tumble from Ben’s mouth.

  ‘No right is quite correct, Sergeant-Major!’ Sister Atkins says sternly. ‘I must remind you once again that I am a captain and you are a warrant officer, the army forbids any fraternising between us. You know the rules as well as I do.’ She pauses and then continues, ‘Now you’ve just been through a nasty op and you really must get some rest. You’ll be allowed up in two days and then you’ll be in a wheelchair for a few weeks before you’re allowed to walk. In a month or so, barring complications, you’ll be up and about. In six weeks you’ll be allowed to leave the hospital grounds for a few hours, you may even be well enough to go into London. In which case you’ll need an escort, someone to be with you in case you have a turn, and, if you’re a very good boy and promise not to pester the ward sister, then Sarah Atkins, the cousin of Lucy Atkins, the well-known Tasmanian blabbermouth, may volunteer for the job. Do I make myself perfectly clear, Sergeant-Major?’

  ‘Yessir!’ Ben laughs. He can’t quite remember when he has been as happy.

  ‘Now try to sleep, Ben Teekleman,’ Sarah says, smoothing his blanket and tucking it in at the side. ‘I shall call in to see how you are before I go off duty tonight.’ She turns and, in the neat crisp way he’d first seen her walking away from Brokenose Brodie’s hospital bed on the Orvieto, she walks towards the door.

  ‘Sister! Captain Atkins!’ Ben calls out.

  Sarah Atkins looks back at him. ‘What is it, Sergeant-Major?’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Will you please rest now or I shall be angry,’ she calls, though Ben can see the corners of her mouth twitch as she struggles not to laugh.

  A week later with Ben now in a wheelchair there is a ceremony at the hospital which Lord Kitchener himself visits to present to twenty of the Australian convalescents ribbons and medals for valour while serving in Gallipoli.

  Kitchener reads a prepared speech, fumbling with his glasses and then equally with the words which are high-flown, pompous and patronising.

  Sarah Atkins, watching, sees Ben’s head sink lower and lower as he slumps in his wheelchair as if to make himself smaller. Anyone looking at him, though thankfully all eyes are on the great field marshal, will clearly see that he is embarrassed and upset and his face is beginning to colour.

  She then looks at the other Australian wounded lined up in the front row in various stages of convalescence, two of them have been carted out onto the lawn still in their beds with a saline drip beside them, and their expressions are no different from Ben’s.

  Sarah becomes conscious that the turgid speech is filled with sentimental rubbish which might work at a convocation of middle-aged English choirmistresses but which is highly patronising and insulting to the Gallipoli wounded forced to listen to it.

  She has nursed these Australians before and was on the hospital ship, the Gascon, when the wounded started coming in on the first two days after the landing. Barge after barge filled with wounded men arrived at the ship’s side and had to be refused since the medical staff of six doctors, seven nursing sisters and thirty-eight medical orderlies were unable to cope with the influx.

  Sarah’s mind goes back to the time on the Gascon. One barge had waited at the ship’s side in the rain for five hours, from six until eleven that night, the men in it having lain on the burning beach a further twelve hours or more, their arms and legs smashed, skulls cracked open, features reduced to a pulpy mess so that nose and mouth are simply bloody holes filled with pink froth and bubbles. Some have gone mad in the sun and now cackle and scream, while others beg to be killed or are silent, staring, completely traumatised. Those who die are pushed down onto the duckboards under which the blood leaking from the wounded sloshes and splashes up through the wooden slats. And still the barges arrive.

  One young lad comes on board just as Sarah has completed bandaging the head of a soldier. He seems unharmed, though he has his hand cupped over his left eye. Seeing her, he comes over, stumbling against some of the wounded, apologising. ‘Sister, it’s me eye!’ he cries and removes his cupped hand slowly and Sarah sees that he holds his eye in the palm of his hand, though it’s still attached to a membrane that stretches some four inches from where it disappears within the bloody socket. ‘Can you save me eye?’ the young soldier cries again. ‘Please, Sister, can you save it, I’m a sniper and they won’t want me now!’

  A doctor, one of the six on board, passes at that moment. ‘Cut it!’ he yells. Sarah looks at him, momentarily stunned. ‘With your bloody scissors, woman! Cut the membrane, dammit!’
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  She takes the scissors from her pocket and snips the membrane so that the lad now holds the eye unattached in his palm. Blood from the empty socket starts to run slowly down his dirt-streaked cheek. ‘What do I do with it?’ he cries in a panic.

  ‘Here, give it to me,’ she says, stretching out her hand.

  Taking the eye from him she can’t think where to put it and so she drops it into the pinny pocket of her uniform. ‘Have you still got your field-dressing pack?’ she asks and when the young soldier nods she instructs him to take it out and use the swab on his eye. Then, in an impatient voice she will forever afterwards regret, she says, ‘I haven’t the time to do it myself, there are others worse off, I must go, you’ll just have to manage somehow.’

  The boy looks down at her, the blood from his eye running into his mouth and over his chin. ‘Thank you, Sister, I’m sorry to be a nuisance,’ he apologises.

  Sarah recalls how she worked all night with the surgeons while the remaining doctors tried to cope with the wounded who didn’t require immediate surgery and who could be sutured and bandaged and whose shrapnel pieces could be removed from more superficial wounds. However, the doctors found themselves often enough removing fingers and toes, and on one occasion an ear, on the spot while the soldier’s mates held the patient down, with part of his tunic stuffed into his mouth so he could bite on it.

  By dawn the pile of arms and legs in the operating theatre was stacked to a height of four feet, leaving just enough space for staff to move around the operating tables. The orderlies were unable to keep up with the removal of severed limbs or find a place to store them. Soon it became apparent that what room there was on board was needed for the living, and the ship’s small mortuary was packed with the dead. But the severed arms and legs could not be allowed to decay in the heat, so, together with other bits and pieces, they were thrown, unweighted, overboard. For weeks afterwards they washed up on the beach at Lemnos ten miles away and as far as Alexandria, more than a hundred miles from the beachhead at Gallipoli.

  By morning the unventilated ship’s hold and the decks carried eight hundred casualties with every nook and cranny packed with wounded men, most of them still unattended to. The rest of the medical staff worked to save the lives of the more critically wounded except for a single orderly who handed out water and cigarettes and occasionally lit a fag or held a tepid mug of water to the lips of a soldier too sick or unable to use his hands.

  For the most part, the normal nursing duties were left to those soldiers more lightly wounded who procured the few blankets available, less than fifty, changed dressings, made tea and prepared what food there was for their mates, often going short themselves.

  These same men, without complaining, performed a further duty they would never have contemplated in civilian life. The ship’s toilets were inadequate and soon clogged hopelessly. With no bedpans available, piles of newspapers were handed out so that the men could defecate on a sheet of newsprint, which was then wrapped into a parcel and thrown overboard. As one wag was heard to remark, ‘Most of what’s in the newspapers is a load of shit anyway.’

  Yet, once on board, those in pain were stoic to the extreme, barely wincing when shrapnel was cut out or lesions stitched. Others waited patiently for surgery, often slipping in and out of consciousness. The ship sailed at morning light, its hold crammed with wounded men, not an inch of deck space available to fit another casualty.

  Sarah was transferred to the No. 1 Australian Hospital at Heliopolis where she nursed in a constant state of organised chaos and where the relationships between the Australian soldiers and the nurses more resembled the feelings between brothers and sisters than those of medical staff and patients. In the five months she stayed before being sent to Britain, Sarah lost thirty pounds in weight. She had regained half this amount by the time she met Ben again, yet he thought her nothing but skin and bone and talked constantly of fattening her up.

  Now, as she stood listening to the platitudinous nonsense from the old, tired warrior whom all England so loved and worshipped and watched Ben’s terrible discomfort, tears began to roll down Sarah’s cheeks. She knew it was wrong to love Ben, that he would soon be gone, back to the horrors of France where his chances of returning to her were even slimmer than they’d been at Gallipoli. ‘Ben Teekleman, I love you,’ she whispered through her tears, ‘please don’t die.’

  When it became Ben’s turn to receive his medal she watched as Lord Kitchener bent to pin it to his chest. Then she saw the old man suddenly jerk his head back in surprise and drop the medal into Ben’s lap and immediately move on to the next man. She saw that Ben was weeping softly.

  Later he told her what had happened. Lord Kitchener, noting Ben’s two mentions-in-dispatches and the Military Medal he was about to pin to his chest, remarked, ‘Well done, you’ve had a good war, Sergeant-Major.’

  To which Ben replied, ‘Your Lordship, there is nothing good about this war, except that good men are dying because of the arrogance and stupidity of the old men who lead them.’

  It is to Lord Kitchener’s credit that nothing was done about Ben’s remark. Those hearing about it from Kitchener’s aide-de-camp, who held the medal cushion at the time, simply think it typical of the uncouth Australian soldier who refuses to salute his superiors and deserves the contempt with which the English military regard the rancorously undisciplined antipodeans.

  Sarah Atkins, though having to maintain her distance while Ben is in the hospital, spends a few minutes with him each day after she has completed her shift. She will pull a screen around his bed and allow him to kiss her, though only briefly. Soon they both long for the time Ben will be well enough to be allowed an eight-hour leave pass from the hospital so that she can accompany him to London where they will be on their own. But his wound proves stubborn and his recovery is painfully slow.

  The day of their first freedom, when it finally arrives in early April, though still cold, is filled with spring sunshine. Sparrows chirp cheekily on the pavement outside the hospital where Ben and Sarah wait for their trolley bus and people smile at them as they pass.

  Sarah is dressed in civilian clothes just as if she is a soldier’s sweetheart, which indeed she is. She’s borrowed a pale blue winter coat from one of the English nurses so that she doesn’t have to wear her army coat which will give away her officer’s rank. Ben can hardly believe how pretty she looks and when she puts her arm in his he can feel his heart thumping madly.

  Sarah has packed a picnic lunch and, after getting off at the Embankment, they walk along the Thames, stopping to admire Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and visit Westminster Abbey, after which they cross Horse Guards Parade and enter St James’s Park. The ground is still too cold to sit on, but Ben removes his army greatcoat, spreading it on the grass and Sarah lays out the lunch. ‘It’s only hospital sandwiches and a raisin bun,’ she apologises, ‘but I managed to scrounge an orange and I’ve brought a thermos of tea.’

  ‘As long as there’s no tinned meat?’

  Sarah laughs. ‘Cheese, lettuce and onions or apricot jam, take your pick, either way you’re in trouble?’

  ‘Trouble? Why’s that?’

  ‘The apricot jam will make you too sticky to kiss and the onion too smelly,’ she teases him.

  Ben smiles happily. ‘No kiss, no afternoon tea.’

  ‘Afternoon tea? There’s only three cups in the thermos.’

  ‘At the Ritz, my dear.’

  ‘Whatever can you mean?’

  ‘Victoria, my sister. It’s all arranged. We’re to have afternoon tea at the Ritz.’

  ‘Your sister is at the Ritz? The Ritz Hotel? Isn’t that very posh?’

  ‘No, she’s simply arranged it. Sent them a telegram, I suppose. Victoria can arrange anything, anywhere at the drop of a hat, for all I know she probably did it through the High Commissioner’s office who would have sent a flunkey round.’

  Instead of looking as pleased as he’d expected, Ben now sees that Sarah has a
n unmistakeable look of panic on her face. ‘But, Ben, places like that are only for the nobs, the very rich. How will we know how to behave? What fork or spoon to use?’

  ‘It’s only afternoon tea, Sarah. Sandwiches and cakes, a pot of tea and a glass of champagne. We can pretend to be nobs for an afternoon, can’t we?’

  ‘You can’t pretend to be a nob. You either are or you’re not, the very rich are different, you can always tell, they’re not like you and me. The people in those posh hotels can see a couple of country bumpkins coming for miles.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Ben laughs. ‘Do you know something, Captain Sarah Atkins?’

  ‘No? What?’

  ‘You’re a horrid little snob.’

  ‘Me? No I’m not! If you’d ever been in a place like that you’d know what I mean.’

  ‘Oh? Have you?’

  ‘No, of course not. But I’ve seen them at the pictures. There are at least four different glasses on the table and more knives and forks in one place-setting than we’ve got in the kitchen drawer at home.’

  ‘Not for afternoon tea, surely? A cup and saucer, a tea pot, a plate for the sandwiches or cake and a glass for the champagne, maybe a cake fork, oh . . . and a teaspoon.’

  ‘A cake fork? There you go. Now there’s a fork made especially for cake?’

  ‘Yeah, on one side the tines are joined, to create an edge for cutting through the cake, or a tart or flan.’

  ‘How do you know all this, Ben Teekleman?’ Sarah asks suspiciously.

  ‘I saw it in the pictures,’ Ben fibs.

  ‘It’s not funny, Ben. You’re not a woman. You don’t feel these things. When you grow up having to make your new dress by unpicking someone else’s old one, when you see a pretty pair of shoes in a shop window and know you have to buy the plain pair with the sensible heels that will last you all summer because you can only have one pair, when as a young nurse there are holes in your spencer and your stockings have darns on the darns, you soon learn your place in life and it isn’t with the nobs.’ She pauses and looks at him with her big hazel eyes. ‘And it isn’t having tea at the Ritz. I’m not ashamed of being who I am, I don’t want to be anyone or anything else, I’m very happy being me. It’s only that I’m sensible enough to know I can’t have everything or that having everything is even good for me.’