Where the Line Breaks Page 11

  One might argue that the progression of Lewis’s attitudes towards the war mirrors that of many soldiers who faced as much as Lewis did, and that the parallels found between poetry and service record are typical of a more commonly shared experience. I agree that the poetic experience espoused by the Unknown Digger is one shared by many soldiers throughout the war (indeed, it may even go some way toward explaining the poems’ astounding popularity), but I would challenge anyone to deny that the matching up of ideological and physical evidence for Lewis and the Unknown Digger is anything less than compelling. Note the route Lewis took through the war, and delineate its defining characteristic: from his country town in the state’s South West and its perfect Western Australian beaches, Lewis travelled to Egypt, to a rocky outcrop in the Dardanelles, to the white shores of Lemnos, across the arid plains of the Sinai and through the Middle East.77 At extremely few points did he find himself in lush green landscapes or fertile wetlands. The constant, running motif of Lewis’s time in the war is one rooted in desert landscapes, in rock and dirt and heat. It should be no surprise to find that the word with the greatest frequency of use throughout the poems of the Unknown Digger is ‘sand’, which occurs twenty-four separate times in the entire collection.78 Shuckman’s study excluded pronouns like ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’, and verbs, conjunctions and articles like ‘and’, ‘was’ or ‘the’.79 The second most common word is ‘south’, with fourteen separate occurrences, which makes sense, with ‘the South’ having dual meanings, as both an indicator of home (along with ‘down under’, ‘red earth’, and ‘home’) and as an allegory for death (as in ‘travelling south’, i.e. dead and buried).80

  ANZAC HOSPITAL, LEMNOS. EARLY 1916.

  Nothing down here can touch him, eerie silent, the slippery soft caress of seaweed on his toes, the dull pulse of his heartbeat, the throb of blood in his head.

  And up there, the sun, reaching warming fingers toward him, dappled light to heal, to wrap him up safely, relax his tired muscles and draw him back toward the surface.

  Nothing down here is trying to kill him, destroy him, tear him apart with metal. The scars on his back accept the sting of saltwater with relish, and from the sandy sea floor the world above looks rosy, healthy, beckoning.

  Caught for a moment in the ebb of the receding waves, his body drifts across the seabed, his fingers trailing sand in small clouds, the green-blue haze of the deep stopping time.

  Yesterday was yesterday, and tomorrow is tomorrow, and all that matters is now, and here, and the surge of water around his head as he surfaces and breathes in the clean island air, baptised, back into the world.

  I am alive, my love.

  I hope someone saw fit to write you and let you know of my condition. I asked one of the nurses, but I have no way of knowing. Thank Christ I am now strong enough to hold a pencil.

  I have been in and out of consciousness, strung out with fever and dreaming such terrible dreams I wonder I haven’t kept half the ward up with my delusions. I must lie on my stomach so they can clean the wounds on my back, and they say I may limp when I get back on my feet. I’m the lucky one.

  Sit down, love; breathe.

  Red was a lot closer to the shell. He has lost an ungodly amount of blood, though is improving each day. He will never walk, or bowl a cricket ball. They say he may eventually regain his sight. How he has survived this long is a miracle. You know Red.

  I don’t know what to say.

  I am alive. The pencil is heavy in my hands.

  I can hear the sea.

  Yours, bedriddenly.

  His nurse is a severe woman from England named Nancy, who chides him for rolling onto his back and reopening his scars, who finds his pack of cigarettes one day and confiscates it, ‘for your own good’ she says in her schoolmarm voice, her black hair tucked behind her ears. She’s a good ten years older than him, makes him feel like a boy when she tells him off, which she does lightheartedly, knowing he’ll be smoking again in an hour, knowing he can’t help but roll over when lying on his stomach becomes oppressive, the skin on his stomach itchy and warm.

  The long corridor leading to their temporary ward is made of wooden slats on rough earth, with canvas walls. They are lucky enough to have a real roof, corrugated metal hanging above their heads, which grows hot in the daylight and creaks and groans as the cold night approaches. They have two windows, wide enough for two men to smoke side by side, looking out across the beach toward the smaller islands, listening out for the telltale click of the nurses’ heels on the wooden slats to give them enough time to stub out the fag, close the window, and limp back to bed. Any time a nurse arrives for a check-up, the room grows loud, the men sit up taller and stifle coughs, telling jokes and flirting. The medicine helps, and the sleep, and all the rest, but the real work is done by the girls in uniform.

  The Kiwi corporal in the bed next to him asks Nancy to come for a swim before he returns to service. She laughs, a prim and proper English laugh, gone in an instant, and gratefully accepts, but only once the weather gets a bit warmer – by which time he’ll be long gone. When the Kiwi fella points this out she says it’ll be no good going swimming when the water is so cold his testes retract, in which case he might as well shower with the nurses. The whole room erupts, whooping and hollering, and the Kiwi bloke turns a bright shade of red. Nancy says he’s looking healthier already.

  The other nurses are younger and standoffish; they travel in packs, approaching the beds in numbers like the injured men might be more dangerous than the war itself. There is truth in their suspicions. The boys are restless from sitting around and eager for a warm touch or a quick graze. Nancy bustles about the room smacking away hands, or, if she likes you, leaning over and rearranging pillows with her breasts by your ear. She loves the blushing from the younger boys, and gives as good as she gets from the older men. She tells them there’s no use in being stoic, a stiff upper lip is no use to anyone on a dead man. She says if it hurts it hurts, and they won’t get better by acting the hero.

  He watches her cross the room, filling the ward, swinging her curves around the beds, joking, cajoling, terrorising the young boys, swearing, getting her hands dirty when the need arises, like the time the Kiwi’s stitches spring open and spray blood across the room. She remains calm, efficient, in control. Brows furrowed in concentration, her features manage to be soft; though heavy-set, she is light on her toes. She is a contradiction in terms and he can’t look away.

  Down the maze of corridors, in the ward for the severe injuries, Red lies unconscious, breathing through a tube. His eyes are closed, one side of his head shaved, one side thick with ginger tussles. Nancy wheels Alan in for a visit one day and leaves him, stuck in his wheelchair, and he can’t think of what to say except to tell Red about the view out the window. The long slope down to the beach. The white walls of the houses on the cliff. The fishing boats out in the bay. Red’s breathing is low and jagged, coming in fits and spurts like sawing through thick jarrah. All Alan wants to do is leave, stand up and run, or roll out down the corridor and back into the noise of his ward, and leave Red here. He calls out for Nancy, but she takes an age to arrive.

  ‘Take me back,’ he says.

  ‘Wouldn’t hurt to say please,’ she says, and despite Red’s broken body in the bed next to him, he smiles.

  He gets a letter. From Rose, saying how proud she is, how brave he must be for surviving, for pulling through. ‘For continuing the fight.’ But he’s not brave, he happened to be in the right spot. By random chance the shrapnel that peppered his back missed his vital organs. He hasn’t done anything to be proud of except not die, and he doesn’t think that was his own choice. He receives interminable letters. From Rose, from Ma, one from Tom, on his way to the Western Front. He opens one from Nugget, full of spelling mistakes, letting him know the regiment retreated from Gallipoli safely.

  He reads whatever he can get his hands on. Whatever will pass the hours. He reads all the books in the hospital’s m
eagre library. He writes to anyone he knows to send more.

  He’s treading water, sat on the sidelines while the rest of the team play the grand final, win medals and top the ladder. He writes this, in a letter home, and Rose tells him to stay strong, that he’ll be able to play soon enough, it being cricket season soon. Funny he should mention sport, she writes, because, what with all the young men away, she joined the club herself and discovered she can bowl a decent leg break. Rose doesn’t understand. He puts her letter in the drawer of the bedside table, and then keeps pulling it out, ready to reply but having nothing to say. He leans his pencil on the paper and makes little crackled piles of lead, black smudges of graphite crossing the lines.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?’

  ‘Greek legends. For children.’ He puts the open book down on the covers, making a small tent among the light blue of the sheets, and sighs. ‘Again.’

  ‘You must be gentle with the books, Lieutenant.’ Nancy picks it up, marks his spot by folding one corner of the page down, and places it on the small table by his bed.

  ‘You folded one of the pages!’ He can’t believe what he’s witnessed. ‘You’d be down for a caning if they caught that little move at my school.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with a light caning now and then, Lieutenant.’

  He bends forward, allowing her to rearrange the pillows behind his back. As she passes by his face, he notices the dimples of her smile. His cheeks burn. She is teasing him.

  He pulls his shirt off and rolls onto his stomach, his head to one side, his feet sticking out over the edge of the bed. Her fingers are like ice on his back, and he sucks in air at her touch. She pulls away.

  ‘Sorry.’ Her voice is soft behind his back, and when her fingers return they are warm with her breath. Goosebumps rise on his arms as she runs her fingers down the scars. ‘These look healthy.’

  The way she says it makes him feel like a boy receiving a surprised well done for an outcome he had nothing to do with. He feels simultaneously pleased with himself and like he could do better, if he only applied himself.

  ‘Never a big fan of Achilles,’ she says, about halfway down his back.

  Achilles was always his favourite. Quick-footed. Righteous. Unstoppable.

  ‘You know the Greeks?’

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised.’ She sounds offended, but when he tries to roll over she stops him. ‘I wasn’t always a nurse, you know.’ She laughs like she’s made a joke, at some unknown memory maybe, but doesn’t explain herself. He should speak.

  ‘So, who do you prefer?’

  She thinks this over for a second.

  ‘Problem is, they’re all just big boys. Ten years of war because your wife runs off with another man? Bit of an overreaction.’

  ‘I think there’s more to it than that.’

  ‘But you sense where I’m coming from.’ Her fingers massage his lower back, down by the line of his blue hospital pants. ‘If I had to choose one, maybe Odysseus. Pre-Odyssey, of course.’

  ‘Pre-Odyssey?’

  ‘He’s supposedly the smart one. Would it kill to ask someone for directions?’

  Odysseus the wise, the brains behind the wooden horse. Another foolish soldier. Another little boy to Nancy.

  ‘And yours?’ She’s being polite, making conversation.

  ‘Achilles. Probably.’ He can imagine her shaking her head behind his back, is certain her fingers push a little harder into the muscle and wishes he had lied. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘This is good.’ She means the scar on his back that keeps reopening, the one giving them a little trouble, but the way she says it, as if encouraging him, makes him think she means something else entirely. She moves away to her cart. He’s lost her, she’ll end the conversation there and they’ll return to harsh civility and bland pleasantries. He should have said Hector, Patroclus, or Helen. But then he would have been lying. He read classics at university for the unbridled heroism, the black-and-white ease of it all. The Greeks were good. The Trojans were bad. The Aussies. The Turks. If the current situation was anywhere near as simple, it all would have been wrapped up, like they had been promised, before Christmas. Yet here they were, well into the new year, with no end to hostilities in sight. And Nancy wondered how ten years of war with the Trojans had slipped by.

  She opens a tube and rubs pungent cream on his back, massaging the long scar that runs perilously close to his spine. She’s silent as she works, humming some unknown tune beneath her breath.

  ‘How do you know the classics?’

  He waits for her to respond.

  ‘That, Lieutenant, is a story for a later date.’

  She’s going to leave, and he has no reply, and their whole interaction is going to end with her sashaying away, that walk of hers that pulls eyes all down the ward, and him lying, struck dumb and semi-erect, on his stomach. An artist’s charcoal sketch of the pathetic.

  Say something. Take the leap. But he doesn’t; plays the scene in his head and hates himself but keeps quiet. Staying silent is safer – she can’t reject him outright that way.

  ‘Do you read much poetry, Lieutenant?’

  He’s unprepared for her question and takes longer than he should to answer, not wanting to embarrass himself with his response, unable to gauge her reaction. At university they read Tennyson, Wordsworth, Kipling. He’s read the two or three small books of the modern swill the hospital library has to offer.

  ‘A little. Rose got me into it.’ He speaks without thinking.

  ‘Rose?’

  ‘Little sister.’ He swallows. ‘You read poetry?’ Chilling, how easily the lie comes.

  ‘I do. I like the modern types.’

  ‘I prefer the traditional, if I’m being honest.’

  ‘I see.’ A pause. ‘I should hope you’re being honest.’

  They are silent as she finishes applying the cream, though he’s aware of her breath, faster than his, by his ear, further down, back by her cart.

  ‘Have you read Brooke?’ She walks over to the window, pulling the curtains closed, the room golden with the oil lamps they are forced to use in the makeshift wards, and then she’s back by his shoulder. She’s the one nurse who can sneak into the ward without warning the men of her approach, her tread light and graceful. She fills out the white uniform with perfect curves that strain the material, tight in all the right places. He can’t help but think how unlike Rose she is – Rose is a caged fireball, small and excitable, tiny in his arms. But gone, now. Back in a past he can’t remember, back in a home he doesn’t think would accept him back. Nancy is an enigma he is still figuring out.

  He’s staring. She’s noticed. He rather thinks she likes the attention.

  ‘Brooke?’ she says.

  He coughs as he tries to speak. ‘I’ve heard of him. I gather he was extremely popular in England?’

  ‘He was. And only more so since his passing.’

  Silence as they ponder this, until he worries he needs to speak to bring them back to the conversation. She smiles at his nervousness, and saves him the trouble.

  ‘He’s buried a few islands over, did you know?’

  ‘That’s what I heard. Didn’t even make it onto the beach.’

  She sighs. ‘I’ve wanted to visit the site since I was posted here. One can dream.’

  She moves once more to his back.

  ‘We should go. Together,’ he says. He can’t see her face. ‘If you’d like?’

  She’s silent, and he starts to turn over, but she stops him, returns him to his position. He can hear her rummaging on her cart, returning the cream to its spot, filling out his file. He waits.

  ‘Until tomorrow, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Please, call me Alan.’

  ‘Of course.’

  And then the doors swing open and shut and she’s gone and he’s alone with the men dozing in the beds next door. He waits five minutes for the cream to sink into his skin and dry, and then turns over.

  On the nightstand next
to his head is a small brown book with gold lettering reading 1914 & Other Poems, and on the first page, in a looping pencilled hand: Property of Nancy Taylor.

  Once his scars heal, he’s allowed to start his recuperation by taking walks around the hospital garden, or lying in a lounger on sunny days, reading. Sometimes men will meander down to the beach and swim, scream and laugh and play like children, splashing each other in the cold shallows. They ask him to join them, but he refuses, the skin on his back scabbed and hard, his head throbbing when the rain comes. His right leg is stiff and rigid, and he finds it hard to turn, but Nancy says that’s normal, that he hasn’t used the muscles for a while and they need to time to warm back up. The ward echoes with voices, and sleep, a mythic nymph teasing him, refuses to spend the night.

  Ma sends a letter. Robbie is missing in action, somewhere in France. Things don’t look good, she says. When he tries to write back the words wiggle and blur on the page and his hand shakes. He puts the paper down and stares out the window. Nancy asks him what Robbie is like, and places her hand on top of his, anaesthetic cool against his burning skin. Sits with him in silence for an hour. Her presence calms him, and eventually he is able to sleep.

  He dreams of The Nek, as he always does.

  ‘What do you believe in?’ he asks her, as she walks with him around the square of manicured lawn that is the garden.