1915: Casualty Clearing Station on the Greek Island of Lemnos… around Christmas
The wet canvas billowed in and out noisily with each gust of cold wind. The tent poles groaned as their ropes pulled into thin taught strings and dragged at the pins in the wet ground. I found myself talking stupidly to the tent as if it were an organic being saying, ‘Hold on. You’ll be free one day. Just hold tight and protect us.’ And it did. Other tents did not and some nurses found themselves with 50 injured men suddenly out in the open, totally unprotected and the tent dancing its freedom in the wind. What equipment there was, blew everywhere and it took a rescue operation each day to retrieve it. We had so little in the way of equipment at the Casualty Clearing Station that I hardly know how we carried on. The place was awful.
And the poor wounded boys, fresh from the hospital ships, up to four hundred of them at a time, were dumb with desperate injuries, pain, infection and sea-sickness. And on top of it all, influenza was a threat that could hit anybody like a hammer. We nurses worked liked automatons, our brains frozen.
But now after the worst of times, my mind is thawing and I remember… I recall… Obadiah Monk. Obadiah was a lovely boy. Only 19years old… not much older that myself. Both of us had volunteered with what I now see to be youthful vigour and optimism. I suppose he like me took leave of his mother with a smile and confident words ‘See ya, Ma. I’ll write… keep ya up to speed. Don’t worry ‘bout me.’
Obadiah came flat on a stretcher with his face covered in gauze. He was thin, dirty, stinking. With the orderly, I washed him and put him in clean sheets. He made no sound throughout but lay resigned. The army surgeon did the ward round and said we had to remove the dressing. I feared the worst and my heart thumped as the doctor pulled at the edges of the gauze. I was relieved to see that Obadiah’s eyes were free of injury, lovely brown eyes with long blood caked eyelashes; the eyes of a gentle boy. But as he turned them to look at me, my eyes involuntarily shifted away and I held his hand instead.
Then the doctor lifted the gauze a little more. It was stuck to the wound. He pulled. It must have been agony but no sound came from Obadiah. The gauze was off. The lower half of his face was shattered. I then turned and looked at Obadiah’s eyes but he had closed them. Then he was off to the operating theatre. He returned with a face repaired as much as the surgeon was able but all we nurses knew it was a face that society would find hard to accept.
It was my task each day to nurse him until he was fit to travel home. Home – where was it I wondered? Oh I know it was in his notes, somewhere in Australia… but that does not mean home. Home for him was probably where love was evidenced by daily smells; the particular smell of his ma’s cooking and cleaning, the smell of his pa’s greasy overalls from mending and oiling things, the disinfectant stink of the privy and the perfumes of the flowers outside in the garden. But this poor boy would never smell anything ever again.
My Obadiah finally started to… improve. He began to give a few grunts and we learned to understand each other. He was in pain and I especially liked to put his white painkilling pill into his distorted mouth and give him cool water to drink. I would hold the long spout of the special white cup to his mouth and he would put his hands over mine, their sweaty bed heat meeting my clean, tar soaped fingers.
I had so many men to care for, all wanting… needing a mother, a wife, a lover… someone to hold and take away the pain and make everything alright again; men whose pain and despair gave them no time to be anything more than just men in need. I have never felt more of a woman than I did then; so different from the men who had thrown themselves into battle regardless of the consequences; so different from the ignorant men who had led them and then left them to be treated in gale lashed tents with equipment too basic for injuries such as Obadiah’s. I felt the difference between men and women heightened, brought into stark relief.
Obadiah began to stink with infection. It was a common stink in the tents but even so, I recoiled as it hit my nostrils. He became distressed. His hands gesticulated but I couldn’t… didn’t want to understand. The Army chaplain came to see Obadiah. A busy man, he had no time to learn to communicate with Obadiah but he said he would pray for him and he handed over a black bible, for comfort, ‘kindly given by mothers back home’. I saw Obadiah’s eyes squint.
Obadiah drifted from me from then on, pre-occupied with his own thoughts. He started to scrape away at the white inside pages of the black bible with a long fingernail. I couldn’t understand why. You can’t punish God like that! I tried to cut Obadiah’s nails but he aggressively closed his fingers into his palm. I gave up.
Then the scratching stopped. I was relieved but he still clung to the black bible. I carried on giving him white pills but he never again held his hands over mine, just pushed them away before the drink was finished… And I knew his pain was increasing. His eyes stared, blankly. More white pills had no effect.
Two weeks later I found Obadiah Monk dead in bed. His head was flopped to one side and the black bible was open on his chest. Inside, I saw a small tattered, white cavity… scraped away, no doubt by a sharp finger nail. One white pill remained inside. One that Obadiah had missed; the last of all those saved to take away his pain in one massive dose.
I miss Obadiah… part of the woman I was, left with him.
©Andrea Sarginson
2015
