Dark Angel by Sally Beauman

Author:Sally Beauman [Beauman, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780553057621
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1990-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

VI

UNKNOWN SOLDIERS

From my mother’s diaries:

General Hospital 1,

Saint-Hilaire,

March 21, 1917

IT IS SIX DAYS since I lost a patient, but this evening the Canadian died. I want to write down his name. It was William Barkham. His family came from Devonshire, but sold up and went to farm in Saskatchewan, in a place called Fort Qu’Appelle. It is a very small place, and their farm’s address is a box number. I have written to his mother there.

I knew that he would die: He had trench foot, and the doctors amputated badly. They had seared the wound with tar; he was then three days at the field station. The gangrene was advanced before he reached here. I knew there was no hope.

He talked to me for an hour before he died. He told me about that farm at Fort Qu’Appelle. They farmed wheat. They kept two cows, some bantams, and some chickens. The farm was near a lake; in the winter mornings, when he rose early for the milking, he used to walk by the lake and watch the sun rising. The ice was three feet thick; it stayed all winter, from November to March. When he was a child his father taught him to skate on that lake, and when he was a man he skated there with his girl. Except—I suppose he was not really a man. He joined up when he was eighteen. He was nineteen yesterday.

Each morning when he finished the milking, he walked back to the farm; his mother cooked him griddlecakes and bacon. He saw her at the end; he spoke her name when he was dying. There was something he wanted to tell her; he clasped my hand very tight; I could see the words in his eyes, but he couldn’t speak them. He was in great pain, and being silenced. It made me very angry.

I wanted a miracle. I wanted to put my hand on him and feel the life come back. I prayed—but nothing happened. Nothing ever happens. There are no more miracles, and God does not listen to my prayers. Perhaps there is no God, and I had to come here to learn that. I think I prefer to believe that, than to believe in the God I see here every day, in the hospital wards, a God who turns his back on an only son, a boy of nineteen, a God who spares no one and never intervenes. Surely he could give some sign—is that so much to ask? Just one resurrection.

I thought I could not cry anymore—I could not even cry when they told me about Boy. Yet I cried tonight for William Barkham, and that made me angry too. Tears are useless. They give no comfort to the dying. Tears are an indulgence.

Some of the nurses take laudanum, for the tears. I will not do that. Wexton says that eventually you reach a place that is not beyond the tears, but in them. Maybe he is right. I am still waiting.

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