Remembrance by Theresa Breslin

Author:Theresa Breslin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446452714
Publisher: RHCP

Then, without any deliberation on her part, rather than writing ‘Maggie Dundas’ as she had done in her previous letters, Maggie signed this letter ‘Maggie’.

A week later she received her reply.

Along the bottom of the letter Francis had written a PS:

In the factory all that day Maggie had a smile on her face.

Chapter 20

CHARLOTTE, ON MAGGIE’S insistence, had taken to calling in at the shop on her way home from the hospital. Maggie had told her that it would be good for her parents to see Charlotte and speak with her, although Charlotte rightly suspected that Maggie’s purpose was also to help her. Whether her visits helped John Malcolm’s parents was something Charlotte could not clearly assess. His mother’s pain of loss was burnt into her face. She was abstracted, and found it difficult to keep her place in any conversation that she attempted. His father, in tight control, would say a few words and then keep himself busy in the shop long after closing. It was Maggie and Alex that Charlotte saw most, and talking to them did help her pass some of the bleak time of each weary evening to be endured. She became friendly with Alex, and was forever patient with his endless questions about her work at the hospital. He wanted to know every single thing that the soldiers said to her, and gave her lists of questions to ask them on his behalf, telling her it was special schoolwork that he had to do. The wounded men were amused by this, and, as hospital life was boring for them, were quite willing to write out notes which Charlotte relayed back to Alex. He had asked her for anything of interest, and she, thinking he had thoughts of becoming a doctor, brought him one of the small surgical information books relating to war wounds.

Alex had no intention of studying medicine. He was methodically garnering every scrap of information that might be of use to him in avenging the death of his brother. After he had gone to bed one night Maggie picked up from the kitchen table the book on treating war wounds.

Treating war wounds needs an elementary knowledge of the agents which cause them, she read, rifle, revolver, machine gun, shell, trench mortar, bombs and grenades. Her eye ran down the page … Shell wounds in particular cause great damage. Clothing, equipment, and earth can be driven deep into the body, causing complications of infection spreading from the wound. Farming soil in particular bears organisms, thereby increasing the chance of severe sepsis leading to fatality.

Maggie put the book down and stared ahead. It was something that she had not considered at any length. The actuality of death in war. Here it was, carefully explained, cause and effect. A bullet travelling faster than the velocity of sound, over distance does not always offer a clean drilled hole. Complications of wounds occur as the missile can turn in the air, ricochet, strike bone …

The truth of the words allowed no contradiction, needed no embellishment.

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