Nightingale Read Free

shoulder as best he could. Claire took a slow breath and reached for the brown bottle and mask.
    â€˜Your war will be over soon, Billy,’ she murmured to reassure herself more than Private Martin, who was no longer listening.
________
    Back on the ward, Claire drew her wrist across her forehead before vigilantly washing her hands once again. She moved towards a new patient, flicking away droplets of water and recalling how her long-fingered hands, with neat, oblong nails, had been the envy of the other girls in her year at St Catherine’s in Sydney, which she’d attended briefly. She smiled wryly to herself now; today her hands were raw from the constant disinfectant and carbolic soap, whose sulphurous smell clung to the makeshift ward like an invisible overseer.
    â€˜Get some air,’ she heard a voice say behind her.
    She didn’t have to look around to know who it was. ‘I’ll be fine, Matron.’
    â€˜That wasn’t a suggestion, Nurse Nightingale,’ the older woman said, eyeing her over tiny horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Nurse Parsons has already been sent up for a break. It’s time you took one too.’
    Claire had come to respect their head nurse. On that first night, when they’d begun excitedly mobilising from their tented hospital onto the
Gascon
, she’d given her nurses a welcome with her most stern face on.
    â€˜. . . 
and there’s to be no fraternising with the ship’s officers. The captain has requested that colonial nurses eat separately!
’
    Matron, Claire had learned, only sounded like a stickler; she bent the rules constantly to make sure they helped as many wounded as they possibly could. Claire obeyed her senior and headed up the stairs. The sound of mortar shells and artillery got louder the higher she ascended. The smell of carbolic switched to cordite, and black smoke, like drifts of gloom from various explosions, hung above the tiny bay. She wondered when the captain of the
Gascon
ever imagined the officers and nurses might fraternise. There was barely time for anyone to scribble letters home. Developing romantic relationships was the last notion on anyone’s minds right now, she was sure.
    The scene above was worse than below. Walking wounded helped their fellow diggers stagger down the short beach that was now a chaotic casualty clearing station, swarming with soldiers and alarmed animals that intermittently escaped handlers or pens and were capable of hurting themselves and further injuring already hurting men. Wounded diggers took their chances under fire and in a raggle-taggle line made their way towards the shore, ignoring regimental medical officers, who were also undoubtedly finding proper assessment near impossible. Their ticketing system had clearly been abandoned. To Claire’s knowledge none of the nursing team had viewed a priority red ticket recently; besides, near enough every soldier seemed to qualify for that category.
    She massaged the muscles above her shoulderblade and arched her back to stretch out the soreness that nagged from shifting around prone men daily. Day, night, afternoon, evening . . . it was a seemingly interminable round of blood-soaked dressings and despair. Each time the
Gascon
sailed away with its hundreds of casualties Claire knew there were dozens of desperately hurt men left behind at the clearing station on the beach. Too many of them would die before the three-day turnaround gave them access again to full surgical help.
    Even so, some evenings they’d sailed with seven hundred injured or sick, dropping off the least grave at Mudros before going on to Egypt – to Alexandria, where ambulances, quality facilities and specialist staff attended to the most seriously hurt men, who may then be transported to Cairo for even more sophisticated help.
    Cairo! What a city. It was only weeks but it felt like a lifetime ago that she’d witnessed the enormous orb of sun