Chapter 2 What the Labels Say

By morning the chalk had turned to a grey soup that came over the tops of her boots, and the column was working the road without rest. The push had begun somewhere to the east of them, a low continuous drumming that had been going on for days and had already stopped being a sound and become a condition of the air, like weather. The wounded came back in a river that swelled and fell and swelled again, and every swell had its own character: the rush after a dawn attack, the thinner trickle of the afternoon, the sudden ugly spate that came at dusk when the stretcher-bearers had the last of the daylight and used it. The labels told you what you were carrying, if you knew how to read them. A man walking was a man with a light wound and a long wait ahead of him. A man on a stretcher with a white label was serious, and needed the clearing station before nightfall. A man with a red label was for the surgeon and God, and the order in which you took them was a small, terrible arithmetic that Milly did not like to think about and could not stop doing. At the clearing station at Argentonne, Dr. Aubrey Lanning met the ambulances in a ruined schoolroom with the roof half off and the windows boarded against splinters. He was a thin, stooped man of fifty with spectacles mended at the bridge with wire, and he had a way of looking at a stretcher and pronouncing over it like a priest, gently, as though the words might do some good even when the man was beyond them. "Two abdominals," Milly told him, at the tailgate, that first morning of the new rush. "One chest. The rest are limbs and one eye." "Number them for me," Lanning said. "I shall take the chest first and then the abdominals, in the order you carried them. The legs can wait an hour. Do the legs know they can wait an hour?" "They usually do," Milly said. "They usually do," he agreed, and went to work. It was at the schoolroom that Milly kept her second reckoning. The clearing station kept an admission register, a long ruled book in which the clerk wrote every man who came through: name, number, battalion, diagnosis, and the ward he went to. The clerk was a young corporal called Wilfred Danforth, too short-sighted for the line and too gentle for the work, and he wrote everything down twice, once in the register and once, later, in the returns that went back up the line to be counted. Milly had no business with the register. But she had her notebook, and a memory for names that Hilda said was a disease, and on the second evening of the rush she did what she had promised herself she would not do, and stood at Danforth's elbow while he wrote, and checked. The count did not answer. She had carried eleven men up that day. She had eleven entries in her book, numbered in her own hand. The register for the day held ten. "Danforth," she said. "Yes, miss." "Eleven came up today. I brought four of them myself. Your book says ten." He flushed to the ears. "The register is for the clearing station, miss. It's for the men who stop here. Some go straight on to the base hospital, and those are on a different return." "Which ones go straight on?" "Those with the labels for it. I only write what's on the label." "Show me the labels from my four." He could not. The labels had gone up with the men, or been burned, or been filed in a drawer he was not allowed to open. He said this with his eyes on the desk, and Milly, who could tell shame from guilt the way she could tell a broken spring from a loose one, understood that he was not lying. He was small, and frightened, and doing what he was told. She went out into the yard. The rain was thinning and the guns had gone quiet, and somewhere beyond the ruined school the road ran east toward the line, and under the line lay the men who had not come back on anyone's stretcher, Ted among them, or not among them, or nowhere. That was the night she began to keep the second list, in the back of the notebook, in a hand so small it hurt to read: the names that should have been on the register and were not, and beside each one the day she had carried him and the hour she had set him down. She did not know yet what she was doing. She only knew that a thing she had carried, a man with a name, had gone into the machinery and come out a smaller number, and that she could not leave it there. Hilda found her at it before dawn, trying to write by the light of a match. "You'll burn your fingers," Hilda said. "And your eyes. What is that?" "An account," Milly said. "Of what?" "Of what came up the road." Hilda looked at her for a long moment, and then, because she was a practical woman and had learned in two years that Milly did not explain herself twice, she said only, "Mind you keep the total right. If you're going to keep an account, keep it true. A false account is worse than none." Milly closed the notebook. "It will be true," she said. There was a kind of silence at the dressing station that Milly had learned to hear, and it had nothing to do with quiet. It was the silence of men deciding, all at once and without a word, which of the men in front of them could wait and which could not. It happened at the door of the dug-out, under the swinging lamp, when the stretcher-bearers came in out of the dark and laid their burdens in a row and stood back with their hands on their knees, and the medical officer walked the row once, twice, with a pad in his hand and made his marks. She had seen it a hundred times and it never stopped being the worst thing in the war, worse than the noise or the mud or the waiting, because it was done in lamplight and on purpose and by a man who was not a monster. He was doing sums. Everyone at the front was doing sums, and the sums were always the same: never enough of anything, and more broken men than there were means to move them. The only question the sums could answer was which of the two men before you would live, and the answer, often, was neither. The first man she carried on the Argentonne road that autumn was a bombardier with a ruined leg who talked the whole way about a dog he had left with his sister, and who did not mention the leg once. When they reached the school he was still talking, and Lanning looked at him and looked at her and said, quietly, "He will lose it, but he will live." She wrote the bombardier in, and the dog, and the sister, and she began to understand that her book was not only a list of the wounded. It was a list of everyone the wounded had left behind, and the two lists travelled up and down the road in the same cart, in the same rain. She did not know, then, how much the truth would cost, or how many names would have to be put down before she found the one that mattered: the name that was not supposed to exist at all, that had died on the road before Argentonne in the rain, and that would walk into the clearing station, a month and a half later, alive. ---