Chapter 4 The Clearing Station at Argentonne

The clearing station had been a village school, and it still looked like one, if you could forget the sandbags and the smell. The main hall kept its long windows and its rows of iron hooks, where a century of children had hung their coats, and where now the surgeons hung their aprons between cases. The classrooms had been turned into wards and named with letters, and the little walled garden, which had once been full of the teacher's roses, was full of stretchers when the sun was out and full of nothing when the sun was not. Dr. Lanning worked in the hall, at two trestle tables pushed together under a hanging lamp that swung whenever the guns were close, and beyond him was the theatre, which was a scullery with the copper taken out. There were four wards by the autumn, A through D, and a fifth in a barn behind the church that was really only a place to put the dying so that the dying would not see the living. The wards were run by nurses and by orderlies and by a night sister named Bertha Farlow, who had the hands of a farm girl and the face of a woman who had stopped being surprised in 1914. The paper came in with the blood and stayed after it. The clearing station kept a register, and the register fed the returns, and the returns went back up the line in a canvas bag every evening, and in the returns men were numbers and the numbers were added and subtracted until the arithmetic was pleasing to someone in an office a hundred miles away. Milly had understood the register from the first week. She had not understood the effects until the night she stood in the yard and watched a man come for Ryecroft's things. His name was Cradock. He was a quartermaster sergeant of about forty, small and neat and grey, with the calm that comes of never being in the place where the shells fall. He carried a lantern in one hand and a key in the other, and he took the dead man's tunic and his boots and his pay-book and his disc from the orderly's hands and checked each against a list, ticking with a short pencil. "Ryecroft," he said, aloud, to himself, and ticked. "Private. Thursday. Abdomen." "Yes," Milly said. He looked up then, and looked at her for a moment longer than the word required. "You brought him in." "I did." "Then you'll be the lady who keeps the book," he said. Nothing in his voice changed. He might have been remarking on the weather. But Milly felt the skin of her arms go cold, and she understood, with the certainty of a person who reads faces the way other people read print, that she had been spoken about in rooms she had never entered. "I keep no book," she said. "The register is Corporal Danforth's." "The register is Danforth's, yes," Cradock said, and smiled, a small, tidy smile, like a drawer closing. "Well. Good night, miss." He carried the dead man's things across the yard to a store by the gate, a long low room with an iron door and a padlock, and Milly watched him lock it behind him and go, and understood the shape of the thing she had been shown without meaning to be: that a man's whole mortal estate could go into that room and come out the property of the Army, and that whoever held the key to that room held, in a manner of speaking, the man. She lay awake that night and took the half-photograph out of her tunic and looked at it by the light of the door. The thin man and the dog. On the back, in pencil, worn almost to nothing: *R. and me, Ashbourne, 1913.* Ashbourne. She did not know the place. She knew only that Ryecroft had been going to write to Roly Denbigh, and that the writing on the back of the photograph said R., and that a man who is about to die does not invent the friend he fails to finish the sentence about. In the morning she asked Danforth, carefully, what happened to the effects of men who died. "They go to the store," he said, not meeting her eye. "And then?" "They go home. To the families. Or they go to the depot, if there is no family. There is a ledger. Sergeant Cradock keeps the ledger." "And if a man does not die? If he is only wounded, and goes to the base?" "Then his effects go with him, miss." "Then how," Milly said, "does a man who never died come to have his effects signed for?" The establishment at Argentonne was larger than the school it had started in. By October there were four wards in the school itself and a fifth in the barn behind the church, and a marquee for the walking cases, and two surgeons who worked in shifts at the trestle tables, one a stocky Scot with a moustache and a habit of talking to unconscious men as though they could answer, and one a young man from London whose hands trembled before an operation and were steady the instant it began. There were eighteen orderlies and six nurses and a cook who had cooked in a hotel in Rouen before the war and never once let anyone forget it. And there was the administration, which was Cradock and Danforth and a cupboard of printed forms, and which was, in Milly's slow and growing understanding, the most powerful thing in the building. The store by the gate had one key, and the key lived with the quartermaster sergeant, and the quartermaster sergeant lived in a small room above the stores with a stove and a kettle and a photograph of his mother. Nobody thought about him much, which was the point. A man who is not thought about can do as he pleases with a list, and a list goes up the line and becomes a number, and a number goes to London and becomes a policy, and a policy decides who receives a pension and who receives nothing, who is dead and who is merely missing, and whether a woman in a stone cottage in a wet county will spend the rest of her life watching the road for a postman who is never coming. She began to see, too, that the whole building ran on a currency of paper: the field cards, the labels, the register, the returns, the effects ledger, the admission slips. A man arrived with paper pinned to his chest and left with paper at the foot of his bed, and if the paper said he was alive then he was alive, and if the paper said he was dead then he was dead, and the flesh did not get a vote either way. It was Danforth's work to keep the paper true. He did it the way a thin boy does a heavy task, with enormous care and a great deal of fear, and it was wearing him down. Once, early in October, Milly watched a wagon come in loaded with boots. They were dead men's boots, gathered at a dressing station and sent back to be sorted and reissued, and they came in loose, thirty or forty pairs thrown together like stones, and the orderly who unloaded them wore gloves and said nothing at all. Each pair had been a man. Some were new and some were past saving and some still held the shape of feet inside them. She thought of the boys who would wear them next, and of the boots that had once belonged to her brother and were now on her own feet, and she did not look at the wagon again. Then she went and washed her hands, though she had touched nothing. Danforth looked up at that, and his face did something complicated, hope and fear fighting for it. Then the door at the end of the corridor opened and footsteps came along the tiles, and he bent over his register and would not say another word. Milly turned to go, and saw, in the doorway, the neat grey shape of Sergeant Cradock standing quite still, watching her, with his hands folded in front of him like a man waiting for a train. ---