A Rose for the Anzac Boys by Jackie French Read Free Book Online Page A

her.
    More ambulance trucks had arrived while they’d been talking. There were horse-drawn ambulances too, the horses thin and tired-looking, and even a few carts, the wounded lying on the straw. As Midge watched, orderlies unloaded stretchers and laid the men out along the platform, then hurried back for more. Most of the orderlies were women, in trousers and boots like Slogger’s or dresses with big white aprons like the canteen girls wore. Already a third of the station was covered. The tiny courtyard was full of vehicles, and others lined the street waiting to get in. How could this peaceful station change so fast, thought Midge dazedly. Midge had read Aunt Lallie’s letters and the newspaper reports. But nothing had prepared her for this.
    The stretchers seemed endless, laid on the cold ground. The men lay without blankets to cover them, much less pillows or sheets. Their uniforms—muddy, stained and torn—were French. Some of them had roughly bandaged wounds; others had been left with their wounds open when the bandages ran short. There were men with grey faces, white faces, faces cut by shrapnel. Men with closed eyes who might be dead or just blessedly unconscious. Men with strange hooped cradles where their arms or legs had been. They looked so still. So quiet. There were some groans and cries, but strangely few. These were men who had seen hell. And now they waited for what help a distant hospital might bring.
    Only the orderlies and drivers in their skirts or trousers were still whole. Even as Midge watched, the carpet of bodies grew. Whatever she had expected, she thought, it wasn’t this.
    Ethel strode back along the platform, her arms full of loaves of bread. ‘No point standing there staring. Reckon we’d better get cracking, lass.’
    ‘What if we run out of cocoa?’
    ‘Just keep adding water. So long as it’s hot and wet.’
    Midge followed, half running to keep up. Impossible to expect these wounded and shocked men to line up like the soldiers they’d been serving, she thought. ‘We’ll have to take the pannikins to them, help the men to drink,’ she said.
    ‘Yes. I sent the goose boy to ask Madame for help. We need more hands.’ Ethel was already cutting bread as she spoke.
    Midge tried to think. She could carry four pannikins at once, but she’d have to put them down to help each man to drink…Impossible. There must be two thousand men here already, more than they had ever served before. And this was just the start, Slogger had said. They couldn’t serve a tenth this many. Her knees felt weak with the smell of blood.
    Suddenly, she thought of her grandmother fording a river flooded with snow melt on horseback to get to her new home. Her mother facing what she must have known was her death in the isolated highlands, rather than leave her home and family for less pain and a hospital. Lallie working herself into exhaustion for the boys from Gallipoli, and Tim and Dougie out there somewhere, fighting for all of them…
    Impossible not to try.
    ‘ Pardon, monsieur ? Cocoa?’
    The man smiled with bloody lips. His hands reached for the cocoa. Thank goodness he could hold it.
    ‘ Pardon, monsieur ? Cocoa?’ This time she had to hold the pannikin while the boy sipped. One of his hands was bleeding, the other a stump strapped to his chest. His eyes were vague, but at least he drank.
    ‘Cocoa, monsieur ?’ No answer. Sleeping? Unconcious? Dead? No time to check, nor was it her job. ‘ Monsieur, un peu cocoa?’
    She glanced out at the courtyard. More ambulances…and more. The road was jammed with vehicles: carts, cars, trucks. How many more, she thought frantically, then bent to her job again. Anne and Beryl hurried between the stretchers up the platform to help Doris with the mixing and breadslicing. For a time, Midge and Ethel simply handed the pannikins to the hands capable of reaching for them. Ethel strode away to get more powdered milk and Midge looked at the men reaching desperately