The next day, the nurse tended to her patients in the sunshine, whilst the amber leaves tumbled in profusion on the lawn and the poignant perfume of chrysanthemums was wafted on the soft breeze. The scent of Death, the flower of Mourning, as the French have it. And much mourning continued in France with the tragic death of the flower of her young manhood. The mothers of Germany, too, wept for their lost sons; a mother's love for her boys has no nationality, no boundaries, no end.
The trooper’s story had preyed upon her mind all night, stirring in her a guilty sadness that she had carried for more than a dozen years. She was moved to confess to the trooper her long-concealed culpability. Her father, she said, had decided that his daughter would be a first-rate shot, so that when she would, in a year or two, drive him out in his Wolseley to take some sport, she would not shame him. He had the gardener trap rabbits and tie them up, three or four at a time under a tree, for the young girl to perfect her aim. She would stand in the window of her bedroom with her shotgun, and as her father shouted his instructions, she would shoot them. The animals had screamed in fear and pain, straining on the ropes that held them, unable to escape. Her father had bellowed at her to stop being so weak, so cowardly, as the tears had streamed down her face. Since her experience of the wounded men arriving in their hundreds, their helpless suffering had put her in mind of those rabbits, and she had wept in shame for her part in her father’s pantomime of appearances and the desire to be socially ‘correct’.
Was there no end to human cruelty?
Trooper Carrington had taken her hand in his bandaged one as she told him her story and had gently brushed away a tear from her cheek. There had been a quiet moment between them. Then Carrington had spoken: “Apologies, Nurse Roberts, for my coarse language, and if I offend you. But you are real and you understand me. You know, nurse, Jack and I left money with the Sister in the sickbay back in Zeitoun. The most trustworthy person I could think of. We asked around, found that the going rate for a horse carcase in Cairo is fifteen shillings. You know what an old war horse looks like once it’s been on-sold to the locals? Have you ever seen a horse, still standing, but only just, with his ribs completely de-fleshed? Beaten so badly that the poor creature is in agony? Ribs a mass of flies and maggots? Ulcers all over his body? That would have been Jim and Bobby. The army had sent all those Mounteds with their horses over here, all that way, from the far side of the world, then on to Gallipoli, leaving their animals behind without their trusted riders. Now they are simply remounts, orphans, really, hundreds of them. I doubt that Jim and Bobby will be missed. Sister is holding on to that money until the end of the war for us. The army can have its damned thirty pieces of silver, whether we’re both alive or dead.”