Free Bring Larks and Heroes by Thomas Keneally Page A

of them no rest.
    â€˜Let’s go and collect our sick man,’ he suggested at last.
    They approached the doorway with their headsback. ‘Hew!’ they said constantly in a note of discovery. ‘Hew!’
    The door was open. Bronze flies sizzled in the daylight on the steps, wavered like the black spots in migraine. Perhaps they too were partially afflicted with disbelief. Faced with one of those things which have to be done quickly, Halloran ducked his head under the lintel and sniffed the dimness. He blinked up the length of the unscreened inside. Somewhere towards the centre, seemingly robust laughter broke out.
    The hospital had been fitted out with bedsteads and pallets, but mostly pallets. Men dozed, blankets down, shirts up, legs apart, letting the air to their crutches. An owlish consumptive stared across the room, not to be taken unawares by Halloran or by death. His two stubborn nodules of shoulders were propped against the wall, giving fair promise to remain, stanchion-firm and stanchion-bare, when the rest of the frame had finished wasting from them.
    â€˜Good afternoon,’ called Halloran. ‘Surgeon in?’
    The consumptive shook his head, pointing down the hut.
    â€˜Orderly,’ he suggested, and paid for it with a coughing-fit like axe-blows. The little body jiggled, and Halloran, in decency, waited the spasm out.
    There was a clear aisle in Surgeon Daker’s hospital, water buckets along the aisle, privies along the walls. All else was random, a melee of bodies andills. Halloran passed stray charcoal-burners in which something resinous smouldered. A man with lupus face, being a wise monster, stayed close to one to keep off the flies.
    â€˜Did you see that, Corporal?’ whispered the fool of a Marine behind Halloran.
    Then, without warning, they were amongst healthy men. The insanity of the long hospital gained much from these, who stood inert by the windows or rested on their beds in silence. They were watching an acutely craggy woman, shift up around her armpits, on her back on the floor under a small well-fed man. She frowned at the handful the man tried to make of her fruitless little paps. They were people, even separately, ugly beyond telling. A preacher like John Chrysostom would have delighted to have them mate beneath his pulpit as he preached on the viciousness of the flesh, on the death-sweat and -bed of love.
    And even there, on the floor, things seemed insanely inert.
    Just the same, lust, the size of a hippopotamus, flopped over in the tropic swamps of Halloran’s belly. Oh, it alarmed him to have his bowels yearn out towards that sort of oblivion.
    â€˜What are you all doing here?’ he asked with a severity intended for the hippopotamus. ‘Where’s the surgeon’s orderly?’
    They all began to laugh at him. It was the worst type of laughter possible. Their mouths flew open likevents; the laughter came out like a snatch of laughter out of a mine.
    They ’ re all possessed ,he thought, and went cold.
    They pointed at the poverty-stricken woman and her portly burden.
    â€˜Don’t break him off now,’ one of them said. ‘You’ll never get him started again.’
    Halloran could then have kicked the orderly’s grey buttocks. They presented themselves, and it would have been befittingly gross to lay his boot to them. But more than that, there came over him a queasy urge to mash both people with his feet and rant against them, text and fury. Yet all of this would have been no more than a device to join himself to them in their sad fever. So he managed to hand his flint-lock to one of the privates, and dragged the orderly upright by the shoulders. As he was hauled up, the man roared and struck at Halloran’s waist, and Halloran, exultant, let him go with one hand and knocked him out of the other with a punch flush on the ear.
    â€˜Christ, can’t do that!’ said a satanic Welshman in a