Free For King and Country by Annie Wilkinson Page A

the list was finished, and stood in the doorway. ‘He’s Cheyne-Stoking; you can hear it
halfway down the corridor. Ten days after a three-hour operation! Ye gods, he might have had enough consideration to last a bit longer, after all that bally work! Don’t look so shocked, Nurse
Wilde. Dying’s a poor return for all the work we did on him, and it looks very much as if that’s what he’s going to do.’ He turned to Sister Davies. ‘Very little to be
done, I’m afraid, except keep him sitting up. Send for me when you want the death certificate signed. It can’t be long.’
    The words were barely out of his mouth when David’s breathing stopped. Sally stood hardly breathing herself, waiting for it to begin again, but in vain. Dr Campbell applied a stethoscope
to his chest, and gave Sister Davies a brief nod. She pulled out the pillows to lay him flat and closed his eyes, then covered his face with the sheet.
    Sally dried the young face that Dunkley had just washed as gently and carefully as a mother might have. His eyelids had lifted, and his mop of black hair, black brows and dark,
empty eyes stood out against the yellowing flesh. Now Dunkley handed her an arm, wet, limp and lifeless. The sheet they’d folded back across his hips preserved his dignity until they’d
washed his trunk and, as if he’d been alive, they moved it just enough to expose and wash each leg in turn. The break in his thigh distorted the shape of one leg, made his knee and his foot
lie at odd angles. Dunkley picked up lumps of tow with forceps and packed them into his throat to prevent any leakage from his stomach and then pulled him onto his side, to wash his back, and take
more lumps of tow to pack his rear before allowing him gently to fall onto his back.
    Now the sheet was off, and for the first time in her life Sally saw a fully-grown man entirely naked. Dunkley washed the last part of him that awaited washing, and while Sally dried him she cut
off a length of narrow bandage, for the tying of that member whose virility was gone forever. She tied it tight, and finished the knot with a neat bow.
    Hard to preserve any dignity now. His body looked faintly ridiculous, and unutterably pathetic. They slipped on the white shroud, combed his hair, and closed his staring eyes, and he reminded
Sally of nothing so much as a big, broken doll. Dunkley put pennies on his lids to keep them closed, crossed his hands on his chest, and then put a pillow under his chin to prevent his jaw from
dropping.
    Sally took one last, lingering look at him as she wheeled the trolley away from the darkened room. His poor parents, to lose such a lovely son. And he would have made a loving husband, and a
father. Such a waste. All that promise of future generations, all that youth and love and laughter, that vibrant life, all were stilled, soon to be as cold as the clay that would swallow him. How
pathetic, how helpless, how vulnerable he seemed. As are we all at the last, she thought, feeling that she, too, stank of death.
    Ah! There came the porter, rumbling along the corridor with the mortuary trolley.
    Odd that it should come as a shock, the following morning, to go on duty and see his bed empty and made up with clean linen ready for the next patient. It bore testimony to an
enormous void, the lack of Lieutenant David Jones on the ward, and the sight of that emptiness cut her in a way that laying out his body had failed to do. Her hand pressed against the ache in her
chest and met the crisp stiffness of a starched apron bib.
    No time to mourn him. Better get a move on and get the washing bowls out for those men who were confined to bed, and get the junior to help the ones who couldn’t manage to wash themselves.
Then breakfasts, and the bedmaking and ward cleaning to be done, and then temperatures. Dunkley would do the blood pressures and the medicine round and it would be time for the mid-morning drinks.
By that time the dust would have settled,