1 December 1942
"We got another one, doc!"
The door to the makeshift infirmary swung open as yet another young man was carried through, bloody and sagging hopelessly in the arms of his comrades. Lucien fought the urge to sigh; earlier that day a train of Allied soldiers had marched through the gates of Selarang Barracks, their steps hounded by their Japanese captors, and over the last twelve hours more than a few of them had made their way here, in desperate need of care. The infirmary - such as it was - had been the officers' mess prior to the invasion, but now all the tables had been stacked at the far end, and a series of pallets had been laid down upon the floor. Though Lucien was not the only man in the camp with medical training he remained the most experienced, and so he had assumed the position of camp doctor. With more than fifteen thousand prisoners housed on the grounds, he had his hands full.
Triage had become the order of the hour; the men who worked tirelessly by Lucien's side - some of them trained medics, some of them just selfless volunteers - had over the last ten months learned how to with a single look at a patient determine whether or not he could be saved. Illnesses went for the most part untreated, as they lacked medication or even proper quarters to house the infected. The gutshot and the starving were given a place to sleep and a priest, if they wished - there were three on hand. Amputations could be performed, now that some of the more inventive prisoners had found a way to turn rotting food into bootleg liquor, the closest thing they had to anesthetic, but even then only the most hopeful cases were taken. Sometimes the dying men understood, and accepted their fate with good grace, and sometimes they howled for their mothers, and Lucien could not say which was worse.
It was strange, how quickly this horror had become reality, how quickly Lucien had adjusted to his new status. After the failed escape attempt in August - and the resultant wave of dysentery, and the executions - thoughts of escaping had faded from his mind. These men needed help, and Lucien knew that they were best served by his continued presence. Even if he somehow managed to escape Selarang, he had no notion of where to go for aid, while the city was crawling with Japanese soldiers and the shoreline was patrolled by their ships. If they didn't kill him at the gates, they'd just drag him back here to face the firing squad, and then who would care for the sick and the wounded among them? Lucien had stopped praying the day Singapore fell, the day he watched his brothers in arms butchered with their hands up in surrender, the day he had been dragged to this place that had once been home to a host of British soldiers, and had now become their own private hell. If there was a God, he wasn't listening to Lucien Blake.
"What have we got?" Lucien asked, wiping his hands on the dirty shirt he wore tied around his waist to serve as an apron. He was splattered with blood and worse, dead on his feet after a long and trying day without enough food to sustain him, and he hoped that this would be his last patient. Night had fallen, and with a strict curfew in effect he knew he would have to remain where he was, but there was an empty pallet in the far corner of the room where he longed to stretch out and rest his weary bones.
"Broken leg," Paul answered as their patient was laid out in front of him on a table that had only recently held a man who'd lost two fingers to gangrene and Lucien's sharpest knife.
Paul was a bright young man, a Scottish medic from the 2nd battalion, who had been housed here at Selarang before the invasion. Throughout the long day he had served by the door, accepting or rejecting patients as needed, allocating beds and and blankets and what precious foodstuffs they could spare. The lad before them was groaning, his head thrashing against the table while his mates who had carried him here looked on apprehensively.
"His name is Chris, sir," one of them piped up. "Chris Beazley. He fell, out there on the road."
Lucien grunted, carefully peeling away the tattered remnants of young Chris's trouser leg, the better to survey the damage. By now Lucien knew what the lad meant, when he said on the road. These soldiers had been captured far to the north and then marched for miles and miles on end, sometimes overnight, with whips to encourage them and no food to speak of, drinking rainwater and worse just to keep themselves alive. Though thousands of them came flooding through the gates, they left a trail of grief behind them, out on the road.
"It's a wonder he was able to keep walking," Lucien mused, half to himself, as he stared at the wreckage of the young man's leg. This wound was old, three or four days at least, and already destroyed by infection. Ideally Lucien would have amputated there and then, but with no antibiotics and nothing but a cigarette lighter to cauterize the wound he knew to even attempt such a thing would be folly, would spell an unkind end for the Sergeant on the table.
"We took turns carrying him, sir," the young man told him sadly.
Not for the first time, Lucien found himself amazed by the capacity of these men to care for one another, the depth of compassion they showed to their brothers while facing unending torment and deprivation. Though they were starving and exhausted themselves these dirt-splattered boys before him had taken it upon themselves to do whatever they could for their fallen comrade, only to bring him here, to a place where it was now Lucien's job to tell them that he could not be saved. A bullet would have made a kinder end for young Chris Beazley, but Lucien would not dare tell his friends such a thing, not now, not after all they had endured.
"Paul," he said carefully, "why don't you help these lads find a place to sleep, and I'll look after Sergeant Beazley here."
They exchanged a single glance, and in the depths of Paul's dark eyes Lucien saw the same hopelessness that filled his own heart. There was nothing more that they could do for Chris Beazley, and Paul knew it. To his credit he did not show his distress to anyone else, simply squared his shoulders and led the others away, leaving Lucien alone with Chris Beazley.
"Chris," Lucien said, leaning down close to his agonized patient. "Can you hear me?"
"You the doc?" Sergeant Beazley asked on a gasp.
"I am. My name is Lucien Blake. Tell me, do you think you could drink something?"
"You got water, doc?" Blue eyes flashed at him out of a sunken face, desperate and hopeful.
"I do," Lucien answered. Carefully he lifted his patient's head with one hand, while with the other he raised a small canteen of water to his lips. It was a messy business, but Sergeant Beazley seemed grateful enough for what little bit he managed to swallow. Though he was clearly still in pain the water seemed to help him, a little, and Lucien counted himself grateful for small mercies. There was a dirty towel stowed beneath the table, and Lucien gathered it now, balled it up and slipped it under Chris's head to serve as a pillow.
"You can't help me, can you, doc?" Chris asked through gritted teeth.
Lucien's shoulders sagged at the question. It was always easier when the patients were comatose, too far gone to learn of their own fate. This, telling a man that he was dying and there was nothing Lucien could do to stop it, remained the single hardest trial he had ever faced.
"I'm afraid not," Lucien told him sadly. "I don't have the proper equipment, and I don't have any antibiotics. That infection has set in, and there's no way to stop it."
For a long while Sergeant Beazley was silent, his eyes closed against the pain. There was a stool close to hand and so Lucien dragged it over, finally giving his aching feet a rest as he took a seat near his patient's head. Everyone reacted differently, to news of their own imminent demise, and it would seem that Chris Beazley was one of the quiet ones, one of the ones who kept their grief to themselves, no matter how great.
"You said your name's Blake?" Chris asked eventually. The sound of his voice startled Lucien out of his own exhaustion, and he returned his attentions to the young man at once. Lucien could not save him, but he could do this much, could sit with him and listen to what he had to say. "There's a doctor back home named Blake."
"Oh?" Lucien asked. "Where are you from?"
The lads always loved talking of home, he'd found. Home, and their girls, those were the two topics of conversation that seemed to give them hope, to keep them going though the world around them was grim and full of terror. Chris Beazley had a familiar accent, as Australian as Lucien himself, and Lucien hoped that a friendly voice would help to ease him as he slipped away.
"Ballarat," Chris said.
"I'll be damned," Lucien muttered. What were the chances of that? He asked himself. Thousands of miles from home, lost and lonely, surrounded by thousands and thousands of strangers, they had stumbled across one another, two Ballarat boys united here at the end of all things. The world was a big and scary place, but sometimes it seemed as small as a village.
"What was that, doc?"
"I said, I was born in Ballarat," Lucien said quickly. "That Blake, that's Thomas Blake? He's my father."
"I'll be damned," Chris said. Lucien smiled.
"I gotta tell you, doc," Chris continued, his eyes still closed, as if blocking out the dim light of the infirmary could in some way ease his suffering. "I never much cared for your old man."
Lucien chuckled a bit at that; he couldn't help it. Strange, how despite the sorrow of the moment they could speak to one another so easily, as if they were friends, as if they'd known each other for years. Strange, how their conversation made him feel more human than he had done in weeks.
"You're in good company," Lucien told him.
Just then a grimace crossed Sergeant Beazley's face, his whole body tensing for a moment as a wave of pain washed over him. Keep him talking, that was the trick, Lucien knew. Keep him talking until the effort of conversation and the pain grew so great that he would fade into dreams, and, if he were lucky, never return to the nightmare his life had become.
"Is there anyone waiting for you back home, Chris?" Lucien asked him. He could have asked if Chris had attended Ballarat West, if he missed Lake Wendouree, if he'd ever enjoyed a pint at the Pig and Whistle, but he'd spotted a gold band on Sergeant Beazley's left hand, and he thought the lad might rather talk about his wife. Christopher was in truth perhaps only five or so years younger than Lucien, but war had made an old soul of Major Blake, and all these brave volunteer soldiers looked like so many green boys to his eyes.
A beatific smile split Chris Beazley face from ear to ear at the mention of the word home.
"Jeannie," he said. "My wife's name is Jeannie. Well, Jean. I'm the only one calls her Jeannie. And she's the only one calls me Christopher. Her and my mother."
Lucien smiled sadly, his heart touched by how much Chris's countenance changed at the sound of his wife's name. Lucien had loved a girl called Jean once, but that time in his life was lost to shadow, and he could hardly recall the sight of her face. The years had not been kind to him, and so much had changed; he was no longer the reckless boy he had been. He had married a woman he loved, had fathered a child who had become his whole world, had lost them both when he put them on a boat bound for safer shores, never to be heard from again. He had made a promise to himself that when this war was done, when he was free, he would search to the ends of the earth to find them. No doubt Christopher Beazley had made the same promise to himself, but given the state of him, Lucien knew he would never keep it. For a moment he wondered about this Jeannie, safe back home in Ballarat, wondered if she had any inkling what had befallen her husband, the heartbreak she was soon to face. For her sake he hoped not, hope that she could live in peace, just a little while longer.
"We've got three little ones," Chris continued, and Lucien forced himself to focus on the man's words, to ignore his own problems which seemed to pale in significance in the face of what the man in front of him was suffering. "Lily, and Chris Junior, and Jack."
"And how old are they?" Lucien asked, trying hard not to think about how Christopher's death would affect his family; it would be hard enough on his wife to lose her husband, but to have three children to look after as well, three children who relied on her for everything, seemed a burden too great for anyone to have to bear.
"The boys are six and four, and my little girl just had her eighth birthday. I should have been there, shouldn't have been so far from home." Chris's voice had begun to fade, but a note of self-loathing had crept in, there at the end. Though he knew he could protest, could point out that what Christopher Beazley had done in volunteering to leave his home and fight this fight was a selfless act, he likewise knew that such words would be wasted. What did it matter why Chris had decided to fight, if in the end the war was not won, and his family would be abandoned? For a long time Lucien simply looked at him; the lad couldn't have reached his thirtieth birthday yet, seemed much too young to Lucien's eyes to have a child already eight years old. Must have gotten started early, he thought distantly.
"It'll be all right," he said aloud. Things wouldn't be all right, not for Christopher Beazley or his family, and Lucien knew it, but he said it just the same.
"Listen, doc, can you do me a favor?" For the first time since he'd learned that he was dying Chris's eyes opened and fixed themselves upon Lucien, bright and blue and full of pain.
"I'll do whatever I can," Lucien answered hesitantly. There was only so much he could offer, but he would give what he had. He owed his brothers-in-arms that much.
"There's a letter in my pocket. For Jeannie. When this is over, when you get out of here, can you see that she gets it?"
This much he could do, and so Lucien quietly agreed, carefully reaching into the pocket in question to retrieve the battered envelope. It bore her name, Mrs. J. Beazley, and an address scrawled across the front, and Lucien dutifully tucked it into his own trouser pocket. Perhaps he would not make it out of here alive, but he made a silent vow in that moment to pass the letter along, to bequeath it to Derek or some other soul, to make sure that Mrs. J. Beazley received her husband's last communication, that Christopher's dying wish would be fulfilled.
"Thanks, doc," Chris said, his voice hardly more than a tired whisper.
"You're very welcome," Lucien answered.