Her words, hoarse as they were, seemed almost miraculous. They were the first words she had spoken in almost three weeks. We were twenty-three minutes into our first session. It had taken her all that time to answer the question I’d asked at the beginning of the session: What seems to be the matter? I’d been waiting patiently for her reply since. She looked down at her hands, which were fretting on her lap. Two tears hurried down her cheeks and softly plopped on the lap of her woolen skirt. In every other respect she was perfectly calm.

She cleared her throat. “He was one of the most mutilated men I’ve seen,” she continued in a clearer voice. “A frightful mess.” Another pause. “He had the most horrific burns and blisters all over his body. He was clearly not going to survive. The doctors and other nurses had left him for dead.” The words were starting to flow now. “Sometimes, when a patient is a lost cause, there’s nothing else to do but administer painkillers and concentrate on the men who still have a chance of making it. But I took it upon myself to care for him all the same. He’d been in the ward for two days, on a lot of morphine, but in agonies. And, despite all that, whenever I was with him, dressing his wounds, he talked. The skin of his lips had been shredded and scorched in the mortar attack, but somehow despite the pain he managed to speak in a whisper. I had to put my ear close to his mouth to make out his words. He just needed to tell someone, anyone, what had happened to him. Not just how he was wounded, but who he was, where he came from. He was Australian, just a boy, really. He must have lied about his age when he volunteered. I couldn’t understand why anyone on the other side of the world would volunteer for such a hell as this. I even remember the name of the place he was from: Ballarat. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I try to imagine what kind of place Ballarat could be. I imagine it to be flat and bright and very quiet, with great trees swaying in the breeze.”

“You speak English?”

“I speak four languages. My father was a diplomat.”

I looked down at my notes. Madeleine Pernety, I read. Volunteer nurse since May 1916. Born 1898, Saigon, Indochina. Father French, colonial official, deceased; mother Indochinese, deceased. Symptoms of shellshock and neuralgia. Admitted 10 February 1917. “What did you say, when he declared his love to you?”

“I said, ‘That’s what they all say, when…’ And I had to stop myself short. But it was too late. He guessed what I was going to say.”

“What were you going to say?”

“I was going to say, When they’re about to die. But he finished the sentence for me anyway.”