BURRANGONG, SEPTEMBER 1978
The flood had seeped almost to their toes. The late afternoon sun hovered above the horizon, sending the water red and rippling gold. It was beautiful, the way a coiled tiger snake looked beautiful until it struck. Arjun leaned against the rubbish bin, forcing himself to look at Mrs McLain. If he didn’t look at the flood maybe the water would stop rising.
‘How did you feel?’ he asked.
It seemed impossible that this small old woman with faded eyes and wrinkles like an apple left in a schoolbag all holidays had ever been a sixteen-year-old girl in a train full of soldiers in 1917.
But then World War I had always seemed impossible anyway: armies hiding in muddy trenches and fighting for years over a few metres of ground, battles where tens of thousands of men died in a day because some general in England said so. World War I had been just so stupid . . .
‘I felt guilty,’ said Mrs McLain quietly. ‘Because I sat down in the middle of that train seat with a grin I’d been hiding for the past ten days. Yes, I was going to miss Mama and Papa. But I was finally going on the same kind of adventure as my brothers. I was going to help win a war! The war to end all wars! A chit of a girl from Butterwood.’
‘But World War I didn’t end war. It was all for nothing!’ said Arjun, trying to listen for screams or yells from the semi-submerged mall. But it was too far away. All he could hear was the deep rush of water as it pushed across the land, and the distant mooing terror of cows.
‘You know nothing about it,’ Mrs McLain said sharply. ‘Yes, the war was a tragic waste of almost a whole generation, but that was the fault of the ignorant men in charge. It took those British generals years to accept that telephones might be useful on a battlefield. The British ammunition wasn’t even good enough to penetrate German armour! But what do you think would have happened if we hadn’t fought that war?’
He shook his head.
‘The kaiser — the German king — was a madman. He’d been preparing for that war for years. People in conquered countries like Belgium were carted off as slave labour for Germany. The German army dismantled whole factories and moved them to Germany. That’s what would have happened to France, to England, and then the whole British empire, including Australia. They wanted us for our wool and wheat and minerals.’
‘My ancestors were in India.’
‘And India was part of the British empire too back then, not that I’m defending the British empire.’ Mrs McLain shrugged. ‘But I didn’t know any of that then, not the good nor the bad, just that I might finally have adventures like the girls in the sixpenny magazines.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Not much,’ she said, and nibbled a bit more chocolate.