The Daughters of Mars

by Thomas Keneally

  After lunch, Carradine later reported, Mitchie visited the officers’ walking wounded quarters and asked them—good fellows that they were—to treat her nurses with respect. They were not chambermaids nor private soldiers.

  Carradine later told the others this—and that an Australian colonel, a broad-faced, good-looking but portly man, was in the corridor on crutches listening to her speech and now entered the room. His accent might be British but he had the sort of complexion you could get only under the Australian sun.

  Good for you, Matron, he said. Go for the bleeders!

  So by evening Carradine told the mess that some of the officers were decent people, and many walked who should have been on crutches.

  At some ill-defined hour they returned to their stations. Outside—for inscrutable reasons—shelling had paused. Dressings needed changing again. Wounds irrigated. Pulses taken. Recurrent morphine doses given. To Sally the swabbing and dressing was more like a preoccupying mercy to herself rather than the soldier. By these exercises she kept saneness amidst the stench and the weighty tang of blood. The customary nature of these small ceremonies of nursing kept her eyes from taking in the broader scope of injury from bulkhead to bulkhead.

  On a cot before them now lay a man whose wound once unban-daged showed a face that was half steak, and no eyes. The lack of features made his age impossible to guess. He had a young chest though—it was naked. Even mercy was bewildered here. In a fresh surgical gown Captain Fellowes appeared and let out a little professional groan that declared this degree of harm beyond his powers. Wilson held the man’s head by the intact side and Honora cleaned his face. The murderous streak in Sally emerged here. This man should be given three grains of morphine to save him from the improbability of what had befallen him.

  He lived on. Others died with a sigh or strenuous gurgle and were carried away by orderlies, their places taken by others from above decks. All pinafores were bloodstained and there was no time to change. Mitchie moved down this deck herself in stained apron, and her air of purpose told you that this was all usual—this havoc could be reduced to order in the end.

  Good girls! she called out in a busy but undistracted voice. The chief noise other than the shiver and now and then complaint of the ship’s steel walls came from orderlies holding the handles of stretchers. They demanded room for their present burden of man and searched angrily for places to drop it. In that time they shouted and raged with questions and profane advice. They too had not thought they would be engaged in such events or would see their ship transformed so suddenly. And their knowledge of things had also been expanded beyond the reasonable. You knew therefore that some dropped the wounded too hard or at unlucky angles in which splintered bone might cut open arteries, or a shell fragment plugging veins or arteries be shifted by some minor nudge that let the dammed-up blood flow.

  One man—younger than Sally—wept as she and Honora tended him because he had seen his brother killed. But unexpectedly he howled for the agony of his wound. Whatever chemicals of shock protected some men from pain had not flowed in this boy. Honora stayed on her knees pulling muck from the flesh beneath his ribs.

  What is your name? Honora asked.

  Peter, said the boy. And Edgar, my brother. How will I write?

  Sally went to the trolley to collect the quarter grain his grief and pain entitled him to, and there was none. Then in the dressings room she found a rubber-capped solution bottle with dregs left and many used needles scattered about it. She came back with a hypodermic containing an eighth—she had felt bound to leave the dregs of the dregs for other men. Once he was soothed Honora drew the calipers from the wound.

  At some hour all peroxide, all iodine too were gone. Orderlies came round with bread and “bully” beef and pannikins of tea for those wounded who could eat.

  Good girls, good girls, said Mitchie passing amongst them.

  Sally went on cleaning the flinching wounds and dragged the muck of the Dardanelles and the uniform out of holes in jaws and legs or from places close to the heart or from the neck—on the pretext of saving men for a disfigured life or even afterlife. With morphine gone, the distress of the injured was getting louder. The amputees—legs and arms lost ashore or in the theatres of the Archimedes—were some of them observant of the scene around and seemed ready to give bright-eyed if feverish assessments on the skills of the workers. When Sally and other nurses had eased the stumps clear and swabbed the sutures they saw some of these wounds had rubber drains emerging and others were stitched up fully to keep their inner processes secret. Therein lay a controversy of surgical procedure.

  Hookes—it was said—was going by launch to surrounding transports and a British hospital ship begging for morphine. He came back with some too. It was to be rationed.

  An Indian in a turban—wounded in the side—told her what an honor it was to be nursed by a memsahib.

  From a further barge nudging alongside came walking men—jaunty—with their shattered or punctured upper bodies. She believed she could predict how they would behave—she felt she had encountered them a hundred times before, as if her memory and history was completely what had happened in one night and a day and was now set to recur forever without pause or surprise. New stretchers now. Where? Where? the orderlies howled.

  Earlier, the brain. And now the heart. They were working with Dr. Hookes, down from the deck. When at his orders Sally eased the surgical dressing away from a right breast with forceps, they all saw for a few seconds the wondrous upper outline of the heart. Air sucked into that revealing cavity and releasing itself with a terrible low whistling. They pushed on the wound with pads and Hookes left to inspect other arrivals, writing this one off.

  Later—dazed—some women were washing themselves at communal tubs near their cabins. They had stripped to their shifts, but the smell of blood had penetrated even as far as skin. Without false modesty they undressed and swabbed all the taints from their breasts and bellies. Naomi appeared, her eyes stark ovals. Though newly washed, Sally herself went to her and they embraced with a fierceness impossible to imagine somewhere normal—in some place where shared crimes counted. It has taken horror, Sally thought, to make us sisters.

  I was so bad at it, said Naomi, beginning to sob. I was so bad at it.

  They got lethal wounds ashore you know, said Sally, soothing the back of her sister’s head. And not by you.

  None of this is at an end, said Naomi.

  Half-naked across the floor—and leaning bare shouldered against the wall—Carradine was also weeping. The fact that her husband was ashore, and today, gave her the sense that no one there could live.

  We’ve all killed men today and yesterday, Sally confided to her sister. The orderlies killed men. Surgeons killed men—you can be sure. We were all out of our depth. But the ship’s full now.

  Going on duty to the hospital deck again, Sally intercepted Mitchie who was passing and made a pleading she did not even know she would make until an instant before.

  Don’t put my sister on triage again. It’s really distressed her.

  Mitchie leveled her eyes at her. How astounding that she should not have slept at all yet still have the means to extend a hand and say, Well, she has nothing to reproach herself for.

  And then Mitchie said, Would you do it? By would, I mean, are you halfway trained?

  Terror filled Sally. Look, said Mitchie, triage at a Sydney hospital is not like triage here. You must be willing to take a sane attitude. Can you?

  She nodded.

  Take the colored cards and go now.

  Mitchie told Naomi some saving lie and left her below to work with Carradine amongst the walking wounded. On a bright and crowded morning deck gusted by an offshore breeze there were orderlies but no doctor. Hookes had now been conscripted below. A barge lay beside and cradles were being lowered to it. For the moment Sally was alone with colored cards in her hands and a sense of rawest and clumsiest knowledge. As well as all else there were detonations from ashor
e again, and shells aimed at ships around. This fire impressed a person more here in the open and made sure that you understood you were part of their business.

  The lean sergeant named Kiernan who had a knowledge of Greek islands was there and raised his head a margin to greet her and allow her his brotherhood. Out on the bright sea yet another barge—on which Englishmen in pith helmets swayed on their feet in the bows—was edging across her vision. There were barges at all places—attached to the sides of ships like piglets on sows. They were at troopships which had just delivered more armed men to great Moloch ashore. It was obvious that this was not the way things were meant to happen. In what Sally had read, the disasters of empires took centuries to ripen. Here it had all matured in days.

  A new Turkish barrage of shells arrived, howling, and displaced the Aegean’s surface water into fountains whose spray—Sally was sure—reached her face on the main deck. The great missiles bracketed a British cruiser a bare four hundred yards off and the detonations conveyed their power through the water. A few seconds later, she heard an orderly say in the hollow quiet—in the hope the whisper would reach powers beyond the Archimedes—I wish that bloody cruiser would move.

  And, grateful for its luck, it did begin by inches to turn its bows and seek a new location to test out the Turkish gunners all over again. But then she could see that a launch and its tow—a barge full of damaged men—had become separated, the cable that connected them cut by a piece of shell. The swamped and torn-apart barge was sinking. Men floated face down or seemed to be waving sodden bandages like a flag signal. Oh Christ, said orderlies. Oh Jesus, oh Mother of God. For what of abdominals and thoracics and amputees in that stinging water? Where was mercy there? Other barges and the launch whose line to the sunken vessel had been cut began to nose about the area and sailors began to drag at the floating wounded with boat-hooks, throwing out lifebuoys and leaning over the bulwarks, extending both hands to those who still had the power to reach.

  On the Archimedes’s deck, men from an intact barge were now being winched up in cradles four at a time to make their own demands. The first crate carrying a cot case drew level with her and was dragged down onto the deck by men under Kiernan’s orders. The soldier had a head wound and bore the normal filthy number 1. When his stretcher was lifted out of the cradle, his gaze was wild and unknowing. He would never remember his rise up the flanks of the Archimedes. He might never remember anything. Sally attached the red card to him. The color game!

  Put him forward near the theatres, she told the orderlies, not that she knew if there was room forward. She wondered if she would want to give each of them a mothering red until the reds ran out and the anesthetics and morphine. She felt the panic Naomi had on the bad-lit deck last night, all alone in authority over the shades of life and death that were so hard to tell from each other.

  Wounds smelled. But she worked hard and without too much doubt. The cases arrived in numbers and she felt competent at numbers.

  There were four cradles at work on the stretcher cases. With a part of her vision she could see orderlies signaling to the winch men on the upper deck to ease off on the handles and then they were swinging her candidates for triage on the deck, one every few instants, it seemed. Stretchers were accumulating. She speeded up. A quick reading of the label applied by the casualty clearing station doctor and a mere touch of the pulse, that was all. Kiernan—moving in to apply a blue tag to a boy of perhaps sixteen years who was bare-chested except for bandages—murmured, We can do only what we can do, Nurse.

  Later she thought there could not be a more obvious thing to say, but it seemed utterly novel to her then—a new first principle mined by Kiernan’s cleverness. A spate of walking English—Tommies in their quaint music-hall pith helmets—all seemed to say, Hello, Nurse, as they were asked to settle themselves in the shade along the open deck. One of them had it in him to bow, but in a kind of cockney mockery that was all right by her.

  At an hour of the day she could not have named—there was not even time to consult the watch her parents had given her—the cot cases had suddenly been all taken down. The variously afflicted walkers sitting in patient exhaustion by the railing now came forward. Shell splinters in arm or leg or shoulder, bullets in soft tissue or peripheral bone. Orderlies had however been serving them pannikins of tea—the grand sustainer, a remedy itself and promise of further remedy. One man with his mid-face wrapped in bandages said in brittle, feverish humor, Nose shot off by some bludging Turk, Nurse. Wasn’t my best feature anyhow!

  He too had been lucky by fractions of inches in his distance from some propellant or other.

  She dealt then with the men from the barge. Slattery told her that below on the crowded, enormous hospital deck, they had hauled Dr. Hookes off to the theatre and he’d looked like someone summoned to the gallows.

  Through opened portholes the sun struck this man and that as if bent on dazzling them to their graves. But there was a different thunder now. It was the sound of the anchor chain rising. Everyone seemed to pause, the nurses at their hectic stations and the wounded in their anguish.

  Half the nurses went back to work in the night reverberating with the Archimedes’s deep-set engines. To see who slept first, they drew numbers from a soldier’s slouch hat Mitchie brought round. The fortunate—Sally included—fell into bunks so oblivious they were confused as to where they were when aroused the next dawn. Before rest they took turns at the basins and perhaps for the one time in their lives hitched their nightdresses in common for a brisk cleansing between the legs.

  By morning the morgue was overcrowded. Men were committed to the sea. And at their tea break there was a sort of hissing girlish mutter amongst some—a particular sniping expression had come to several faces. One of them was Honora’s. Honora—it would need to be said—had not slept for more than forty hours and had become mean and in-the-know and au fait. Something bitter and catty was arising—all the more because they were smashed with tiredness. Freud entered with her dark, large eyes rimmed with exhaustion after hours as theatre nurse. She looked pale and stayed by the door as if she were waiting for a welcome from one of her sisters to bring her completely into the mess.

  Are you still under the influence of the chloroform fumes, Karla? Honora asked with a squinting intent before Karla could find a seat. Freud shook her head and looked at the coven of knowing women at the table.

  No. Sorry, she said. Just distracted.

  She yawned.

  Singing any songs lately? asked Honora.

  Where did that edge she had now come from? Her eyes were suddenly ablaze with ill feeling. Beside Honora, Leonora Casement stood up with tear-streaked eyes and left the mess. The tears were an assertion particular to her and nothing to do with the hours of peculiar nursing labor they had all been involved in.

  What’s this all about? asked Freud, though she could not choke back the yawn that overcame her.

  I believe you’re singing to the surgeons.

  What? That’s ridiculous.

  Honora blazed. In falsetto she sang, “Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary . . .”

  Are you barking for yourself? asked Freud with a new iciness, or are you someone else’s watchdog?

  Captain Fellowes likes it a lot, I believe, and has told people so. He is suddenly song struck. I’d keep it up if I were you. You might net him yet.

  And then it all developed.

  Freud: Tell me what you’re saying.

  Honora: You choose what to make of it.

  Freud: I want to know, Honora.

  Honora: You can have any man. They all sit at your feet. Leo has the one who’s fixed as the pole star. And you’re trying to unfix it.

  To hell with you, Freud told her.

  She had a fine rage, Sally thought. Her stark eyes showed she was no average opponent. Do you know where I’ve been the last two days?

  Same place as all of us, said Honora. Except you’ve been serenading blokes blown to pieces.

  What
if I were asked to sing, to calm the patient?

  Naomi stood up all at once. She was rigid and intent.

  Bloody well stop it! she yelled.

  It was not typical. Sally had never heard from her such a roar and even for the others it had total authority. Freud and Honora were brought to a stop by this fury.

  Don’t you remember? There are men hemorrhaging—internal and external—while you squeal at each other. There are men hemorrhaging, for dear God’s sake!

  Honora’s high feelings were all at once punctured. The anger she had accumulated on Leo’s behalf seemed to drain from her, and the chance of tears of regret or repentance arose. Freud took her own dark-faced, unappeased place at the table.

  If only you knew about me, Freud told Honora.

  But Honora looked like a person who has just woken up to the fact she’s betrayed herself. She was willing now to let Freud be whatever she chose. She could not concede it, of course. That wasn’t her nature.

  • • •

  Sally slept two hours in the early morning and—wide awake then—put on a fresh white blouse and skirt and shoes without stockings and went on deck. It was a brilliant, kindly, salmon dawn. It did not seem to deny any of its children its even blessing, and there was no other ship and no spine of land in view. The rest of the world had made such a claim for so long that it was hard at a level beyond reason to work out where it’d all gone to. A man at the railing—tall, in loose uniform—stood upright as a courtesy to the new presence. He was smoking a Turkish cigarette. At home they had changed enemy names. But—as far as she knew—Turkish cigarettes were still Turkish.

  Now—seeing it was a nurse—he yielded up the railing, even though there was no one else there to compete for its entire length. He was getting ready to walk off.

  Sergeant Kiernan, she said.

  That’s right, Nurse. Caught smoking. Don’t tell my parents.

  He had dark hair, wind raked and so a little unmilitary. And his gaze was direct, as if there was still a lot of civilian in him. He had even, long features, no Irish or Scottish freckles. It was the sort of face people described as “honest” when they meant it didn’t quite manage to be handsome.