The Daughters of Mars

by Thomas Keneally

  So, she said, Alexandria then? Someone said Malta, though, because Alexandria’s full.

  No, Alex, he nodded.

  He turned only his head to scan the deck. He knew that at the official level he was not supposed to fraternize with nurses. But the scales that measured infraction were missing for the moment.

  He said, I don’t like to call an ancient place like that by a short name, “Alex.” Almost an insult. Such an old, old city. It deserves its title.

  She admitted she was fussy herself about using short forms. I hate it when they call a surgical operation an “op,” she said. And the Mediterranean is much too deep and wide to be the “Med.”

  I’d say it was, he agreed. Your name is Durance, Nurse, isn’t it?

  He crushed out his cigarette but placed its remains in his jacket pocket. So he hadn’t repented of it yet. Also—she was sure—he was embarrassed to toss it into the fabled Mediterranean.

  I think that’s a pretty fine name, he said. I mean, if you put an “en” in front of it, you have one of the most flattering of words.

  He saw at once that “flattering” was going too far for her tastes.

  Well, if not flattering, he admitted, then at least sturdy.

  She smiled. It was, after all, a soother of a word. En-durance. This wasn’t the first time the obvious point had been made, of course. Old Dr. Maddox was just one who’d noted it. A few teachers had played on it too when she didn’t understand mathematics or got the order of the coastal rivers of New South Wales wrong.

  I doubt I want to carry a motto for a name, she confessed. It’s better to have something people can just take or leave.

  Like Kiernan, he said and smiled. Common Irish name. Slides right past people. Australia’s full of Kiernans. Hordes in America too. I mean the family is Irish. But my grandfather became a Friend—I mean a capital F Friend—when he saw the work the Quakers were doing in the west of Ireland.

  She could not comment. There were no Quakers in the Macleay.

  I have taken to filthy tobacco, he said, only since Egypt. I intend to renounce it though. I have, thank God, stayed teetotal. When I’ve been most tempted there hasn’t been anything around except surgical alcohol—which isn’t a good place to start. But that has sometimes been a near thing. I was amazed. No brandy on the Archimedes. Not this trip. They should rectify that for the next trip. I saw a few fellows who needed it.

  Then he turned his face back to the sea and made up his mind to go silent. He clearly thought he might have traveled too far in conversation.

  Just to keep things going—as she wanted to—she herself played the geography game. He had mentioned the University of Melbourne earlier. Was he from that city? she asked.

  Like all people from Melbourne, he rushed to say he was. Melbourne, he affirmed. South Yarra. A city boy. No hardihood at all. You can tell the hardy people. I bet you’re from the bush. The land doesn’t always sustain people but it does teach all its children to have a certain robust air.

  That’s city talk, she told him. There’s no nobility in milking cows. And they would pretty soon complain, the farmers and their wives, if they thought they’d be listened to. It’s the lack of a complaints department that makes people look hard. And it ages people as well. South Yarra. Is that nice? Broad streets? Trees?

  Copper beeches, he said. And the river near where we live.

  We have a river too. But it floods.

  And so it does test you, after all.

  It makes us take the cattle uphill. It makes some people sit on their roofs, and sometimes it drowns people. And so they fail the test you’re raving about, Sergeant. En-durance!

  Struth, he said like a non-Quaker. You know how to wing a man.

  She laughed. That sounds like another girl altogether, she thought. So she decided to go easier.

  Now, where did you learn about these places? I mean these around here.

  School, he said.

  Well, she told him, I left at the end of my third year of the high school. I learned a tiny piece of French. Plume de ma tante. And the angles on the square of the hypotenuse. That was about the lot. So where did you get all your knowledge?

  All my knowledge? There’s no all about it. There could be more, if I hadn’t been such a clown when I was thirteen, fourteen. A wildness came out in me. My father blamed an uncle who was a drunk. However, there was a Classics master, wonderful fellow, splendid cricketer, all boys adored him—you’ve heard the story. He taught me to read Latin and Greek. And, you know, I fought him but loved it at the same time. Greek I was lazy at, but I relished knowing the alphabet, and it worked pretty well as a code for messages I wrote to other subversive boys. So I was much taken with the Greek world. And here we are in it. But I never thought it would contain what is on this ship.

  Then university? she asked.

  I’ll admit to that, as long as you don’t make much of it when there are all these doctors aboard. They’ve graduated, some from Guy’s Hospital or Trinity or Edinburgh. High-school scholarship isn’t a lot of use here. It’s my honor to be a carrier of water—boiled if I can manage it—and a bearer of stretchers and linen.

  No, you have leadership, Sergeant. You should be an officer.

  I would never be an officer, he said, shaking his head. I have some convictions that prevent that.

  He took a glance at the strengthening light and consulted his watch and excused himself. But he had somehow returned her to a settled state with the sort of palaver and primness that had characterized Lieutenant Maclean at the pyramids.

  • • •

  Did the Archimedes’s crowded decks and floors and corridors render it a ship of groans on the approach to Egypt? The supplies were teased out and young soldiers swallowed complaint in their peculiar way. And much had been learned—enough for despair and enough for improvement.

  Near Alexandria the Archimedes emerged from a haze above limpid water and saw the East Harbor far off with the old fortress at its root to endow it with a remnant of historic authority. Across the harbor the fabled city looked bleary. Briefly on deck Sally felt none of the stir of arrival and none of the usual urgency to get ashore and see wonders by daylight. The great white mansions and hotels did not look connected to earth.

  The lesser wounded were marshaled on the shaded starboard deck where it was cool to the point of chilliness. Some with blankets around their shoulders were at the rails. Others sat, sipping tea from enamel mugs, seeming sicker and paler and barely more pleased with arrival than she was. Of course they had had their shock as well. They had lost the wholeness of their bodies. Bacteria were working in their wounds and keeping them in suspense.

  She went below to the wards again. Near the main stairs Naomi worked at washing a soldier, and the others about to come off duty were variously busy. The squall about Karla Freud’s enchanting of surgeons was over and everyone—even Leonora—had chosen to write it off to the surprise of events and exhaustion. Honora seemed to have forgotten her own venom.

  Sally could tell by looking at Naomi there had been a change that might last a time. She had not in a lifetime looked fraught but now had a peculiar, harried frown on her face. With that there, Sally could no longer envy her. The first night’s triage had swept away all her smoothness and her air of knowing. Had she ever seen a rifle wound at Royal Prince Alfred? It was unlikely.

  Nurses washed men and re-dressed wounds for the departure. There was something left in them that wanted nurses in hospitals ashore to marvel at what had been achieved at sea.

  When it was reported ambulances were on the wharf, Mitchie was sent on deck to manage traffic and took Sally with her. The lights on the wharf burned biliously in the hazed night. As the two women appeared on deck, some walking cases rushed the gangway and—once down on the wharf—moved between trucks and ambulances like men looking for taxis.

  No more of that, Mitchie announced. Other walkers, smoking by bulkheads and waiting for stretcher-case friends to be unloaded, disapproved
of the stampeders with dark utterances of Bloody awful way to act!

  The red-ticketed appeared—mute on their stretchers—and were put in cradles and winched down. The sight of them being loaded into ambulances was so pleasing to Sally that she felt a form of joy. We have managed to deliver them—that was her jubilant thought. Every man descending by winch or stairs now consoled and invigorated her.

  Mitchie made a decision that Freud—no longer needed in the theatre—should be fetched and sent ashore to see that the loading occurred in correct order. There were no doctors to do it, for they were still working in the wards. Sally watched Freud’s back and veil descend the gangway and then saw her enlist the aid of a young officer. Together they made trucks and ambulances wheel and edge beneath the sickly light and turn for the city. They struggled by quarter inches past vehicles arriving and choking the route to the city’s military hospitals. Some military policeman gifted in initiative took a stand and held the returning vehicles for now and let the waiting ones escape. If he did nothing else for the business of war and brotherhood, thought Sally, he had done enough.

  When the last stretcher had been lowered, Sally went below to feel and hear and smell the echoing deck. She fetched a bucket of carbolic and joined the nurses scrubbing surfaces. Blankets were folded and sheets soiled with blood and excrement collected for an intense boiling somewhere. The meaty smell of wounds still competed here with the sharpness of carbolic.

  Making Friends

  They were oblivious in their cabin—profoundly unaware of their own breath—when a polite but not-to-be-denied knocking on the door awoke them. Half-conscious in her upper bunk, Sally saw night-gowned Honora answer it. Because events had in a sense concussed her, Sally could not have safely named the time or the day or the place. It was Mitchie at the door and fully dressed. She had a telegram for Carradine. While Mitchie waited on with narrowed eyes in the doorway, Honora roused Carradine from her bunk.

  The news soon broke in all the cabins, of course. Carradine’s husband was a casualty. He was in Alexandria—brought by one of the transports—and located somewhere named the British Fifteenth General Hospital. All the women rose and dressed quickly, fussing over Carradine. Girls with aghast eyes came in from other cabins. Carradine was flustered—given that “casualty” could mean so many things. But they were all solidly with her. Leonora kissed her cheek. The meanness of a few days back—if any had lingered at all—had been utterly borne away by Carradine’s stricken eyes and the fact that somewhere ashore was a wound whose owner they knew.

  Mitchie had a truck for them. At the commandeered hotel and now British General Hospital near the old fortress, a clerk told Carradine, Mitchie, and three other nurses who had escorted Carradine from the truck that this was indeed the Fifteenth General Hospital and Lieutenant Carradine was on the list. But he could in fact be in any one of four or five places—convents and Greek mansions—overflow branches of this one.

  Carradine stood by in her gray uniform with her face gray as well. Under Mitchie’s intense gaze, the man decided to write out the addresses of the other hospitals. Mitchie took the list in her hand and waved it like a guarantee. They returned to the truck. As she settled herself on the hard bench opposite Carradine, Mitchie said, You must realize, dear girl, that this cable is signed not by some flunky, but a British brigadier. This would mean to me that your husband is being attended to at the most exalted level. They do not want to let down his distinguished father. That should be a matter of some hope.

  They drove southeast, away from the sea, along a European-style boulevard towards a great parkland where an ornate building with old-fashioned curlicues and flourishes—a place now absorbed by military necessity—declared itself by an engraved legend over the main gate to be the Australian Hospital for Women. They got down and went inside the gate and up the path to search. The gardens were full of untended walking wounded smoking and chatting and contrasting their histories. Once inside, the women introduced themselves to British orderlies at desks. As Mitchie negotiated, the women spotted an occasional British nurse whose eyes glided across theirs and they felt comforted that the same bewilderment which had earlier afflicted them was here as well.

  There was no Lieutenant Carradine in this place. They traveled eastwards now, past the ancient city. No interest in the meaning of ruined columns and tumbled stone was roused in them. As the road swung back to the coast and glitter of sea, their driver pulled up at what had been a French convent—Les Soeurs du Sacré Coeur. Beyond the gate, they saw that marquees had been set up in the garden and men on stretchers had accumulated amongst the shrubs. Mitchie and Carradine and the others entered the office of the former convent and the clerk identified Lieutenant Carradine’s name. Are you all going up there? he asked, not having the authority to stop a matron.

  Outside the office, Mitchie suggested only she and Carradine should go on upstairs to conclude the search. The rest should wait down here in the smell of new paint. Young nurses rushed by on their way into the garden or from the garden into the house. The women left behind felt odd and superfluous and lost for somewhere to stand.

  They would find out that for Mitchie and Carradine it concluded thus: Carradine found her husband on the wide upper balcony above the garden, lying in clean linen but with a stained dressing on his head. A young doctor was leaning over him inspecting his eyes and pulling a lower eyelid down. This is my husband, Carradine told him.

  Aug, said Lieutenant Carradine at the sight of her. Aag gaut nair.

  They would all—when they eventually visited him—hear him speak in these terms. Oh be quiet, Eric, she said, falling down on her knees beside his bed and kissing his chin. But he would not. His brain had been roused and sent on the wrong tangent and he refused to cease speaking in tongues.

  It’s normal, the young medical officer told her, as if he’d seen this phenomenon through a long clinical life. It’s normal for head wounds.

  Yes, it is, said Mitchie at Carradine’s shoulder.

  Daug ack raga, said Lieutenant Carradine and began to weep.

  No, said Carradine. No. Don’t cry.

  Mitchie went and at Carradine’s urging let the other women come in one at a time. When Sally’s turn came, the lieutenant was sleeping uneasily and with a face utterly pale. He pleaded once in his sleep. Au rog, he said.

  None of them stayed long. Nothing could be said. They left Carradine there with her husband.

  • • •

  There were other nurses who lived splendidly at the Beau Rivage Hotel. But the Archimedes remained the home in port of Mitchie’s women. They were meant to do their routine work and have their siestas and go ashore to take a cab and see those things they’d flitted by in their seach for Lieutenant Carradine—the Caesarium, which Cleopatra was said to have built out of love, and Pompey’s Pillar and all the rest. Nurse Carradine had other urgencies. Mitchie was stuck between not mentioning Carradine’s marriage to those in power while getting her privileges because her husband was wounded and uttering gibberish. Somehow—during the previous night—the permission had arrived for Carradine to special her husband—to devote herself to his care. She wanted them to visit him, she said, and speak to him so that his brain reaccustomed itself to normal talk. She packed a bag and rushed with Mitchie to take an ambulance to the Sacré Coeur.

  From the mess table, where oatmeal and tea and peacetime crockery steamed amidst dishes of boiled eggs and French-style rolls of a kind no baker in Australia made, four of them—Naomi, Nettice, Freud, and Sally—descended the gangway. That day the air was suddenly clear and pleasantly cool, and the city defined itself in sharper lines beyond the mole. With the help of a British military policeman they found a taxi, and told the driver their destination. It was the Sacré Coeur. For they felt they must accede to Carradine’s call to speak to her confused husband before they did anything else.

  They got there and entered the garden where the marquees did not now seem quite the sight of confusion they had been yest
erday. In the lobby they saw Mitchie introducing herself to an exhausted-looking and restive matron. Mitchie declared that one of her nurses was here specialing a relative, a Lieutenant Carradine, whose father was known throughout the Empire as a notable statesman of the Commonwealth.

  The Commonwealth? asked the matron. Do you have Cromwell down there in Australia or something?

  Mitchie let it go—it was just a kind of frankness minus eight hours’ sleep. They were familiar, said Mitchie, with the arrival of a mass of wounded men, and had been through the same thing themselves on the Archimedes hospital ship. They didn’t want to take her time. They knew where Lieutenant Carradine was. What if she took Staff Nurse Carradine up there and introduced her to the ward sister. All the paperwork, she said, had already been handed in at the office.

  The four nurses waited like applicants for a job inside the door. They felt superfluous and tried to make themselves small and—but for Carradine—thought of leaving.

  Matron, said an English nurse coming up and addressing the British matron. She wore no red cape. General Archibald has arrived.

  A group of officers, one of whom wore the red tabs appropriate to a general—his uniform and those of his entourage without stain and their leathers from Sam Browne to boots unscathed by the fracas across the Mediterranean—entered the hospital and the British matron nodded to them and led them up the steps. General Archibald was—as they would discover—a legend in British neurology, and on his way by request of the Foreign Office to inspect Lieutenant Carradine’s head wound.

  In his wake—discreetly—followed Mitchie and Carradine.

  • • •

  It came to Sally’s turn to visit Lieutenant and Staff Nurse Carradine on the balcony. It happened that though he slept, his dressings were temporarily off and the ripe wound discharged pus. Carradine sensed Sally’s shadow and turned and with a small raise of her gloved left fingers indicated the hole in her husband’s—or as the British matron possibly thought, her brother’s—head.