The Daughters of Mars

by Thomas Keneally

  She forgot dosages as she dripped further chloroform onto the mask which, for the first seconds of its tenure, needed all the force of her left arm to keep it in place. Then the patient made a bleat like a child and was under and the orderlies drew back panting, before leaving for more stretcher work. Sally flicked open the young man’s left eyelid. The pupil was appropriately dilated and she felt grateful to the numbing chemicals.

  Now she placed the airway device in between his teeth. They were a bush kid’s teeth, with some gone and some fixed with fresh amalgam—for he had been to the army dentist in Egypt. His respiration was ragged. But what was to be expected? She moved to one side of the body to let in Fellowes and Freud and placed the cuff of the blood-pressure device on his arm, pumping it up. She saw a low diastolic and then felt his pulse, which was thready and leaking along the artery. She reached for a thermometer but Fellowes said briskly, Don’t bother. For what if he somehow woke and filled the theatre with chaos before she could get more chloroform on the mask. Fellowes did his work. Retractors were involved, the unglamorous tools Freud had mocked. And the rest of the armory, which Fellowes nominated calmly and Freud passed to him. Sally took notice only of pulse, which maintained itself at its present unsatisfactory level.

  The blood pressure had fallen, she saw. She called out the figures. Ninety over fifty. Her dread was the two figures meeting. Fellowes cried to the surgical orderlies, Elevate the table six inches. They got six-inch blocks from the corner and one lifted the end of the table. Gently, cried Fellowes and there was despair at their lack of skill in his voice. You could not get men to stay in the theatres and wards and become proficient at one thing. They thought it feminine work. They would prefer to lump the wounded or supplies around the ship. She wondered about her amenable old ally—Wilson—from the last trip. For he had not seemed humiliated to work with women. These fellows finally propped the blocks under the end of the operating table to stop the blood fleeing the abused brain. The scrub nurse received bone fragments in a bowl, Fellowes saying, I want some of that back, Nurse.

  He would in part rebuild the skull with suitable pieces. He asked for blood pressure again. It was not a good tale—the number for the heart under pressure falling to meet the measure for the heart at rest was a lethal union occurring one instant before the final heart fibrillation.

  It happened. A tremor through the body. Oh damn, said Fellowes softly. And no adrenaline on board. Take him away.

  Somewhere was an ammonia-refrigerated place where such men went. There he would be stored for an Egyptian burial amongst the other children of shock and hemorrhage—until it filled and the sea again became an option.

  No sense of failure delayed things in the theatre. Orderlies washed down the surface of the table with soap and water and briskly dried it off. There was at once another boy. He had a shattered femur wound and was brought straight to her with a splint of dowel stick tied with rags from thigh to foot. He could smell the fumes and obviously feared anesthesia. Sally put the mask down and could hear him beneath it bravely counting numbers. When the putrid bandages were gone, there proved to be two wounds, one made by a bullet, the other by the upper end of the fractured bone showing itself jaggedly through the bloody hole it had made an instant after the bullet struck. After probing the wounds, Fellowes ordered the upper leg lifted and dragged by an orderly and the scout nurse. A traction splint was strapped on, and this man-boy was now destined to walk crookedly for a lifetime.

  Amputations occurred at times on the Archimedes—in spite of the rocking of the sea—and when an overhopeful surgeon ashore had cut the limb off below the knee of another man brought onboard, the sutures were cut and the stench of the wound competed with the chloroform. A new and graver amputation must be done above the knee. With the big strap tourniquet around the thigh, Fellowes’s lancet went cutting decisively through fascia—vastus lateralis and hamstring and quadriceps. A good flap left. And the wound irrigated and sutured up around a rubber pipe. And then the bandaging. Here was a surgeon! Imagine had it been Dr. Maddox, with his confident cack-handedness.

  The Turkish guns exchanged their metal with the warships offshore, and the shudders of the Archimedes were something those on board dealt with without a thought. Fellowes would raise whatever instrument he held when a shell seemed near and start again once the jolt conveyed through the water to the Archimedes ended.

  The timeless session in the theatre ended. Noon had eaten all time, and what was left was devoured by midnight. They were to have three hours’ sleep. At subsequent meals—when they were taken—there was no conversation of any length. Salt was pointed to. Worcestershire sauce lay untouched. They could have been an order of silent nuns.

  They slept for a full afternoon before a ship’s steward—a man left over from the days of peace when the Archimedes took sane people to sane places—knocked on the cabin door and told them he had left a tray of tea for them. The bugles had sounded ashore. More barges on their way. More sweepers.

  • • •

  Nearly eight hundred men were on the Archimedes when the anchor was again raised—another battalion of men treated brutishly by metal but better accommodated now on new cots crowded in. This time more were dysentery and typhoid cases and so a hasty readjustment had to be made to the ship to create a contagious ward. It was a short run this time, a matter of four or five hours. From the ship they saw arid mountains in the sun—the harbor of Mudros on that island of Lemnos whose myths Kiernan had explained but which Sally had forgotten. Tales of man-murdering women and the furnaces of gods had become thin and tame, even here. Military tents filled the valley between the two great heads of the port. Hospital tents had begun to colonize the headlands as well. The camp’s roads were marked out in brown earth by prim, white-painted stones. The olive and orange orchards grew inland—on hills—and meadows beyond the coastline were green. The hills looked enduring and real—whereas the camp looked like a giant and hasty misconception. A new order was to land the urgent cases here. Egypt for the walking wounded, the stable, the uninfected wounds. Lemnos for the rest.

  That day in the harbor of Mudros, the women—their bloodied clothes being washed in a huge boiler by a Greek crewman—were served soup with some genuine beef in it. Sally watched her sister’s head bent to the plate and its earnest concentration evoked a pulse of love in her. A conversation in the corridor nonetheless arrested their attention before they had finished eating. They could hear Captain Fellowes’s voice and that of Lieutenant Hookes in a conversation Sally thought she had heard the beginning of some days back.

  Fellowes: My good chap . . .

  Hookes: No, it won’t do. I’ve never dealt with anything like I am asked to deal with here. In the bad light and all the shudders and the mess of the wound, I cut a femoral. That’s bad enough. But the nurses knew I had.

  He repeated it. Do you understand, I cut a femoral? Drop me off here, for God’s sake, where I can work in a ward.

  Fellowes: Are you worried about the nurses seeing, or the mistake? A doctor is always a peril to people, dear Ginger. As well as a rescuer. How many have you saved in the past few days? Ask yourself that.

  Hookes: I told you, I can’t do it anymore. I’m tuckered out, can’t raise a sweat. I don’t care if they shoot me. Either let me go ashore here or I’m going ashore in Alex. I’ll get a job, any job, in the hospitals there. Don’t stand in my way, Fellowes. You’re too kind for that.

  Fellowes: I won’t consent. The colonel won’t.

  Hookes: Then you will find I’ll hang myself like Barcroft Boake.

  Fellowes: Barcroft Boake?

  Hookes: The stockman poet. He hanged himself with his own whip. And he hadn’t done anyone the same damage I have.

  There were tears in Lieutenant Hookes’s voice. None of the soup eaters despised him. Something in them roared for escape too.

  Fellowes: What can I say? The colonel wants three theatres working.

  Hookes: Even if one of them is useless? Even if
it’s murder?

  Fellowes: I’ve had men die on the table too.

  Hookes: I promise you I’ll finish myself before you can make me go again. I’m being made to do more than I’m qualified for.

  Naomi looked around the table at those who shared it with her and whispered—not to them but as if to the atmosphere of authority that imbued the ship—her own pleading that he should be let go.

  The two men moved on down the corridor, Fellowes murmuring now but both unconscious that their debate had been public.

  Yes, said Honora. Let the poor beggar go. Some doctors wouldn’t even feel any guilt. But he does.

  She declared like a sudden discovery, We can get a new surgeon in Alex.

  In Alexandria, said Sally—in honor of Kiernan.

  • • •

  Hookes became so distressed that Fellowes moved him from his cabin to the walking-wounded officers’ ward in what had been some sort of elegant salon of the Archimedes. A young orderly was put by his bed in case he might wake and need restraining. His years as a country doctor were negated for now—doctors always being respected in the bush if halfway jovial and if they benefited even the handful of patients sufficient to get the word of their ability around the town and the region. Parks were named to honor them. Wards named in hospitals. Was that earnest future now washed away for Hookes?

  Nettice was the sister on duty in here. She was a woman who rarely uttered orders. She directed tasks with a nod. She seemed to believe till proven wrong that if she could see a need for action then so could a nurse. Looking sour (that had to be admitted) she ran her ward by inclinings of the head. How old was she, this little prune? Twenty-seven? Forty-seven?

  It was more like a normal hospital in this ward, Sally thought during a shift here. In the first place, it was a visible and contained ward. Here were lesser wounds already dressed and looking redressable. Morphine not called for as much as it had been in the early frenzy of overcrowding amidships and aft. Some young men lay drugged and palely still or turned slightly bewildered faces to her. Others sat on the sides of their cots in remains of Cairo-tailored uniforms they had once worn in Egypt’s fleshpots. They smoked Turkish cigarettes and chatted. Many were chirpy—aware they had been plucked out of the furnace, though they would not say so. There were bullet wounds of the hand here that had subtly borne away tissue and fragmented bone. As surely as if they had been shot in the heart they could never again use a weapon. There was a blind lieutenant with bandaged pads over his eyes of whom they said, Watch that one, Sister. He’s a larrikin.

  The young man so labeled cocked an ear at Nettice’s approach. Here we are, boys, watch it. The ogress cometh.

  Beyond this part-cheerful ward lay the locked doorway to what used to be the ship’s library. The typhoid ward. The women who nursed those cases were required to take antiseptic baths before returning to the messes or cabins or other wards.

  When the Archimedes began hooting its way into the East Harbour of Alexandria again—amidst all the other hooting and protesting ships, the noise woke Dr. Hookes—Sally saw him stir and moved to him. He looked up at her, and his lower face formed a rictus. Will there be tears now? she wondered.

  How are you feeling, sir? she asked him.

  Which is it? Which of the Durance ones?

  He swallowed with that audible dryness and began to weep very softly. I’m glad you’re here. Because the first time, when they all came aboard in a rush, remember, I was on deck too. I could tell how frightened you were too.

  My sister, she told him. It was my sister with you. I would have been frightened though if I’d been there.

  He tried to stare hard enough to verify that this was a different Durance, but his eyes slewed about.

  You would have been, yes.

  He began to weep again. It was time for more of the valerian that had been prescribed. With the smallest movements of hands and eyes, she motioned the grubby orderly to be vigilant while she fetched it.

  Naomi arrived to relieve her at her shift’s end—since it might be some hours before these officers were taken ashore. Pinned to Naomi’s white breast was not the normal nurse’s watch but the gold-plated watch of Ellis Hoyle. They managed to say little to each other.

  All right then?

  Yes, you go and have dinner.

  Ellis Hoyle’s watch was no larger than the one their parents had bought Naomi. But in a sense it was huger than any other timepiece. Should it be mentioned? Sally asked nothing about it. But she knew all her sister’s walls of reserve had been shaken down. Naomi sat within ruined battlements. Her safety was gone—the safety of the polished country girl who chose the city. There was a risk she might join Lieutenant Hookes in his mania. Because she believed she shared with him a kind of clumsiness.

  Sister Talk

  When the Durance sisters chose to, without saying anything they each had the gift to warn the other of people who might approach. In a palm court full of officers, any who might come within a certain distance would suddenly see they were absorbed in each other and feel the authority of their aloofness. The fact was clear that they weren’t here to meet people, or to expand a circle of acquaintance, or to satisfy the inquiries of any young man—neither of one likely to be sent to Gallipoli as reinforcement nor of one slated to ride into the Sinai to face the Turks. When they first made their way in their approved uniforms—boomerang badge at their breasts and their nation’s name at their shoulders—from the ship to the place down the hill where the gharries waited for fares, they had already taken on something of that preventive air almost without thinking about it.

  The palm court at the Metropole was a bazaar of officers—if that was what a girl wanted. There were even some in kilts—and an occasional Frenchman carrying his pillbox hat under his arm. And there were few other nurses to satisfy the surmises of these fellows. So it was just as well that they were not gifted with airs of acceptance. Their airs of rejection were of a high order.

  The surprising thing was, though, that—within this ring of immunity they made so easily for themselves—Sally had no idea what to say. It had been Naomi’s concept to have tea and a talk. Sally did not know if her sister had brought her here as a duty because sisters should sometimes meet up and have tea. The only men Naomi looked at, meanwhile, were the musicians in dinner suits and tarbooshes who filled the court with music as undistracting as the play of a fountain. Naomi waited for the tune to end—a Strauss waltz kind of tune—as if it would be impolite not to give it a chance to curlicue itself away.

  And then she turned her face as the players let their instruments drop from their chins and eased their posture for a second or two. You look tired, Sal, she said.

  Sally could have said the same. But it wasn’t a competition. One more good night’s sleep, she promised, and I’ll be right.

  Some officers have invited all of us from the Archimedes out to a café, you know. I forget the name of the place. But the cars are coming for us at eight.

  I think I’ll stay on board, said Sally, and have the stew.

  On the other hand, said Naomi, it’s a distraction. And if I’m willing to be distracted then you should be too.

  Yes, all right. But do you think going out to cafés will help us the next time a crowd comes on board?

  Maybe not. But that’s not its job. Its job is to make us feel that for now everything’s A-one. Just for an hour or two. I don’t mind being distracted, I’ve decided. You’re the one of sterner stuff, Sal. You’re like Papa. You’re the one to reckon with.

  They ordered their tea from earnest young waiters in crisp jackets and jalabiyas. It arrived very quickly. Sally found it strange that though there was nothing like this—the trolleys with cakes and the waiters with their murmuring politeness or the musicians in tarbooshes—anywhere in their history before the war, she and Naomi behaved as if this was their lot and they were as used to it as to the Archimedes. And cars at eight to take nurses to “dinner”—not tea, but “dinner,” tea here being
this serious afternoon ritual. To “dinner” along the Corniche, and a stroll along the Mediterranean to finish things off—to see if anyone in uniform was worth talking to. The coming evening and its foreignness were the silken hours, and for enjoying them young men were willing to then be shipped to Gallipoli and give up their brains and limbs and hearts. And yet Sally could still not see how she could be enhanced by these hours.

  I reckon I’ll stick with the stew, she reiterated.

  Fair enough.

  The band had taken on its formal posture again and had begun playing something that sounded Scottish and drippy—the-only-lassie-for-me sort of stuff.

  You were in the theatre this trip? reiterated Naomi. Giving anesthetics?

  Our first patient died of shock, Sally admitted. But that didn’t stop Fellowes and Freud getting on with things. It’s peculiar what you’ll accept as normal. But that red-headed lieutenant—Hookes—he can’t take it on.

  I don’t think the poor fellow should be despised for that.

  Though it’s a pretty basic thing, to cut the femoral.

  Well, the wounds are quite a mess, aren’t they? They’re not like an illustration in a book.

  They both took a spoonful of cake.

  I wanted to let you know, said Naomi then, I’m back to my normal self. The first night was what you’d call a jolt.