The Daughters of Mars

by Thomas Keneally

  The poison gases fell into four distinct groups, the matron instructed them. They were told to make notes, and Sally ended up with dismal columns she would never remember—“Acute Lung Irritants,” “Lachrymators,” “Sternutators,” “Vesicants.”

  There were also superficial irritants such as tear gas—although those attacked by them might not consider them superficial but grounds for fleeing trenches. The acute irritants were capable not simply of irritating but of killing by pulmonary edema. Some were solids packed into an exploding shell. Microscopic particles of them could destroy men’s lungs. There were also liquids or liquefied gases, such as chloropicrin, phosgene, and chlorine, and these were dispersed as sprays by cylinder on the right wind, or, increasingly, in a shell by a small explosive charge.

  The malign inventiveness of it all made Sally think that she had entered a new continent of human bile.

  They should approach these cases with confidence. Most of those who suffered lethal effects had already died closer to the front than this. Here the cases were chronic. They still needed oxygen and—in the case of lachrymatory gassing—care of the eyes. And even here, pulmonary edema could strike a man.

  She was brisk—this matron. She had the hydra-headed vileness of gas under her management.

  But there was something else they would not previously have seen on such a scale. They should follow the matron—out of the mess into the last lilac light. In the fine spring afternoon day nurses and orderlies who had had the patients’ beds out in the sun were now moving them indoors. Nurses helped the blue-pyjamaed wounded on a last evening stroll. At the end of General Bridges Street there was a crossroad named in honor of a racehorse—Carbine Street. Here the matron-in-chief led the women into a long tent with a cardboard plaque on the door that read NYD. A few dozen of the German prisoners the British had caught in the shock of their first spring foray lay on beds or walked about arguing amongst themselves in German or sat rigid on chairs under the care of a number of orderlies. Some of those who at first looked tranquil on beds were—on a closer look—convulsed into shuddering balls. Some of those who walked about began pushing themselves against the tent wall and bulged it out in terror when an orderly approached.

  The matron gathered her nurses about and spoke softly—a tour guide in a strange church.

  On both sides of the line, said the matron, whether in clearing stations or general hospitals, lie men who show no wounds but who are afflicted in some disabling way. Doctors believed this mental disablement was funk at first. At the other end of the scale there were even alienists who claimed it had nothing at all to do with a man’s mental history. They argued that such was the absolute shock of the war—the shock of high explosives or of being buried alive—that the invisible disablement might befall any soldier, however brave. Unlike inmates in many mental wards, these men never or rarely show violence.

  She walked the nurses down the aisle under a guard of orderlies. Sally knew that even in Egypt the term “shell shock” had escaped as if from a burrow and run through the wards and was picked up by some doctors and debated by others. Its relationship to cowardice—that was the debate.

  What is NYD on the door? asked Leo softly.

  There is always doubt, said the matron. So it stands for “Not Yet Diagnosed.”

  They were permitted to sleep longer that night and were awakened later in the morning by an Australian orderly with a Scots accent. He rang a bell and walked amongst the tents singing genially that his heart was in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.

  • • •

  They die so quietly, said Leonora of the British and the Germans they nursed. It’s just like Lemnos that way.

  If conscious, a man might announce his awareness of death in the quietest tones—as if telling a friend that he was going to a shop on the corner to buy tobacco. Some of them were more appallingly young than in Egypt. Britain was scraping boyhood’s barrel. Some were chatty—telling their horrifying stories of the hours of being carried back out of the trench system. Or else they had limped rearwards on shattered limbs or with chest wounds against the tide of reinforcements and supplies—ammunition boxes, cooking boilers, barbed wire—making for the front trench. The worst of cases died at the regimental aid posts or the forward dressing stations. If not there then at a casualty clearing station.

  But the wounds of those who reached Rouen were still full of murderous potential. One night in the ward labeled “C” and reserved for Germans Sally watched the heart rate of a young prisoner who had suffered a mere upper-arm flesh wound climb ferociously as his temperature rose in concert. She and Honora watched him gasp and were pleased to see early morning, when he could be sent to the theatre. Here, his arm was amputated. But the bacteria had beaten the surgeon’s knife and entered his system. Or else, some meningeal infection had been provoked in his brain. The boy died not with the quiet Leo had remarked on, but raving. His corporal grasped his hand and gave answers to his hectic, fearful inquiries.

  Because Rouen was so large—and authoritative in its bulk and marked streets—it struck Sally as a hospital where men were kept for their entire medical care. But the ward doctors had nurses mark the British and Canadians and Indians with a “1,” “2,” “3”—according to their readiness to return to the front (1), their likelihood to recover within three months (2), or their unreadiness for battle for at least six months—if ever (3). If marked 3, they would be taken by ambulance to the port of Rouen for shipment to England. The recovered—of course—went in the other direction. Back into the threshing machine.

  Coming Back

  A Melbourne late summer day. The desert that had killed Burke and Wills was breathing on the city. The air moved as fiercely as anything Naomi had known in Egypt. And in that furnace heat she saw from the deck of yet another sister—the Alexander—a thousand young reinforcements sitting on their kits on the blazing wharf where tar melted beneath their boots. They shouted to each other and endured the withering day. Maybe they thought, If we can’t put up with a hot Melbourne afternoon, how will we put up with other places?

  Across the wharf came a party of nurses in summer straw hats and the same lightweight gray Naomi wore. They were led at a sedate pace by their matron, who moved stiffly on a stick and bore in her other hand an unfurled parasol designed to fight the sun. This party was not delayed on the wharf at all, but—reporting to a sergeant-major at the gangway—immediately permitted to climb the gangway. They were slow. The younger legs of the nurses were inhibited by the awkward gait of their leader. Even though she was so lamed, this woman leaned on her walking stick with a flamboyance which falsely suggested it was an implement of gesture rather than something needed. Naomi saw then it was Matron Mitchie. A nurse behind her carried her satchel. On both feet—including the one that was prosthetic—she wore black shoes. She rose up in the fierce air, with the wind tearing at and buffeting the face veil which hung from her hat. Naomi concluded that Mitchie had been sent to conduct these girls and to advise them on shipboard life. By that night she would be back to one of the military hospitals around Melbourne to continue practicing how to walk on a false limb.

  My God, panted Mitchie. She stepped off the top of the gangplank and down a little into the shade of the deck. She waved her stick for the pure joy of arrival.

  My God! she called. It appears to be Naomi Durance!

  She handed her parasol to her assistant and embraced Naomi with one strong arm. The other women arriving on deck looked startled. It wasn’t in the normal repertoire of matrons to caress.

  Did you notice what an athlete I am these days? she asked. Not waiting for an answer, she introduced Naomi to her aide. A Nurse Pettigrew.

  Poor girl, aren’t you? Mitchie asked Pettigrew. Given an old wreck to look after. And having as well to carry her satchel.

  Naomi said, You must be visiting someone aboard. Or seeing these girls settled?

  No, I’m visiting you. And I’m visiting France and what it holds. I may visit England
, land of my forebears, though they did not frequent distinguished parts of that kingdom. But, in a word, Mitchie and company are open again for business—and not without some little argument. Come, let’s find the cabins for these girls before the officers get on board.

  In the passageway inside—where the purser sat ready to tell them where their assigned cabins were—Mitchie whispered, It’s brave of you to go back. After that hospital at Mudros Harbor in lovely Lemnos. Not to mention the little bath we had in Mare Nostrum.

  I felt that I had nowhere else to go, said Naomi.

  How peculiar, said Mitchie. My very feeling too. We’ve been spoiled for the usual regimen.

  Naomi was aware of her good fortune in finding a benign aunt aboard a vessel in which she might have been a bewildered spirit. She had already seen Sergeant Kiernan come aboard and had felt reinforced by that fact, even though they had barely spoken. But he was her seer. He was a quantity of shrewdness and wise counsel—a sort of essential store.

  Robbie Shaw was not here. He would have dearly desired to be, but was still waiting—so he said—in all senses of the verb to wait. She had frequently let him know that she would not remain in Australia throughout his struggles to have military and medical boards ship him abroad again. Now she was proving it. Robbie wrote that he hung discontentedly around military offices in Brisbane where they had the hide to tell him, he said, that he had already done all that any man could be expected to. But he—having felt that attraction to horrifying circumstance too, to serving the giant mechanism—was not willing to be orphaned by it until the halt was called. What a peculiar thing it all was. This desire to find a home with the gods of sacrifice. She had assured him that she cherished his friendship and wished he could fulfill his ambition. She had once written that in her assessment he was a completer fellow than nearly any other man she had met. But though this was true, she said, she must also insist this did not mean they were suitable for one another.

  Baying sergeants and the echoing, metallic thud of boots on corridors—which in more peaceful times had been carpeted and subject to less din—showed that now the ship was taking on its new warriors. She had heard the urgency of sergeants’ commands before harrying soldiers along. It was all so anxiously reminiscent of the Inniskilling men entering the Archimedes. In the meantime Naomi welcomed three new women to the cabin she had occupied on her own along the coast to Melbourne. She felt little of whatever original itch she’d possessed to know shipmates. She knew they would think she was aloof. That was the price of being a Durance.

  Through the opened ports she saw thunder clouds surging in, to the relief of the city. Everyone climbed on deck again and watched the cooling electricity of the rain torrents over Melbourne and the thunderheads dropping hail on the wharf like a good-bye gift.

  • • •

  At Fremantle the Alexander became part of a convoy. In the Indian Ocean—in that vastness which made a pond of the Mediterranean—it was rumored that German raiders were loose. All deck lights were doused and cabin lights hidden by curtains. No French destroyer with a supply of blankets could save them in this immensity.

  With the troops on deck agog, the Alexander and the other transports entered Table Bay, Cape Town’s harbor. Here it became known by rumor that they were bound direct for England or France. Naomi went to town twice on the squalid little train from the dock. The first was with Kiernan to travel to False Bay and drink tea and eat cake while watching the dazzling southern Atlantic.

  The two of them exchanged tales of their homecoming. But Kiernan had not run into a wall of bogus congratulation. His father had been prayerful and rather depressed. He was developing that unjustified repute for disloyalty which afflicted all Quakers in wars. He was fighting off by every legal means a—to quote Kiernan—“compulsory offer” from the federal government to buy his engineering works for war production. He had been promised by public servants that his steel containers would be used purely for water storage. He was certain that they would also be used to store fluids of greater military intent.

  I am afraid I complicated things, Kiernan confessed to Naomi, by pointing out that motor fuel was needed not only to run military trucks but also ambulances. In any case, it’s becoming clear he could end up being considered a pariah. Yet he’s a fine citizen when it comes to civil society. I won’t boast of his exercises of charity, because it is the duty of all Friends to perform such things.

  It struck her that this discourse was more substantial provender than Robbie Shaw offered.

  Her only other journey ashore was to accompany Matron Mitchie to the emporiums of the city. Making her part-sideways, part-direct approach to the glass counters, she showed a taste for jewelry and face powder and bought some talcum. That evening, as on others, she asked Naomi into her cabin and—sitting in a shift—exposed her raw stump and the long, tough scar for Naomi to apply ointment to.

  The hard tropic times and sleeping on deck began. By day the ships of the convoy pushed through a gelid ocean which made dense opposition to their bows and gave their sterns no encouraging push. From nearby cruisers they heard machine gun practice—a submarine drill which caused a surge of momentary panic in Naomi’s chest. Moored off Freetown in saturated air they were not let ashore because of the fevers the place was so willing to pass. They watched from the railings the Africans on the coal bunkers below—singing as they loaded coal aboard in baskets. Everyone formed up on deck for the sea burial of a tubercular stoker.

  Out to sea again, and further ceremony occurred when the convoy stopped briefly as three soldiers on neighboring transports received similar rites. Then—in one day off the Azores—the air grew cooler, and in a further few days cold. The ocean turned turquoise somewhere off Spain or Portugal—from both of whose shores the convoy took wide berth for fear of observation by enemy spies. It turned gray under the influence of a lingering winter off Biscay. Soon sleek, lithe, and darting destroyers met them and herded them into the Channel.

  A spring fog both protected them from the submarines and prevented those young soldiers who were not immigrants to Australia but were born colonial from sighting the isle of their progenitors. When the ship found Southampton and fabled England, all seemed low sky, grim, gray derricks, long warehouses. Trucks took them to the railway station, past dour, unwelcoming terraces and boarding houses little better than tenements and comfortless pubs on corners. And so to a crowded and besooted railway station. Some of the young soldiers must have secretly asked themselves if this was what they had volunteered to die for.

  The railway station—it had to be said—was also a coal dust–ridden wonder, august in its columns and great vault. The troops were bound for the training grounds of Salisbury Plain and the nurses for London. In Horseferry Road, Westminster, where the Australian military administration had its headquarters, they would have their future disclosed to them.

  Cosmopolitans

  From Rouen they could go for a day to the Paris they had been cheated of on the way north. Sally had written to Freud’s hospital near Wimereaux and named the spring date on which the three of them would be under the main clock at the Gare d’Orsay—a clock which none of them had ever seen but which surely had to exist in all railway stations—at ten o’clock. If Freud could get a lift along the coast to Boulogne, she would find the train journey from there less long-winded than their journey from Rouen.

  For their Paris leave they were issued with rail warrants and taken by ambulance to the great white railway station of Rouen-Rive-Droite, where the light through the artfully designed windows was uncertain as to whether to be dreary or display some pastel subtlety for their day out. By the time the train left, the day had decided to honor their journey with color and they were in a mood to let the countryside enchant them. They passed copses of elm trees and poplars which seemed to Sally to have been culled down from ancient forests into ornamental size. The dying ring-barked verticals of tall gums which marred Australian distances were utterly missing from the scene.
In the villages women and children were drawing their water from the pumps at the end of streets while—puffing on a cigarette—a boy in sabots and aged about ten watched the train sweep by. An occasional grand house would stand in its own company of trees beyond ploughed fields. But no châteaux were jammed up against the railway line—coal grit was for ordinary people.

  Then they approached the squalor and glimpses of grandeur in the city and rolled into the Gare d’Orsay—the grandest locomotive palace one could imagine, the most infused with style, a structure of French jollity to stand in counterpoint to all the solemn domes and columns of British-built railway stations from Tasmania to Egypt. They found on the concourse the great clock they had expected. Beneath it—tall and pale and a little undernourished-looking—stood Freud. Her appearance there—upright and singular and even with that vacancy on her face which belongs to those waiting for a train to arrive—seemed to round out the day with absolution. They rushed to her and she returned their kisses soberly but without any hesitation.

  Where are we going? she asked—as if they were in charge.

  They could cross the bridge to the Louvre and decided to do that first. The museum was full of soldiers of uncountable nationalities. A good argument for the ultimate rout of the enemy seemed established in this variety of uniforms of alternating dourness and flamboyance. The fancier the clobber—went Honora’s opinion—the less fighting the bloke had done. They had time only for a few galleries—they told themselves they would be back and would devote a day entirely to the museum. Sally was unexpectedly startled by the figures in landscape (landscape for some reason being the lesser element for her) or figures alone. But she was inhibited—since meeting Condon—from ill-educated Oohs and Aahs, from saying something basic when something better should be said. She nonetheless found herself rehearsing—in case she met Charlie Condon soon—the names of artists. She liked David—he was easy to like—and Ingres’s woman with the high-waisted gown. Somehow she understood that she would not have brought the same eye to them if it weren’t for Condon and the brief but intense education on sketching and allied matters he’d given her at Sakkara.