The Daughters of Mars

by Thomas Keneally

  When they emerged from the Louvre they found the day still bright with high, streaky clouds and—though it was chilly—they walked in the Tuileries Garden where trees were still bare. Their branches offered buds though, like promissory notes on a coming exuberance. Then—following the map Sally had bought—they hiked along the embankment of the river towards the island where the great cathedral was to be found. This too they had all seen represented in childhood compendia of the world—and then there was Quasimodo lurching and dominating their imaginations. Like the pyramids, the cathedral could be approached by ordinary steps taken by one’s daily legs—the same legs with which one emerged from Kempsey’s Barsby’s Emporium and crossed Belgrave Street to Mottee’s Tearooms. The cathedral bloomed with side chapels and before each one were ranks of burning candles. Honora lit one after another for what she called “my special intentions” and sank to her knees before the Virgin, moving her lips in beseeching God’s favor for Lionel Dankworth, whose last letter was from Egypt but who might even now be in France. Another little flame for her family and one for the Allied cause. And a fourth. For Freud, she confided to Sally in a whisper. For the wrong we did her. She went on fitting small franc notes into the cash boxes attached to the racks of candles.

  When Honora’s votive candle foray ended, they climbed Quasimodo’s tower where—looking down the reaches of the Seine—she covered her Paris amazement with a more earthy issue. She could see the hatted heads of men in the open-topped pissoirs, capable without embarrassment of lifting their hats to passing ladies.

  The Eiffel Tower waited in its gardens for them and was reached by the Métro with its crowds of soldiers and older men in suits—all with lush Gallic moustaches—and worn-looking housekeepers, seamstresses, wives. Their weariness was unlikely to be dispelled even by a military triumph. Then, as they mounted the Métro steps—there, the tower beetling and dizzying but tethered by its four giant feet to four distinct plots of earth.

  Back at the railway, they kissed Freud good-bye in the belief they had at least in part expiated their earlier crassness. She responded with a wary affection—not sure yet whether she wished to go back to full sisterhood. She found her train. Then they took theirs to Rouen, on a long-lasting spring evening.

  As they ate chocolates and pastries, Leonora suddenly asked the others whether they thought there were malingerers amongst the NYD. On the table before them lay the litter of what Leonora called in her private-school way a beano—boxes which had held exuberant gâteaux and little fluted cups for the most improbable chocolates and the most fanciful confections. As Leonora raised the matter of NYD, Honora made a sucking, dubious sound through her back teeth as if uncertain that she wanted to discuss it.

  Warwick thinks there are, Leo said. Not all. But a sizeable number. Malingerers.

  Warwick was of course Captain Fellowes. Leo would be the sort of wife who would gladly take on her husband’s opinions and not feel imposed upon by them. She was an excellent nurse, energetic and willing, skilled and kindly. But she thought that Captain Fellowes’s ideas were worth a lifetime of assent.

  Sally ran through the catalogue of cases she’d met. The young Scotsman who talked a great deal when not heavily sedated and who, as his dosage wore off, was likely to rush around the tent asking everyone where his mask was and—comic if it weren’t tragic—looking for it under beds and chairs. He had been gassed himself—though the doctor said not badly. It seemed, though, that he had seen his fellows choking to death and thereafter even the smallest residual waft of chlorine or phosgene left behind in the trenches after a gas attack was enough to unhinge him.

  So was this pretense? But to pretend for weeks on end to be out of your head with shock was itself a sort of madness anyhow.

  Honora gave a small chocolate burp and echoed Sally’s thought.

  If any of them are fooling us, then we shouldn’t be ashamed because it means this—they have fooled their way through three levels of doctors and officers, from the front line to the dressing station to the casualty clearing station and on to Rouen. That’s what you would call a worthy performance.

  I was on duty in there one day, Leo persisted, however, when I turned suddenly and saw this sly, half-smiling look on one of them. Just in the second before he went back to aphonia and shuddering away. It made me wonder.

  It might just have been a variation in the condition, Sally suggested. Or it could have been a rictus.

  You’re very charitable, said Leo with some of her beloved’s skepticism.

  But, said Honora, even if they are pretending, something horrible made them give up their sense of honor and become pretenders.

  Leo ploughed on in a way Sally now found overblown. Perhaps it was the binge of sugar and chocolate and cream that had made her uncommonly persistent.

  That’s easy to say. But they’ve abandoned their comrades, in that case. Warwick doesn’t think they’re deliberately shirking though. He believes it begins with the medical officers at the aid post. If the first doctor they meet is too sympathetic, it has a knock-on effect—they act it up for the next MO they meet at the dressing station and then for the next one at the casualty clearing station. So that by the time they’ve got back here, they’re convinced they’re a complete mess and act accordingly. Warwick says he would like to be a doctor at the regimental aid post, and tell most of them they were fine and give them some medicinal brandy and a good sleep and send them back.

  But he’s too badly needed at base, isn’t he? asked Sally.

  Yes, said Leonora. In a sense he would be wasted up there.

  They assessed that. It was true—even if uttered with a touch more certainty than required. She continued, He’s a man of kindness. He doesn’t easily suspect people. But he’s entitled to his skepticism.

  As we are, said Honora with sudden sternness, to our conviction. I think it’s clear there’s such a thing as this shell shock. Most young men can’t act for two bob. You can see right through them. The cases I’ve seen aren’t acting.

  Let’s not argue over it, Sally urged them. It’s been too good a day to end in a brawl. Besides, another few months of nursing, I think, and we’ll all know for sure.

  I wonder, will there be less of it when our Australian boys go into the line, said Honora in a whisper.

  Warwick believes so, said dutiful Leo.

  • • •

  This was in many regards a spring of jaunty hopes. Wounded Englishmen strolling General Bridges Street knew what the boomerang-shaped badges on the nurses’ go-to-town uniforms meant, and the Gallipoli “A” for Anzac at their shoulders as well. And English officers stopped them to say, We saw your chaps coming through Armentières to relieve our Twelfth Division. My heavens, they looked so robust and confident!

  The influence was more in people’s minds, though, than in military dispositions. Not even the greatest Australian patriots could argue that they had the tens of millions as America did to make an army so massive that it could by mere numbers tame the year and bring it to peace. Of course, the newer women in the mess believed that each Australian was worth a number of the others. But as Kiernan had said on the Archimedes, flesh was flesh.

  What could not be argued with was the fact that to other armies the Australians were like the birds of the spring. They were a sign of things turning—of the greater and greater accumulation of armies whose soldiers would resolve it all before the trenches froze again. The Australians were the harbingers.

  In that atmosphere of newness and hope, Captain Fellowes and Staff Nurse Leonora Casement sent out a cyclostyled invitation to all doctors and nurses of Number 3 Australian General Hospital Rouen to attend a party in the officers’ mess to celebrate their engagement. It was considered they would not need to wait much beyond autumn to have their wedding. Speeches of praise for the couple were made by the colonel and matron. Leo’s face shone with such authority that for an hour it was easy to believe the Western Front would accommodate itself to her nuptial timetable.
/>   • • •

  Now the first of the Australians began to arrive. One was a young officer who had been training in a quiet area they called “the nursery.” But a shell had found him there and his entire head was—for the moment—bandaged. The wound beneath that was a test Sally and Honora were set. This scale of harm and outrage numbed and drove from her mind for days on end the memory of her mother and of all connivance with Naomi.

  In the surgical ward—since it was considered his wound would need occasional trimming under anesthetic—the young man took in soup and tea through a tube inserted into his bandages. Other nutrients in sterile solution were infused through a vein in his arm. The ward doctor seemed pessimistic and had declared a face wound a prime site for sepsis. When they first exposed the raw meat of the man’s face by removing the packing placed there at the casualty clearing station from which he’d come to Rouen, Sally and Honora found that one eighth of a grain of morphine did not save him agony. Stutters of complaint escaped from the bloodied hole in his face. His one eye seemed to shed tears. So the dose was raised to one quarter—which left him drowsy by the hour and was a good arrangement in Sally’s estimation. When so relieved, he could dazedly attempt to speak, making words from the throat and not with his palate. The voice box was intact but many words were unformed for lack of lips. The name on his label when he’d first come in was Captain Alex Constable.

  This young man—whose face was steak from his upper right eye socket to the corner of his lower mouth—uttered one day after his wound had been dressed the sound “A’her ease nur.” He repeated it, quite politely but insistently. They eventually realized he wanted a pad of paper and it was all at once so obvious that he should have been given one—and a pencil—earlier. It was as if his lack of a face had somehow prejudiced everyone into thinking he couldn’t write. Honora fetched a pencil and a notebook with AUSTRALIAN COMFORTS FUND on its cover. He held up a hand—long-fingered—and had it do a form of salaam in thanks. There was humor in his remaining eye, now left uncovered by the dressings. And so he set to writing a letter. The energy and fluency with which he wrote were astounding to Sally. When he was finished he tore out the pages he had written on and coughed—that was one form of expression thoroughly remaining to him. He folded the letter in four to fit the flimsy envelope they gave him, and handed it over for postage. He then wrote on a full, unfolded page, “Nurses, could you kindly send this missive to”—and there was an address—“Mrs. G. D. Constable, ‘Congongula,’ via Narromine, New South Wales.” They said, Of course, and he nodded and began writing again. “Sorry to hold you young women up,” said the page he ultimately handed to them.

  But I heard people saying I am the first Australian wounded in France. It is an annoying thing to hear. If you can find the means to do so, could you contradict this silliness at every turn? It is the one thing I cannot stand. To begin with, there were Australians in London in 1914 who enlisted in the British army. Their cases were written up in the Sydney Morning Herald. Some of them must have been wounded before now. Could you please tell people as kindly as you choose to cut out the rubbish?

  Yours,

  Alex Constable

  Honora assured him she’d get the word out. She was not any surer than Sally as to why this concerned him. But his wound entitled him to consideration. He had no face. He might not live. At best, years of painful remedy awaited him. And the thing he claimed annoyed him was the rumor that he was the first Australian to be wounded on the Western Front.

  A letter awaited Sally one evening when she got to the mess. It was from England.

  16 May 1916

  Dear Sally,

  I am safely in England would you believe? Matron Mitchie—yes, Matron Mitchie—is here to demonstrate her toughness. Or is it stubbornness? Kiernan is here too—training at Wandsworth—and was our squire around the sights of this great city. It is interesting to us that though a Quaker and friend of man he enjoyed the Bloody Tower.

  You’ll be amused that when we turned up in London—at Paddington—the only rooms we got were at the Salvation Army Home for Fallen Women. Even Matron Mitchie! They’d covered the sign with Union Jacks. Thank God for the War Chest Club in Horse-ferry Road where we can meet up and have a bit of a meal. We have not been given our posting yet but hope to see you soon in France . . . Have you heard from Papa?

  There was soon a letter from Charlie Condon as well. He too had arrived in France and had been at first delayed in Marseille with suspected typhus. But the symptoms had misled the British doctors and he had recovered in a few days. This gave him the chance, he told her, to visit the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Marseille—it was in a palace, and the seventeenth-century sketches there put the last remnants of his fever to total flight. “When you looked at them,” he wrote, “you felt light as a breeze and you thought, I can produce a line like that.”

  He was, he said, about to find his way north.

  And if not immediately required to spread myself on the altar of Mars, I shall seek out your location in Rouen and come to visit you. I enjoyed greatly our trip to Sakkara. Perhaps that was because you permitted me to talk so much. But I remember your interjections as demonstrating a wisdom which does great honor to the valley I was running away from.

  The Chariot Descends

  Matron Mitchie—refusing help—had taken the train to a hospital at Sidcup in Kent to have the bucket of her false leg redesigned to the final healing of her stump. She now returned and professed the adjustment to her prosthetic leg so satisfactory that very soon—so she claimed—she would be able to walk without that pronounced stiffness which gave away most amputees. Naomi did not understand how this would be achieved but did not argue.

  Nor did she when Mitchie told her to pack up for a move. Mitchie had already packed under her own steam. She had not long tolerated the personal nurse Pettigrew. Not that Pettigrew was lacking in skill. But Mitchie was a woman who wanted to attend to things herself.

  Are we all packing? asked Naomi.

  No. You and me. We are off to improved digs. A bit of an undemocratic arrangement vis-à-vis the other girls. But they’ll survive.

  Descending the grim institutional stairs of the Home for Fallen Women an hour later, they found waiting for them an enormous white limousine trimmed with black—a Vitesse Phaeton no less surprising than if Elijah’s chariot had descended on this bleak street. Naomi’s dun uniform and gray hat were a welcome option when faced with such a vehicle. She would otherwise have had to find something up to the style of the thing—for which she had neither the resources nor the gift.

  A middle-aged chauffeur in a uniform of cap and jacket and leggings stopped and opened the back door to admit them. He introduced himself as Carling. Once amidst the splendor of upholstery, they were driven through the center of London and across Hyde Park and its exercising cavalry and baby-walking nannies to the Dorchester Hotel, where they were allotted rooms they had no time yet to see. Instead, they left their baggage and returned straight to the enormous car. Then the great vehicle found its way into Mayfair, whose astonishing townhouses seemed as gratuitous and wonderful to Naomi as buildings on a different planet designed to house a different race.

  Well, said Mitchie to her, now we’re ready for socializing in London.

  As the Phaeton slowed, Mitchie told her, The people we’re meeting here are the clever Lady Tarlton and her total donkey of a husband, Viscount Tarlton. He was governor-general of Australia for a time until the prime minister got fed up with him. That’s all fine with you, I assume? I’ve kept it as a surprise.

  The house they arrived before was tall and painted a jovial cream color. The driver helped them out and they rose up the steps to be met by—what else?—a doorman in livery. He made a hand gesture that they should enter the great circular lobby which rose to a brilliant dome trimmed with gold-leaf moldings. Naomi thought it must be a stage set. It was surely not for occupation by people.

  A servant who looked more like some masquerading duke
in morning suit took their entrée cards and pointed them towards the large room beyond the lobby. At the double doors into the room stood another servant in morning suit next to a most beautiful, upright, muslin-draped, and well-bosomed woman wearing her brown hair informally ribboned at the back and—unlike any of the other women who were arriving, including Mitchie and Naomi—with no gloves on her hands. A slim, slightly shorter man with a ginger moustache stood on the other side of this woman. He was dressed in a suit which so exactly fitted him that it was like an outer skin. His face was handsome in a boyish way but his eyes were vacant. The morning-suited servant—having got their names in whispers from Mitchie and Naomi—muttered to the gentleman and the smiling, splendid woman that these newcomers were Miss Marion Mitchie and Miss Naomi Durance.

  Oh, cried the woman with the not-quite-perfectly-done hair. I don’t need an introduction to Marion. I know Marion. You remember her, Bobby? From Melbourne?

  Oh yes, said Lord Tarlton, who didn’t remember Mitchie at all.

  His wife kissed Matron Mitchie on the cheek with a sisterly intensity.

  My champion in the wilderness! said Lady Tarlton. Do go in, Marion, with your friend. Have whatever you like, and I’ll come along in a moment to have a good confab.

  Lord Tarlton put a hand into Naomi’s gloved one and muttered, Delighted! in a voice of great indifference. Lady Tarlton shook it with more earnest energy. I do so admire you for being here in embattled Britain, she said.

  In a room full of men and women who were chiefly middle-aged and looked important—some of the men proving it by wearing the red tabs indicating they were generals—a waiter with a tray came to ask them what they would care to drink. Matron Mitchie nominated dry sherry and so did Naomi—though purely for lack of something else credible. No one came to talk to them so they went to a deep-set window and Mitchie gratefully took a seat in a gilt-backed chair placed there. The honking in the room was like that of poultry who knew a thing or two. Naturally enough Naomi asked Mitchie how it was that a woman from her world had met someone so preposterous as to bear a name like Lady—or, as she was announced, Viscountess—Tarlton.