The Daughters of Mars

by Thomas Keneally

  He nodded after she had read it, and Sally looked at him with the bleak knowledge that he was right. A thunder came up to the east. It was massive enough to make them uneasy about its meaning and intentions.

  Will you ever listen to that? asked Honora, coming up to Sally.

  They went to the door of the Nissen hut—the tents were giving way to such structures—and parted the inner and outer air-raid curtains. The eastward sky was continuously and massively lit by pulses and changing emphases of light which moved up and down the horizon. It was bigger than Gallipoli.

  Honora said, Bloody old Mars himself doing the scales.

  Are they doing it? Or are we? Sally asked. It dwarfed nature and its fires and furies. If it were them making this, how could the front hold? How could the war endure? This was the war’s summit, she was sure. Something must end and something be born.

  The thunder went on throughout their daytime rest and into a second night and a second day, and so on. At midnight on the third day the regiments of wounded arrived in convoys of ambulances that choked the approaches to the racecourse. It was like Gallipoli—the mutilation had overflowed the forward stations. And so in the reception wards to which most nurses were rushed, men still wore the reeking uniform fragments and the regimental insignia that now stood for nothing.

  Again—amongst the mass of these British—the nurses were faced by an astounding and unearthly lack of raucous complaint from men getting to know their wounds. Even some of the amputees had abandoned their screams in the regimental aid post or the dressing post and clearing station and were now left with mere crumbs of complaint which nurses went about soothing with hypodermics full of morphine.

  Only after the turmoil ceased and men had been carried away to appropriate wards was Sally sent back to the post-operative ward or the gas or thoracic wards. It was a broad education you got in Rouen.

  She was sometimes sent to the gas wards for night duty. Usually it was days since the men had inhaled the stuff, yet the taint could still be smelled on them and their eyes were still wide and alarmed—their eye sockets and lips blue, their breathing tormented, froth around their mouths. Orderlies came round with hypodermics and atropine sulphate solution and Sally injected them. A device named “the octopus”—many masks running from an oxygen cylinder—was designed to give simultaneous comfort to a number of men. Revisiting them before going off duty at dawn, she saw that it had little effect. The gas was still working on their hidden membranes.

  The shelling and roar and night illuminations in the east continued but there was no conclusive news—it appeared that no climax had been reached and little had been won. When it was adjudged safe by the ward doctors, amputees were taken out to the hospital ferries at the port of Rouen. So were some thoracic and abdominal cases—and head wounds and the blinded and gassed. Honora said with some credibility that they were making room for Australians—for they did not doubt Australians had now been thrown into the furnace and were on their way. That was the arrangement—clear the Australian hospitals for Australian casualties. In any case—Sally reflected—in this hectic season, Lady Tarlton’s hospital would not beg for patients. Such was the weight of daily arrivals.

  On the strength of her Archimedes experience, Sally spent three nights in the theatre giving anesthetics—more precisely, ether—for the nerveless and level-headed Dr. Fellowes. Ether was considered safer and more mistakeproof when you had an occasional anesthetist, which Sally was. But her work became necessary because in suddenly warm weather and over a day and a half, convoy by convoy, the Australians did indeed arrive—up to a thousand a day. They were nearly too numerous—too smeared in feature and too blurred in endeavor and pain—for her to look for Charlie Condon amongst them and see if he had been punished for knowing so much about Rouen Cathedral.

  The men arrived with a word on their lips—Pozières. It might have been a village but it was vast in their minds: the birthplace of their pain. The English newspapers had a name even broader than Pozières. The name of a bloody river previously unremarked in the earth’s imagination. The Somme ran scarlet and was vaster than the Nile or Amazon now in the imagination of all those in France. It was the altar on which Abraham did sacrifice his son, and no God spoke out to stay the knife.

  The name ran around the reception ward while, with an orderly’s help, Sally took a fouled dressing off the groin wound of a weathered, young-old man, when his femoral artery began to gush. Just stop the bleeding, Nurse, he said reasonably, and I’ll get back to the missus and kids. All the pressure she and the orderly could apply did not save him—this man they knew could hew timber and hand plough and be unwearied at the day’s end. He shuddered and then yielded up his existence.

  The name Pozières was uttered by a boy with a chest wound who told Honora that he was too tired to sleep. In the theatre—before he was etherized—he admitted to the theatre nurse and the surgeon that he was only sixteen. The walking wounded from his unit pronounced the name too, as, getting ready to be sent back to the front or on to England, they paid him a visit and brought him cigarette cards they had collected for him—comic scenes of bulls charging tigers, of parrots shocking maids with the viciousness of their language, of cowboys and Indians, of soccer players, and trout fishermen.

  A newspaper in the nurses’ mess declared: “Huge Losses to the Hun. ‘Fritz Is Running,’ Says General.”

  Captain Constable remained at Rouen through the melee and treatment and transfer of men that Pozières created. The name seemed to call up a private crisis for him. Sepsis had broken out at the edge of his wound, a peccant tooth needed to be removed under anesthesia and the pus drained. And so England and its promised round of face-remaking surgery receded for him. As thousands came and went, he remained fixed in place. For it was axiomatic that no work could be done in England to repair him until he had been free of sepsis for six months.

  • • •

  At the Château Baincthun, Lady Tarlton had just two surgeons and two ward doctors on the day the Australian casualties began to arrive to join the small numbers of British officers of middling or light wounds so far sent there. Someone in the office of the deputy director of medical services clearly thought that a titled woman like Lady Tarlton should be confronted only by officers. But now Australians of all ranks turned up in motor ambulances.

  The military had sent an apparently robust surgeon named Major Darlington. But he had a distant manner, and to Mitchie and Naomi it became clear that Lady Tarlton suspected he was a military reject—not for surgical reasons but perhaps for social ones. Immediately and unsuccessfully she set the Red Cross in London the job of recruiting another civilian surgeon—as if that could be done these days.

  Darlington was a lanky man with a slight stoop that made him seem attentive but whose sentences sometimes were ambushed by thought and trailed off. But it was not long before he was seen as the essence of the place. Word of his competence came from theatre nurses. And from his side, he was pleased to be placed at an institution where he had control of his own pathology laboratory.

  His junior was a young woman named Dr. Airdrie, a small-bodied and frizzy-haired volunteer with the Scottish Women’s Hospital who was sent to Baincthun at Lady Tarlton’s request. She too came to be considered a treasure of the place. But Darlington remained an odd treasure.

  Mitchie walked the admission ward with Major Darlington, Naomi with Dr. Airdrie, and they directed where men were to be taken next. Airdrie still wore a little of her resentment at being sent here. She had been heard to say in her brogue, I didn’t volunteer just so I could be a hobby doctor in fooking Boulogne. Her mind had been on the Mediterranean or Mesopotamia. But these ambulances grinding up the elm-lined drive of the previously undervisited Château Baincthun were changing her mind about Lady Tarlton being just a gentlewoman hostelier.

  Soon Airdrie and Major Darlington became so busy in the theatre—and the two young ward doctors so overburdened—that Mitchie and Naomi became decision makers. The
y instructed the few newly arrived Australian nurses and others from the Red Cross, whom Lady Tarlton had gathered in to keep penciled records of wounds and treatment on sheets hung at the base of each man’s cot—just as in the best-run hospitals. They announced dosages of morphine and other drugs and decided on the changing of dressings and irrigation of wounds. Naomi behaved with a confidence she had not felt at all on the Archimedes. She had learned somehow not to fret about decisions made in good faith. Men grinned up from the admission-ward cots when they heard her and the other Australian nurses talk. Could an accent be curative to those who shared it?

  Naomi worked by timeless routine in which hours did not exist. Only the seconds of pulse measurement meant anything. There was no leisure to observe the larger areas of time their watches proffered. A convoy of ninety wounded from Pozières arrived and Naomi worked for more than a day without being aware of it—except through a contradictory lightness of her upper body balanced by a sense of the gravity dragging at her legs. As well as acting as a virtual matron, she had in a day and night herself dressed wounds and hauled oxygen cylinders for the nurses to administer to the gassed. The roster she had worked at in the Dorchester Hotel might as well have been a transcription of Paradise Lost for all the relationship it bore to the days after Pozières.

  By early August of that year—the predicted year of triumph, 1916—the wards were crammed with Tommies and Australians and a few Indians. Another young ward doctor—a rejectee of the Medical Corps for some reason of health—arrived. So did a squad of voluntary aides summoned from London—of course through Lady Tarlton’s airily deployed influence over the Red Cross.

  My husband is hopeless, she hissed at Naomi and Mitchie one morning as they drank tea—scalding their mouths—in the mess room. He doesn’t like my doing this and my being importunate with some of his chums. So he tells me he lacks any power. He’s a whisperer, that’s what he is. He can undermine, but he can’t build.

  And then—being herself a woman of action rather than whispers—she went to see what the volunteer English women were making for men’s breakfasts.

  It was easier for a man to get to Blighty from Baincthun. Major Darlington was kept busy making these assessments, which came on top of his surgery and work in the pathology lab. Dr. Airdrie and the ward doctors joined Darlington in their reluctance to send a man back to the front until he’d had at least a little Blighty leave. Rhetoric about shirking had no impact on them. Except in the rarest and most blatant cases of recovery—or in the face of furious insistence by a soldier that he should return to the fighting, they sent all who could travel—including the battle shocked—by ambulance to the ferries. And recuperation at the Australian Voluntary was no idle business. In the summer garden, Lady Tarlton used men to dig drains or stoke boilers or milk the three dairy cows she had acquired so that the wounded should have fresh milk. Carling was their inexhaustible foreman.

  Those military satraps still hate us, you know, Lady Tarlton announced as a boast to all her staff.

  The young Scots woman, Airdrie, had a melodious laugh and clearly admired Lady Tarlton. Since she was freshly minted as a physician, the Australian and English nurses muttered that she lacked a mentor to turn her into a fully accomplished surgeon. She was not haunted by that. The wounded Tommies and Australians who came under her knife all said—those who could—that they trusted her for her lack of airs. Men found the presence of a woman surgeon a strange thing only once they had outlived the pain of wounds and surgery.

  Baincthun People

  Naomi worked—according to need—as theatre nurse and anesthetist for both the surgeons. Mitchie’s Australian and Red Cross nurses became the sort of fast learners and expert dressers that she and her sister had been—under necessity—a year before. Mitchie nicknamed the Red Cross women “the English Roses,” but some of them were from the women’s suffrage movement, of which it seemed Lady Tarlton had herself been a member. Many were from what the British called “better families.” Their accents were not so far removed from that of Lady Tarlton. Their parents probably knew and trusted her as a mentor for their daughters. Others of the English Roses were not nurses and insisted on being cooks and scullery maids—a form of rebellion against the cosseted lives they had led, an assertion that women were equal in the moils of the earth and were all subject to the same condescension from the male world. Naomi and Mitchie’s group delighted in telling them that Australian women had had the suffrage for—how long was it now?—twelve years. But they could not pretend it had delivered women from care—from being aged beyond their years and strength by labor and concern.

  Major Darlington’s slightly dazed belief in the uses of pathology was unshakeable and he promoted it even—or perhaps especially—in conversing with nurses and orderlies. He had quarreled with his superiors over the wearing of face masks in the treatment of wounds. The Australian Voluntary and its little pathology lab—which he equipped at his own expense—was his chance to manage experiments on the issue. To it he summoned nurses and orderlies and took swabs from their throats. He ordered that in certain wards nurses and orderlies dressing wounds should wear masks—a prominent placard marked MASKS was placed at the doorway of two wards. A NO MASKS sign was posted at the door of the other two. The wards in the newly built huts in the garden were not included in the experiment because that might make the numbers too hard for him to get his work done, either as pathologist or as surgeon. He came around the wards—himself wearing a mask—to take samples of wound tissue. He put them in a glass dish and bore them away. As he worked he told nurses in wafting and often broken sentences that he suspected streptococci in their throats were a peril to wounds. Not that, he laughed—in one of those near-silent laughs uttered with lowered chin and like a series of nods—their having streptococci was in any way a jailable offense. Streptococcus likes us, he told Naomi and some of the other nurses. He likes to take us dancing.

  At this he uttered coughs of laughter.

  His lean face—sallow on his arrival, and watchful and sour—then composed itself into an expression of calm purpose.

  The masses of wounded and gassed of the bloodiest and most chemical-doused summer in human knowledge continued to arrive. They were at least two-thirds Australian—to justify the establishment’s name—but frequently more. The hospital did not receive the shell-shocked, even though there were men with wounds who woke at night hyperventilating or screaming. But the Australian Voluntary was not equipped with alienists.

  At the Voluntary there were separate messes for officers and men who were well enough to sit at tables. As summer progressed the tables were sometimes put out on the pavement in front of the château, where officers and men began to mingle as they had in the battles which brought them here. At Lady Tarlton’s insistence a glass or two of wine was served with dinner for anyone fit to desire it. She had put together a subcommittee in London who put up the money for such delicacies. These seemed to be placed democratically on the tables without discrimination—preserves and condiments and shortbread from Fortnum & Mason were made available to the officers and men alike. It honored the reality, Lady Tarlton said to Naomi one day as they looked across the terraces at the walking wounded and recuperants at the sunny tables, of a citizen army in which some privates were schoolteachers, religious ministers, and journalists. She did not mention the hard-fisted country boys and the worldly innocent children of the slums. Yet—contrary to normal military credos—the firmament did not crack open when Lady Tarlton permitted this mingling.

  Faster than Naomi could have believed, the days began to shrink and leaves reddened and withered to warn generals of their failed summer. The wildflowers of the hospital grounds of the Australian Voluntary Hospital—hyacinths and primroses—closed up. The sky turned a stubborn gray and descended on the château so that it seemed within reach of the gray slates of the roof. The mornings were misty with vapors the sun could not always burn off. Heaters were moved into the wards. The rain grew colder and even mo
re slanted than on Lemnos—driven before a wind that swept in from the Channel and froze puddles overnight on the doorsteps of the château and in murderous little patches on the pathways to the huts. An English nurse broke her ankle in a journey between the reception wards in the garden and the house. Another scalded herself carrying cocoa across an open stretch. But the volunteers did not leave—as they had every right to. Lady Tarlton was a magnetic figure and the English Roses proved strong-willed young women who stuck. And where else would they go on the Western Front to see their suffragist principles in practice?

  In the first onset of cold—the rehearsal for the winter that would ultimately take the unconcluded war to Christmas and into 1917—the young Scottish surgeon Dr. Airdrie would visit the wards in a wool-lined skin-and-fur jacket of the kind worn by officers and men. She sported stylish stalking boots which seemed to imply that she was ready to go hiking or hacking or hunting stags in the Highlands. Penelope was her first name—so it emerged—but no one used it. Perhaps because she had not encountered many other women doctors and had contempt for the hauteur of male physicians, she was familiar with the nurses and seemed to talk to them as if no veil of wisdom separated her from them. When—if ever—the war’s giant wheel ceased to turn, she would be taught how to behave—at peril of her career—in a civilian hospital.

  Naomi came to see that Airdrie had no other choice than to chat over tea with them. For she was in many ways the most isolated person in the château—potentially separated from nurses by her university education, but inevitably seen even by the distracted Major Darlington as a medical anomaly. She told Naomi and others that she found the two former consumptives who worked as ward doctors very plain company. They were the sort of men, she said, who’d studied their wee medicine rather than grow up and become human beings. Mammy so wanted her little boy to be a doctor! she mocked.