The Daughters of Mars

by Thomas Keneally

  Sedgewick unlocked one leaf of the double doors and they followed him up a steep staircase to a bare room where benches faced each other. There was no altar, no pulpit, and no enforced or pious silence. Sedgwick continued to converse. I’m afraid most of us are French, so the meeting will largely be in French. But the Committee of Clarity are all Anglophones, and obviously I include myself.

  And this Committee of Clarity? asked Naomi.

  Kiernan put a reproving hand to his forehead. Heavens above, he said, I didn’t explain that.

  He turned to Sedgewick. It sounds like the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution.

  Sedgewick uttered a small sequence of sounds that added up to a laugh. It is a group of three, he said, who ask you merely if you are interested in each other as partners for life.

  The other Friends began to arrive—modern-looking men like Ian, some older men, a number of women soberly but not unpleasantly dressed. Women’s hands were kissed in the French manner. Men kissed each other on the cheek. They all welcomed Ian and Naomi in that manner and sat them on facing benches on either side of the room. Thus Naomi expected that when the service began the other women would be separated from the men. But men and women were mixed on the benches. In hers and Ian’s case it was therefore a symbol of apartness—their betrothal had not become formal. There was to be a ritual distance between them.

  Suddenly—and by some signal Naomi did not see—there was a silence for inner prayer.

  O great God, Naomi intoned within herself, who is far beyond the battlefield, too kind to be close to it, too far to be blamed for it, take my thanks that I’ve been brought here by this noble man.

  Someone began to speak in French. It was a man, but not Sedgewick. He went on praying for peace and brotherhood in a calm voice. A woman took up immediately after him. And then another woman—and so it went. Apart from hymn singing, she had never heard women make so much noise in church. An hour passed and betrothal had not been mentioned. At last Ian was nudged by Mr. Sedgewick and rose to progress to the middle of the floor, holding out a hand for Naomi to join him. She did so. She felt that her face blazed before these strangers.

  Sedgewick stood and stated that Monsieur Panton, Madame Flerieu, Monsieur Gosselin, and he himself were the members of the Committee of Clarity on this matter. The committee swapped seats with others so that they could all sit together on a single bench. Allow us a second to study your papers, said Sedgewick.

  Madame Flerieu—thin and fine boned—started a robust discussion about something. Mr. Sedgewick answered, gesturing like a Frenchman and adopting that throaty Gallic seriousness. The two other men had their say as well. At last Mr. Sedgewick looked up at the two candidates.

  The question is, he explained apologetically, whether your work, Mr. Kiernan, could be seen as redeeming lives or preparing them for further military demands.

  The woman—Madame Flerieu—was clearly the one who had taken this line. So, thought Naomi, this committee business is more serious than old Sedgewick implied.

  I have had the same doubt myself, Ian said. I provide medical supplies and surgical equipment. There are Quaker ambulances from America working in the field and what might be said of me could be said of them as well. It is the ancient question of trying to do a small good in a devilish world.

  Sedgewick appeared happy with that answer, but Madame Flerieu said in English in a reasonable but intense voice, Members of the ambulances of the Friends do not hold military ranks.

  I confess that is a question to discuss, said Ian.

  And Mademoiselle Durance holds a military rank. Do you not, Mademoiselle?

  I work in a voluntary hospital. I believe the Australian army has forgotten me.

  Sedgewick held up his hand and shook his head benignly like a man quelling unease.

  And you intend to marry?

  As far as Naomi could tell it was the first time anyone had actually used that verb aloud.

  She said, Yes. If Ian intends to marry me.

  Of course, said Kiernan. Of course I do.

  At times convenient to you both, are you able to meet again with the Committee of Clarity? asked Sedgewick.

  I’m sure we will make the arrangements, said Ian.

  Sedgewick asked, Does Miss Durance have any concern about such a requirement?

  Naomi said she did not. But—as she told them—given her duties at the Voluntary Hospital it would take some skill on both their parts to make their leaves coincide.

  So it is your will before God, Ian Kiernan, to take Naomi Durance as your betrothed with a view to marriage?

  Exalted by her re-creation as a woman betrothed, she heard him agree. Then Sedgewick asked Naomi the same question and afterwards she could not remember having given an answer.

  So the betrothal is initiated, said Sedgewick. And may God turn his face to you.

  Naomi felt in that second that the solemnity and casualness of the ceremony gave it unrivaled hope, and a sense of liberation, not of bonds. Here—in this room vacant of all but two dozen residents of France—lay a definition of marriage so particular as to mark Ian and herself off from the bad luck and ill will of other alliances. She was sure of it.

  • • •

  The clearing station had quickly spawned its own graveyard, which lay across the shallow valley and a few steps north towards the village in a field one side of which was a farmer’s ditch. Night duty was a time when young men yielded up their souls. Orderlies carried bodies to the morgue hut from which in the morning they would be placed in coffins and carried across the Deux Églises road to the site where a padre from a unit resting out of the line—and a burial party ditto, along with a bugler or bagpiper—would give them their final rites.

  Everyone seemed to take this growing crop of white crosses as a given and nothing to distract a person. Only sometimes—as the summer came on—did Sally notice in temporary shock that amongst the hollyhocks the place had grown new suburbs. Farmers and their wives ploughed and planted in the fields all about and were as indifferent to the raucousness of the front and to the field of crosses as were the nurses and orderlies.

  Dr. Bright’s Sunday picnics—held in a field on the slight ridge above the casualty clearing station—had grown since the spring and included English doctors and nurses from the British casualty clearing station across the road to Bapaume. Almost inevitably a surgeon from the British clearing station had brought a cricket kit. Thus Test matches—Australia versus England—were played. Nurses and middle-aged doctors leapt to catch hook shots at square leg and crouched to fumble at snicks in slips. But at least they had encountered the rich, dark soil and the irrepressible grass. Sally, however, took a big catch in the position she believed they called square leg.

  Sister Durance, called Major Bright, take the slips with me.

  For he was standing near the wicketkeeper.

  I don’t understand, said Sally.

  Slips, here. I’m first slip, you be second. I see you’re a good catch. Advance Australia Fair. Come on!

  She moved grudgingly to take up the position and saw Honora was profoundly asleep under the tree on the ridgeline and was not engaged at all in the game but seemed in fact sedated by it.

  You see this young chap? Major Bright asked Sally confidentially, pointing to an Australian gunner they’d found in an estaminet in Deux Églises and recruited for their team. He’s a leg spinner. So be ready for a catch. It won’t be fierce. Ball off the edge of the bat. A lollipop catch.

  The English orderly at the batting crease met the Australian’s less than distinguished delivery and belted it across the field so far that it disappeared over a hill.

  My God, said Bright, they’re taking it seriously. That’s a bit rough.

  He stood straight and inhaled.

  I hope you don’t mind my asking, Sister Durance, he murmured as beyond the fall of land Australian and British orderlies and two nurses searched the grass for the cricket ball. But I would be grateful if you
kept an eye on young Slattery there. It seems to me that the word of the bureau in London, and of course of our glorious military authorities, is uniform. And she is the only dissenter.

  Yes, said Sally. But her work stays solid.

  Of course. But she writes too often to the bureau, and she continues to do so, even though they have nothing to tell her. She seemed to be over the loss, but she’s reverted. She needs a long leave, and a chance to find the means to accept that her fiancé is dead. I am not asking you to be a spy. But there are so many letters to that bureau, I assure you—nearly daily. More—I confess—than I have actually sent off.

  There were rumors Major Bright was more affected by Honora than that. There did exist, however, fifteen or more years’ difference.

  Please keep an eye on her. Just to see signs of stress or of the . . . the abnormal. She refuses to leave here; I have no grounds to make her. But she should be observed. In case . . .

  Sally said she would do her best in this matter. On the rim of the slope a nurse had found the cricket ball, and this was a pretext for jubilation and cheers.

  A Summer of Stubborn Matrons

  In the garden on a suddenly blazing day when men sat in scattered light by oaks and elms and read books and magazines—with Matron Mitchie dozing in her wicker wheelchair—Lady Tarlton took Naomi aside.

  Our friend Matron Mitchie, she confided, has had an X-ray in Boulogne at Major Darlington’s insistence. There are damp spots on her lungs. She is suffering from tuberculosis. It’s urgent that she go to a sanatorium down there in the south, and take ship to Australia as soon as she can healthily do so. I am trying to recruit an experienced sister or staff nurse from Étaples or Wimereux or Boulogne to special-nurse her. Because you notice that three of our volunteers left during the winter to return home? But I can hardly blame them.

  Naomi thought that given the rigors of the work and of the château as a building three departures was a modest number. At the news of Mitchie’s consumption, she thought at once of the sinking of the Archimedes. It was as if that cold and shock had caught up to her at Château Baincthun.

  Not to put too fine a point on it, Lady Tarlton went on, she is refusing to move. A tear emerged in the corner of one of her eyes.

  I fear she might have no family back there. And yet out of English reticence I don’t ask. I think you can ask her. And use your best endeavors. She must go, says Major Darlington, if she is to see her senior years.

  That night Naomi intercepted the volunteer who was carrying a meal from the kitchens to Matron Mitchie’s room on the first floor. The girl was masked, according to the strictures of Major Darlington. Dr. Airdrie had told everyone that Darlington was about to publish an article in The Lancet on the connection between bacteria in nurses’ throats and sepsis, and on the whole issue of masks on or masks off. This—everyone felt—would validate the Voluntary and Major Darlington and Lady Tarlton and themselves.

  I’ll take that meal to the matron, Nurse, Naomi said.

  Would you, Sister? asked the girl in an elegant, tired voice. She was a sturdy young woman who had once well-meaningly said to Naomi, Your soldiers are extraordinary in their patois. And Naomi had said, I doubt they’d know what patois was.

  Naomi took the meal from her but did not don a mask. How could you have a heart-to-heart with Mitchie through a mask?

  The matron’s room—into which she was bidden after knocking—was a little larger than her own. The French owners who had fled the war had at least left their thick curtains behind—and in Mitchie’s room they were drawn. But the room was simple apart from that—an iron bedstead, a dresser, a lowboy of painted pine, a little bookcase made of pine. Matron Mitchie in bed wore a mobcap and her hands were folded across her stomach, her bedclothes neat, her prosthesis with its shoe on its false foot beside her bed. The matron grinned unambiguously and broadly at seeing Naomi.

  Come, she said. You can put down the food and tea there. I’ll have the tea first. As for the rest, my appetite is not . . . But tell me—your visit to Paris?

  Naomi found herself without embarrassment relating their meeting with Mr. Sedgewick and the other Amis in Paris.

  When she was finished, Mitchie declared, I always liked that Kiernan. He was a good egg from the start.

  I am so sorry to hear about your problem, said Naomi.

  Problem?

  Well, that you have some consumption.

  Some? asked Mitchie, mock sneering. That’s not a very accurate medical assessment, Staff Nurse Durance. I wouldn’t mind betting that blabbermouth Lady Tarlton told you all about it. And sent you to plague me into going to Marseille. I simply won’t. I am better than Major Darlington and Lady Tarlton think.

  Naomi said, You argued you were better than you were to get here in the first place.

  Mitchie said, Is there soup on that tray? Place it there on the little table. I might have some.

  Would you like me to feed you?

  I’m neither a baby nor in my dotage, thank you. If I go to Marseille, they’ll have me on the Australia boat before you know. And so to a sanatorium out in the Dandenongs. I am not a sanatorium dweller. It’s not in my nature. Besides, what is so precious about me that I should be taken out of France? The countryside is weighed down by young men who need to be sent home. I’m tethered here by the same things as you are. So let’s have no argument. I really mean it. Let’s have none.

  Namoi set her up with her soup.

  Good soup indeed. Some of those English Roses can actually cook.

  It’s none of my affair, said Naomi, but I wondered if you had a family to look after you in Australia?

  Here we go! said Mitchie in disgust. A family? I have a brother in Tasmania, since you ask. But he’s totally unsuitable as a tuberculosis nurse. I wouldn’t call my brother a relative in any meaningful way. I am as good as forgotten there. Anyhow, it seems that I have been here forever. Even Mudros is distant—and Egypt’s distant beyond belief. This is my home and I won’t be thrown out of my home. Lady Tarlton owes me her loyalty on this, rather than going around enlisting you all to evict me.

  You should never have come to France in my opinion, Naomi said. But I know you’ll argue otherwise.

  So would you if you were in my position. You wouldn’t want me to have missed out on meeting Major Darlington and all those well-bred English gels? Would you? Truth is, there is no rest for anyone until it’s all over. Unless it’s the sort of final rest they dish out in Flanders and on the Somme.

  She handed her unfinished soup bowl back to Naomi. Naomi put it on the tray. The tubercular cough set in and Mitchie covered her mouth with an old towel. The spasm built to a paroxysm and then composed itself.

  Don’t gawk at me. I’m not spitting blood yet. Well, not much.

  I won’t gawk, Naomi promised.

  But do not raise this business again if you want to be my friend. I say this not only to you but to Lady Tarlton too. So enough of it now! Remember this—in helping that woman out, that Lady Tarlton, I hacked all around the bush in third-class carriages and on bicycles and the back of trucks and by horseback. Setting up bases for our bush nurses and visiting them so they didn’t feel lonely and leave us and go back to the big towns and cities. Lady Tarlton did not want any praise for the scheme, but it was her name in the newspapers. Well, her name deserved to be. But I was the one on the bike. I was the one who got saddle sore. And now I deserve her consideration too. I am not to be shunted off to the south. This end of France is where the war and the grief and my friends are, and this is the end I’m staying at.

  Matron Mitchie sipped her tea and her lips curled and she frowned. It’s gone cold. I made too long a speech, damn me!

  I’ll get you more, Naomi offered.

  You’re too busy, Matron Mitchie ordered. Have one of the gels do it.

  Naomi said, I’ll get some more. For now, have plenty of rest.

  That sounds like condescension to me. “Have plenty of rest, dear!”

  For God
’s sake, don’t be so sensitive, Naomi told her smiling. A person would think you were a Durance.

  • • •

  Under the spur of her concern for Mitchie, Lady Tarlton thought about a villa on the cliff top at Antibes—between Marseille and Nice—owned by her husband’s family. It was staffed by servants Lord Tarlton’s brother-in-law had been too distracted to let go for the duration of the war. An entire domestic establishment down there thus awaited a convalescent Matron Mitchie. The proposition Lady Tarlton kept bluntly running with Mitchie was that in the south—where there was a North African sun and North African breezes—she would get better. Here she would die.

  When Naomi visited her room, Mitchie complained of this further attempt at clearing her away from the Château Baincthun. The disease was eroding her and turning her pallid, thinning her skin to tissue, sharpening the bones at the points of her cheek, and narrowing her nose to a blade.

  She thinks I want to stay out of pure vanity, Mitchie complained. I want to stay because this is the place and there isn’t any other.

  It seemed to Naomi that Mitchie had the talent and force of temperament to make a community wherever she went—and in the south of France no differently than anywhere else. Lady Tarlton had already found a reliable and pleasant Red Cross nurse to go to the marvelous, all-healing south with her, and had also organized some orderlies to travel with them to Paris and transfer them to the train down to the south. But it seemed that to Mitchie the supposed date of her departure hung over her like an ax and distressed her so much that one night Dr. Airdrie had to sedate her with lithium bromide.

  By the evening before the departure Matron Mitchie had become a plaintive shadow of that figure Naomi had once seen on sticks and a prosthetic leg rising up the gangplank of the Melbourne-moored troopship, bent on Europe, the cockpit, the center of all matroning. Naomi began to wonder if the threat of leaving the château was not doing Mitchie more harm than good, and she went searching for Dr. Airdrie. She found her writing case notes in her office. Her handsome long nose was red at the tip from cold, and her hands mittened, though it was meant to be spring.