The Daughters of Mars

by Thomas Keneally

  Is there a chance for a tea? Sally whispered. As she petitioned Honora she leaned down almost automatically and adjusted an oxygen mask on the face of a soldier. His mustard-gas rash called out for ointment. But oxygen was more important. The patient frowned up at her.

  It’s the horses, he said.

  The man in the next bed—not as desperate for breath—said his companion was right.

  The way they begin to neigh and bray and plunge about once those gas shells come landing with a little thud, thud.

  He was exhausted by this speech and for what the gesture was worth Sally drew her hand over his shoulder as if she had some power to command his violated organism to operate the right way.

  Sally, murmured Honora, Major Bright wants to see you.

  Honora led her out of the ward and along duckboards to Bright’s office near the theatres. He was attending to forms and letters. He got up from his desk, and it was by his demeanor—not by Slattery’s earlier—that she understood the news and feared her existence was now void.

  It’s Charlie, she said.

  Bright held up his hand. Be assured. Alive but wounded. He was at Franvillers but they’ve moved him to the big hospital at Étaples.

  But I’ve had my leave, she said. She realized she must sound like a schoolkid.

  No. That doesn’t matter. You can see him. It’s been arranged.

  What sort of wound?

  Bright looked at the floor.

  I’m afraid I can’t say. I don’t know anything further. I’m sure it’s minor . . . He must have been well enough to tell them to reach us here.

  So—in a lather and ferment this time—she made ready to travel again and without unpacking caught one of the buses that brought troops from the great depot at Étaples, which the soldiers—distanced by a language from the place—called “Eatables,” up to the rear lines beyond Corbie, and returned with soldiers going on leave. She traveled at the front of the crowded vehicle with blinkered sight, refusing to start conversations, though the officer beside her did his best. She both expected minor damage in Charlie and mourned his death. They traversed through a countryside of townships still rubbled from the battles of March and April and in a landscape chiefly populated—it seemed—by the aged, by hungry children, and, above all, by soldiers. Sometimes as she endured her frenzy in the front seat, the driver would let himself be hailed down by soldiers with leave papers, and after long discussion they would be let aboard. They all moved along the bus and passed the desolate girl in the front seat without knowing that the driver’s slow braking and slow starts made her murderous towards him.

  It was late afternoon when they reached the hospital in the base outside Étaples. In the summer evening light—just as at Rouen ages back—German prisoners worked on erecting new huts with all the energy and attention of men brought in on contract. Beyond the hospital lay a terrible immensity of camp, and over all of it a dismal air—a feeling of something ugly getting out of hand. A general look of depression, she thought, was apparent in the guards and the off-duty orderlies walking the streets of the hospital.

  She reported to a guardhouse and was directed to the main office of the hospital to find out where Charlie was. Now and then as she waited for the records to be consulted, hope surged in her, and then receded to leave desolation. Once an orderly was called on to lead her, it was a long trudge down laneways. She found the ward, climbed the few stairs, presented herself at the nurses’ station, and asked for Charlie Condon.

  Oh, said a young Australian nurse, I’ll take you there.

  Is it bad? she asked.

  You’re trembling, said the girl. She seemed viciously determined to keep Sally in ignorance. She led Sally down the aisle between beds. Before Charlie could be reached they encountered the ward sister to whom the nurse introduced her. Sally saw on her a particular expression, something, she thought, which did not suggest the utter worst.

  The sister led her down the aisle and with a shock she saw Charlie amongst all the unknown faces. He was asleep with a slight frown.

  Some shrapnel wounds in the side and hip, the sister explained. But gangrene has set in in the arm. He’s due for surgery.

  The arm?

  Surely it would be too melodramatic—even for this mongrel war—for an artist to lose his arm? It was a coincidence suitable to the stage but surely not to real tragedy. But on top of that, gangrene.

  The sister took his pulse and the nurse found a chair for Sally to sit on. Sally put a hand on his forehead and the pulse-taking woke Charlie. He looked at the ceiling, and then lowered his head and with a slight effort of focus saw her.

  Sally, he said wonderingly. He asked the sister, It’s not the fever, is it?

  No, said the sister. She’s here, all right.

  Aren’t I lucky? he said but without the boyish exhilaration which often took over young men with disabling but not mortal wounds. A Blighty wound, he told her, and the left arm. All I need to paint is the right. Best of both worlds.

  His eyes were fevered from the gangrene.

  I mean, he told her, I can open the tubes of paint with my teeth.

  Sally leaned and kissed him on the mouth—a lover with a lover. The sister did not object.

  The sister said, The surgeon has him down for a below-elbow amputation, but it depends on nerve and tendon and the ability to get a good flap. And on the infection. Either way, he’ll still have a stub of wing to wave with, won’t you?

  Precisely, Charlie slurred.

  She waited until he was taken away and they brought her cocoa heavily laced with sugar—the way at Deux Églises and other places she had fed it to the casualties. After an hour and a half Charlie was carried back stupefied and when the surgeon visited and inspected him, he murmured to Sally that they’d done an above-elbow amputation to save him from the threat of the gangrene. The state of the brachial artery and the tendons—together with the sepsis—warranted above the elbow, said the surgeon.

  She sat with him into the evening as they fed him morphine as regularly as she would have and dressed and irrigated the wound, which she wanted to do but was not permitted to. She felt an abounding thankfulness. They were no less prompt or less expert than she would have been. He was an utterly standard case, except that he was Charlie. The nurses found a bed for her in their quarters and at last persuaded her to go to it.

  Sister to Sister

  Sally left Étaples the following afternoon, with everyone assuring her Charlie was coming on well and already showing himself a robust recuperant. His temperature was down. They boasted they had “caught” the gangrene in time. She would be contacted if there was any change.

  On the way back by ambulance, she felt her own fever return—not gradually but in a rush. Her joints were in agony and by the time the ambulance reached the clearing station the fever had her bewildered.

  But the poor thing had it earlier, she heard Honora say to Dr. Bright as she lay in the influenza tent where Leo had died. Honora and Bright wore masks.

  It’s unfortunate, said Dr. Bright helplessly, but her first one wasn’t the influenza. Honora’s dissatified eyes loomed above Sally. Her mother looked over Bright’s shoulder. Her mother was unmasked and knew that her daughter had drowned in the Archimedes and showed a curiosity about Sally’s process of sinking. Sally had enough mind left to wonder why it was always the Archimedes she ended up with.

  Do you have the morphine I stole for you? she asked her mother. The idea was if her mother would give it back now, it would take Sally away into light and air.

  It has all gone to young men, her mother told her. And Mrs. Durance put her hands to her own temples as if trying to puzzle this out—the lack of comfort available to Sally.

  Sally could feel things happen at the gallop within her. She blazed. Her lungs were bleeding southwards, melting away. She was frightened. But Charlie might come and pour her the sweet wine of clear air.

  She’s such a beautiful one, said Slattery to Bright. And Leonora went
too. It takes the beautiful.

  No, said Dr. Bright. I trust that can’t be true.

  Masked Slattery knelt by Sally’s bed at some hour. Her face became as large as a balloon. But she said nothing. My lungs are bleeding away, Sally in the meantime acknowledged, stealing the breath pledged to Charlie, and the delight of lungs filled and expelled. Her mother’s wan good wishes radiated out but could not prevail over melting luck.

  The rottenest of luck, said Bright.

  Charlie knows my body, she stated. I have opened it to him.

  All the Sallys of her acquaintance—the child, the country nurse, the Egyptian tourist, the seaborne nurse, the landlocked one—were torn away like leaves off the boughs of her fever. The thief, the murderer, the sister, the hater, the sinker, the swimmer, the lover, the unloved, the witness of light, the coward of dark, and the binder and rinser of wounds, the daughter fled and the daughter forever. What do I think you do to your friends on the wire, Charlie? Australian mercy comes from the mouth of the rifle. Where is Charlie and his wing, his docked arm? So busy up in a hospital. Not knowing to come once more for a visit and give me back the air.

  When air was not returned to her, terror gave way to confusion and it was all dreams and much tumult. It was dreadful how fast the tumult faded, until she let go of all the strings and felt herself choke awhile in a serenity that was A1, first class, not so bad as all that. A woman who wanted to feel more than this serenity would want portholes in her coffin. Ah, ease! It was not hard, after all, to rise—and even Charlie was just part of a mass of people left.

  • • •

  As Sally struggled, the revived influenza struck the Voluntary. Patients and orderlies and English Roses caught the thing and were in a special wing. Naomi too all at once sensed it advancing within her, but for about six hours—from ten in the morning until four that afternoon—denied the symptoms. When one staggered in corridors and was unsure of where the walls were—and the differentiation between them and the floor—then it was time to pay the fever attention. Declaring herself to Airdrie, Naomi was permitted to take to bed in her own room—an isolation ward of one. Her joints throbbed, she vomited the clear broth one of the masked Australian nurses fed her. Through lack of breath she felt a hellish separation from everything, from even the simplest objects in her room—a cup, a book, a coat hanging from a hook behind the door.

  An English nurse came in to look at her with arresting but overhuge eyes. She was followed by two masked orderlies manhandling a bed, and two more with a stretcher on which one of the English Roses lay. The girl was gasping hard and thrashed her head continuously, squandering strength. They might both have been the victims of membrane-blistering yperite. At some stage of her fever Naomi was sure they were.

  Separated from herself in this plain room, she was aware that another colleague visited her and stood writing on a chart as well. You have stayed here—she wanted to say. No military authority told you. Lady Tarlton asked you and you stayed. Was it to give me back my breath?

  Naomi descended from her airless space above the bed to the deck of the Archimedes, where men and women ran about in hysteria. But with an acidic grief in her belly she went looking for Kiernan and her mother, who were both there and not there, who had both stayed and gone. She saw ponies milling on the foredeck as it began to rise.

  Shoot the horses! shouted a nurse.

  No one is doing it, her mother declared with that wistful smile Naomi had seen in childhood.

  Naomi felt the rage she had always had against her mother, who was crying, Nothing can be done, nothing can be done . . .

  Something can be done, Mama! Naomi insisted. Nothing can be done? I killed you with morphine because you said that sort of thing. Sally had taken it from the cupboard in the Archimedes. Sally, the little thief, had put it in place for me. I found it and let the snake run into your heart.

  The horses first, said Mrs. Durance, farm-bred and grimly practical, the corners of her lower lip tucked under the upper in resignation. So she went off to attend to those things—the neighing beasts who would not question her, who offered no chance to this victim who made no threats and was content with her own murder.

  When the room returned to Naomi, there were still horses in it, raging and panicked. She had time to sit at a breathless table with the gaol governor and plead with him to let Ian out to save the horses. The man was stupid and could not see the urgency which grew in her, the greatest agony of her life. The ship pitched till she and the asinine gaol governor and the men and women and horses slid into the sea which felt of nothing. Thus she went down. Roaring for breath.

  1918–1922

  Since both the Durance girls knew, without knowing the other did, that there was the smallest membrane between alternate histories of themselves—between the drowning and the floating, between the fevered and the convalescent—it was somehow appropriate that two contradictory reports appeared in the Macleay Valley’s papers—the Argus and the Chronicle.

  The Argus read, “Mr. Durance of Sherwood has received the sad news that his daughter Naomi has died of a prevailing influenza while serving as a nurse in France. The Argus and all its readers extend their sincerest sympathies . . .”

  The Chronicle read, “Mr. Durance, a well-respected farmer of Sherwood, has been informed that his daughter Sally (Sarah) has died of a congestive disease while serving our gallant soldiers as a nurse in France. The Chronicle and its readers extend to Mr. Durance their . . .”

  A few days later Mrs. Durance (formerly Sorley) dropped into the newspaper offices. The names had been mixed up, she told them. But that seemed to create further confusion.

  The Argus printed a report that said, “The Argus regrets its earlier notification that Nurse Naomi Durance has died in France. It was her sister, Sally, who regrettably succumbed to influenza. The Argus apologizes to the Durance family and again extends its sincerest . . .”

  While the Chronicle declared, “The Chronicle regrets that it was mistaken in reporting the death of Sally (Sarah) Durance of influenza while she was serving as a nurse in France. It was her sister, Naomi, who has died in the service of our valiant young men and of Australia, which this paper chooses to see as a separate entity to the Empire. But, rising above politics, we apologize to Mr. Eric Durance of Sherwood and offer our most heartfelt . . .”

  Thus from the start people were confused. When they mentioned the Durance sisters—as they did infrequently—they were uncertain which of the girls had gone under to the Spanish influenza. It was known that the other one had married a man from Sydney or Melbourne, a returned soldier. One of them had been involved with the Condons, but the Condons were gone from the valley—the solicitor to join his brother’s more extensive practice in Orange. They could not be conferred with on the matter.

  The new Mrs. Durance had in a way lost one of her children too. Ernest was not the same boy when he came back from France. He spent a lot of time drinking with other repatriated soldiers at the Federal Hotel and then wandering down to the railway station to chat drunkenly in the refreshment room with any train passengers who were survivors of the war and who happened to be having a meal there during the half hour the Brisbane Mail sat at the station. Ernest had vanished by the end of 1920—off to Queensland, it was said.

  So which of the sisters died and stayed in French soil? It was a question anyhow on which people expended some interest, but not a great amount. Out of politeness, they did not ask Mr. or Mrs. Durance.

  • • •

  But taking into account the membrane between alternate versions—of which Sally herself had become so convinced after the sinking of the Archimedes, believing that though she had survived, there was a parallel world of chance in which she had not—we can venture to say that at the end of the Australian summer of 1922 wealthy businessman, part-time painter, and printer of fine books Eddie Horowitz laid on a gallery for an exhibition by Charlie Condon.

  When Charlie and Sally had first returned from Paris, the go
ing had been hard for them. Sally worked at Sydney Hospital to give Charlie the breathing space homecoming always required. Paris had been in its way difficult too. But the excitement of beginning there—at the epicenter of art—had intoxicated them for a time. It was strange nonetheless that the British painters, the Americans, and the few Australians lived almost entirely in their own clique. They got together often to talk English or take holidays on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany—and thus to shy away from confronting the great alps of recent European achievement. The Americans were fascinated by Charlie’s missing arm—though rather than pin up his sleeve, he used a prosthesis and a glove over an artificial hand in an attempt to put paid to the issue. The British took missing limbs more for granted. So it was not out of false sympathy that Charlie had two paintings exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1921. This provided the modicum of validation needed for the artist to keep going and for his wife to continue in her original faith. He was also invited to exhibit at the Chelsea Arts Club. Though at that stage Sally had been offered a job nursing at the English Sanatorium in Paris, Charlie insisted that she should not waste her French experience on drudgery.

  The parties they went to in Paris could become difficult. Spirits—particularly cheap spirits, which were all they could afford—made Charlie irascible. Then, when they got home to their one-room apartment, there were the sort of night sweats and dreams that all the women of the soldiers of the world endured at secondhand.

  Painting French forests and seasides and pastures was an education rather than a career, Charlie began to assert. When it became apparent to him and Sally that the honest and essential thing was to go home, they knew it would not be an easy business. The English artists who went home had the certainty that they could swan back to Paris whenever they liked. The Australians had the greater certainty that their decision was a choice—very nearly—for life.