The Daughters of Mars: A Novel

by Keneally, Thomas

  In their tent later Naomi came and stood by Sally’s bed. Sally was reading for comfort and distraction a remarkable book—Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham. If in her colonial innocence she thought of his name as “Morg-ham,” the book still spoke to her and told her things she did not know she knew. It gave her the illusion of opening doors which the outrage on Karla Freud had slapped shut. It was also a new book and smelled wonderfully of glue and pages. Someone had brought it from England and somehow left it in the small library in the mess. She was hungry for its distractions and for the variousness and sameness of humans it proved. It was an education she could resume after a day of frightful shock.

  On the scale of pure information, she had learned from Maugham things about the Anglican Church she had never known. She had learned something of living in Heidelberg, which made her think of the Germans as sharing the one soul of humanity. That there were German girls on whom the character Philip could “feast his eyes” was a revelation a person had to deal with. In this book—just published and whose buyer might have died in one of the wards or been shipped off wounded to Egypt or Malta—the author put his voyager, Philip, in the heart of German families. The subversion of that was somehow to be relished. She took a portion of delight in that the other nurses presumed she was reading some English romance. Whereas she read risky sentences such as, “Men are so stupid in England. They only think of the face. The French who are a nation of lovers know how important the figure is.”

  And how did that relate to Freud? Which had the attacker wanted to punish in Freud’s case—the face or the figure? Did men divide up women in this way? If they did, it made the brutality more understandable.

  And now Naomi was there. Getting down on a knee, she murmured to Sally, If Freud is like us, no periods, I mean . . . Well, at least no risk of pregnancy.

  A pregnancy would be unspeakable. They could not want to understand what it would be like to bear such a child, waiting for the monster’s face to emerge. Would you love and hate it at once? Would you send it to an orphanage? Would you murder it at birth?

  So nature has some wisdom, asserted Naomi. Then she kissed Sally and went.

  Next morning the supreme matron—the colonel’s consort in spirit—entered the tent. She trod on ground grown cold overnight and on the rubble left by moles. She spoke to Freud, who was dressing determinedly and wanted to work. Clearly the matron was offering her a choice of wards. Post-operative, Freud decided. No, she said, she did not want to mope about, but a new ward was advisable because it was in the dysentery wards she had been seen and speculated on and become prey.

  They ate their poor, cheerless breakfast of hardtack and—though condensed milk sweetened the tea—then went to their duty. Freud inherited the post-operative, the young men as dazed as she was, and the gravity of what was done to her matched by the gravity of what had been done to them. Here, they were reduced to an awful humility by anesthesia and their wounds. Here, pale, blue-lipped boys were dependent and someone’s children. The holiness of man could be again believed in.

  The following day was cold, but there was a distraction of a kind. A car grinding up the hill pulled to a stop outside the nurses’ mess tent. After car doors were heard being slammed shut, a male voice called, Anyone in?

  Sally—Of Human Bondage in her hands—was one of the dozen or so who were in the tent. The inquiry was so genial and so markedly different from the snarls of orderlies that a number of voices called, Yes. Two Australian officers in their slouch hats entered. One was on crutches. He moved easily and had the reddish, pleasant, broad face of a future publican or auctioneer—or at least a town worthy. The other was leaner and taller and watchfully shy. He looked to Sally like someone remembered from a vastly distant time. They were both well tailored. They shamed those nurses from the Archimedes who, despite the kindness of their sisters, were still wearing little better than army shirts and pants or else drab skirts—the sackcloth of their survival.

  Both visitors were from the rest camp of Lemnos, and a closer look at their uniforms showed them to be not quite as flash as at first blush.

  The shorter one declared, We heard you were here. Our battery is over there in the rest camp. We had a visit from a certain Sergeant Kiernan, who said he had heard you young ladies have a hard time of it here. Rather upset about it, actually. So we thought we’d come over with a small box of things.

  They had heard of the attack on Freud, of course. But they would not say that.

  Just hang around a tick, said the lanky officer. He went out of the tent and as he ducked his head to go out, Sally remembered him. Lionel Dankworth, who’d been keen on Honora.

  Well, said the genial, huskier man left behind. He rubbed his hands as if the day was actually colder than it was. This tent is a bit draughty, isn’t it?

  Except when it is stifling, Naomi conceded.

  Did you do yourself an injury? Sally asked him.

  The old femur, he said. A bit of a knock, but a clean break. I’m hoping to go back when the boys do.

  Sally and Naomi exchanged glances. Femurs took longer than that.

  The tall gunnery officer was back, toting a bully-beef box. But when he put it down on the table by the giant enamel teapot there were better things than bully beef in it. He said, A little contribution.

  The stockier man asked if he could take a chair. He did it with his stiff leg stuck out in front of him. He recited the contents of the hamper. Canned asparagus, he said. Canned salmon. Then there is some cocoa, he declared. Chocolate—it goes a bit white when it’s been in a ship’s hold in the tropics. Never mind. Oh, and some biscuits—macaroons, not hardtack. Marmalade too.

  Lieutenant Dankworth, said Naomi. We met in Egypt. Honora’s here, but sleeping. Off-duty. I could go . . .

  No, said Lionel Dankworth, let the poor girl sleep for now.

  He seemed frightened of the reunion—or at least of it being public.

  The women pulled the cans and packages from the box and squinted at the labels like scholars trying to read hieroglyphics. Nettice spoke.

  There is a young officer who is blinded. He’s a jeweler, you see. Rather down. Since the supply in the ward has run out, if you’ve no objections I might take him some of this cocoa.

  Why not? asked the tall man. If the others don’t mind.

  The shorter man with the femur injury gave the sort of smile over which no shadow had ever fallen. And yet he had been on Gallipoli and been part shattered there.

  Sally inspected Nettice. It was strange that she would mention one soldier in that way.

  Look, said the officers, we should introduce ourselves.

  The lanky one said his name was Dankworth—as Naomi had already said. The man with the femur injury was Lieutenant Robbie Shaw.

  Shaw lowered his voice. We heard one of our girls was having a bad time here.

  They told him Freud was on duty. At her own insistence.

  We don’t like that sort of thing happening to Australian girls, the lanky one grumbled. If there is anyone you’d like us to talk to . . .

  It was the normal male proposition—we can take your enemies aside and box their ears for you. That would fix everything.

  She wouldn’t want you to do anything just now, Naomi told them. They have promised to find the man.

  You just let us know if they mess about, Lieutenant Shaw advised.

  In the meantime, said Dankworth, there’s a depot ship full of tea and frozen lamb and other delicacies in the harbor. Comfort from home. The laziness of quartermasters and other people meant the goods on board just sat there. They had the other day grabbed a fistful of quartermaster’s invoices and filled them out and gone on board and collected the goods that they’d brought here.

  So this isn’t the end of it, Robbie Shaw promised.

  Lieutenant Dankworth surveyed the mess. He referred to Naomi’s face and then his eyes moved to Sally’s. You young women are sisters, I seem to remember?

  Yes, Sally admitte
d.

  The two men seemed to welcome the idea, as if it were some sort of souvenir of home. On their way out, Dankworth paused by the tent flap. Remember that we are willing to protect you, he growled with his eyes lowered. But the shield he offered them was not the right one for the time.

  • • •

  Honora was outraged they had not woken her to meet Dankworth, but she was half pretending—she seemed invigorated to know he was on the island. Soon they’d be promenading the foreshores together, and that would restore something that had been lost here.

  It was raining when the military police officer and his sergeant came to the mess tent to collect Freud. Nurses had till now been muttering about how well she seemed to be taking things. Nursing—Sally knew—was a great if temporary distraction from all memory. The two provosts shone like deliverance in their slicked waterproofs. The Australian matron also appeared in an overcoat and was a fellow authority. The provost officer asked Freud to come with them, and the matron said Naomi could come too.

  When Naomi and Freud set out with the military policeman and the matron, they were themselves bulky in khaki overcoats and as good as disguised under sou’westers. Their gum boots robbed them of all grace as they tripped through puddles to the hut down the hill which served as a police station. Naomi was later spare with details about what had happened there. Freud could not be asked for fear of what the question would bring on in her. The man imprisoned and identified by Freud as the rapist was an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old who was wide-faced and fair-haired—an orderly from the medical wards and the circus tent. Freud was asked to swear that this was the criminal. She gathered herself and—as Naomi recounted it to Sally later—it was already apparent that she could swear. But the forces working on Freud for denying it were potent. The provosts and others would be pleased if she did refuse to point to the attacker.

  The young man brought in front of her was blushing. Freud snorted at this—as if it were a plea of innocence.

  Did you say something? the officer asked.

  That’s him, Freud answered. She looked at the boy full-on. He would not look at her. At the moment of identification the boy’s mouth hung in a way which almost made Naomi pity him. He’s not clever, she thought. He’s a muscular child. Those who recruited him carry their barbarous portion of the blame. But suddenly Freud needed to be restrained by Naomi and the matron from attacking him. She managed only to spit at his face. After a second—held by the arms—she went peacefully. There was no answer for what this blundering kid had taken. The young man was charged in front of her with rape and marched away hatless. Afterwards Naomi and the matron guided Freud back to the tent and suggested they would need to call the doctor again with his benevolent sedatives. No, said Freud—upright in their hands. Whatever he gives me, I still have to wake up in the end.

  She wanted to go on duty with Naomi, so Naomi was promoted to post-operative. Dysentery was declining anyhow as autumn came to the Gallipoli Peninsula and to Lemnos. The medical wards were not as full, as the armies on the peninsula dug deeply rather than raged forward. Freud worked with a neutral and measured air. She took temperatures and blood pressures and encouraged young men to wake from chloroform. She had the power now to call on orderlies to help her move patients onto their sides. They obeyed her with their own neutrality or with a strangely shy sullenness. Naomi heard one man who worked with them—an orderly who must have been near forty years of age—bend forwards and tell Freud he was sorry and that he hoped she understood they weren’t all like that, et cetera. Freud said nothing to him.

  The entire nurses’ mess felt a certain solace to know the evildoer had now been arrested—and identified as barely more than a child and not a very clever child. They could not help feeling it reduced the scale of menace which had hung over them. Now—more than in the interim—it became clear to them that they had been frightened of someone satanically astute and not to be appeased. They were relieved by the anticlimax of an arrest to which one plain face belonged.

  Dankworth had been back to stroll down the headland with Honora—that was a token of the normal. But the women as a group acted in Freud’s company with the false breeziness appropriate to a fatal condition. Her fatal condition was that the trial of the rapist was still ahead of her and he might get exonerated.

  • • •

  Lieutenant Robbie Shaw and his newly promoted friend Captain Lionel Dankworth did help ease the weight of such questions by calling at the mess again one evening. They found a small group of nurses ready to go on night duty—Sally, Naomi, Honora, Nettice, Leonora. There are thermal baths on the other side of the island, Shaw told them. We’re going to try to get a car on Sunday to take us over there. Would you like to go?

  These two had a wonderful air of unstoppability about them. They walked on the island on their own terms. And behind their joking, their casual watchfulness, and their unspoken sense of affront at what had been done to Freud, Sally could tell that they were by their very instincts assessing and weighing the women as men customarily did. Is my wife here? they asked themselves. Is she amongst these gravel-dwellers with their mixed clothing and their harrowed looks?

  Speaking of the coming excursion, Robbie Shaw said, Why not invite the girl who had the problem too? It’ll be good for her.

  Ah, said Dankworth—sidestepping that noxious subject. That girl Carradine, is she here? We have a truckload of bedpans outside.

  They went outside and there was the improbable truckload. As they carried canisters of tea and tins of fruitcake indoors under Shaw’s rowdy orders, Naomi went urgently to find the right orderly to get the bedpans unloaded. It seemed to her that these two young men of no great gifts were angels of efficacy on an island whose masters sought to forbid every gesture of cleverness and grace.

  Naomi told the men that there would be at least eight women free to make the journey.

  Will you be one of them? I mean, the ones who come? asked Shaw confidentially—and out of Dankworth’s hearing.

  It depends. I would like an outing. If Freud comes, then I’ll go too.

  He lowered his voice. Lionel likes the brunette with the eyes. And all the impudence. Could you get her to come?

  I doubt she could be stopped.

  It was agreed amongst the women that if anyone should have a holiday from the general hospital—assuming she could be persuaded—it must be Freud. And so Naomi must—of course—go too. Apart from that, names would be drawn from a hat.

  That night in the darkened wards Sally moved amongst fevered amputees, those whose wounded arms lay in cock-up splints and legs in long splints. Taking temperatures and pulses, she was a meek inspector of frantic dreams and listened for pain and anguish in those whose sleep was shallow. She saw the English matron loom out of darkness. Her torchlight skimmed the beds and bounced off her white bosom.

  Sister Nettice? the matron asked Sally. Nettice was somewhere in this darkness and still to be found. The matron’s torchlight went probing into corners. It brushed over faces in repose and eyes starkly awake.

  Accompany me, Nurse, said the matron. Sally walked in her wake and they moved down the chicanes formed by army cots and came on something extraordinary. The torch beam discovered Nettice standing by a cot. Sitting on the floor in blue hospital pyjamas was a young man whose eyes were still bandaged but who cocked his head inquiringly towards the light. Nettice had been only partially successful in putting a distance between herself and the patient. The matron-in-chief hissed at Nettice and asked what she had in her hand. Nettice slowly produced something from the folds of her lumpy skirts. It was—Sally recognized—one of the chocolate slabs Shaw and Dankworth had brought them from the depot ship.

  The matron gave the appearance of understanding this scene—at least in her own terms. Nonetheless, she breathily called on God to shed light on what was happening here. The young officer—a little smear of chocolate on his left cheek, a childlike and forgivable smudge—turned and began haltingly to feel the edges o
f his mattress. Unaccustomed to his dark within the dark, he levered himself slowly up. He intended to stand upright in Nettice’s defense. Nettice, however, reached out with authority and put her hand on his shoulder—exerting pressure so that he sat down on his cot.

  What’s the problem, Rosanna? he asked.

  I was taking some time, Matron, said Nettice—low but without apology—to give Lieutenant Byers some chocolate. In my estimation, it does him good and lets him know he still has a name and a future.

  “Let him know?” Of course he has a name.

  He had forgotten it with the blow to his face. I have had to school him in it and now he knows it again. But his memory must be fortified.

  Must it be fortified with chocolate and on the floor? I would imagine not.

  Nettice’s face was set. It would not change to mollify the matron. It refused to take on any trace of shame or contrition or justification. Nettice said reasonably, It’s so big here with voices coming and going. He would have forgotten who he was without me telling him. And a bit of chocolate.

  Come, said the matron. We can’t go on hissing and whispering here. Come to my office.

  Matron, Lieutenant Byers called out in a voice firm and loud enough for the daylight, if you are suggesting that there was anything untoward . . .

  He stood again, as if with the intention to follow the matron and Nettice.

  Here, said Sally, taking one of his shoulders and then the other. Nettice will handle it. Don’t worry.

  She helped him sit once more on the side of his bed, a slight figure in his large drill pyjamas—the uniform of those lost in that confused space between soldierhood and the lesser life arising from the scale of the harm done them.

  I’ve got her into trouble with the ogre, said Lieutenant Byers. Are women ogres or ogresses? Poor little Rosie.

  She’ll just get a talking-to. We’re all used to talkings-to. Don’t worry.