The Daughters of Mars: A Novel

by Keneally, Thomas

  A hiccough of sorrow came from him. She patted his shoulder.

  It’s nothing at all, she said. That woman disapproves of people breathing.

  He shook his head. Rosanna’s right, you know. Living here is like living in a factory.

  Oh, will you get some sleep? asked or commanded a voice from across the room.

  Sorry, mate, Byers called lowly. Sorry, all. No sweat. Can’t keep my eyes open a minute longer.

  He gave Sally a little stutter of laughter.

  • • •

  That Sunday forenoon the two omnipotent artillery officers arrived in a car and a truck and with a young Greek guide to take them to the promised baths.

  Listen, said Robbie Shaw, limping around the car, I hear different reports of these hot springs. But let’s give it a go, anyhow. By the way, this young bloke’s called Demetrios.

  Four of them—Sally, Naomi, Honora, and Freud, who Naomi had somehow persuaded to come along—were able to sit in the car. Dankworth drove, with Honora in the middle of the front and Shaw with his legs stuck out as the window-side passenger. The truck—driven by one of the artillerymen—followed with the other women.

  But Nettice was not there. Nettice had been suspended, which, in this windy island on a headland of gravel and with no place of entertainment but the mess, was a severe test of the soul. She was forbidden to enter the wards or speak to Lieutenant Byers. She amused herself by playing Patience with a dog-eared pack. She gave Sally a daily note for delivery to Byers. She seemed to look calmly on the possibility of further discipline.

  Now the expeditionary path took her off-duty sisters jolting north away from the sea—from the place of ships and hutments and encampments—and upwards amidst fields in which green pasture grew. Scrawny cattle and plump goats availed themselves of this. On the hills, the lines of olive trees seethed in a brisk wind. Here, without warning, the colonel’s Lemnos gave way to Sergeant Kiernan’s. The gods were here, Sally thought, though she could not have named them. A long white wall contained a patch of hillside in which there stood a white Greek chapel and its gravestones. In the backseat of the car, Naomi pointed it out to Freud, who took polite interest. But the dazzle of Greek white walls wasn’t enough to soothe her. Most of her could not be reached by light.

  They threaded between hills and exclaimed to see wildflowers on hillsides and speculate what they were. In a village of white walls and houses, Demetrios and Dankworth had a loud discussion on directions before continuing on and passing an ancient amphitheatre beyond. Before Christ? shouted Dankworth. Demetrios nodded his head emphatically. Far before Christos. Greco-Roman, he said.

  The road began to wind, and the truck stopped to allow Carradine to be sick. They all got out for the occasion and picked wildflowers and looked down the long ribs of the island towards the brilliant sea. Sally demanded that Carradine take a seat in the car, and she joined the girls on the benches at the back of the truck where the wind blew their veils horizontal. Rising up a hill now, they saw the sudden apparition of mountains beyond a whitecapped sea. For that instant they were utterly released from earth and absorbed by the company of those mountains across the water and their remnant snow. The car stopped, and at Dankworth’s order Demetrios came back to the truck and pointed at the mountains for the benefit of the nurses aboard. Thrakya, he said, and ultimately the word “Thrace” was suggested and Demetrios agreed. Then earth dragged them back again and down a stony hill and into another glittering white village, where clothes blew on lines like regatta flags.

  The road beyond the town ended above a bay. They gathered their bags and their bathing costumes—borrowed from the Canadians—and accompanied Dankworth and Shaw down a pathway over which sheltering trees cast shade. So they came to a long white building with a tiled roof and a disused-looking open-air café to one side of it. The bathing party milled inside while Demetrios bought tickets from an old man in a glass booth and—in a heavy atmosphere of sulphur from the baths—feverishly distributed them while pointing to the doors for men and women. Shaw apologized for the smell. I believe, he said, it’s not your normal baths. Demetrios told me it’s about smearing on mud. Some Greek saint used to do it and it cured his gammy leg or some such. I suppose it all adds up to an experience, anyhow.

  An elderly woman in a scarf, with gentle, hooded eyes, smiled at the women and—holding a stack of aged but clean towels—led them into the women’s baths. They were half blinded by the miasma of hot sulphur. The foreyard of the baths seemed to be dominated not by a water pool but by two pools of gently stewing mud. The old lady mimed rubbing the mud on her body and—when the women looked mystified—smeared some on her arm and then traversed the room to a small pool above which was placed a tap and its handle. She turned on the tap and rinsed her mud-streaked arm under steaming mineral water. Then she left—satisfied that all was now clear.

  There was a debate about whether they should ignore the chance of this sacred mud bath. But Carradine said that, having been brought so far by the courteous officers, a few of them ought at least to have a go. A further conference developed on the damage the sulphurous mud might do to the bathing costumes they’d borrowed from the Canadians. But Naomi pointed out that they could rinse the mud out in the surf below. Freud settled it. Still in her shift—not having changed into a bathing costume at all—she stepped forward to one of the mud pools and got to her knees. Testing it for temperature, she then lowered both her hands into the viscid muck and scooped it up and daubed it across her cheeks and forehead. Slipping off the strings of her shift, she loaded it on her shoulders and—when the bodice of the shift sank to her waist and hips—plastered her breasts. She worked fixedly. There was no cure in what she was doing.

  Naomi understood at once this attempt at self-obliteration. She ran up, pulled Karla Freud upright, and held her by the shoulders, receiving broad smears of mud on her own costume. She helped Freud away and across the room to the water pool and sat her down by the tap and washed her thoroughly with a towel. Naomi left the face till last. She murmured reassurances all the time. She was telling Freud, You mustn’t blot yourself out. He is the one to be blotted out.

  As a sort of duty the other women coated a few of their extremities with the mud so that they could report to the men that they had done it.

  They could hear that next door Dankworth and Shaw were asking each other raucous questions and answering with barks of laughter. A mud fight had obviously developed. Since the women felt they should not leave their room until the men left theirs, Carradine had time to tell them that there had been such an improvement in her husband that he’d been to London with a theatre party. They had worn their proper uniforms. And then Sally found herself announcing as a marvel that she and Naomi had a stepmother.

  He was just waiting for his daughters to get out of the way, suggested Leonora.

  She’s a strict Presbyterian, Sally explained. She’s made our old man a Presbyterian as well.

  But that won’t kill him, said Carradine.

  I can’t imagine anyone being willing to marry my old man, said Honora. Now that he’s old and bitter. Just as well my poor mother’s still alive.

  They were relieved in the end to clean themselves off and change and climb the few steps out of the baths. Dankworth and Shaw emerged ruddy. Somehow they had had a wonderful time in the fog of sulphur. What a place to bring you! said Shaw. You can get mud anywhere you like. But we brought you all this way as if it’s a treat!

  This is holy mud, Demetrios reminded him.

  The women exaggerated the delight of the experience. In the outdoor café, a dense coffee was served with pastry full of honey, and cakes with fruit at their center and their dough teased out into strands. All this revived the day. The chatter became hectic, and Freud—holding Naomi’s hand across the table—took trouble to keep up with it and occasionally contributed a smile. But she did not seem certain about whether it belonged at the particular point she bestowed it.

  Sally saw Shaw wince a
s he unwisely crossed his legs. She leaned towards him.

  How long were you there? On Gallipoli?

  Three months or so. Hard work, positioning the guns.

  Was it terrible? she dared to ask him.

  Well, he said, it was hard achieving elevation for the guns. They allowed only thirty percent elevation. And we just had to try to haul them up the ravines to level ground. That was the worst of it.

  He was determined to make it a problem of terrain. He wished to abstract from the blood. She did not dare push him any further on the matter.

  Did you happen to know a man named Captain Hoyle? Naomi asked—still holding Freud’s wrist across the table.

  Shaw’s eyes tried to measure how much grief the name might carry for her.

  No, she said, he’s not a relative. Nor anything else. But I went riding to the pyramids with him once.

  Captain Hoyle fell on the first day, he said. Just after we landed.

  It shocked me at the time—he left his watch to me. I didn’t know what that meant. I knew him socially but that was all. The watch puzzled me and upset me at the time.

  As she spoke she stroked Freud’s wrist.

  Shaw had become solemn. Solemnity didn’t sit easily on him.

  Instantaneous, I promise you, he said. There was a lot of “instantaneous” that first day.

  • • •

  They sang all the way back to Mudros. They were exhilarated—even Freud—by wildflowers, the reaches of the Aegean, the mountains of Thrace. And the holy, sulphurous mud was forever part of their comic repertoire. On the final ascent to the hospital Sally saw distantly the military stockade and men shuffling across a reach of gravel to collect a meal of what she hoped was bitter bread.

  On Monday morning the colonel and both matrons came to fetch Freud from her place at the mess table. The colonel said he wished to invite her to what he called in their hearing “a parley” in his office. Naomi—given the lopsidedness of numbers between the authorities and Freud, the single victim—had risen, expecting an invitation. But the matron-in-chief said with a confident measure of scorn that Staff Nurse Durance could sit again. Sally’s suspicion was that in some way they were taking Freud onto their own ground to make her prey again.

  Only those still there in the mess tent at eleven o’clock that morning saw Freud come back with a mute face and utterly dry eyes. Sally was not there. According to the chanciness of rosters she had been placed on day duty. So it was to only a few of her fellows that Freud announced they had posted her to Alexandria. But there has to be a trial, one of the nurses said. Freud’s face knotted and melted then into some ageless and unredacted mask of rage.

  There will be no trial, she told them. They were all in agreement on that. They say the boy was too easily persuaded by his mates. So he’s been sent—you won’t believe it—to Gallipoli. And it’s considered good enough for me to be sent to Alexandria. The orderlies return to their ways, and the monster and I are removed.

  She reflected on the inequity. Her face was almost abstracted.

  We could win on Gallipoli, and men would still be brutes. And there would still be stupidity.

  The news—as it spread—demented the others too. They shook their heads but their outrage was too huge and subtle to be stated. When Naomi offered to walk with her through the wards, Freud said she was forbidden the wards. But imagine the wounded over there on the land being dragged down the ravines by my monster. And falling into his hands.

  So it came down to near-useless gestures and words—such as Honora telling her not to forget a rug since the cold season was coming and they all knew it could be chilly in Alexandria. Yet she and everyone else understood well that climate could not alter things for Freud. Naomi and others went to help her pack. A truck arrived for her, its engine vibrating with impatience. An unsteady Freud was helped up into the cabin. Naomi and the others could not lend enough hands to lift her portmanteau and her hatbox into the rear of the vehicle.

  One last idea struck Naomi then. Mitchie is in Alexandria, she called.

  But the truck had circled and was on its way, and she did not know if Freud had heard.

  Nor was this the only departure that day. Nettice had by now been moved to the post-operative ward in lieu of Freud. Here, amputees and other dazed survivors of surgery from a newly arrived convoy lay in a hut amidst groans and murmurs. The matron-in-chief was flanked by two orderlies when she found Nettice there and announced that she was to be sent to a rest compound until she had recovered from her mania.

  The “rest compound” was—in this case—the evasive name for the mental hospital below Turks Head. Other nurses saw Nettice refuse to go, but it was pointed out to her that the orderlies could take her straitjacketed if she chose. The Durances were sleeping at the time. It was not until an orderly clanged a series of shell casings to signal time for the night-duty nurses and orderlies to leave their beds that they and others discovered what had happened. It gave Sally that sickening sense of the authorities creating their own world, working by their baleful rules and excluding all other versions. This awareness made other nurses feel a disqualification from protest and an unfitness for struggle before the powers at play on Turks Head. The local regimens seemed more potent than the prerogatives operating in the known but remoter universe beyond the island.

  Sally sensed that her own feelings of outrage—like all those of the cowed women—were secondary in their depth to Naomi’s.

  But at breakfast Leo told them no visits were permitted to the rest compound. Nettice was as unreachable as Freud.

  The sisters slept deeply after their morning failure. Defeat and fiasco, loss and stalemate acted on them like a drug. Yet when Sally was awakened by the evening bell, she saw Naomi across the room washed and half-dressed and still wearing an air of purpose. Sally observed her and hurried to keep pace with her for fear of what she might do when she was ready to go out. They left the tent together, and the now relentless autumn wind blew them across Turks Head and down its slope.

  British hospital, Naomi declared.

  They came to the British general hospital and found at last the nurses’ mess. As they knocked on the pole at the tent flap the dusk meal was in progress. Asked in, they could see at once that it was a place of far kindlier climate than theirs. Someone had had enough spirit and license to paste pictures of the English countryside on the walls. Everyone seemed properly dressed in white pinafores. The record of a soprano singing folk songs turned on a table-top Victrola. The women were talking over the music with a liveliness—thought Sally—which bespoke their greater confidence in the world. A young woman noticed them standing at the entry and rose and said, Hello there, Kangaroos, come and have some tea.

  How can you tell we’re Australians? asked Naomi.

  Those great gawky overcoats, said the nurse.

  She made her friends move up and found them chairs at the table. They all exchanged names. The one who had welcomed them in was Angela. She had young, glittering, impressive eyes. She had not yet had the goodwill pummeled out of her. She introduced them to two other Englishwomen there. These are the poor girls who were sunk on their ship, Angela explained in wonder, as if the sinking had been an achievement of theirs.

  Poor things! one of the girls said. It’s really too bad you have to wear those old clothes. We should take up a collection for you.

  Please, said Naomi, don’t go to the trouble. We’re dressed the way the colonel chooses we should be dressed.

  That can’t be true, said Angela soothingly.

  No, we are meant to be degraded, Naomi insisted.

  The three English nurses frowned at each other. Sally felt a duty to show them her sister did not overstate the case.

  It’s true, sad to say, Sally confirmed.

  Naomi said, One of our friends has been put in the rest compound for no particular reason than being sweet on a blind officer. You British nurses look after the rest compound. We’d like to send a message of cheer to our friend
.

  Oh, said Angela, you must talk to Bea over there. She’s rostered in the compound. Angela lowered her voice and confided not in Naomi and Sally alone but in her three friends as well. Bea got in hot water herself for getting too friendly with one of our boys here. You see someone with a terrible wound who looks like your brother or your cousin or a boy you used to know . . . It’s easy to get a bit infatuated with them. But you know that.

  Naomi and Sally both studied the girl who had been pointed out. She was very pretty, with ringlets. She was the sort of girl who would have one of them hanging down her forehead—in defiance of the strictures about keeping hair enclosed. She looked childlike. But no one could be a trained nurse here and be an utter child.

  Nonetheless, said Angela, I can’t imagine someone being actually binned and diagnosed as mental just because she liked the soldier. Come, we’ll see Bea.

  She got up and led the Durance sisters across the room. The sisters stood off a bit as Angela spoke to Bea and indicated them. Bea scraped back her chair and got up. The four of them moved into the corner by the Victrola. Bea had a less posh accent than Angela. It was Yorkshire or some such. But she was—Sally thought—by far the prettiest mental nurse a person was likely to meet. Yes, she said, she was the day nurse in the women’s compound. She knew Nettice—there weren’t many patients in there. Just nurses who’d gone a bit unsettled. There’s a guard with a rifle by the gate but that was to protect the women patients from the males’ mental compound because the behavior from those men was not to be predicted. A boy will think he’s at home and go off wandering down to his local pub.

  Some of the fellows were so awfully upset by the thunder of the other night, she said. Jabbering mad from Gallipoli and Cape Helles to begin with. There is one of yours who hid under his bed, poor kid—a boy of about sixteen or seventeen. Whoever let him into the army should be shot.

  But Nettice, said Naomi, what sort of company does she have?

  There are only four of them. One is a girl who got a big crush on another woman and one is a girl who doesn’t speak at all. The one who doesn’t talk sits there until she pees herself. I do the changing, of course—we couldn’t allow one of those orderlies. And then another girl who can’t stop speaking. These two are both pitiful cases and will be sent back to Alexandria, or else home. The sooner the better too. We don’t have any mentalist here worthy of the name.