The Daughters of Mars: A Novel

by Keneally, Thomas

  Out of the windows Naomi found camels and their owners on the roads they passed and green crops tended by unaltered, strong, black-clad, bent women so much more unchanged than the world at large. The sky above Suez grew murky and yielded a gray evening—like a scowl from the Red Sea Moses had parted. She saw—as their train rolled into the port—British army and navy officers sitting at tables under the porticos of the Grand Pier Hotel, men still engaged in a rearwards sort of way with the war Naomi and the others were now departing. The sight made her feel excluded from life rather than fortunate in it.

  The train came right to the wharf. Orderlies bustled in to help them with their bags. A cluster of wheelchair cases began to form on the station. The amputees on crutches—their trouser legs bravely pinned up to about knee height—tried not to collide with rushing orderlies. Smoking casually, those who missed an arm walked with a balanced air that claimed they had always wanted to sport an empty sleeve.

  Their ship looked—according to Carradine’s habitual assessment of vessels—around sixteen thousand tons. It possessed what people called “good lines” and was named the Demeter. The great doors of the lower deck—more or less at dock level, the same doors which on the Archimedes had been opened to admit horses and gun carriages—stood agape.

  Those chirpy on this grim Egyptian afternoon cried, Make way, boys! as they stood back to yield the nurses the gangplank. Their wounds were not visible—were covered by their uniforms—and some of them were possessed by the happiness of valid homecoming. But not all. Some were dreading it like she was.

  From the deck, she saw below on the pier a contingent of blinded officers—each with a stick held edgily and unfamiliarly in his hand—advancing towards the lower doors in a line. The first had his free hand on the shoulder of an orderly and the second his hand on the shoulder of the first. And so on. She had never seen the blinded so arrayed or in such a force. She noticed Lieutenant Byers in the midst of the column. He looked lost in the mass.

  The nurses were now the first to be let below. The steward who led them told them that their cabins were A1. Walking further forward in the ship the women saw what could easily be imagined as peacetime salons and libraries and smoking rooms. And the promenade deck they had been ushered across felt just that—a deck for promenades and not for heaping the wounded. Nettice praised the ship endlessly and kept some of her applause for the spacious ports in their cabin. Naomi suspected that it was Byers’s presence onboard that brought out this applause in her.

  At dinner—seated with the captain and his third officer—they began with an entree of fish in a near-vacant dining room. The captain was a Scot and of a certainty, a gaze, a solidity that would not easily yield to any projectile thrown by an enemy. Other nurses they had not yet met arrived in the dining room in their long gray dresses and jackets. Some looked to be women as old as Mitchie and were puffed from climbing the gangplank and companionways. They were all from the great barn of a hospital in Cairo known as Luna Park and from a hospital at Ismaïlia. It turned out that at least two of them—having lost a brother each—were being sent home to console their parents.

  The matron of the Demeter spoke at the end of dinner. By then they’d had some miraculous beef and roast potatoes and pudding with custard. The matron was broad-shouldered—she looked like a country girl grown up—and had an eczema outbreak on her cheeks. She enumerated the range of work they would need to do according to a light, six-hour-a-day roster. The demands of the eight-week journey home would tend to be medical rather than surgical. So there were the two small medical wards—for officers and men—and a contagious ward. There was also a small mental ward. Most of the patients here were depressed or suffering delusions harmless except to themselves. Forward and on a lower deck lay the living quarters for some fifty syphilitics. Smile on them, issue their medicines, and then leave them to the orderlies. In the meantime, the majority of the men—in stable condition—would occupy the normal cabins and bunk spaces.

  Nettice’s face bloomed and the knot which had fixed her features in place seemed suddenly to release itself.

  • • •

  Naomi’s job some days was to take blinded or lamed men for a turn on deck. Nettice thought it was against the spirit of the matron’s lenient instructions that she should always accompany Lieutenant Byers—she found other ways of meeting him during the day. Naomi was therefore in the company of Sam Byers amidst a now-vivid-blue Red Sea when she saw Sergeant Kiernan in overall control of a string of orderlies guiding blinded men on a spin around the promenade. He stepped aside from the procession a moment to speak to her and Byers.

  Sir, he said to Byers, I hope you’re well.

  Who is this? asked Byers with his head cocked in a way which had now become habitual to him. Kiernan introduced himself. He wondered whether the lieutenant would allow him to have a word with Naomi.

  Byers laughed. Pardon me, he said, but I was never used to such courtesy from my platoon.

  So Kiernan turned to Naomi, calling her Sister Durance. He said he had undertaken to produce a newspaper for the ship. Could she write something about the sinking of the Archimedes for him? He said he would publish it after they’d left the Cape and got into safer waters.

  Her very blood revolted at the idea. To put the thing down in ink would be a form of self-exposure and would profane the drowned. She told Kiernan she was sorry but she could not do it.

  Oh, go on, Nurse, said Byers. It should be recorded by somebody. I have been at Rosie Nettice to set something down but she won’t consent.

  Naomi challenged Kiernan. Why don’t you write it?

  I think it will have greater authority coming from a woman. And I remember that you were very conscious throughout. I might have approached Matron Mitchie but I doubt she remembers much. But if you like, I could write it and say how thoroughly brave you were and that you deserve the Military Medal.

  That idea appalled Naomi. She felt rage towards him, that he would play such mean games when it came to the Archimedes.

  I beg you not to do that, she told him. You will never be my friend if you do.

  Yes, he said, chastened. That was a stupid joke. I’m sorry.

  • • •

  There was much wire netting on the Demeter, and as the ship reached the end of the Gulf of Aden the nurses—if stifled by heat in their cabins—were permitted to sleep under distractingly brilliant night skies in a wired-off area at the stern of the promenade deck. They made their way there each evening carrying their palliasses and pillows. Beyond a canvas curtain they disrobed to their slips. There was some conversation here before women trailed off into sleep.

  Drowsy Carradine told Naomi she had met Lieutenant Shaw while he was undergoing a strenuous massage of his upper leg and hip in the room off the officers’ medical ward. He had promised them a stroll around the deck but he wanted to get his leg fit so he did not hold them up. Though she wished him a normal gait, Naomi was pleased to be free of social duties. The literary ones were enough for the moment. Kiernan’s request for an account of the Archimedes had unexpectedly started in her a compulsion to set down the whole business in ink without exaggeration or vainglory. It was an imperative that came from within her—not from Kiernan. She still had time and space for dutiful strolling with blinded or lamed soldiers. But not yet for Shaw’s bush whimsy and flirtatious chat.

  Two days’ sail from the equator—when both the starboard and port decks seemed open to the withering sun, and the tar in the deck became liquid—Naomi went into the officers’ library. Here nurses were permitted amongst all those writing letters home and reading bound volumes of Punch, and it was here she continued her account.

  “The Sinking of the Archimedes,” she wrote after she’d chosen a desk.

  Whether nurses or doctors or orderlies, we had all come to think of the Archimedes as our full-time home. It was also our post of duty from the first time a barge from the beach at Gallipoli came alongside with wounded men on its decks. Some of the
men on the Demeter might even have been nursed on the Archimedes at one stage or another. We were not to know that our ship—which seemed as solid as a town or as a hospital in a city—would soon be taken from us. But not before it had brought many damaged men to Alexandria and to the harbor of Mudros.

  What a delight it all at once was to write of this—even in the plainest terms. But the horses and their terror. How could that be conveyed? And the boyish apathy of those who slipped away and yielded themselves up? And Nettice—the layers of ocean through which she sank and rose. The horror of men hitting the propellers—as if they preferred to be obliterated quickly by the mechanical instead of slowly by the weight of water. Could all this be put down?

  As she went on, Kiernan drifted into her imagination, grabbing on to his copper cube. He had been a full partner in her command of the raft. She remembered having been loud and high-handed. For the torpedo had strangely restored her authority when it took down the Archimedes. (That was something not to be included in the account.) The Archimedes had taught her about her weakness and yet educated her in the nature of the woman she was.

  As she was writing, too, the idea of Kiernan having been admirable—of his proving he’d probably be admirable anywhere he was put—took hold of her imagination. The word itself seemed lodged in her brain for the two days she was engaged on the task. When she later saw him on duty, he seemed to her to be placed in the midst of people with a special distinctness other figures lacked. This sharpness of outline was not a form of infatuation but rather a new version of seeing things. It was more akin to identifying a prophet.

  The captain recommended that they be at the railing to see the coast of South Africa and the approach to Cape Town.

  Naomi and Carradine caught a grimy little train to town. The city was comparable to towns they had known in girlhood—with the strangeness, though, of African women in their swathes of wildly colored cloth selling flowers and fruit from baskets on the footpaths. Black children harried Naomi for money, shouting, Australia! Rich Australia. Give us some.

  They were treated with reverence by shop girls as they browsed in Cape Town’s emporiums.

  A climbing party met up on the quay the next morning with robust young women who were members of the Cape Town mountaineering club. Naomi was a member of the group and suffered a phase of guilt. Given she’d felt obliged to walk the deck with Shaw for more than an hour last evening, she had deliberately chosen an outing Shaw certainly could not embark on. From the middle of the barely woken city—occupied only by black street sweepers—they caught a train which took them around the base of the mountain. The party walked upwards through scrubland and wildflowers, at the end of which great rock platforms presented themselves. Nurses and soldiers were helped upwards by young black men who climbed ahead and reached a hand down with unpredictable strength. They were not permitted to eat or swim with whites, but were essential for scaling a mountain. From massive platforms of rock along the way the local mountaineers pointed out Simonstown and—out to sea—Robben Island, where lepers were kept. At the summit of great, split-apart boulders from which grew wildflowers and shrubs, they looked down at the city and bay and could identify the Demeter—rendered minute by distance. They were exhilarated and distracted to happiness by the utterly physical demands of getting here.

  Guilt made her seek out Shaw in the officers’ lounge that evening. She talked about the climb as if she had done it for its own sake—for its enlivening enthusiasm. She was pleased to see that his face as yet was the face of Shaw the Joker and not of Shaw the Tragic Lover.

  He said, Lucky girl. Of course, I can fall off the donkey with the greatest of ease but I haven’t mastered Table Mountain yet. Spent all morning with massage and exercise. And it pays off, you know.

  She found she liked the ease of his company. He never said anything that would make a person sit up and see the world afresh. He therefore gave her a rest from her own unchosen gravity of soul.

  He said, It’s not as if I’m less a man. A man’s whole life can’t rise or fall by a few inches of bone this way or that. I’ll be able to ride a horse as good as ever if I balance out the stirrups. And my old man has a motor anyhow. But it’s true a stock and station agent ought to be able to ride. You wouldn’t want to take a motor over some of the tracks up there. Anyhow, I’m well set. And I reckon we should change the subject. We’re getting morbid.

  It was to his credit that he thought these modest detours into discussing his condition were morbid. But there was another thing besides the unwillingness to look distress in the face, and that was the inability to see it in the first place.

  Look, you don’t have to hang around talking to me. Like a duty to the sick and the lame.

  No, please. You are a good and kindly friend and despite the wound and all the rest—despite all that—you seem to live in the sun. So you’ll always attract friends. It’s not a duty for me.

  Anyhow, he said, leaning forward and keeping a half-inch or so greater closeness than was preferable, I was off on a jaunt while you were climbing mountains.

  He and others had been taken to Cecil Rhodes’s home and seen the grand library with Rhodes’s bust and his last words, “So little done, so much to do,” and then his bedroom full of lives of Napoleon. Robbie Shaw said he couldn’t get over those words.

  I’ve never heard a better argument for leading an easy life, he told Naomi. I mean, he ran round Africa like a demented being—diamonds here, gold there, land somewhere else. And still . . . he was disappointed.

  This—she could sense—was like an argument for a pleasant life in a Queensland town and children running in the garden. He did not understand that a person had to possess a gift for contentment to take up what he was offering.

  From the decks outside, they could hear the sounds of the Demeter unmooring. No announcement of sailing time had been made earlier. It departed of its own will. There was a rush to the deck now. Robbie Shaw insisted on taking part.

  • • •

  Some nights the nurses dined in their mess. But they were frequently invited to the dining room where Robbie Shaw remained one of the officers who paid them special attention in the Lemnos way. And always that glint—directed at Naomi—that suggested some shared and indefinable secret. At one of the chief tables sat Padre Harris with crosses on the lapels of his uniform. He was a harmless case Naomi had met when she worked in that small section of cabins set aside for the officers with mental concerns. There was a little cabin with a Primus stove in that part of the ship where nurses made tea and cocoa for themselves and the patients. Whenever she gave the Reverend Harris a cocoa he responded with the remotest politeness—one transmitted over a vast and disabling space. Or a display of etiquette remembered by the cells but not by the man. No doubt he had been shocked and became burdened by the men whose hands he’d held for a last “thine is the glory.” His features—which were long and lean—seemed always in false repose. Parsons had a duty to adopt the smugness of possessing the truth on free will and sin and the mind of God. That look seemed long vanished from him.

  There were two other padres on board to serve the Anglicans and Catholics. So Harris was not called upon for any duties and was allowed to take his time to find his way back to sureness and solid ground. In the meantime, he was likely to say extreme things suddenly. There was no small talk in him. One evening Naomi delivered him in the officers’ salon his evening mixture of ethanol and laudanum. Other nurses were similarly dispensing pills and mixtures across the room. And after he had drained the mixture, he told her, Two of the boys from the venereal section have jumped overboard, you know. It’s been kept quiet. But shame, you see. Shame killed them.

  And then he returned again to his remote self.

  Naomi did not know whether this was reliable news or not. At the first chance she asked Carradine whether any men from the syphilis ward had jumped overboard.

  Not that I’ve heard, said Carradine. But then they wouldn’t tell anyone, would they,
in case the idea came to others.

  The next evening Naomi approached the matron of the Demeter and asked the question—whispering it so that the infection did not rise into the air.

  The matron inspected her and then looked at the ceiling. It was a confession in a gesture. Lowering her head she murmured, You must not tell anyone. You might start them off like lemmings.

  Lieutenant Shaw seemed innocent of the information when he asked her to go for a stroll on deck. He wanted the exercise before the Roaring Forties set in. For when they did, unsteady men would need to take to their bunks. It was a brilliant morning of fierce sunlight when they met up. There was much promise of future violent seas in today’s choppy ocean. The wired-off section where the women had slept on torrid nights had been dismantled. A small section of a lower deck—where the worst mental patients exercised—had been cooped in by wire to prevent the disturbed casting themselves over the side.

  Her problem in walking with Robbie Shaw was that she had entered a stage of her existence in which she could imagine the company of men as endurable and more than endurable. Was this the beginning of delusion which would suck her down into drudgery and weariness? Was it the dawn of wisdom?

  Walking on the promenade that morning with Shaw she sighted Padre Harris. He strolled in the fraternal care and company of the uniformed Catholic priest and Anglican minister. He was in the middle of the two. Since—as Naomi knew—his conversation was erratic and prophetic, it was understandable that they tended to talk across him. An impulse arose in Naomi to excuse herself from Shaw and run forward to advise them that—though self-harm was unimaginable in a clergyman—they were coming towards the point in the bows where the steel canted away to become the blade which cut the water. The priest and minister were so involved in some topic now that they moved towards each other behind the Reverend Harris’s back. Whatever they discussed—the Nicene Creed or horse racing—they were distracted and barely ready for the fluid way their friend climbed the crossbars of the railings and stepped onto the polished wood at the top and let himself fall into the Indian Ocean more or less in the direction of the bows. The two padres threw themselves against the railings and shouted, and then one rushed up a companionway to the bridge. Shaw and Naomi and others who had seen it all also ran to the rail and gazed down.