They tell me, Charlie murmured, chewing, that you and Honora were on a ship that was sunk.
We were fortunate, she said. And it seems a very long time ago.
What is it all like? When everything starts. The other fellows don’t even try to tell a person.
They can’t tell you. It’s like a new world where there aren’t any words. As for me, I’ve only worked around the edges. But even I can’t explain . . .
I was ready to come away in November 1914 and got scarlet fever—had a dreadful time talking doctors into letting me get here now, but of course a person thinks all the time, What is it really like? And even—what it’s like when men die around you?
I can’t remember screams, she said. By the time they got to us on the ships or the island, most of them were quieter than you would think they should be. Morphine might have helped. If they’re our patients, we see them go—sometimes it’s hemorrhage. But twenty paces away no one in the ward hears anything.
You must think my questions are absurd, he admitted.
No, she hurried to tell him. I would ask them myself if I were where you are. But don’t forget pneumonia and typhoid and dysentery. They can bring a fellow low too.
Thank you for being so frank, he said, his head on the side. The men aren’t as frank as that.
Well, it’s true you seem to be a different person when these things happen. Not your daily self. You’ll find that. I wasn’t my ordinary self when the ship sank. I was another creature. And that creature finds it hard to explain things.
There was something fragile about him which made her remember the war shocked, the men of bad dreams and waking fears. Was it the fundamental delicacy of his face? His passion for the ancient sketching?
Suddenly he was on another tack. Have you ever looked at the black fellows? he asked.
What do you mean by looked? she asked.
Well, I mean, taken a chance to have a good gaze at their faces?
I don’t think anyone does that, she admitted. I haven’t. Gazing? People don’t gaze at them. Sometimes it’s politeness—they’d be embarrassed to be gazed at. And fair enough—some of it’s fear too. Our fear. And, I mean, the blacks at home seem a pretty desperate lot, don’t they? And that puts us off looking at them.
Well, I used to gaze at them when I was a kid. I got in trouble from grown-ups for it. I played with our abo laundry woman’s kid in the yard in Rudder Street. I wasn’t at my gazing stage then. Gazing came later. This building . . .
He nodded his head towards the pyramid.
They’re older than this, you know. The Aborigines. You see it in the face. If I find the courage, I might go one day and negotiate man to man with one of them and try to sketch his face. They say at the art class it’s easier to do if you go to the desert—one of the teachers has done it by train and camel. It’s easier to gaze at them there than it is at home. But I’d like to gaze at them at home. Where they’re not romantic figures. Where they’re living in misery.
The mention of art teachers serious enough to penetrate the interior seemed to suggest to her that these were no fly-by-night art classes he attended. She asked him what school it was.
It’s run by an artist, Eva Sodermann. She was worried when the war started she might get interned. But we all petitioned the government. Up to the time I left, it had worked. Anyhow, one of the men who comes there, who teaches with Eva, quite a jaunty sort of fellow—he studied in Paris. Even sold a few paintings to the Royal Academy in London. We used to look at him in awe. You know what he told us? All the paintings he did in Melbourne in the 1890s . . . no one bought them. Now they have. But he still has to earn his bread teaching. So . . . God help the rest of us.
I wish you’d brought your sketchbook with you though, she said.
Oh, he said, I’m no good at it in company. I won’t mind showing off when I succeed. But on the way I need to fail and I like to do that bit privately.
But I wouldn’t be critical, she assured him.
You should be critical, that’s the point. There’s no art even at my level unless people are critical. Art doesn’t exist until someone says, That’s good. Or else until someone says, That’s on the nose. I’m too proud to be on the nose in public. As an artist I’m still tentative, even if I talk as if I know what I’m doing. In fact, I was a law student taking a bit of a break to go to an art school. And I’ll probably study law again if no one buys my work. Or at least if no one employs me as an art teacher.
I hope you come to trust me well enough, she said, that you’ll feel free to sketch in my presence.
The even, too innocent smile again. That’s a wonderful thing to say, he told her. When I rally the confidence, I’ll sketch you. Even if I’m not one of those fellows who gets popularity by sketching their friends halfway well. But I’ll study you unawares and do the sketch later. No sense in sketching someone who knows she’s being sketched. It just encourages the subject to put on airs. I want humans in the moments they’re unaware of their grace.
The compliment shot past her eyes and was gone—just as their sudden discomfort wanted it to be. The glare of early afternoon began to hurt the eyes. The sky was vacant of all screening devices, whether sand or cloud. They went and looked at the flat-roofed tombs around the pyramid and made a few investigations of their chambers. Less worried about being lost beneath the vanity of an old emperor, she saw more clearly why the frescoes were marvelous and why they might evoke a kinship between Condon and their makers.
British trucks coming up from Aswan could be expected to roll through Sakkara from three onwards. Charlie and Sally packed their satchels and fetched the ponies and left King Djoser for good.
The West Encountered
Easing back into the velvet and leather of First Class, Leo said, I pity the boys back there in Third with their wooden seats.
On a long train, the nurses occupied perhaps no more than two carriages—a living and breathing buffer between the officers’ carriages forward and the harsher ones back there where the masses of infantry and gunners and sappers, stretcher bearers and orderlies rode. Everyone had been rushed away from the old port of Marseille—from the sight of offshore Château d’If with its Count of Monte Cristo associations and from the city’s dominating cathedral, as well as from other more profane possibilities which could have created the problems of Australian discipline that Cairo had. Nearly all their ship from Egypt was—within an hour of landing—on a train bound for the more serious north of France. Heading north through unafflicted sections of France they gawked at their railway squares and church spires, at their mairies and hotels with the tricolor flying. The train pulled into sidelines to let other trains pass loaded with French soldiers—poilus—in their blue-gray uniforms. In the Rhône Valley—the rail running amidst ploughing farmers—nurses from farms exclaimed about the chocolate-colored soil that promised fertility. There were gray fortified medieval towers the farmers took for granted but which to girls from communities shallow in time riveted the eye and the imagination.
On the station at Arles, French girls gave crucifixes from large baskets—one for every passenger who would accept it. The wives of the town offered apples and oranges and wine at the carriage windows.
They sat in a siding for four hours near Avignon and saw beyond a bridge the heights of its papal palace and its skirt of humbler buildings obliquely visible across fields violet with dusk. At Lyons they queued with soldiers at the station’s taps with the water jugs from their compartments and a wash basin loaned by the porter. Sally filled one of those decanter-like water bottles and stood up and looked straight into the face of Karla Freud.
I saw you, said Freud in a tight sort of voice. She carried a decanter too. It was exactly as if she was continuing an unhappy conversation begun on Lemnos. How are you?
Karla! cried Sally with a complicated joy. She put her decanter on the ground and hugged her.
Ah, said Freud, you missed me, did you?
Yes, of course we did
, Sally claimed but already she felt guilt. It was a revelation: they had tried—in fact—to forget her.
I wouldn’t have known you gave me a thought. No letters. No visits in Alexandria.
Freud was located far beyond complaint and blame though. The accusation was sad but absolute.
They didn’t give us time, Sally told her. They sent us straight across to Heliopolis.
She knew she was equivocating.
Yes, and I suppose mail didn’t occur to you. May I use the tap, if you don’t mind? There’s a bit of a queue behind.
Sally moved away and picked up her decanter. She waited for Freud to be finished. Honora and Leo appeared and also waited to talk to Freud. That was it, they couldn’t help solemnly waiting. And solemnity was the wrong mode.
Freud finished filling her own decanter and walked to where they stood. Honora and then Leo kissed her on the cheek.
We had no idea where you were, Leonora claimed.
You must have really searched, said Freud. She let them stew a while. Then she said levelly, I know how it is. You thought rape was catching. I was as good as dead. Don’t worry. I might do the same as you, mutatis mutandis. You didn’t know what to say and I’d probably have resented anything you did say.
Sally said, You’re absolutely right. We were a disgrace.
Naomi writes though, Freud told them. Naomi always has the right word. But anyhow, they put me in a British hospital in Alex. It was good. I could start from square one. So forget what I said.
But still—in the midst of all the milling around the tap—it astonished Sally that she had not thought to chase up Freud; that she had considered her at an end.
What I won’t stand for, said Freud, is if you start any gossip about me here. I’ll hate you for that all right.
What sort of girls do you think we are? asked Honora.
Well-meaning. So were the generals at Gallipoli.
Oh, I don’t bloody well know what to say, Karla, Honora continued. But at least the fellow’s dead . . .
That makes everything all right, doesn’t it? asked Karla with an extraordinary and withering combination of forgiveness and irony. Look, I’ve got to take this back to the girls. But I might see you somewhere. Don’t worry—I mean it. We’re all stupid bitches on our day.
She raised and tapped the decanter. They went back to their carriage too since the engine was making head-of-steam noises.
After the train moved out again they awoke often—it was frequently sidelined and being static was what kept them awake most, with thoughts of their neglect of Freud. As morning came they looked out from the moving carriages across flat fields where old men dug. Bluebells and irises could be seen pocking the edges of copses and promising a vivid destination. Nearing Paris, though—they could even sight the Eiffel Tower—they veered away towards Versailles and looked at the vanishing promise of the great city. They assured each other they’d get there soon.
At some stage—while Sally slept—the men started to leave the train. She woke to see long lines of them shuffling onto double-decker buses—the first such contraptions she had ever seen. Were the men to be carried by bus straight to the front? After they had gone, the nurses and orderlies were asked to descend and climb on old-fashioned buses to be taken to a number of destinations they had been allotted. They were allocated to Rouen, but saw Freud climb on a separate bus, which someone said was bound for the British hospital in Wimereaux.
The fairly plain little villages they passed through—the doors of houses crowding to the edge of the narrow road—lacked the charm of the awakening fields. They were no longer, in any case, in a mood to be fanciful. They were willing to believe that the people who lived here were as plain as the people of Dungog or Deniliquin. Sally received small thrills of difference at the sight of a bakery in a square or of crossroads Virgins and crucified Christs in their little shrines. Even over there eastwards—on the way to the front—Christ and the Virgin obviously presented themselves village by village to the French soldiers as a small promise of protection and another scale to a man’s armor. Nurses drowsed and shifted irritably by the misted windows of the bus.
After rolling through a half-rustic suburb of Rouen and glimpsing the dull river—the same Seine which ran through Paris—they entered some ornamental gates with a stone arch proclaiming in metal script Champs de Cours de Rouen and—on a sign beyond the gates—Hippodrome de Rouen. Their bus ground past a few stables on which soldier carpenters were working. They saw before them then a metropolis of huts and marquees, and were delivered to the open yard beside an assembly of these huts marked with signs and corps and divisional colors and a kangaroo and emu. Orderlies—already standing with clipboards in hand—met the bus and directed nurses to their tents down firm-surfaced roads lined with sandbagged walls to waist height. Birdwood Street, they might say, number seventeen. They would point to a veritable street—with a pole and a name on it, as in a township. All the streets were named after an Australian general, and one of them after the director of medical services. And in the midst of a vast racecourse—with the distantly glimpsed railings of the course and a brick wall marking the perimeter of the medical town—was the Australian general hospital.
As Honora, Sally, and Leo found their way down General Bridges Street, a number of men came out of a tent—their faces bandaged, their arms in slings—to watch them. They were Tommies. Honora waved her hand not occupied by a valise towards them with the ease of a spoken-for woman which Carradine had once shown. So they found their tent. To enter beneath the canvas did not feel at all like entering the canvas of Lemnos. The beds looked better. Each woman had a cupboard to hang her clothes. Pleasant orderlies brought their heavier luggage in and told them where their mess tent was. In the mess tent were apples and porridge—or a decent stew and fresh bread. So now—they decided—they were located in the kindly stream of a good supply system. They received the standard lecture on flirtation’s limits. They were to use proper titles when speaking to matrons—not least because it shocked the British Red Cross volunteers if they didn’t. They would notice that most of their patients were—for now—Tommies and Kilties and Taffies and Paddies.
After their meal they strolled back, restored, along the hospital roads and said hello to Frenchmen and Britons to calls of, “Wotcha, luv” and “Quelles jolies Australiennes” and so on.
Sally was sure they were all still thinking in part of Freud and their stupidity in her case. Yet they devoted themselves to issues such as whether the stove in their hut needed to be lit. Honora declared it was no colder than a mild winter’s night at home. Then they slept.
When they awoke late that spring afternoon they gradually became aware that the patient capacity of this city of a hospital at Rouen racecourse was two thousand—and it was a hospital of beds, not just mattresses. As a sign of its seriousness there was a well-set-up dispensary from which in an orderly manner drugs were given out on doctors’ prescriptions, as happened in the civil world. This too—as the establishment prepared itself for a war-ending spring slaughter—was a sign of good order. The conclusion the women slept under was that this French affair was a better-ordered war altogether than the hit-and-miss affair of Gallipoli.
When they rose they reported to the reception ward where men were brought on arrival at Rouen. The first ambulances to arrive were full of German wounded. Some came in by the rail spur which ended near the gates of the racetrack. Others arrived by motor ambulance—even by the barges which docked at the quay on the river. Sally was impressed that the more severely wounded Germans were carried in on stretchers which proved to have a blanket not only over the patient but underneath. Femur wounds were splinted and amputees draped over by protective canopies. Many of the supposed enemy wore only tatters of gray uniform and some of them entered the hospital tents on crutches. Others already wore smocks which were marked with the letters “POW.” Many of them ridiculously retained their military caps—those with peaks for officers, and those without for
men, and the little button of German colors in the center on the front. It was hard to believe in their culpability. Sally nonetheless could not help studying the faces of the enemy for signs of difference. She gave up the effort as the medical demands of moving bodies for washing and dressing took over. Flesh was flesh.
In the morning a matron called them together in the mess and—using a compliant British Tommy and one of his number of shrapnel wounds for illustration—demonstrated how to irrigate wounds with the newly appointed official disinfectant and method called Carrel-Dakin. A Frenchman—peppered by a bursting shell with extensive but non-fatal wounds—was also brought in on a stretcher for them to practice irrigation on. He lay without complaint throughout the demonstration smoking cigarettes provided by orderlies.
Their sleep that afternoon was broken by the cries of Australian carpenters and of German captives in “POW” smocks who worked as their offsiders. Language incomprehension added to the noise both made as they hammered and sawed in the evening light and tried to convert the stables for thoroughbred racehorses into wards.
The matron-in-chief now called the ward doctors and nurses together and addressed them. The spring and the summer and their battles were on the way and there was something those from Lemnos or Alexandria, Cairo or Heliopolis had not seen yet. There was gas. Yes, they would be taken on a tour of the gas wards.
This was a dimension of barbarity that had not existed on Gallipoli and had been undreamed of in the Archimedes. The nurses were required to take notes on the variety of gases, and all this felt to Sally like a forewarning that there was an even less contained savagery in France than there had been in Lemnos. An unease kept the palms of her hands wet as the matron enlarged on the array of afflictions contained under the general term.
A chemical gas recipe—said the matron—devised by this or that German gas officer is projected towards our poor fellows in a cloud from a line of cylinders. Or else shells full of a recipe are fired by batteries and land with a thud amongst them. We have our own chemical officers since the Germans forced us to retaliate in kind—they began the practice by firing grenades full of tear gas almost as soon as the war started.
The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Page 27
