The Daughters of Mars: A Novel

by Keneally, Thomas

  Beneath the bombers they ran across the tracks and threw themselves into the trenches. They clung close. Slattery and Leonora were beside Sally, who had a brief view of Freud along the trench. Freud was hunched yet somehow looking detached from the peril. While the bombs could scare the deepest atoms within Sally, there was a part of Freud that could not be alarmed.

  Above them were sounds more vast, she was sure, than anything that had been in their universe before—enmity that made the walls of earth shudder like a land in earthquake.

  Their stocks of thunder depleted, the Gothas at last vacated the air. There were now hollow noises of lamentation from the earth above the trenches, and they climbed out, chastened. Major Bright and other doctors were traveling round in a spot where there were wounded and a mess of dead. Soldiers and men and women lay like winnowed stalks. Inspection showed Sally and the others that a mother and two small children—laid out neat as if for burial—had been killed by concussion. A regimental sergeant-major crossed the lines—a man still in control—and said the captain regretted to inform them that the rail line had been destroyed just a few hundred yards west.

  I’m afraid that you’ll have to leave your luggage in the ticket office, said the sergeant-major, which I’ll lock. Then you’d better take off by foot.

  They presented themselves to Bright and asked to be permitted to move amongst the injured. The curse was they had no equipment. Sally attended uselessly to a hemorrhaging boy with badges which declared Staffordshire Light Infantry. Some tried to treat with handkerchiefs and other oddments those soldiers who had been hit by shrapnel. In a kind of exasperation and clearheadedness Bright ordered them to get going and threw their bags into the ticket office at the station. They set off along the line—some with hand luggage and some with nothing. They were no longer separate from the beaten troops and the fleeing French.

  They made relatively fast time the first mile and then—in a laneway by the rail—there appeared a string of five lorries, rocking over the mud which a few genuine spring days had mercifully hardened. All the nurses were to board them, said Bright. Light was fading as they climbed up as clumsily as they liked. No one expected athleticism from them now.

  Many fell asleep under the canopies of the trucks and were woken after a while by stiffness. They alighted into a cold spring night at a crossroads where two British casualty clearing stations stood. The matron divided them into two parties and half were sent to the station north of the road to crowd in with the nurses there and half south.

  Sally and the others sent to the south side waited in the nurses’ mess as a brisk British matron had orderlies carry palliasses and blankets for them into the women’s hut. As they waited they washed as well as they could, made cocoa and ate bread. Then they went into the hut—amidst the bedsteads of the British girls—and found their places on the floor and slept.

  In the morning as they went from the tent to help in the wards, they saw a new battalion marching in the most splendid order down the road towards Albert. So used were they to disorder by now that the sight of hundreds of men advancing by company seemed a forgotten spectacle. The first time they had seen men move with more than training intentions had been in Egypt in eons past. Those men were immaculate and unsullied and accompanied by music. The nurses thought the music had been crushed by now. But these men gave off a similar air of solidity both as a mass and at the core of each component soul. British nurses standing amongst the huts and tents were telling them, It’s your Australians!

  The fact that these were of her tribe and looked unflustered seemed like a curative for the Allied retreat and evoked in Sally and the others a primitive urge for celebration. Hope insisted on rising as it had in the ill-informed spring of 1916. They started hauling out handkerchiefs to wave, unaware for now of this being a commonplace of war and a means to stoke martial purpose. They went running down towards the road swinging them—cheering ecstatically as if this column were not simply a fragment of an army or a mere stone thrown into the maw of a gale but a total answer.

  Leonora yelled, Gidday, boys! to them, and the men said, Crikey, it’s Australian nurses. And men roared out that they were going to go and get the dingoes. That they’d show Fritz he shouldn’t have left his dugouts. They’d come down from Belgium (following routes Charlie might have had some role in reconnoitering) to do that. This energy and ferocious purpose they gave off sent the women into a further delirium. Yesterday—the pain of being refugees and powerless. Today—this, the antidote. Now there were trucks, and another battalion, and Australians yelling, Fini retreat, girls! They looked so fresh because they had just left the railway and were full of marching. And if they were maniacs and spat in the face of reality, then theirs was a mania necessary for the morning.

  The last of the men and some horse-drawn guns vanished down the road. The madness waned in the nurses and there was sudden wistfulness. Had they seen mere chaff for the furnace? They drifted back across the meadow to present themselves again for use in the wards.

  That afternoon many of the English nurses were pulled out towards Doullens but Sally and the others were pleased to be permitted to stay. No ambulances arrived, however, to deliver wounded—only ambulances to take yesterday’s away. And the next morning—despite the dazzling gestures of advance they had seen the previous day—they were ordered back again and packed washed and half-dry undergarments in their valises, embarrassed for their unbathed bodies. But all their patients had at least been cleared off to the rear or to the cemetery across from the road to town—placed just as the one at Deux Églises had been.

  • • •

  Their new station at Corbie shared a crossroads with a British casualty clearing station. Easter had come and gone—swallowed by the emergency. At a church parade in memory of the landings at Gallipoli three years before, an Australian padre declared that this year Easter had a special meaning, given the deliverance of the British Army from annihilation due—he stressed this—to the heroism and Christlike self-sacrifice of those two Australian divisions who were thrown into the hole—sixty thousand or more of Christendom’s finest young men. Even Sally found him irksome in his trumpeting of Antipodeans as saviors of lesser beings. It seemed a simpleminded version to those who had nursed the survivors of almost undifferentiated battles. Behind her, Sally heard a well-modulated English girl mutter, Vainglorious old fool!

  But above all, points about who had died and who had fled and who had stood—although the latter had certainly been the Australians they’d seen march by—seemed for the moment beneath arguing about. For this was not the hour for being prideful. They knew the Germans could still come and had not been infallibly stopped. They were themselves just ten miles from Amiens. That told you something of the enemy’s recent territorial success. Besides, the war was not a football match. Points were not allotted. Even in success, points were lost.

  At the mess table in Corbie a retreat-exhausted Honora Slattery told Sally she did not believe the rumor—though many people did—that the new influenza striking orderlies and nurses and sending men to the rear had been dreamed up in an enemy laboratory. This was to give them too much credit, she declared.

  Just the same, she said further, a woman can’t help wondering . . .

  It seemed now that Major Bright had been forgiven by Slattery for tearing her away from her wounded at Deux Églises—prisoners though they may have become. Slattery confided in Sally that she and Bright now “had an understanding.” He was a disbeliever but a better fellow than most believers, and her parents would just have to lump him—the fact that he wasn’t some rosary-saying, beer-guzzling, bet-laying RC fool from the slums.

  Freud—when told—took the news with her air of wise distance.

  What, precisely, do you mean by “an arrangement”? she asked with an unnecessary coldness.

  It means, said Honora, determined not to answer her plainly, that if there’s ever peace, I’ll wait until the prison camps and the hospitals have been emptied and
if Lionel has not been found . . . Then, we’ll see. That’s the arrangement with the major.

  Freud said, My God! He’s a patient man.

  Would you want any other kind? asked Slattery. Is your American a patient man?

  Sometimes, said Freud. It all grinds along. It is a hard thing to sustain enchantment. Particularly with a difficult woman like me.

  Sally began to wonder if Freud would ever recover from Lemnos. She achieved the appearance of steady purpose for long periods and—apparently—in the operating theatre too. But on other days she swung between content and cold mistrust at a pace no one could have considered normal. Yes, it was established. Her surgeon Boynton was a patient man.

  • • •

  At the Australian Voluntary the crisis at the front was visible in the men who arrived by ambulances. The hospital had at a stretch held two hundred and fifty, but now the demand brought in over three hundred. The reported Australian success had not been bloodless—the cocksure Australians the nurses had seen marching that operatic morning, brimful of self-belief, had paid by the thousands. Naomi supervised treatment in the preoperative ward on more than a dozen fractures, face and thigh and even serious thoracic wounds, and amputations which had turned gangrenous or septic and needed to be prepared for surgery. A new young military surgeon and Airdrie worked in the theatres, along with one of the ward doctors anxious for surgical experience and showing none of that nicety of conscience or concern about it that Hookes had once shown.

  On a hectic morning towards what would prove to be the end of the military crisis, Lady Tarlton came looking for Naomi and found her directing the Australian nurses and the English Roses. As ever, when she arrived Lady Tarlton had an earnest demeanor. She had taken no more time since her consolatory drink with Naomi to lament Major Darlington. But without Mitchie—and in the light of their combined loss of their men—they spoke to each other like confidantes. Lady Tarlton was not immobilized by sadness and none of her fervors had stalled.

  The name of the commander of the newly assembled Australian Corps, she told Sally, a huge one of five divisions, has just been announced. This general is planning to visit the general hospital in Boulogne on his way from a meeting in London back to the front.

  I knew him in Melbourne, said Lady Tarlton airily. He’ll be tolerant if I raise the vexed matter of Lieutenant Kiernan’s imprisonment. And, Naomi, we should be strong in the matter—even to the point of offending our hosts at Boulogne.

  After his trial Ian had been sent across the Channel and was serving his sentence in Millbank Prison in London with other Australian miscreants and supposed deserters. Millbank lay on the dank edge of the Thames. It sounded to Naomi a cage for pneumonia as well as harm dished out by guards whose natures had been changed by the place. It was always a solace therefore to be associated with Lady Tarlton’s determination. Sentiments such as “even to the point of offending our host” gave Naomi a sweet sense of alliance.

  Can we spare the time?

  Appoint the sister in charge of the English Roses. You and I are not indispensable, you know.

  On the morning of the general’s visit, Lady Tarlton appeared in the front hallway of the château in a full-length fawn coat over her best cerise dress and her long, thin-ankled button-up boots. She looked superb—a true force—and there was no trace of the rejected woman about her. Naomi, of course, wore her dull go-to-town uniform. They traveled to Boulogne in the now faded, dented, imperfectly repainted but functional glory of Lady Tarlton’s vehicle and arrived in time to walk along the graveled paths and visit the grave of brave Matron Mitchie. Where was her son now? In England, they hoped. Or along the Somme or Ancre Rivers somewhere—engaged endlessly in repulsing the enemy, as all the Australian divisions were said to be.

  Carling drove them along the familiar road—going slow in the sump where Mitchie had been killed—and to the outskirts of the huge general hospital. The administration building had put out all the flags and bunting for the arrival of the Australian commander. The large shape of a kangaroo done in white pebbles served as a centerpiece of a bed of gravel in the square. Beside this great white image of a marsupial the matron-in-chief welcomed Lady Tarlton—with an air which said she wished there had been some way of stopping her being there. The matron was torn between showing contempt for Lady Tarlton’s well-advertised insistence upon maintaining the vanity of her own private hospital, and the fact that this was British nobility and the wife of a former governor-general of that Commonwealth in whose name they were lined up today around the dominating kangaroo. As they aligned themselves with the honor guard at the main entrance, Lady Tarlton murmured to Naomi, He’s Jewish—you understand—and at the same time a child of Prussians. He was an engineer and very high in the militia and the university senate when my husband and I were in Melbourne. His name escapes me. Excuse me a second.

  And she turned to the matron-in-chief who stood beside her and asked, Matron, could you refresh my memory? The general’s name again, please?

  General John Monash, the woman declared coldly. Milady.

  That’s it, said Lady Tarlton to Naomi, the matron listening in. That’s the name. Monash. Now at his command are more than one hundred and twenty thousand of the finest men on earth! Oh yes, some of them are rough-hewn or not hewn at all. But trees that stand. That’s it. Bravo, General Monash!

  The general’s automobile entered the gates and orderlies with rifles presented arms. Young nurses saluted because here was their chief. Their chief and his men—it was said—would lead the armies of salvation and redeem the known world and avenge the sad retreat only now ending. Monash’s men—it was believed especially by Australians—could save the bacon, the beef, the kingdoms of the west. This was the man who had in the emergency driven back the Germans through Villers-Bretonneux. No maidenly yell of approbation could be too strident for him.

  He dismounted his vehicle—a middle-aged man heavy in the hips and yet somehow youngish and crisp in movement. He introduced himself to the chief medical officer and then walked along the line of nurses attended by the matron-in-chief. Soon he reached Lady Tarlton. Lady Tarlton! he said with enthusiasm, as they wrung each other’s hands. You and your husband were so generous to me and my wife in Melbourne. I’ve heard of your Australian hospital. I’m afraid that like me it attracts its critics. But since I feel I know you, I say, good for you! Yes, good for you!

  I might as well tell you, stated Lady Tarlton, my efforts seem to be an embarrassment to many. Enthusiasm is my great fault.

  The general said, If that were a disease, I wish others would catch it. I wish it was of an epidemic scale. As for embarrassment, you know that I am a source of embarrassment too. A mere citizen soldier. And . . . well, the other thing. And on the other thing, I must again thank you for the invitations to Government House.

  She introduced him to her matron—as she called Naomi. An interesting and complicated face, Naomi thought, an activity behind the eyes and an engagement in all around him—in her as well. None of the oafish oblivion of Lord Dudley.

  If you have a moment, said Tarlton in a lowered voice, I must ask you about Miss Durance’s fiancé. A medical supply officer, he has been imprisoned for refusing to take up a rifle. And yet he is a Quaker and made his pacifism clear when he enlisted. I am sure you of all people could not stand by and see such religious persecution.

  Naomi could see—from a visible jolt in the general’s eyes—that he was not too pleased to be distracted by such a reproach on a ceremonial visit.

  Why do you say that I of all people . . . Are you referring to my Jewishness? If so . . .

  No, no, not that. I mean you as a citizen and a progressive.

  Naomi decided to care little for the embarrassment of generals.

  My fiancé, General Monash, has been imprisoned in Millbank because he is a member of the Society of Friends and served the Medical Corps and has done so since Gallipoli. To be of service in that regard was his motive for enlisting. But the order
that he take up a rifle . . . that was something he could not consent to.

  There was a darkness about the general’s brow. You realize we can’t have people making choices, he told Lady Tarlton as if she were the relay point for Naomi. You must understand above all that our French and English brethren are outraged by our leniency towards our own men when they are so stern towards theirs. I have to say, Lady Tarlton, I wish this matter had been raised in another forum.

  Lady Tarlton said, If I were sure, General, that we would share some other forum, then I would choose to raise it then rather than now.

  I plead with you, General, said Naomi, aware that she and her patron Lady Tarlton were sabotaging the event but willing to do it if she could simply by those means engrave Ian’s case on the general’s memory. This is a man—Ian Kiernan—who has done good service and is no coward, but a sincere Quaker.

  You said Quaker already, the general murmured with some coldness.

  May we write to you? asked Naomi. Will you remember us?

  Oh, said the general, I think it’s pretty well assured I shall remember you.

  Then, thank you, said Naomi. Thank you earnestly, sir.

  Yes, thank you, Colonel . . . no, I’m sorry, General, said Lady Tarlton, with her laugh a little like a shaken chandelier. When we first met, you were . . .

  Yes, said the general, a militia colonel when you first met me, Lady Tarlton. Things change and wars elevate us to heady heights.

  And I rejoice in your appointment, General, asserted Lady Tarlton.

  Thank you. Excuse me.

  And he moved away to visit the rest of the line of nurses.

  Lady Tarlton turned to Naomi. I think we did very, very well, she whispered—though the rest of the reception line were at least mystified at why the renowned general had spent so much time with the eccentrics of the Australian Voluntary. The matron-in-chief wore a face drained of all hope. This was to be a meritorious, pleasant, smooth day. She walked on fixedly by the general’s side. But she knew the occasion had been plundered.