The Daughters of Mars: A Novel

by Keneally, Thomas

  The Fever People Talked Of

  At Corbie one afternoon Sally could feel what might be the onset of the flu everyone was discussing. At some clearing stations they said it had felled—at least temporarily—one out of three, and in a few, half the personnel. Sally suffered a shiver and a leadenness of the joints and throat ache. She took her own temperature and saw it had escalated in a few hours, which was said to be one of the marks of the thing—rapidity of onset. She presented her symptoms to the matron and was taken to a tented ward where twelve nurses who had caught it were tended by other nurses wearing masks.

  One of them said to her, How ridiculous, to have a spring and summer flu when there was no real winter one.

  She suffered high-fever delirium in which she was back in the cold-to-the-core water after the Archimedes. And up swam her mother with an unfamiliar smile and said, I can teach you to let go.

  Mama!

  She was later told she cried that. Were you dreaming about your mother, love? she was asked.

  Her exchange with her mother involved gratitude. You knew I had determined to commit a crime and you died of your own will to prevent it.

  She also encountered Charlie Condon—he was engaged in painting the wall of a trench yellow and wanted her to admire it.

  When she was clearer headed, she saw Slattery wearing a mask. She had come to see her and told her how there had been an advance of some miles and everyone was going partway back towards Deux Églises—the trucks of equipment were loaded again. Amiens and all things holy were saved for now.

  A doctor said, I don’t think you have the flu. Your symptoms are not quite right. Yes, you had quick onset, but you caught something else—something that crawled out of the trenches and struck you.

  She was taken from the contagious ward and put in a separate room in a medical ward just in case, but soon was permitted to walk around—feeling limp perhaps, but confident of revival. A brief postcard came from Charlie to say he was well, and a long-delayed and redirected note from Naomi, which broke to her the news that Ian Kiernan was in prison in England. The length of sentence took her breath away.

  • • •

  The influenza struck Château Baincthun when one of the Red Cross nurses collapsed. The pathology lab run by Darlington had fallen into disuse and throat swabs had to be sent to the overworked laboratory in Boulogne so that the nature of the thing could be confirmed. The nurse was placed in a separate room and declined with a terrible rapidity, dying in the afternoon of the following day. She was a woman exhausted by work and very thin and the common wisdom was that this was an influenza crafted—like howitzers—to take the young in particular.

  She was considered unfortunate, however, because medical reports from elsewhere declared the infection would be widespread but the death rate shallow. Some of the men in the wards—the healthy and the recuperating—caught it. Masks were now compulsory if one was to nurse anyone suffering from the virus. The heresy of Major Darlington was becoming an orthodoxy—at least in this case.

  In those early days of this startling new outbreak, Naomi received a further letter—this one from Melbourne. Its letterhead said “Kiernan and Webster, Importers and Manufacturers, Industrial Machinery.”

  Dear Nurse Durance,

  Our son Ian has earlier written to us concerning your process of betrothal. He admires you to a great degree, and we are pleased that he has met a woman who understands his high purpose and who shares it with him, albeit he is now in prison. He has the right to send one letter a month and filial duty caused him to write the first to us. But he wanted us in turn to write to you and tell you that he declares himself to be surviving well. It is a great pain to us as it must be to you to know where he is, in that dank place—I believe it was founded in the middle of last century when concepts of appropriate punishment were even more drastic than they are now. I am a prison visitor here to Pentridge Prison, and my visits have given me an added perspective—I judge the conditions there and wonder how they apply to Ian’s position. Our chief hope lies in the fact that he has a sturdy soul, that he is endowed with spiritual resources, that he understands he is not a criminal, and that we have formed a group of friends—and indeed Friends—to pursue a letter-writing campaign on his behalf. We make what representations we can to ministers and indeed to the prime minister. But we receive nothing but pro forma letters from civil servants pointing out that, the populace having rejected conscription, the Australian army must be entitled to dispose of the services of its members as it sees fit. I hope the men who write these letters are logical and that therefore when the conflict ends, as it one day must, the shortage of men will no longer be an issue and the idea of punishing Ian for the way Australians voted in those referenda need no longer apply. But for the present he writes, “I think my punishment inevitable in the world as it is at the moment.”

  Ian insisted we reiterate to you his awareness that you are a young woman and that the responsibility of the young is to their very youth and vigor. He is worldly enough to know that you must not feel forced to become an external prisoner serving time parallel to his own. I know you have probably written to him, but it seems that his correct address is now Kiernan, 27537, Millbank Military, London. We are very proud of Kiernan 27537, for we know other young men in the Society of Friends who began as Ian did and who yielded to the pressure of arms.

  Naomi had not yet passed on to her own father the news of Ian Kiernan, let alone news of the betrothal sessions or his imprisonment. She did not choose yet to explain the—by Macleay standards—oddity of it all.

  • • •

  Sally stayed at Corbie with the British nurses until a doctor decided she was well enough to take the rough journey eastwards to start work at Albert, where her normal station had fetched up. There were now—said the walking wounded she took to nursing again—remarkable advances accomplished not over months but sometimes in a day or a few hours. In the mess, the newspapers—when she had time to read them—were full of phrases about thwarting the intentions of the Hun, turning back his hosts, stemming his tides. Was all this true? For there had seemed all that spring and early summer of 1918 to be no lessening of the ambulance stream. The clearing station at Corbie felt as she imagined a factory might when orders could not be fulfilled, however industrious the laborers.

  So on a warm morning she climbed into the passenger seat of an ambulance to go to Vecquemont, to which her clearing station had been moved. The station was held within the arms of a forked road, and was chiefly a place of tents—a nascent institution. After a reunion in the mess she found out that here too some men were suffering the three-day fever—as people now called it. Or else they said the Spanish flu. What the Spanish had done to deserve the honor of that name Sally did not know. A new ward had to be set up to contain soldiers who arrived with it and orderlies who went down with it.

  Be careful, ladies, said Dr. Bright, visiting the mess. Eat well and rest as much as you can.

  But Sally could see Honora, Freud, Leo, the lot of them, were all dazed from working day-and-night–long shifts—interspersed by an occasional six or seven hours of sleep.

  It was perhaps three days later that Leo—blessed always by sunlight and sturdiness and pursuing the firmest line of destiny of any of them—fell on the floor of her ward as if struck by a blow. This was what the vicious fever did, like the attacks at the front—it fulfilled its purpose in an hour. It ambushed and it felled the sufferer according to its own frantic timetable.

  This was considered the worst of luck since the doctors had all decided the influenza was waning. They carried her to the tent which had been set up to contain the earlier victims of the virus. Overnight she declined at a terrible rate into a vicious kind of pneumonia. Someone had whimsically called the first phase of flu—the one Sally had been wrongly suspected of catching—“Three-day Lady.” But this lady raged at a quicker rate. Honora and Freud took turns watching Leonora by day—speaking to her through their masks, taking her temp
erature and pulse, washing her face, promising her recovery. Sally—considered to be recuperating—was advised not to approach the place. In any case, recovery was the one possible outcome for a young, dazzling girl like Leo, a girl whose life had advanced like a life in a novel, whose inevitable marriage—announced two springs ago—had been delayed by evil events, but was designed to be the long story in which this present condition was a mere few pages. Her development from childhood to affections which bloomed in time into a noble union of effectiveness—that was the life intended for Leo. Everyone could sense it. She would get better.

  In Leo’s periods of clarity she remarked that there was pain behind her eyes and in her back. But later the next day her face grew abnormally blue and Honora and Freud saw with alarm a foamy blood appear at her nostrils. Her urine stained her bed and they cleaned her briskly as she moaned and carried on some phantom conversation. Towards evening Major Bright declared that her symptoms had become hemorrhagic—hence the blood now showing at the mouth. She grew comatose and two hours later—while the message of her illness was still on its way to Captain Fellowes—she died.

  As well as grief there was astonishment. This girl whose soul was not written on water but on solid foundations had been unable to keep a hold on the earth. This girl was now attached to the malign Somme eternally. She was carried in a procession of every nurse who could be spared from the clearing station, of every orderly, to a grave over which stood a squad of French territorials and one aged trumpeter—all in their helmets and blue tunics. Dr. Fellowes arrived. He wavered and smelled of whisky and mumbled his thanks for uttered condolences at the graveside. Not only was life short but so was ceremony, and the clearing station now demanded the nurses’ return.

  This sudden, galloping death of Leonora grieved Sally, who could utter only obvious things such as, “Poor, poor girl. So beautiful, so sensible and such a good nurse.” It was an obvious case of the disrespect of viruses and war for every solid plan. In the civil world lives were foreshortened by accidents with horses or falling timber, by tetanus and peritonitis. You couldn’t help but believe—because the belief took away your own fear—that these victims were the lesser characters of the human tale—Mrs. Sorley’s shadowy crushed husband for one. But it was clear now the influenza had combined with high explosives, the machine gun, and the mustard gas to disprove these illusions. And the numbers who saw this awful affliction as the enemy’s work were diminishing. Germans suffering from the influenza were captured as evidence it was willing to be an equal slayer.

  Honora asked Sally one evening in the mess, Do you think this thing is a punishment on us all for allowing the war?

  But most of the women—including Honora and Sally—had had considerable childhood instruction in the doctrine of free will. Man chose what to do. Whatever he chose to do, God tolerated it, but might punish it too.

  Freud asked briskly, If he didn’t step in to stop it, why does he step in only at the punishment stage?

  There was great uneasiness in some about Freud’s opinion. It challenged too much what they had absorbed in childhoods to whose roofs they wanted to return.

  Leo’s unplanned death evoked in Sally a horror at the certainty of Charlie’s death—planned as it was, along with others, by the ambitious enemy. She had always been subject to spasms of despair and confidence on the matter, but now they alternated at a hectic rate. His eminence as a man saved him by some lights and doomed him by others. The extra element of this influenza now struck her with an enhanced alarm for him, from which she could not distract herself by the normal means—working to the point of exhaustion.

  Major Bright called together a gathering of them around the breakfast table and read a letter from the general of the Medical Corps praising them for the “textbook” workings of the station. There was—it seemed—a formula for death rates in stations in relation to numbers of surgeons, doctors, nurses, orderlies. The equation had shone a meritorious light on them. Mathematics emphasized that numbers—and not a lone tremulous soul—were the issue. That too somehow made everything worse.

  July arrived with poppies growing in every spare foot of earth and around the edges of the woods, and news of further developments at the front came to Sally as if they were family tidings—intimate to her. The strangely jubilant lips of the wounded told of a specially and cleverly designed battle fought at a village named Hamel. Here, the Australians and Monash had shown the British and the French how things were done with tanks and aircraft, artillery and infantry—all in the one glorious amalgam. She hoped it was true.

  Time thundered in her head and she began to suffer migraines and yellow blotched vision. Major Bright prescribed a draught of codeine for her. On a day when the station was utterly clear of casualties because some administrative error had told the authorities it was full, or else because of some lull at the front—indeed on a day where no artillery could be heard for extended periods of minutes—Major Bright enlivened them by calling another picnic on the edge of the woods a few hundred yards east of the station.

  It was a wistful affair at first, for Leo was not there, and hers was a dominant and absorbing absence. But the invigorating day and the poppies and hollyhocks and butterflies grasped hold of them soon enough. Nurses and surgeons and ward doctors sat down beside spread bedsheets fresh from the makers and not yet used in the wards and ate all the good French things delivered up to them by a grateful Amiens—cheese, bread, pâté. When hunger was satisfied the question arose of what people would do after the war. Various doctors announced their plans—returning to practices in bush towns or in suburbs. One said he intended to stay in London to study ophthalmology. Bright declared he hoped to return to the operating theatres of Australia where—he claimed—the standards of practice were at least as good as anywhere in Europe or Britain.

  I speak facts, he assured everyone. These are not the words of a jingo.

  Freud’s American boyfriend, Boynton, made no special claims that he’d go back to Chicago—when he had volunteered in early 1915, the senior surgeons at Rush Hospital had been so hostile to the idea that he wondered if he would get his job there back, even though he would return instructed by the experience of war surgery. But there were other places he could try, he supposed, even San Francisco, where his uncle was a physician and a surgeon.

  Without warning—and like a public announcement not of professional intentions but of the end of the alliance with Boynton—and without waiting for all the doctors to define their plans, Freud spoke up. Well, she said, should the war ever end, I think I’ll stay on in Europe. The reports from Germany—all the illness brought about by the blockade—make me think I might go there.

  Dr. Boynton regarded the surface of the sheet on which the picnic items were spread. He knew, Sally assumed, that Freud was wounded in some way and that her goodwill towards him fluctuated. The corners of his mouth turned up in a semirictus that combined regret, bewilderment, and embarrassment.

  I am sick of seeing Europe in this particular way, Freud added. I feel I haven’t seen the true Europe at all.

  Honora surprised everyone—not least Major Bright—by agreeing it was a good idea. It was as if she did not see Freud’s statement in its real terms but only in terms of a desire for peaceful tourism.

  I reckon, Honora went on, that whenever it ends, a woman could live for a year in France on the savings she makes working here.

  A glaze came over Major Bright’s eyes too. Was Honora—after all those demented months of hers—unable to read what Freud meant? He had his career to pursue in Australia—he would not be permitted to pursue it here once there were no more wounds. Professional urgency would not permit him to sightsee for a year in France.

  Freud got up suddenly from the picnic. Thank you, Major, she said. If you will excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.

  They tried to start a conversation again in normal tones, but it could only sputter along as Freud descended the slight slope which led to the nurses’ tents.

&
nbsp; Boynton begged them to excuse him soon after.

  Sally had made no pronouncements on her own future. If Leo lacked one, all the more might she. So an instinct of reticence—which would have kept her quiet in normal times—prevented her all the more now. The young wounded who reckoned the enemy was dished might carry a sense of communal triumph to the grave with them. Yet she could not feel it herself. And if it did ever end, she thought, I might simultaneously stop breathing. Only the chance to see the artifices of paint in Charlie’s company gave her a glimmer of the afterlife.

  As a mist rose, the Ford and Sunbeam ambulances arrived, full of young Germans—dirty faced and bleeding, deflated and staring. The field-gray somber walking wounded of the enemy advanced with extreme caution and—as if trained in medical etiquette—soberly visited friends in the resuscitation ward and on nurses’ orders held up bags of plasma and saline and looked down at their sallow comrades whose martial ambitions were reaching a close.

  • • •

  A letter from England from Captain Constable—the defaced soldier—had chased Sally all over Picardy and now caught up with her.

  I have the dressings on my face from what the surgeons say was the last of my reconstructions. What emerges once they’re off will be the final version of me from now on. Naturally I hope to find out what that is and discover it is not as bad as all that. There is hope for all of us now, says the matron. My bandages off will be a sign to her—part of a great global scheme in her head. Though I doubt the future of my dial is a matter upon which princes and prime ministers and parliaments will spend much time.

  Despite the complaining flavor of my words, I think always of the boys who’ve been dead two years here and there—all without the option of wondering how things will turn out. How is that Slattery girl I knew? I hope you can tell me she is still young and fresh and impudent.

  Well, enough! Enough, I hear you say and a fair thing too. Whatever is waiting behind the dressings I’d happily show you and her because I know you’d recognize me. Others might have a harder time of it.