Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Lady Tarlton’s château was decked for Christmas and kept warm at least in patches by army stoves. Naomi and the nurses made up Christmas boxes for each patient—simple things such as chocolate and tobacco, shortbread, a writing pad. Symbols of homely renewal. She had bought Matron Mitchie some lace in Boulogne. This was one of those Christmases Naomi had read of—when joy is a simple achievement. Her sister now wrote to her weekly and Ian at least each second day. Yet even with the Americans now in France, no one dared speak anymore of the coming year as the conclusive one.

Two days after Christmas, Matron Mitchie got a telegram. Her son was in the hospital at Wimereux with gas inhalation and pneumonia. Mitchie struggled upwards without anyone knowing and was largely dressed and—with prosthesis strapped on—ready to travel when Lady Tarlton found her grinding her way along the corridor.

Lady Tarlton knew by now that she should not thwart Mitchie. She pressed an extra comforter on her and adjusted the collar of her coat and summoned Carling. He was to get the Vitesse Phaeton ready to go to Wimereux. When that was settled, Mitchie asked Naomi to come with her. With difficulty Mitchie was helped downstairs and into the vehicle. She had the idea, she told Naomi once they were inside the great car—where even the smell of the aging leather was a cold exhalation—that she might get her son transferred to the Voluntary once his symptoms eased.

When—through an icebound landscape and out on to the coastal road—they reached the hospital at Wimereux, it looked huge and deliberately ugly under a foul sky. Its grounds were littered with patches of dirty snow, the decay of a glittering Christmas snow of two days before. Carling left them in the car as he made inquiries as to where the boy could be found, and then they rolled down the long and frozen streets between huts—no boys brought out to be exposed to the sun today—until they arrived at the gas ward where young Mitchie was located.

Naomi watched for ice patches as she aided Mitchie from the car into the ward. It was at least warm in there. Nurses had insisted on the season and strung tinsel around the walls. They found Private Mitchie with pads dipped in sodium bicarbonate on his eyes. His skin looked reddish and the ward sister mentioned edema in the lungs and a temperature so high that he had been very deluded—even leaving his bed sometimes.

When Mitchie sat beside him he did not seem to hear the scrape of the chair. He had a square face that was slightly smaller than one would expect for the spacious head behind it. Mitchie began stroking his red, gas-stippled hand with one finger. To Naomi his situation did not look or sound good. Oxygen was wheeled up to him and the mask was put on his face and, for some reason—perhaps because of the way oxygen forced itself into him—the rasping of his breath seemed more intense now than it had before. A nurse took the pads from his eyes in the hope he could see and converse. But he seemed to recognize nothing.

When the young ward doctor came around, Mitchie identified herself as the patient’s mother and calmly discussed his case further, raising the matter of a tracheotomy and warm ether vapor being pumped into his lungs by way of it. A nurse arrived while they talked and further bathed his eyes with the pads before replacing them with new ones. He flinched and waved his head. He had presented himself at an aid post later than he should have, the doctor told her, and had done so while already suffering pulmonary distress. The combination must have been an alarming experience. But—the ward doctor said—he had his youth and robustness to fall back upon. This was exactly the sort of medical commonplace Matron Mitchie would have uttered to parents in the same situation as she was now. Naomi noticed she invested her attention in every word as if it would need to be subjected to a later analysis—as if there were subtleties of meaning there.

When the doctor was gone, she had a further conversation with the ward sister, during which she suppressed her cough as best she could. The handkerchief she held before her face was doused with eucalyptus oil and she interposed the saturated fabric between herself and anyone else, in case they read the telltale pallor, rose-petal cheeks, the stain of blood on the lips, and sent her away.

From that afternoon Naomi alternated with one of the English Roses in accompanying Mitchie to Wimereux every second day. Naomi was with her on the third afternoon when Private Mitchie’s temperature began to fall. He was sleeping when they arrived but woke when the nurse came to give him oxygen. Through cracked lips and with breath he did not really have, he said, Big Sister. It can’t be you.

Well, it is, she said, standing up and kissing his blistered forehead. But you know, don’t you, it isn’t Big Sister anymore?

He frowned. There was no complaint there, however.

He said, Force of habit. I’m feeling better.

You weren’t taking care of yourself up there, Mitchie reproved him.

I was, he said and then winked, but I gave the servants a day off and they left the gas on. Buggers!

He laughed—choking—and his eyes watered so that he needed to close them. Mitchie had been laughing with him—crying also—and the shared jollity threatened to strangle her too.

That doesn’t sound good, said the boy, nodding towards her.

Don’t you worry about me, she said. It’s just a winter cold.

He fell asleep again and after a while Mitchie and Naomi left.

The next time they went there, Mitchie asked Naomi—with more apology than Naomi was used to—if she would mind having tea in the nurses’ mess while Mitchie went alone to the ward.

Naomi sat there for an hour and a half, reading Punch and being interrupted by jovial questions from other mostly Australian nurses, who wanted to know about the Château Baincthun—of which they had heard all manner of rumors. That it was a club for officers really, and that it was somehow a loose place. They didn’t mean her, but by and large…

By now Naomi had learned to talk like other gossipy women in situations like this—she became an imitation girl, even though she’d barely been able to handle such impersonation in her earlier life.

I wish it was an officers’ club, she told them, and we were all club floozies. But it’s like any hospital. It has all the normal wards and departments. The work is just as long-winded as yours. We have surgeons, ward doctors, nurses, and orderlies and a pathology lab. All you’ve heard is nonsense. As for Lady Tarlton, the Medical Corps had to build your hospital. But she built the Australian Voluntary out of pure kindness.

Ah, said the women of Wimereux, it’s good to get that cleared up.

And then they began to decry the failure of the conscription referendum, which would have forced new men into the frontline. Naomi knew all the arguments both ways. Could conscripts be trusted? Could the unwilling? And the contrary arguments. The British and Canadians have conscripts. And conscripts would allow our fellows longer to recover and longer leaves. Naomi’s secret argument in response was that all those who arrived would anyhow be fed into the furnace, without any break for the ones already there.

She was rescued by Carling’s arrival at the door telling her that Matron Mitchie was already in the Phaeton and ready to leave.

She followed Carling, the ice crunching beneath their boots. The light was nearly gone, and a high wind rattled the slimmer branches of the leafless trees around the hospital perimeter. She found Mitchie in the backseat sobbing without pause and taking jerking breaths between furies of grief.

He began to choke, she said. It’s unfair. The pneumonia’s gone and now this bloody mustard gas! The doctor came—they used the hot ether device. It was horrifying. Poor boy. Breathing again though.