Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

It will take him a day or two, said Naomi meaninglessly. Then he’ll be all right.

He called out for my mother to tell him he’d be all right. His eyes were searching for her. He didn’t call for me.

Naomi embraced her and pulled her into her own shoulder. He’s still getting used to it, Naomi said.

Matron Mitchie could not however rest there in Naomi’s caress. Coughs racked her, and she turned her head away. The coughing grew cruel—as was the norm for Mitchie. In her desperation she near shoved the eucalyptus handkerchief into her mouth—as if its vapors could choke her disease.

They were partway home, amidst meadows and copses where ice delineated every bare branch. As they entered a dip in the road quite close to the château, Naomi felt the iron fabric of the car take up a new kind of motion, a glissade which the wheels seemed to her to follow—as if the chassis would otherwise tear itself away from its axles. As she watched, the hedges on her right-hand side slid away at angles and almost graciously the limousine turned its nose into the hedge on the left, pitched itself on to its side with a frightful steel whack and then, with a terrible howling and grating, slid endlessly on its side along the road. The glass of the window below her was shattered and road replaced open air, and Naomi hung by a leather strap for an instant before she was flung forward and downwards beyond all control. In her own gyrations she saw Matron Mitchie flying also and at one moment Naomi collided—brow forward—into the heel of Mitchie’s unyielding prosthetic foot. Then Naomi’s head found a sort of permanent harbor in a fixed bolster on the seats that had been opposite her. Far too late the shrieking slide ended. At last—in stillness—she moved her head from between the seat and arm bolster, within which she had been expecting her neck to break, and looked at the skywards door and at that side of the car which had now become the roof. A grudging light was still in the low clouds and she yearned to climb out and greet it. But she turned her head and saw Matron Mitchie. Her feet—the true and the false—were both now unshod. She was head down to the shattered window and—through it—to the road. Carling climbed over into the passenger compartment. His face was bloodied but he was frantic to bring rescue.

He reached down past Matron Mitchie’s disordered skirts and lifted her by the waist. Naomi helped him pull her upwards. There was copious blood, of course. But what was worse was that her brow had been flattened and seemed to have become part of her skull.

Do you think you could climb up there, Miss Durance? Carling asked, pointing to the sky, and push the door open? Yes, use the bolster to stand on.

It was the same bolster that had saved her head.

She dug her remaining boot—the other had disappeared—into a cleft in the wall of upholstery, and turned the door handle and pushed with as much power as she could from such a purchase. But the door was heavy and it reclosed itself.

We need to smash the window, she told him. He lifted and laid down Matron Mitchie according to the car’s new alignment. She seemed limp still, but the damned war gave one a certain faith in medicine, in resuscitation. She climbed into the front seat and came back with the starter handle which was kept in its own cavity. She smashed the window thoroughly with a number of blows. Glass rained down on them. But it was a lesser peril. Then she hauled herself up and out and knelt down on the flanks of the Phaeton.

She had barely positioned herself on the side of the great auto when a military supply truck appeared and behind it an ambulance on its way to the château with a delivery of wounded. They slowed and stopped. Driver and orderlies got out and climbed up onto the wreckage. Naomi’s hands were bleeding and unsteady, so as two of the orderlies clambered up, she surrendered to them the responsibility of getting Mitchie out of the car. She could smell their sweat and their hair oil even as they did it. They lifted Mitchie out and down to two men below. Then they lifted Naomi herself on to the road. The astounding Carling levered himself free and slid down the roof of the Phaeton to the ground.

Oh, he said to the ambulance driver. There’s a lane back there. Go back and turn right and you can get your men to the Voluntary that way.

He came to Naomi wringing his hands and with his face bleeding considerably. He wept. Forgive me, he said. Forgive me. It was ice. It just took the Phaeton away from me.

My God, you’re knocked about, Miss, someone said as the icy atmosphere bit her wounds. She saw Mitchie lying by the side of the road as the orderlies brought a stretcher.

Oh my God, asked Carling. Have I killed her?

No, said Naomi definitely because she couldn’t believe in Mitchie’s death. And, then, contradictorily, It isn’t your fault anyhow.

It couldn’t be thought that with Mitchie’s motherhood unresolved and yet to be savored, she should suffer too lethal a mutilation.

There was an Australian piper at the general hospital in Boulogne. He had learned the pipes as a boy in Melbourne and he preceded the funeral party to the general hospital cemetery. The coffin was carried by six soldiers on leave who had been visiting their girlfriends at the hospital. Most were officers—for what that mattered to Mitchie!

Up the coast—at the other general hospital at Wimereux—young Mitchie was still too ill to process with the others and to honor the woman who had claimed motherhood over him. But a considerable cortege of nurses made their way behind the coffin and the bleating melancholy of the pipes to the pit dug in icy ground for Matron Mitchie. At the head of the procession walked Major Darlington and Lady Tarlton, behind them a brigadier general of the Medical Corps, and behind him Dr. Airdrie and Naomi. Naomi was on crutches from a sprained ankle. Her broken ribs stabbed her as she hobbled over the cold ground, and her head was still bandaged—she had somehow cut it on the glass of the window she’d escaped by. Life was so ridiculous, she knew, that it must be accepted and worshipped as it came. To be saved from the Archimedes as Mitchie was and to find her way back to the world of the walking through all that pain—and then to rediscover her friend Lady Tarlton and a son, and at that point to vanish from the world with her great declaration of motherhood more or less still trailing from her mouth—that was nonsensical! And all just because her skull touched the road during the car’s skid when Naomi’s had been jammed in the upholstery… Well, the absurdity spoke for itself. The disparity between their respective injuries was ridiculous. If God were praised it should not be because there was a plan to the absurdity but because there was a divine lack of one.

A Presbyterian padre read the prayer, the honor guard fired into the sky the Allies still possessed, and then—to some old Scottish dirge, by the piper who roamed in the Scottish manner amongst the graves of the heroes—they all watched Mitchie’s grave filled until the coffin had been covered. With Lady Tarlton and Airdrie, Naomi wept while her side howled with pain from her ribs. Lady Tarlton put a calming hand on her shoulder as she had on Carling’s on the night of the accident. Then she and Major Darlington, Naomi and Airdrie waited there to look at the mound. The brigadier came across to where they stood and confided in Naomi.

I feel great sympathy for you at the loss of your matron. We need all the good ones now. With the Russian Reds out of it, Fritz is coming, you know. Everyone understands that much. Fritz is coming. God knows where and God knows when. But certainly this spring.

He went. Lady Tarlton said, That was almost sensible for a brigadier.