Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

She drifted off and looked across the room blankly for a while.

So that’s the official story, she continued. But there is a real story. And it’s a sadder one. But we are straying too far from your grief.

No, please.

Be assured—we are just beginning our campaign in regards to your man.

But you did say “sadder”…?

Yes. To men in power any woman who tries to deal with them on their terms is ex officio mad. My husband thinks me mad and actually evinces the sympathy of his fellows over me for going native in Australia, for never having the entirely appropriate dress, for failing infallibly to tolerate the primates who pass for society’s leaders as he envisages them. So there you are—I’m announced as mad. I’ve been mentioned in dispatches for it a number of times. And so, since I’m madly importunate with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and particularly towards Major Darlington’s poor upset cousin, the major suffers, you see. They talk about how poor old Darlington took up with the mad woman. After showing such promise! According to them, I am supposed to have been certified in Australia and spent time in a colonial asylum! And here is a man with research he wants accepted by a larger world, with valuable arguments about sepsis—a brilliant man. Yet everyone he talks to is thinking not about his argument, but about his mad lover. You see… And that was why he went. He had to choose between eminence and me.

Even in her own present state of wretchedness and edgy fortitude, Naomi felt the pain of this story, but doubted she could make any soothing commentary.

Of course, said Lady Tarlton, you don’t want to hear this. I have hopes that despite this show of a trial, in the end, soon, you’ll prove to be a fortunate woman. And have your Quaker, if that’s what you want.

But you deserve good fortune too, said Naomi.

Why ever would I? asked Lady Tarlton with a laugh.

Because you’re beautiful and clever and have a mighty soul.

Lady Tarlton laughed. That’s the very recipe—down to the last ingredient—for disaster. You know, when the war ends I might simply return to the old business and be a milliner. That would fulfill every worst expectation that ever they had. And indeed I love it. I loved constructing those confections that women put on their heads. To me the right sort of hat is far more interesting than anything hung in the Royal Academy.

Lady Tarlton began laughing and shaking her head, weighing the world as they all seemed to be required to do these days.

Darlington will now be treated with more seriousness, she admitted. From the point of view of antisepsis it is a day of triumph. Far more important than an adulterous affair. Except I did not think of it in those terms until now. Strange. In the midst of so-called sin we feel we are virtuous yet.

Lady Tarlton found this amusing. Naomi smiled too, within her intent to rescue Kiernan, and sipped the cognac. They sat in the silence of their unlikely companionship and the coincidence of their miseries.

The wounded enemy, captured and questioned, seemed quiet, grateful, and so pleased with the food—plain as it was—that it was clear rations were shorter on their side. But now their brothers were advancing to encircle the food of the west. British battalions appeared at Mellicourt and rested along the streets of the village and then marched up the road past the clearing station to the front to take up the line. Nurses and orderlies who happened to be in the open cheered raggedly as they went past. These men seemed eager in their mass and were placed at a distance from their inner, quivering selves by the overall militant tide running eastwards to meet a contrary current. There was a chance they were mere tokens of sacrifice, that the chief praise they would receive from all history might be those few thin cries of applause from the tired men and women of Mellicourt clearing station.

The patients at Mellicourt were cleared as hurriedly as they could be. No one knew what was to come, but it was clear the wounded and ill would be safer in base hospitals. Gas cases were removed in a day or so, and surgery was restricted to men who needed it at all costs. Any vehicle was likely to be used to move the injured—returning ammunition trucks were loaded up with the minor wounds. In a confusion of orders, two eight-ton trucks were packed up with stretchers and blankets, tanks of oxygen, and unopened cases of dressings and pharmaceuticals, all ready to be removed to safety.

Stragglers appeared—the crumbs of broken units—going west and mixed in with families on wagons or pushing the children and their goods in wheelbarrows. Even wagons hauling guns ground along the roads going west—seeking a new but rearwards position from which to pour down fury on the advancing enemy.

It was amidst all that flurry that somehow Charlie Condon appeared. It was beyond belief that in the great confusion of geographies and movements he could have located Sally. But having presented himself to Major Bright he was permitted to find her in her ward.

Go, go! said the Australian matron distractedly after Charlie appeared at the door of the only partly occupied resuscitation ward. The matron assumed that given the crisis he would not be staying long. Sally went towards him. She could not remember what was said when she got to him—the ordinary things, no doubt. Embracing was a dangerous indulgence to display to her matron and fellow nurses—they both knew that. But on the path they hooked each other’s hand until they reached the mess and a sitting room at the end of the hut which no one was using at this furious hour. They sat together and hauled their bodies close on an old settee which seemed to offer them intimacy but—being where it was, where anyone could appear at any second—could not deliver it. She could feel the mass of his upper body half turned to her. Sitting together wasn’t satisfactory. The whole of a body could not be brought in contact with the whole of another.

This is improbable, Charlie, she said. I’m not saying unwelcome. But it’s so improbable you’d be here.

No, he said, it’s probable. Remember how I was down here on reconnoiter. Now I’m with the advance party from Flanders.

They embraced again. Their mouths were so responsive and knowing of each other that it amazed her and gave her at a calmer level a sense of their destiny, and thus of safety. These seemed the most natural postures now—the postures of nearness which under the pyramids she had thought herself incapable of and had had no ambition for.

Mustn’t worry, he muttered. Our men have always been out in the open and bleeding. Now they’re in the open and, God knows, we’ll make them bleed.

She could tell he was convinced of this and his evoking of vengeance did not shock her. They were his enemy.

There’s talk we’ll be ordered back, she confided. Maybe Corbie, but who could tell? Perhaps the Germans will take Amiens itself, for all we know. I don’t want to see you coming in on a stretcher anyhow. And if you try to turn up and smile at me from a prone position, I’ll be very angry.

I have to go now, Sally, he said.

A high plane of a bed in a curtained room was clearly not going to make itself available to them. This was not the time, although their bodies claimed it was. He stood stooped for a while, since love was ridiculous too. Then he ran out to a truck waiting in the Bapaume Road. His eagerness frightened her. She mistrusted such haste. She felt almost betrayed with the speed and eagerness with which he ascended into the cabin and slammed the door.

Soon after Charlie left, stretcher bearers arrived in ambulances with wounded and told of regimental aid posts and dressing stations abandoned to the enemy with the poor fellows still lying in them. Prisoners who had been put to work under guards making a new path outside the wards were now speaking to each other in very jocular German. They could foresee assured deliverance. Some Gothas overhead began dropping their bombs from low height onto the retreating regiments and French people on the road. At a nearby crossroads two Archies barked at them like toothless house dogs. Morphine protected the worst wounded from knowledge of events. But in many other faces Sally saw an added panic and unrest. For the front from which they thought their wounds had excused them was reaching west to encompass them again.