Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

At four o’clock, when Slattery and Sally were working in resuscitation with eight young nurses—all in the normal attempt to make the patients safe for being moved—Major Bright entered the ward and announced, We have orders to leave. You should pack what you have. Assemble with your luggage in ten minutes. We have to walk to the station, half a mile. There’ll be no one to carry bags so perhaps you will want to leave things.

Sally was appalled. She said she couldn’t simply leave the patients.

Honora said, I’ll stay with them. I am sure the Germans are not the barbarians we think.

Bright seemed impatient with this woman whom he was said to be infatuated with.

I’ve already made the same offer, he said, but it is not to be entertained. We are all ordered to leave.

Then you’ll have to carry me away, said Slattery. I’m not going of my own will.

For God’s sake, Slattery, don’t be dramatic. I promise you that once we’ve drawn back, you’ll be as buried as you want in a cascade of thousands who need you. But all I know is that we’re going west of here.

There were more than thirty nurses—and a number of doctors and perhaps sixty orderlies—who gathered their lighter kit and set off on the clogged road. They hobbled along with their luggage in hand towards the local railhead. Here they had travel warrants to Amiens to present. An orderly led them by a side road to avoid the blocked main, arrow-straight Bapaume–Albert Road. A spur line came to the railway station near the village and as the clearing station’s evacuees converged on it they met thousands of people—and a further vast and undifferentiated crowd of soldiers who had been attracted to it also. The side road they had taken had availed them nothing—this small station built to service local farms was now besieged by an overwhelming mass. There were men not so much in uniforms as in a carapace of muck sitting on windowsills and doorsteps, looking blankly at the commotion. Guards overwhelmed at the entrance gate to the station let the nurses through and onto the platform, where a rail transport officer who looked oddly familiar to Sally limped about blowing a whistle and pointing to the mass of soldiers and civilians waiting either side of the line.

The officer hobbled up to them and said, Ladies, leave your luggage here. The train is said to be due in twenty minutes. Matron, your women may need to fight their way aboard.

He took a whistle hanging from a lanyard around his neck and blew it to direct the guards to keep the rabble off the track. But the last vibrations of his whistle were overtaken by something profounder and more massive in sound. He blew the whistle again and screamed at the nurses. Across the line, everyone! Slit trench, far side!

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.