Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

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 temperature 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.