Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Honora asked Sally one evening in the mess, Do you think this thing is a punishment on us all for allowing the war?

But most of the women—including Honora and Sally—had had considerable childhood instruction in the doctrine of free will. Man chose what to do. Whatever he chose to do, God tolerated it, but might punish it too.

Freud asked briskly, If he didn’t step in to stop it, why does he step in only at the punishment stage?

There was great uneasiness in some about Freud’s opinion. It challenged too much what they had absorbed in childhoods to whose roofs they wanted to return.

Leo’s unplanned death evoked in Sally a horror at the certainty of Charlie’s death—planned as it was, along with others, by the ambitious enemy. She had always been subject to spasms of despair and confidence on the matter, but now they alternated at a hectic rate. His eminence as a man saved him by some lights and doomed him by others. The extra element of this influenza now struck her with an enhanced alarm for him, from which she could not distract herself by the normal means—working to the point of exhaustion.

Major Bright called together a gathering of them around the breakfast table and read a letter from the general of the Medical Corps praising them for the “textbook” workings of the station. There was—it seemed—a formula for death rates in stations in relation to numbers of surgeons, doctors, nurses, orderlies. The equation had shone a meritorious light on them. Mathematics emphasized that numbers—and not a lone tremulous soul—were the issue. That too somehow made everything worse.

July arrived with poppies growing in every spare foot of earth and around the edges of the woods, and news of further developments at the front came to Sally as if they were family tidings—intimate to her. The strangely jubilant lips of the wounded told of a specially and cleverly designed battle fought at a village named Hamel. Here, the Australians and Monash had shown the British and the French how things were done with tanks and aircraft, artillery and infantry—all in the one glorious amalgam. She hoped it was true.

Time thundered in her head and she began to suffer migraines and yellow blotched vision. Major Bright prescribed a draught of codeine for her. On a day when the station was utterly clear of casualties because some administrative error had told the authorities it was full, or else because of some lull at the front—indeed on a day where no artillery could be heard for extended periods of minutes—Major Bright enlivened them by calling another picnic on the edge of the woods a few hundred yards east of the station.

It was a wistful affair at first, for Leo was not there, and hers was a dominant and absorbing absence. But the invigorating day and the poppies and hollyhocks and butterflies grasped hold of them soon enough. Nurses and surgeons and ward doctors sat down beside spread bedsheets fresh from the makers and not yet used in the wards and ate all the good French things delivered up to them by a grateful Amiens—cheese, bread, pâté. When hunger was satisfied the question arose of what people would do after the war. Various doctors announced their plans—returning to practices in bush towns or in suburbs. One said he intended to stay in London to study ophthalmology. Bright declared he hoped to return to the operating theatres of Australia where—he claimed—the standards of practice were at least as good as anywhere in Europe or Britain.

I speak facts, he assured everyone. These are not the words of a jingo.

Freud’s American boyfriend, Boynton, made no special claims that he’d go back to Chicago—when he had volunteered in early 1915, the senior surgeons at Rush Hospital had been so hostile to the idea that he wondered if he would get his job there back, even though he would return instructed by the experience of war surgery. But there were other places he could try, he supposed, even San Francisco, where his uncle was a physician and a surgeon.

Without warning—and like a public announcement not of professional intentions but of the end of the alliance with Boynton—and without waiting for all the doctors to define their plans, Freud spoke up. Well, she said, should the war ever end, I think I’ll stay on in Europe. The reports from Germany—all the illness brought about by the blockade—make me think I might go there.

Dr. Boynton regarded the surface of the sheet on which the picnic items were spread. He knew, Sally assumed, that Freud was wounded in some way and that her goodwill towards him fluctuated. The corners of his mouth turned up in a semirictus that combined regret, bewilderment, and embarrassment.

I am sick of seeing Europe in this particular way, Freud added. I feel I haven’t seen the true Europe at all.

Honora surprised everyone—not least Major Bright—by agreeing it was a good idea. It was as if she did not see Freud’s statement in its real terms but only in terms of a desire for peaceful tourism.

I reckon, Honora went on, that whenever it ends, a woman could live for a year in France on the savings she makes working here.

A glaze came over Major Bright’s eyes too. Was Honora—after all those demented months of hers—unable to read what Freud meant? He had his career to pursue in Australia—he would not be permitted to pursue it here once there were no more wounds. Professional urgency would not permit him to sightsee for a year in France.

Freud got up suddenly from the picnic. Thank you, Major, she said. If you will excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.

They tried to start a conversation again in normal tones, but it could only sputter along as Freud descended the slight slope which led to the nurses’ tents.

Boynton begged them to excuse him soon after.

Sally had made no pronouncements on her own future. If Leo lacked one, all the more might she. So an instinct of reticence—which would have kept her quiet in normal times—prevented her all the more now. The young wounded who reckoned the enemy was dished might carry a sense of communal triumph to the grave with them. Yet she could not feel it herself. And if it did ever end, she thought, I might simultaneously stop breathing. Only the chance to see the artifices of paint in Charlie’s company gave her a glimmer of the afterlife.

As a mist rose, the Ford and Sunbeam ambulances arrived, full of young Germans—dirty faced and bleeding, deflated and staring. The field-gray somber walking wounded of the enemy advanced with extreme caution and—as if trained in medical etiquette—soberly visited friends in the resuscitation ward and on nurses’ orders held up bags of plasma and saline and looked down at their sallow comrades whose martial ambitions were reaching a close.

A letter from England from Captain Constable—the defaced soldier—had chased Sally all over Picardy and now caught up with her.

I have the dressings on my face from what the surgeons say was the last of my reconstructions. What emerges once they’re off will be the final version of me from now on. Naturally I hope to find out what that is and discover it is not as bad as all that. There is hope for all of us now, says the matron. My bandages off will be a sign to her—part of a great global scheme in her head. Though I doubt the future of my dial is a matter upon which princes and prime ministers and parliaments will spend much time.

Despite the complaining flavor of my words, I think always of the boys who’ve been dead two years here and there—all without the option of wondering how things will turn out. How is that Slattery girl I knew? I hope you can tell me she is still young and fresh and impudent.

Well, enough! Enough, I hear you say and a fair thing too. Whatever is waiting behind the dressings I’d happily show you and her because I know you’d recognize me. Others might have a harder time of it.