Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

He was older than she was and deserved the title.

Two beds away, Matron Mitchie called for orderlies to take the thoracic patient to the morgue. Where was the space for mourning in this air of blood and acrid wounds and unwashed men? Sally, Honora, and Wilson applied a Liston splint then to a man with a broken leg who had been knocked back into his trench by a glancing leg wound and who for some reason apologized to them for the ridiculous head-over-turkey act that had landed him here.

That was the lot for now. But the old rifles the Kaiser was said to have off-loaded onto the Turks had obviously not been entirely lacking in effect on the flesh of the legions of the good. At the end of the ward, nurses washed their hands at the basins refilled with water and disinfectant. They went to their mess, where a steward had placed tea and much buttered bread.

Great nurses us, eh, Sally? said Honora without seeming to grieve or ask for apology or consolation. We were busy, she continued, but we didn’t do much good.

She stood at the porthole through which morning had selectively begun to pastel her face.

Sally felt her own less expansive soul preparing to be inconsolable, but then there was a yell from a staff nurse in the door. A minesweeper was alongside with decks covered by stretcher cases.

In a few minutes—it seemed no more—all the cots on the hospital deck were filled. Men carried in were laid in their stretchers on metal floors. Orderlies were looking for pantries or small offices in which to lay down the men. The neat divisions of responsibility blurred under this torrent of the harmed. Only those who were used to dealing with confusion—those who could see through the turbulence because of having come, like Honora, from turbulent families—could have decided where to begin. And Mitchie herself and Sister Nettice too—who moved and spoke without panic—resolved bewilderment by calmly directing the traffic of stretchers.

The ship began to tremble to renewed thunders outside. Large guns were firing by land and sea. These furies may or may not have been directed at them. But Sally became used to that steel shiver. It was the barely noticed pulse behind what she now did. She seemed after an hour to have been feeling that tremor all her life.

And every time Sister Nettice or Matron saw a man weep fiercely for an inability to utter pain, morphine was ordered.

Where are you from, Sister? a pale older man with a chest wound demanded, looking up above his bandages for an announcement of the place name that might save him. There were more of such older men than she would have thought. Men who had known labor and had been aged and hollowed by it. Again her sister on the deck—the unseen Naomi—had chosen a red card of urgency to be pinned on him. Knowing by now that men were solaced by this plain geography game, Sally told him. The idea was this, so it seemed: while I am from one quiet shire and you from another, no harm will approach us. Those who discussed locations could not die. But she knew now there was no dealing with the thoracic wound. The victim and the nurses must accommodate themselves to it. It would accommodate no one.

I’m from Moonta from the mines there, he announced. I’m one of the lucky ones, he persisted with his blue lips barely flapping with breath amidst the graying pallor of a sun-leathered face. Just as well. God knew, see, that I’ve got a wife and three kids.

Even Wilson had to admit he was from somewhere named In-dooroopilly, the name sounding so fantastic that some decided to laugh. Wherever he was from, he was a good fellow. He nodded with her as the place names were told. She heard all the Enoggeras and Coonabarabrans, the Bungendores and Bunburys. Her own tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and was released only to utter one plain sentence.

You must get better then, she said.

Bathing with gauze the skull wound of a youth deeply unconscious and finding it full of grit, its edges of flesh brittle and darkening, she saw the inner membrane torn away, the dura, the pericranium—she beheld the naked brain. It astonished her and gave her too much pause. She had taken up scissors to cut away necrotic flesh when the colonel descended in his gown and claimed the boy.

The wheezer with three children was gone. He had lost his hold on conversation, and it didn’t matter anymore in his patch of Aegean where Moonta or the Macleay might be.

Sally knew something of the imperfections of men but those on this vast white deck continued to behave with a saintly forbearance. There were a few peevish cries from them of Nurse! Nurse! When you went to the caller, you might see panic in the face but were more likely to hear something almost fatuous. Very commonly the stupid thing said was that the patient had let his mates down by getting clipped, winged, hit, bowled base over turkey (as they put it even in their last etiquette of language).

Where did this sanctity come from? They couldn’t have had it before? Not the men who rampaged through Cairo upsetting stalls in the souk and yelling curses at the gyppos and doing bad imitations of British officers’ barked commands.

There was time for the nurses to take a meal in the mess, and all surprise was covered by gossip and stories and guesses. Naomi—down from the deck—sat looking so reflective and pale that Sally went to her and asked her how it all was up there. Naomi put a hand to her forehead and held it out interrogatively. She said, Sometimes there are so many at once it seems Hookes is just guessing at men’s conditions. And other times he’s so slow. I’m having to do half the work and I can’t always assess them properly… bad light, the general mess of their uniform and clothes… The orderlies are confused and have been putting the wrong tags on cases. It’s too much. Too much for the ship and the orderlies and Hookes. And for me. I’ve never been tested…

Sally kissed the crown of her head but then walked off as if by instinct—just to save Naomi from lapsing into dismay.

Carradine said that in the past few hours she had been put in the walking wounded officers’ ward. When she heard the others talk about the unlikely lack of screams and pleadings on the men’s deck, she said some of these officers are utter cowering and whimpering failures.

I’d cower, said Naomi from her place at the table with a sudden energy of conviction. I’d whimper.

Sally—with a mug of tea but no appetite on the other side of the table—frowned at this uncommon outburst and found herself reaching a hand across and patting Naomi’s just as if they were girls without a history. As they were now. It was the now—and not memory—that had cornered all the power over them.

I bet they were the ones, said Carradine, who cut a dash in Mena camp and in the bar at Shepheard’s. I bet they were heroes in the bar of the Parisiana.

Everyone was silent awhile. The men were wild in Egypt, Naomi said at last. But they are holy here. They’re like monks, dying. If it wasn’t so piteous it would be outright beautiful. Their wounds are the devil but their toughness is God.

An awed Honora suggested, Have you thought they might be better at this than they are at living contented in houses?

After lunch, Carradine later reported, Mitchie visited the officers’ walking wounded quarters and asked them—good fellows that they were—to treat her nurses with respect. They were not chambermaids nor private soldiers.

Carradine later told the others this—and that an Australian colonel, a broad-faced, good-looking but portly man, was in the corridor on crutches listening to her speech and now entered the room. His accent might be British but he had the sort of complexion you could get only under the Australian sun.