Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

The lean sergeant named Kiernan who had a knowledge of Greek islands was there and raised his head a margin to greet her and allow her his brotherhood. Out on the bright sea yet another barge—on which Englishmen in pith helmets swayed on their feet in the bows—was edging across her vision. There were barges at all places—attached to the sides of ships like piglets on sows. They were at troopships which had just delivered more armed men to great Moloch ashore. It was obvious that this was not the way things were meant to happen. In what Sally had read, the disasters of empires took centuries to ripen. Here it had all matured in days.

A new Turkish barrage of shells arrived, howling, and displaced the Aegean’s surface water into fountains whose spray—Sally was sure—reached her face on the main deck. The great missiles bracketed a British cruiser a bare four hundred yards off and the detonations conveyed their power through the water. A few seconds later, she heard an orderly say in the hollow quiet—in the hope the whisper would reach powers beyond the Archimedes— I wish that bloody cruiser would move.

And, grateful for its luck, it did begin by inches to turn its bows and seek a new location to test out the Turkish gunners all over again. But then she could see that a launch and its tow—a barge full of damaged men—had become separated, the cable that connected them cut by a piece of shell. The swamped and torn-apart barge was sinking. Men floated face down or seemed to be waving sodden bandages like a flag signal. Oh Christ, said orderlies. Oh Jesus, oh Mother of God. For what of abdominals and thoracics and amputees in that stinging water? Where was mercy there? Other barges and the launch whose line to the sunken vessel had been cut began to nose about the area and sailors began to drag at the floating wounded with boat-hooks, throwing out lifebuoys and leaning over the bulwarks, extending both hands to those who still had the power to reach.

On the Archimedes ’s deck, men from an intact barge were now being winched up in cradles four at a time to make their own demands. The first crate carrying a cot case drew level with her and was dragged down onto the deck by men under Kiernan’s orders. The soldier had a head wound and bore the normal filthy number 1. When his stretcher was lifted out of the cradle, his gaze was wild and unknowing. He would never remember his rise up the flanks of the Archimedes . He might never remember anything. Sally attached the red card to him. The color game!

Put him forward near the theatres, she told the orderlies, not that she knew if there was room forward. She wondered if she would want to give each of them a mothering red until the reds ran out and the anesthetics and morphine. She felt the panic Naomi had on the bad-lit deck last night, all alone in authority over the shades of life and death that were so hard to tell from each other.

Wounds smelled. But she worked hard and without too much doubt. The cases arrived in numbers and she felt competent at numbers.

There were four cradles at work on the stretcher cases. With a part of her vision she could see orderlies signaling to the winch men on the upper deck to ease off on the handles and then they were swinging her candidates for triage on the deck, one every few instants, it seemed. Stretchers were accumulating. She speeded up. A quick reading of the label applied by the casualty clearing station doctor and a mere touch of the pulse, that was all. Kiernan—moving in to apply a blue tag to a boy of perhaps sixteen years who was bare-chested except for bandages—murmured, We can do only what we can do, Nurse.

Later she thought there could not be a more obvious thing to say, but it seemed utterly novel to her then—a new first principle mined by Kiernan’s cleverness. A spate of walking English—Tommies in their quaint music-hall pith helmets—all seemed to say, Hello, Nurse, as they were asked to settle themselves in the shade along the open deck. One of them had it in him to bow, but in a kind of cockney mockery that was all right by her.

At an hour of the day she could not have named—there was not even time to consult the watch her parents had given her—the cot cases had suddenly been all taken down. The variously afflicted walkers sitting in patient exhaustion by the railing now came forward. Shell splinters in arm or leg or shoulder, bullets in soft tissue or peripheral bone. Orderlies had however been serving them pannikins of tea—the grand sustainer, a remedy itself and promise of further remedy. One man with his mid-face wrapped in bandages said in brittle, feverish humor, Nose shot off by some bludging Turk, Nurse. Wasn’t my best feature anyhow!

He too had been lucky by fractions of inches in his distance from some propellant or other.

She dealt then with the men from the barge. Slattery told her that below on the crowded, enormous hospital deck, they had hauled Dr. Hookes off to the theatre and he’d looked like someone summoned to the gallows.

Through opened portholes the sun struck this man and that as if bent on dazzling them to their graves. But there was a different thunder now. It was the sound of the anchor chain rising. Everyone seemed to pause, the nurses at their hectic stations and the wounded in their anguish.

Half the nurses went back to work in the night reverberating with the Archimedes ’s deep-set engines. To see who slept first, they drew numbers from a soldier’s slouch hat Mitchie brought round. The fortunate—Sally included—fell into bunks so oblivious they were confused as to where they were when aroused the next dawn. Before rest they took turns at the basins and perhaps for the one time in their lives hitched their nightdresses in common for a brisk cleansing between the legs.

By morning the morgue was overcrowded. Men were committed to the sea. And at their tea break there was a sort of hissing girlish mutter amongst some—a particular sniping expression had come to several faces. One of them was Honora’s. Honora—it would need to be said—had not slept for more than forty hours and had become mean and in-the-know and au fait. Something bitter and catty was arising—all the more because they were smashed with tiredness. Freud entered with her dark, large eyes rimmed with exhaustion after hours as theatre nurse. She looked pale and stayed by the door as if she were waiting for a welcome from one of her sisters to bring her completely into the mess.

Are you still under the influence of the chloroform fumes, Karla? Honora asked with a squinting intent before Karla could find a seat. Freud shook her head and looked at the coven of knowing women at the table.

No. Sorry, she said. Just distracted.

She yawned.

Singing any songs lately? asked Honora.

Where did that edge she had now come from? Her eyes were suddenly ablaze with ill feeling. Beside Honora, Leonora Casement stood up with tear-streaked eyes and left the mess. The tears were an assertion particular to her and nothing to do with the hours of peculiar nursing labor they had all been involved in.

What’s this all about? asked Freud, though she could not choke back the yawn that overcame her.

I believe you’re singing to the surgeons.

What? That’s ridiculous.

Honora blazed. In falsetto she sang, “Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary…”

Are you barking for yourself? asked Freud with a new iciness, or are you someone else’s watchdog?

Captain Fellowes likes it a lot, I believe, and has told people so. He is suddenly song struck. I’d keep it up if I were you. You might net him yet.

And then it all developed.

Freud: Tell me what you’re saying.

Honora: You choose what to make of it.

Freud: I want to know, Honora.