Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

But there existed as well an entire zoology. The Schimmelbusch, the Vajnas. The Hewitt airway. The Boxwood wedge. The fanciful de Caux’s inhaler, which was apparently not within the expense range of the Macleay District.

Fellowes and Dr. Hookes passed the door of the nurses’ lounge to go to their own salon forward. Fellowes was working with a pencil and paper and paused to allow Hookes to look at a diagram before they moved on. Hookes’s complexion was blotchy with sunburn. His hair was erratically brushed and his little russet moustache looked spiky. From the medical officers’ lounge they could still easily be heard, Fellowes saying resonantly against the muted hum of the Archimedes ’s engines, Look, Ginger, it has to be done. My God, the main danger lies ashore. Not at your hands here.

Hookes’s reply couldn’t be heard in detail. But what he said had the tone of a pleading. She thought, Like Naomi he hasn’t got over the first night.

But you’re needed, Ginger, simple as that. These ships have not been staffed according to the reality of things…

They were arguing about his transformation into a surgeon. Dr. Hookes’s should be a man who—whatever his competence—could forget his own bush clumsiness in the same way she was trying to forget hers. He should consider all this a medical education. Doctors, she thought, were generally good with these adjustments of the mind.

From Hookes came something indistinct but still with the intonation of pleading. Fellowes sighed hugely. Then no more was heard. It was as if the two men had settled themselves in chairs to read newspaper reports about battles elsewhere. Hookes’s anxiety hung in the air and reflected Sally’s own.

There was, however, only so much study that was useful. Mind gorged with obscure considerations and chances, she visited her cabin to drop Peel on her bedside table and climbed again to the deck. There were other women there letting the saffron kindliness of these late hours above the ocean soothe them. She saw a group further along the deck. Freud was there, and Naomi, Leo and Honora and Sister Nettice. They seemed utterly restored to harmony. Women did not carry grievances here as long as on land. Sins massive on the earth were venial at sea and even more venial on this sea which had led them to that place.

Just now—weighed down by what she had absorbed of Dr. Peel—Sally chose to spend a few seconds on her own. She noticed that on the forward deck the orderlies were being instructed in bandaging and splinting. They and the Archimedes were protected by a law which all nations were said to accede to. But how firmly? Sometimes the threat of those modern wonders and undersea beasts—the idea of the torpedoes—stung the imagination and made a person think of climbing to the highest deck and casting a penetrating gaze across the seas.

At last she approached the others.

Here she is then, said Honora, slapping the rail beside her as if the space there had been reserved by them. Is it true you’ve been asked to do anesthetics?

Freud asked in self-satire, Will you sing to the patients?

They would already be suffering enough, said Sally. She saw her sister smile at the witticism and was delighted. They kept an eye out for Kiernan’s lean presence. He was their favorite. Trustworthy in conversation. Our professor, Honora called him.

Kiernan did emerge from some task below.

Tell us all that’s happened here since the last time we came this way, Honora demanded. Any new shenanigans with gods?

Only with men, he said.

Honora Slattery narrowed her vivid eyes. For who would have thought the Turks could do that much damage?

Our men are merely men, Kiernan asserted.

I’d have never known that, Honora told him with a sniff.

Kiernan conceded them the laugh they all had at his expense. No, what I mean is, it’s important for newspaper editors and generals that we believe we have special gifts. We blessed Antipodeans. Worth ten of anything else. But by all accounts the Turks aren’t aware of it.

You sound pleased about that, Freud accused him and frowned.

No. I’m not pleased at all. It would be unspeakable to be pleased. But one worries about shells, said Kiernan. How individual virtues can stand up to them. I would be happy if it were all over. I would be happy had it never started.

That sounds almost disloyal to me, said little Nettice, bunching her features in conviction. In spite of all, that sounds disloyal, she persisted.

It sounds something like the truth to me though, said Naomi, who was determined not to let such silliness reign. But territorially, Sergeant? We must be doing well in terms of territory.

Freud half closed her eyes to remember the news reports. There have been attacks from the toe of the peninsula, she announced. French and British. All still in process. The Australians in the west…

And everywhere the Indians, said Kiernan, who must wonder how they find themselves here.

For the very same reason we do, surely, suggested Nettice. It’s either yes to the Empire or it’s no to it.

She clearly suspected Quakers.

The second dusk after they left Alexandria, the Turkish guns were heard from a dark spine ahead. The Archimedes edged in towards Cape Helles where—with equal convenience—the Australians and New Zealanders, the Indians and British and French could all be welcomed to the ship. Before reporting to the theatre, Sally climbed to the deck in the last light. From the direction of the beach she heard a bugle call—apparently on Gallipoli the bugle did not lead men to battle but was blown to warn ships when wounded were on their way. Some little way off, destroyers were worrying and jerking about the sea in a motion bespeaking threat and fear. A minesweeper with a sailor in the bows—signaling by lantern swing—edged in to the Archimedes ’s flank.

The anchor cable was let clatter, chaining them to their captain’s choice of this acre of sea. Sally went below and washed and robed and stood in one of the small cabins set up with an operating table and with a bench for Freud’s instruments, newly arrived on a tray and covered with a towel. Sally inspected her own equipment at a small table beyond the head of the operating surface. Well, said Freud. Freud and two orderlies in white coats and with a scout nurse—a young woman whom Sally did not know—arrived and maintained their restless posts in their surgeonless theatre.

Freud said to them all, It takes a little time before they come in.

Sally heard the barges bump alongside and winches paying out under the power of stuttering motors as the surgeons waited in the wards to choose their first candidates. Hookes would be there, Sally knew, maybe needing a choice forced on him.

Freud gave her long-lipped smile and gestured to the tray of covered instruments.

This is how I met my fiancé, she confided to the room. Even the orderlies. Your fiancé? asked Sally. The surgeon?

Yes. I was handing him a retractor. Not something simple and pure like a scalpel or a lancet. After all, they call that journal The Lancet . No one would ever call a journal The Retractor . A retractor’s the turnip of surgical instruments. Anyhow, for him and for me it was a case of “eyes across the retractor.”

Other women would be reticent about mocking such events—the weight of engagement. And of breaking it.

The hollow ship was ringing with the shouts of healthy men delivering the maimed. At last Fellowes accompanied a case carried in—the man yelping like a dog. Head wound—that was why. As with Lieutenant Carradine, the loss of the hold on language but not on the impulse to make one. Orderlies either side of him held swabs to the skull. The journey from barge to deck or from deck to ward must have somehow moved bone and brought on this frenzy. Orderlies dumped him—in his shirt and bandages—from the stretcher onto the theatre table. They held him down and called for reinforcements to help them restrain him in his demented state. Big enough to hold a bull out to pee, she heard an orderly wheeze. Quick, Nurse, said Fellowes. One of the dressings fell away and Sally saw through blood the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. The square-headed, sturdy boy looked up at Sally with the eyes of a demented animal and though two orderlies managed to hold his arms, their strength might not last. Sally felt that her movements were heinously slow but took up the anesthetics dispensing bottle and the mask and poured chloroform on the pad without letting any of it too close to his thrashing face. Near enough, however, for the fumes to dope him down and to numb that frantic brain and render him drowsy. The chloroform filled the theatre with its sweet, heavy fumes as she clamped the pad inside the mask. Fellowes—beside her—spoke urgently to an orderly. Hold him. And to Sally, Mask down now. Mask down.