Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

The feared Inniskilling Fusiliers. Feared by the nurses, anyhow—perhaps without necessity. For now the sea had taken all the male boast out of them. So the sergeant rose up into the raft and pulled the boy with the lump of steel for a face after him and—Sally supposed—laid the young man beside Mitchie. Nurse, the sergeant said, acknowledging Naomi like a gent. They saw an upright lifeboat nearby and Sally envied it its substance. But it was a target now for many swimmers who were dragged aboard until its leeboard was so narrow that the yearning of those who grabbed its sides tipped it over and hurled all in it back into the sea. Those now in the water gamely set themselves to get it the right way up again. They would by great heaving from sailors and nurses and soldiers manage it at last, and climb back in. But fewer chose to do that. Some had been stunned by the capsize. Some—whacked on the head by the gunwales—were floating away.

From here advice could only be shouted. The amiable sergeant yelled to the population of the raft not to make the same mistake. There was after all a notice about capacity on the small rubber bulwarks and they had reached it. See there now, said the sergeant—who was their self-chosen captain—in his glottal voice. We can’t take on so many we go under. False mercy, you see. Defeats the purpose. We can change places later perhaps and those in the water have spells up here.

Honora—hanging by her rope—began to pray. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

The sergeant said, Keep at it, girl. That and a passing steamer will get us to dry land.

She sounded as businesslike with her religion as with her sewing long ago. Do you know contrition, Sal? she asked. We should make our acts of contrition. O my God, I am heartily sorry…

And who’s heartily sorry the Archimedes sank? asked Sally with a waterlogged fury she could not herself explain.

A horse with bulging eyes came swimming up, the sort they might use to pull cannon. It floundered and wallowed—floundering being two-thirds of what it did. Holding on to its mane and trailing and riding it in so far as it would let her was that little prune of a woman Rosanna Nettice. Her drenched face—when Sally could see and judge it—was set. It no longer looked an indefinite thing as it had in Egypt and in the Archimedes ’s wards. Nettice half-rode, half-clung to the mane with small, unrelenting hands. She seemed not to notice them, and Slattery yelled, Hey, Nettice! Stick to it like a plaster! And in fact Nettice looked more suited to the horse than they were to the raft. Her blue lips were tight but she seemed in charge of the terror-stricken beast. It was revealed by the horse’s plunging that she wore on her lower body a pair of soldier’s drawers. She looked as though she would ride illimitably past even though they were calling to her—except that the horse could not overtake the drift of the raft. The animal galloped and weltered but had no traction. The splashes created a sort of surf as it tried to renew its capacity to go forward by plunging harder. It was an honest horse for a hill but now began to scream and sink. The sound was horrifying and pitched Nettice into the water. She wore no life preserver and seemed all the more a mere fragment.

Come, Nettice, yelled Sally. And Nettice swam quite functionally to the edge of the raft to be gathered in one-armed and attached to the rope that already held Slattery and her. Now there were eight people in the raft and sometimes a dozen hangers-on suspended in sea.

Are you hurt? Sally asked Nettice. But Nettice needed to wait for breath.

I got sucked down, she said, her lips beginning to shiver a little. I was very deep and gone. I was very deep.

She paused for the breath she had not yet fully got back after her long fall through the layers of the sea.

I was beyond what you could believe I could ever come up from. The horse was down there. It came up underneath me. It tangled its mane in my hand. It got beneath me and brought me up here to you. It was an instrument of God.

Some yards off, the horse was laboring and still protesting.

Save it, poor beast! called Nettice. It labored away and turned to give them one last flash of a panicked, unexpectant eye. Its neck sank and the nostrils tried to hold their place above the sea. It reached a point—fifty yards away or more—where its hindquarters began to drag it down backwards. So it went under, whinnying until choked off.

It was God’s will for you, Nettice, said Slattery crazily.

But Nettice howled for the loss of her pony. The suck of water was now what Sally heard above all. The hollow cries of others seemed to disperse somewhat as all the parties to the Archimedes ’s disaster drifted further apart.

An unmeasured time passed in the water. Naomi was hushed, and reassured Mitchie still, and Honora chattered from an instinct that while she was full of talk she could not be consumed by the sea. The boy with the shrapnel spike cried out once and again. But those things were to be expected. What was not expected was that a soldier or sailor secure on the loops of rope would let go as if he had seen a better prospect nearby. The sergeant yelled after them but they were no longer regimental enough for him to stop them.

Where are all the destroyers and troopships and such? Sally heard Naomi ask. We see them all the time when things are normal.

The sergeant said, It may be they’re too frightened to come near. The U-boat, you understand.

No one tried to paddle with that little plank. Where would they paddle to? They were on a sea lane, were they not? They were on a sea that was all sea lane.

Patience, said Mitchie so clearly. Do we have water on this float, Nurse Durance?

No, Matron, Naomi admitted.

Mitchie should be raging with uncontained, overflowing pain.

Well, said Mitchie, one wouldn’t expect…

Naomi leaned over the side of the raft. She whispered to Sally. You come up here and I’ll go down there.

Not yet, said Sally. I’m happy, she lied.

She chose not to be up there with Mitchie’s great damage and be powerless before it. Honora—offered the same—said, Don’t know if I could manage it without showing the world my fat arse.

The sergeant laughed but without prurience. The other soldier with the younger boy, the original occupants, were utterly silent.

After a further interval, Naomi leaned over the side and confided to her sister that Mitchie’s pelvis was intact. The upper thighs though—hopeless. Compound fractures both. I’ve got a soldier’s belt on one and some of my blouse on the other.

Sally leaned her forehead against the raft’s black rubber flank while Naomi began to lift Nettice, who was vulnerable for lack of a preserver. Nettice was light to lift and of surprising agility. The sergeant did not help but not out of ill will. After so much presence and command he had gone suddenly silent. The high intoxication of his reaching the raft waned in him. He lost his powers of command as awful surprise and cold entered him.

When Nettice disappeared aboard Sally thought it grew suddenly cold in the water. Ridiculous to think such a thing. But you could believe the little woman—in rising to the deck of the raft—had shed off upon them the iciness of the depth she’d been to. In the surf back home, all you did was cry to your sister or to young Macallister, Getting cold! Going in! Into the golden strand where the sun was warm honey on quivering shoulders. She’d half-imagined till now that she had the same choice here. But now she knew by a reflection of her own coldness in Honora’s blue lips that she didn’t. One of the soldiers along the loops of ropes began to sing raggedly.