Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Ladies, he said, Colonel Spanner here. Welcome to Lemnos. May I present my congratulations on your survival.

Their survival, however, did not make him smile. Something in his greeting made Honora turn a mad, mocking face in Sally’s direction. Nettice frowned from the far side of the tent with that vehemence with which she had yesterday risen out of the ocean on the pony. There was something improper in his dominance of them—with them prostrate or lolling.

Are there any problems then? he asked. Concussion, abrasions, contusions, lesions of any kind?

The women all chorused their No’s and felt foolish because they sounded like a class of schoolgirls. The colonel—responding like a headmaster—asked, were they sure? The matron said there was no mention on their charts of anything beyond exposure. So the colonel turned to the orderly. Private, you are my witness that they have vouchsafed no information indicative of trauma.

Yes, sir, said the orderly and smirked.

So, said the colonel like a jolly uncle but one who could not hereafter be blamed, no grounds for a long delay in returning to work then.

Carradine stood there with narrowed eyes.

Orderly, will you see that the women are issued some clothing? Chemise, blouse, skirt, or pants… Yes, and shoes and Wellington boots.

Doctor, said Naomi suddenly, with a sort of impetus. There were more than twenty nurses on the Archimedes.

Yes, said the colonel. Six of them are missing. Please accept my condolences.

Naomi—the one nurse standing—declared, How dare they put soldiers and military equipment on our ship! And apart from the painted-over red crosses, men were visible on deck, exercising when they should have been below, hiding. It gave the U-boat its reason to sink us. I would ask you on behalf of all of us here to protest to the military command.

These are arguable points, said the colonel, but moot. Damage done now, wouldn’t you say? And don’t you normally address officers as “Sir”?

If we had a military status then we would, said Naomi with her eyes full on him.

Ah, said the colonel. A barrack-room lawyer here. You should feel free to write your own letter of complaint, if you choose. But may I say this is a small matter in a landscape of huge matters. Perhaps best forgotten in light of your deliverance.

The English matron read the names of the missing. Egan, Weir, Stanmore, Keato, Delamare, Fenwick. They were Sally’s acquaintances, but belonged to other cabins and another clique. All these lost women had sat generally at the other table of the two in the mess. So they had stuck together in the water—just as her clique had—and been unfortunate together. Someone in the tent began to grieve and her frank tears could be heard. Freud mourned Keato as a fellow Melbourne girl. Sally felt her kinship with them too. She felt nine-tenths saturated by the Mediterranean and that she might carry its weight around in her for good.

And our matron? Honora asked.

Since the question has been asked, I can tell you that Matron Mitchie has undergone an above-the-knee amputation. The second leg remains, for the moment. That is it, then.

He nodded to the matron and orderly. They left. Carradine was left gazing at the women in the tent with her mouth set.

Is he really in charge here? Honora asked her.

Carradine conceded he was.

The orderly put his head in again.

Nurse, he said as a command, and Carradine—after a pause that counted for minor rebellion—followed him out.

Holy Virgin, said Honora. Do you think that colonel creature has a wife?

Dr. Fellowes isn’t gone, Nettice assured them. I saw him on the deck of the Tirailleur , the destroyer.

Sally saw tears on Freud’s face and felt them pushing at her eyes—a little of her saturation rising. Those pitiable girls who had yelled fear and encouragement to each other in the ocean, and it had smothered them. They had howled and the water took its opportunity.

And Leonora, Freud contributed. Leonora’s not gone. They’re fated to last, she and Fellowes. They live on outside all complications.

In her conviction she looked dark and pretty and a little bit cracked. There was silence then, and a surge of wind and a scatter of small gravel and the sound of rain asserting itself.

They died in our place, Rosanna Nettice argued while sitting like the rest in a shirt that had belonged to French sailors. She did not unclench her brow. They were the tithe, weren’t they? God knew that with me he had taken too much and sent the horse to take me up again.

That was her map of what had happened, so they would not argue with her. Reveille ran with an instant’s delay from bugle to bugle and headland to headland and across the intervening lowlands of the harbor. It insisted even the dying hear it—and the women who were not as yet utterly convinced they had escaped drowning.

Other nurses arrived. They carried clothes with them—veils, blouses, shirts, and pullovers hostile to gender, some plain gray skirts, army pants, army boots. Wonderful Lemnos creatures—so assured of the air and so convinced of their own breath. They offered to show the Archimedes women where the water pump was and pointed out a washing bucket and enamel basins which were stacked by the side of the tent. They had also found for them those forgotten instruments of dignity named toothbrushes. They complained under their breath. The colonel preferred the work of orderlies, they said. He thought nurses an imposition. He was a regular soldier from India. The Australians had asked for a Medical Corps surgeon to run this hospital and the British army had taken the opportunity to dump the colonel into the job. He had brought a matron-in-chief who sided with him, and their Australian matron knuckled under to the two of them. Hence the colonel had a lot of time for both these women. But the staff nurses were supposed to be mute laborers. The man was a passable surgeon but behaved as if soldiers suffered dysentery out of willfulness.

A number of the other women who had been on the Archimedes met them in the mess tent and swapped their tales of redemption. Voraciously they ate fresh-baked bread and great cans of blackberry jam—the plainest food and the most soothing. Flies were thick around the condiments. Asked by Sally, would the rescued women have to go on duty that day, the experienced nurses of Lemnos laughed. Take it easy, you were only sunk a day ago, one said. It was an eon of a day though. It was long as one of the divine days from the start of Genesis.

And now they went in twos to visit Matron Mitchie. Sally made the pilgrimage with Naomi at her side. There were two cots in the tent where Mitchie lay with another matron—an English woman suffering pneumonia. Mitchie had color in her face. A little semicircular tent lay over what was left of her leg.

I was a dancer once, she told the Durance sisters as soon as she saw them. It was not any attempt at a joke. There was a glimmer of fever in her eye but not of delirium.

When I danced with the surgeon-in-chief at the hospital ball, people would stand by in a circle watching. I know you don’t believe me.

Both the sisters assured her they did.

A tide of pain ran over her face, and her mouth gaped like that of a woman twenty years older—a pleading, gummy mouth. So, said Mitchie when it passed, it is with a certain sadness… But poor women drowned, younger than me.

One could not doubt Mitchie’s grasp on the world. It seemed firmer than Sally’s.

They are mistaken, said Mitchie, if they think I will be hereafter content in a sedan chair.

She held up her hand.

You have met the officer commanding? I know you have. How I hate to leave you in his hands. But I am due my injection in half an hour. I have become quite the opium fiend. You’ll find me in the dens of Little Collins Street when you get home.