Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Her pain filled the tent and they felt forced in the end to retreat before it—to give it the room it vastly needed.

Orderlies delivered their meals in the mess. Beef and biscuit at night. Some of the men appointed to the job did not care to deliver that joyless tack with grace. They wiped their noses between placing enamel plates in front of the women. They did it because they had not been told they must not.

As Sally finished a letter to their father, Naomi asked whether she was up to an evening walk. They walked along paths marked with white-painted stones, emerged from the shadows of the Canadian hospital on the cliff and saw a lovely bluish light in a sky crowded by great fists of headlands on the low foreshores of the harbor. Vessels lay at anchor in the lazy mauve water of Mudros. In silhouette they were washed clear of any military purpose. They seemed to be there to lend perspective in the great bowl of stone and pasture and sky and sea.

In terms of their friendship, it still had the color of novelty. They chatted about the state of their gang: Nettice’s mute face but her forehead locked into an unrelenting frown. She might simply need glasses, suggested Sally. Freud, said Naomi, looked as though she’d seen everything. As if nothing surprised her. Yet she seemed very surprised underneath. Honora? Leo? Well, with those two you got what you expected or at least you hoped you did. They were more knowable than Freud was.

Who would look after poor Mitchie in old age? Hadn’t she mentioned a brother in Tasmania? Mitchie—they agreed—would make a very rebellious invalid.

Naomi then said something unlikely. I have had no periods. Not since April.

This was friendship then. This was the sort of thing friends gave ear to.

And, said Naomi, I haven’t accommodated any man. So it’s not a pregnancy.

Sally’s face reddened at this sort of unusual conversation. But Naomi reflected her own bewilderment. She too had missed what she had been trained to call her “time,” for three or four months. Had others? She had seen no sign of the curse of Eve in any of them—no bloodied cloths or toweling hurriedly unpinned from belts beneath nightshirts to be dropped in the soaking bucket.

It’s called amenorrhea, Naomi informed her. Another thing, I don’t daydream about men at all. I’m indifferent to them except as patients. Has that happened to you?

Sally gathered herself. Daydream about men ? She must get used to the pace of this new friendship and even to the concept that Naomi had once daydreamed about men, however indifferent she was to them now.

Sally said, I’m still waiting for June’s and it’s already nearly August.

Poor girl, said Naomi softly. Were you worried?

I thought I might ask Mitchie… But then…

Things will return to normal. The triage and the damned wounds. And now, the Archimedes going down. That won’t help.

She took Sally’s hand. Sally could feel her own sweat-slicked palm against Naomi’s dry one. So, nothing to worry about, you see. We’ll lose Mitchie to Alexandria, and Fellowes and Kiernan have been sent to the stationary hospital across the headland. So we don’t have as many allies as usual. So be it. Things will return to normal.

But Sally could not imagine how they would. To confirm that opinion they heard from the whitewashed stone cemetery below the crash of rifle fire and the lonely bugle striving to honor someone whose body had been committed to the earth. She began to grasp her sister’s hand with more of a will now. Her fingers were no longer slack. The bugle had brought their walk to a stop. They stepped off the road to make way for three ambulances grinding their way up from the harbor.

“Hysterical women,” said Naomi when the ambulances had passed. That’s what they say when ships sink or trains go off the line. Hysterical women.

She adopted a gruff voice. “The women were hysterical.” I’ve seen it—Mrs. Carberry when the wagon her kids were playing in crushed her son’s head. But children are a special case, aren’t they? The point is, we weren’t hysterical, were we? In the water? A little bit strange now. But men are strange too. Going silent. Drifting off. That’s another mystery. Our periods are gone and our duty to be hysterical has gone too. They’ll never be able to print the story of the Archimedes because we weren’t hysterical enough.

I’m tired, Sally confessed. The exhaustion felt unanswerable.

We say it’s “the curse.” But when it goes missing we feel a bit lost.

Sally had the sudden confidence to laugh.

After three days their survival became somehow boring to them. They were sick of the burden of the gratitude they were told by all the other nurses they must harbor. Mitchie was the comfort of their days. Her conversational flurries were thinner than normal—interrupted by the encompassing sharpness of her pain. They discussed the nature of her wounds with her day nurse—an English girl as sweet-tempered as the supreme matron was sullen and tyrannous. What drained from the amputation? they wanted to know. The usual, said the English girl. Blood and serous fluid. The wounds on the other, compound-fractured leg showed no sign either of sepsis, but were even harder to attend to.

They were rostered to begin duty on the fourth day and were allocated by the junior matron—their much-dominated and dominating countrywoman—to work in the dysentery wards. One of these was located in a long hut down an alleyway from their own tents, and there was an overflow brigaded tent—what normal people would call a marquee. Nurses called it the “circus tent.” Dysentery was said to be cruel on Gallipoli these days—as lethal as machine guns. The Archimedes women advanced to these wards through a miasma of excremental stink and air spotted with blowflies. The sharp-boned faces of soldiers—flesh retracted around their eye sockets—waited for them inside both the hut and tent, where flies clamored more thickly and where their first impression was of heroic mismanagement. Other harried nurses in white aprons and skirts hurried to answer shamed and urgent cries and helped men hobble towards outside pit latrines, or rushed up with basins of disinfectant to replace linen, or wash a stained rubber mattress while a withered young man waited on a chair for his fouled bed to be remade. Bare-legged men in shirts and shorts—some hopeless cases swathed like babies in clouts—displayed their faces a second but turned them away in a kind of self-reproof for their loss of control before women.

An orderly sergeant set the women of the Archimedes to scrub out the place. They were directed brusquely to a supply tent down the alleyway and came back to the wards with brushes and buckets of ammonia-fortified water. They thus held in their hands the simplest and bluntest instruments of their trade. In fact, they had lost that trade. The idea seemed to be that they must by scrubbing earn their way from an all-fours position to become again upright nurses. They began to cut the stench with their plied brushes and were grateful as the ammonia claimed their nostrils while they blew their breath upwards through clenched teeth to gust flies from their cheeks and eyes.

The floor of the hut done, they went to the circus tent. There were no beds here, no wounds, yet it was hellish—the air dense and feverish and possessed by flies. Men lay on the floor on mattresses and were even more crowded in. Sally could smell the fetor of their breath as she scrubbed the boards between the patients. An ambulance arrived outside, and orderlies were numerous, carrying men in and finding space for them.

Get out of the fuckin’ way, the orderly sergeant screamed at Sally. Where was the kindly and urbane Kiernan? Sent to another hospital, it was said. She stood to make way and considered what had been said but could not devise anything. She saw orderlies lower men onto mattresses already fouled with excrement.