Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Are there no fresh mattress covers? called Naomi, suddenly rising.

What did you say? asked the orderly sergeant from the mid of the three poles of the tent.

I wondered, were there fresh mattress covers.

The man’s eyes engorged. He pointed a sort of NCO’s baton or crop at her. That is not your flaming concern!

Do you speak to your wife that way? asked Naomi.

Bloody shut up, Nurse, one of the stretcher bearers murmured. It almost sounded like well-meant advice.

You can’t speak to nurses that way, Naomi insisted—fixed on the sergeant and his poor man’s imitation of an officer’s riding crop.

Yes, you go and complain, you stupid cow, he told her. It’s been bloody tried before.

Some bearers seemed to laugh, and the faces of the upright, accustomed Lemnos nurses remained tight and their eyes sought upper reaches of canvas. One of them, however, called to her sisters on their knees, They’re not all as bad as this one.

The sergeant laughed at that—the easy laugh of a man with official permission or indifference backing him. Naomi’s reply to the sergeant was the best one that could be chosen for now. She kept her narrowed gaze on him and dropped to her knees, still gazing full-on.

Then she set to scarifying the floor again.

Sally saw a man rise from his palliasse and rush out shuffling with that dysentery urgency. He had been a soldier but now was a flue—a man in flux, paying away his stinking animal substance.

At the end of the shift, carrying basins and a jug, the nurses drew their water ration from the pump, and it seemed an inferior quantity for the task of redeeming themselves and their clothes from the foulness of the day. In the mess tent and at the nurses’ stations at the end of the ward there were at least large water-filter jars brought in by ship. From these they could drink unpolluted water.

There are said to be more bedpans on the depot ship in the harbor, Carradine told them at mealtime. But the colonel feels no rush to get them ashore. He’s got this cracked belief that it’s better for the man with dysentery to have a bit of a walk. It teaches him self-control. Besides, it punishes him in case he’s scrimshanking.

Scrimshanking?

Malingering. His beliefs belong to other wars. The wars in Africa and India that Kipling writes about.

He can’t be serious, the women protested. Doesn’t he know about bacteria?

They were on their knees all the next day in the typhoid ward. It was run less primitively—the absence of uncontrolled voiding of the bowels helped that. The ward doctor seemed more visible. Though of a colorless character, he cast at least a mild influence on the orderlies to take a less cutting air. Thus when a scrubbing Archimedes woman was in their way they emitted merely small hostile hisses. It was their ward though—the hisses stood for their title to it. There was a spirited nurse who spoke at a more than hushed volume and ignored them. There were even orderlies whose manner was inoffensive if not apologetic. It was generally older men who said, Excuse me, Nurse, as they delivered infectious cases to the beds.

The men with typhoid were apparently under suspicion of scrimshanking too. Sally saw the colonel enter attended by the ward doctor, the matron-in-chief, and a sergeant-major. They stood by to honor this high-ranked crackpot who seemed to think the blowflies represented a test of character. The ward sister inclined her head but repressed a bow.

Don’t rise, he instructed the scrubbing women airily.

As he and his orderly stopped near her, Sally could smell—even penetrating the wholesale fug of the place—the strong, masculine odor of polish from the boots of the colonel and his sergeant-major. As the medical grandee and his aides gazed across the typhoid ward, the ward doctor ventured a suggestion.

Sir, I don’t believe the creosol is working well in the latrines. The Canadians are recommending chlorinated lime and the New Zealanders blue oil.

Colonel Spanner was at least indulgent as he put a hand on the ward doctor’s shoulder. Let them recommend away, he suggested. Let them go at it as they will. Creosol is the official British army prescription and thus the Australian.

Sir, said the doctor gamely, the very proliferation of these flies…

Well, yawned the colonel, it’s summer. Of course there’s a proliferation of flies.

He chuckled then. Those Canadians, he said. Only just off the prairie and full of ideas about chlorinated lime…

He gargled some further, forgiving laughter for the raw Canadians, slapped his leg with his swagger stick, and led his party out.

Sally heard the ward doctor tell himself, There’re a bloody sight fewer flies at the Canadian hospital.

An arrival of two hundred men from a transport lifted the Archimedes women off their feet. They were allowed to disinfect their hands and put on their veils and begin work in the general wards. There had been an August offensive on Gallipoli, and now the orderlies unloaded the ambulances. Sally was sent to be Carradine’s aide. She was equipped with shears to cut away the stinking and lousy uniforms from those who wore them. She remembered the first time she had done this on the Archimedes and how fouled she believed everything was after only days of the campaign. But that was nothing to how men and uniforms were now. Her next work was to wave away flies from bloodied bandages and naked wounds. The air vibrated with ecstatic insects delayed only by questions of choice. One-handed she provided surgical scissors and the angled forceps needed to extract the gauze which packed the wound. Then the irrigation hypodermics, the new gauze and dressing and bandages.

As Carradine worked on the facial dressing of a young man with a tag which declared his wound serious, Sally labored with blunt scissors, cutting away his serge jacket. Australia—so proud of its wool—had devoted too much and too densely to this young man’s uniform.

To see the blackened wound in his mandible as the dressing and gauze was eased away was to see a monstrous man—as Sally imagined him in the future—living solitary in some hut of bark and burlap on the edge of a town and lacking the features to reclaim his life.

Oh dear, said Carradine.

She took up a swab doused with hydrogen peroxide. The young ogre groaned as his face burned with disinfectant.

It’s good, Carradine whispered to him. It occurred to Sally that a nurse was the seductress—telling her lies to coax back those whose minds licked at death.

Within the ambit of Lemnos floated a boat with four putrefying dead soldiers and three dead nurses in it. One of the nurses—identified by her watch—was the girl named Keato. All the Archimedes women were given an hour to descend the hill and stand in the neat cemetery for the commitment of Keato and the other two women—known only to God—to the earth. In the half-forgotten life before this, a nurse might die of pneumonia or peritonitis, and her parents put on her grave a shattered column for a cruelly uncompleted life. But Keato’s funeral was from this new and unprecedented order of existence and thus of death.

How the men and women buried today must have celebrated at finding their lifeboat. Had they needed to right it—and then congratulated themselves on achieving this and climbed aboard its hollow promise? To perish in an excess of air, Sally believed, was worse than to drown in water.

Nonetheless, the solemnities of the padre and the trumpeter did release the pressure of grief. After it was done, Sally was pleased to go back up to the tents from this field of putrefaction of young flesh—from this ground which lacked aged souls—to counsel the bewilderment of the lost young spirits.