Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Lieutenant Dankworth, said Naomi. We met in Egypt. Honora’s here, but sleeping. Off-duty. I could go…

No, said Lionel Dankworth, let the poor girl sleep for now.

He seemed frightened of the reunion—or at least of it being public.

The women pulled the cans and packages from the box and squinted at the labels like scholars trying to read hieroglyphics. Nettice spoke.

There is a young officer who is blinded. He’s a jeweler, you see. Rather down. Since the supply in the ward has run out, if you’ve no objections I might take him some of this cocoa.

Why not? asked the tall man. If the others don’t mind.

The shorter man with the femur injury gave the sort of smile over which no shadow had ever fallen. And yet he had been on Gallipoli and been part shattered there.

Sally inspected Nettice. It was strange that she would mention one soldier in that way.

Look, said the officers, we should introduce ourselves.

The lanky one said his name was Dankworth—as Naomi had already said. The man with the femur injury was Lieutenant Robbie Shaw.

Shaw lowered his voice. We heard one of our girls was having a bad time here.

They told him Freud was on duty. At her own insistence.

We don’t like that sort of thing happening to Australian girls, the lanky one grumbled. If there is anyone you’d like us to talk to…

It was the normal male proposition—we can take your enemies aside and box their ears for you. That would fix everything.

She wouldn’t want you to do anything just now, Naomi told them. They have promised to find the man.

You just let us know if they mess about, Lieutenant Shaw advised.

In the meantime, said Dankworth, there’s a depot ship full of tea and frozen lamb and other delicacies in the harbor. Comfort from home. The laziness of quartermasters and other people meant the goods on board just sat there. They had the other day grabbed a fistful of quartermaster’s invoices and filled them out and gone on board and collected the goods that they’d brought here.

So this isn’t the end of it, Robbie Shaw promised.

Lieutenant Dankworth surveyed the mess. He referred to Naomi’s face and then his eyes moved to Sally’s. You young women are sisters, I seem to remember?

Yes, Sally admitted.

The two men seemed to welcome the idea, as if it were some sort of souvenir of home. On their way out, Dankworth paused by the tent flap. Remember that we are willing to protect you, he growled with his eyes lowered. But the shield he offered them was not the right one for the time.

Honora was outraged they had not woken her to meet Dankworth, but she was half pretending—she seemed invigorated to know he was on the island. Soon they’d be promenading the foreshores together, and that would restore something that had been lost here.

It was raining when the military police officer and his sergeant came to the mess tent to collect Freud. Nurses had till now been muttering about how well she seemed to be taking things. Nursing—Sally knew—was a great if temporary distraction from all memory. The two provosts shone like deliverance in their slicked waterproofs. The Australian matron also appeared in an overcoat and was a fellow authority. The provost officer asked Freud to come with them, and the matron said Naomi could come too.

When Naomi and Freud set out with the military policeman and the matron, they were themselves bulky in khaki overcoats and as good as disguised under sou’westers. Their gum boots robbed them of all grace as they tripped through puddles to the hut down the hill which served as a police station. Naomi was later spare with details about what had happened there. Freud could not be asked for fear of what the question would bring on in her. The man imprisoned and identified by Freud as the rapist was an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old who was wide-faced and fair-haired—an orderly from the medical wards and the circus tent. Freud was asked to swear that this was the criminal. She gathered herself and—as Naomi recounted it to Sally later—it was already apparent that she could swear. But the forces working on Freud for denying it were potent. The provosts and others would be pleased if she did refuse to point to the attacker.

The young man brought in front of her was blushing. Freud snorted at this—as if it were a plea of innocence.

Did you say something? the officer asked.

That’s him, Freud answered. She looked at the boy full-on. He would not look at her. At the moment of identification the boy’s mouth hung in a way which almost made Naomi pity him. He’s not clever, she thought. He’s a muscular child. Those who recruited him carry their barbarous portion of the blame. But suddenly Freud needed to be restrained by Naomi and the matron from attacking him. She managed only to spit at his face. After a second—held by the arms—she went peacefully. There was no answer for what this blundering kid had taken. The young man was charged in front of her with rape and marched away hatless. Afterwards Naomi and the matron guided Freud back to the tent and suggested they would need to call the doctor again with his benevolent sedatives. No, said Freud—upright in their hands. Whatever he gives me, I still have to wake up in the end.

She wanted to go on duty with Naomi, so Naomi was promoted to post-operative. Dysentery was declining anyhow as autumn came to the Gallipoli Peninsula and to Lemnos. The medical wards were not as full, as the armies on the peninsula dug deeply rather than raged forward. Freud worked with a neutral and measured air. She took temperatures and blood pressures and encouraged young men to wake from chloroform. She had the power now to call on orderlies to help her move patients onto their sides. They obeyed her with their own neutrality or with a strangely shy sullenness. Naomi heard one man who worked with them—an orderly who must have been near forty years of age—bend forwards and tell Freud he was sorry and that he hoped she understood they weren’t all like that, et cetera. Freud said nothing to him.

The entire nurses’ mess felt a certain solace to know the evildoer had now been arrested—and identified as barely more than a child and not a very clever child. They could not help feeling it reduced the scale of menace which had hung over them. Now—more than in the interim—it became clear to them that they had been frightened of someone satanically astute and not to be appeased. They were relieved by the anticlimax of an arrest to which one plain face belonged.

Dankworth had been back to stroll down the headland with Honora—that was a token of the normal. But the women as a group acted in Freud’s company with the false breeziness appropriate to a fatal condition. Her fatal condition was that the trial of the rapist was still ahead of her and he might get exonerated.

Lieutenant Robbie Shaw and his newly promoted friend Captain Lionel Dankworth did help ease the weight of such questions by calling at the mess again one evening. They found a small group of nurses ready to go on night duty—Sally, Naomi, Honora, Nettice, Leonora. There are thermal baths on the other side of the island, Shaw told them. We’re going to try to get a car on Sunday to take us over there. Would you like to go?

These two had a wonderful air of unstoppability about them. They walked on the island on their own terms. And behind their joking, their casual watchfulness, and their unspoken sense of affront at what had been done to Freud, Sally could tell that they were by their very instincts assessing and weighing the women as men customarily did. Is my wife here? they asked themselves. Is she amongst these gravel-dwellers with their mixed clothing and their harrowed looks?