Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Sam, called Nettice in a thin voice.

Rosie? he said with his head cocked. Darned sorry to get you into trouble.

There is no more trouble now.

He shook his head. For there was the untellable trouble of his blindness. But then he inhaled a deep breath and managed a wide, generous smile.

A triumph for justice, he said. Not a common thing in armies.

The women chose to find this heartily amusing and gave themselves up to more laughter than was perhaps justified.

Uniforms arrived from the depot ship to relieve them from the harsh oddments of coarse cloth. There was a rumor sweeping the stationary hospital that Colonel Spanner had left that morning on a ship for Alexandria. The arrival of a new chief medical officer, a Scots surgeon from Adelaide—a former civilian used to treating other civilians with at least some civility—occurred with equal suddenness. The Australian matron broke the news to them—as if they might be aggrieved at it—that they were required to wear the capes ordained by their military authorities. The near-forgotten and halfway elegant gray overcoats with boomerang-shaped “Australia” on their shoulders were also provided, and a neat array of shoes almost too refined for the mud and gravel of Turks Head.

Sheep from Salonika had been landed. On some nights fresh mutton replaced the bully beef on their tin plates.

Orderlies—former tyrants amongst them—now carried out waste buckets and limbs and bloodied bandages to their points of disposal. No “Bloody dumb cows!” anymore. This was the wonder the Leatherhead visitation had produced. He had switched the poles of the earth—or at least of that planet named Mudros. Because of her experience with Captain Fellowes aboard the Archimedes, Sally was asked to administer anesthesia in some shrapnel cases amongst the newly arrived from Gallipoli. She observed the vital signs as metal was removed from wounds or as limbs were taken off by amputation saws and wrapped in linen and carried out to join the heap of arms and legs awaiting prompt incineration. Honora worked as theatre nurse. Leo worked as a scout, preparing and presenting the appropriate packs of instruments and the swabs, keeping count of them, and even supervising sterilization carried out by orderlies.

The matron-in-chief who had been Colonel Spanner’s chatelaine survived for ten days before her temporary assignment to their stationary hospital similarly ended and she was sent elsewhere. Everyone felt that the hospital had been renewed.

There had been a sad revival of the wound of Lieutenant Robbie Shaw, however, the officer who with Dankworth had taken the women across the island for a mudbath. Sally had discovered that open-handed, sociable Lieutenant Shaw lay in the officers’ medical ward with a fever and a distracting pain in his all-but-healed femur wound. Doctors and the matron conferred over his exposed hip, and the redness and swelling which bespoke sepsis.

I wish they’d open the flaming thing up, he told Sally. It’s just a bit of temporary flare-up in there. They can get it out like a core from a boil.

The ward doctor called a surgeon. By now Robbie Shaw’s pulse was racing and he had begun to rave with pain and a fever. An eighth of a grain of morphine was injected every four hours. The wound had cracked along the suture lines and foul matter seeped from within. He was taken to surgery and—with the wound opened up—had some inches of rotten bone cut out of the shaft of his upper thigh. Sally visited him in the post-operative ward and found him depressed and whimsical.

I’ll spend the rest of my life walking like a bloke riding an invisible bike.

But pain regularly distracted him from the issue of his future gait.

Honora developed a pronounced melancholy as notable as her usual elation when Captain Dankworth was sent back to Gallipoli with his artillery battery. He visited his accomplice Shaw before leaving. Sally heard Shaw tell Lionel Dankworth, Well, this buggers me for the artillery.

He was correct about his chances of more campaigning. It was mysterious that he would want it. But it seemed to be an unfeigned desire. No idea of a future profession could console him for not being capable of further gunnery.

The potent rumor arose almost as soon as the women had their new clothes on. There was to be a ship of wounded back to Australia. It took only hours before an embellishment came forth. Some of them were to travel on it. Their Australian matron—now chastened to an amenable tone by the rigors of explaining herself to Leatherhead—soon confirmed that. She read out the names a few mornings later. To show there was no full justice to be found on earth, the list included those with a reputation for giving trouble. Carradine was to make the journey—punishment for the shortcoming of being married. When she raised the matter that her wounded husband was in England, the matron suggested she leave the celibate nursing service and present herself as a Red Cross volunteer. Then, if necessary, she could pay her way back to the Northern Hemisphere and her husband’s bedside. There was no final absolution for Naomi’s rebellions of word and commission. Nettice, for her irregular ward demeanor, was to go too. And some non-offending others. But not Sally. A strange flush of relief ran through her when her name was not read. If she was sent back to Australia, she doubted she could escape again.

I hope I can make my way without you, she told Naomi. And this was not for form’s sake. Naomi seemed quite even-tempered about it all, neither pleased nor displeased.

Who would have thought I’d be the first back to Kempsey? I’ll have to break in our stepmother for you.

Sally became aware—the closer the departure came—that her dependence on her sister had been near absolute from the day the Archimedes sank. Naomi had stood between her and harshness. Without Naomi, she would need to become her own defender and asserter of her own dignity. But it was clear that there was no argument against these shipment orders—no matter how fretful Carradine might be at the idea of putting a world between her and her husband. It was fortunate that Carradine came from a family of means. She could possibly be back in Britain and by her husband’s bedside within three months of arriving in Australia.

The unspoken but deep, sly idea of torpedoes lay as a shadow over the nurses chosen.

In easterly slanted rain, candidates for the process called repatriation were loaded on launches and barges and taken out to a troopship. On crutches now and with a healing wound was Robbie Shaw and—guided along the foreshores by orderlies—Sam Byers. As they boarded, a black ship from Gallipoli disgorged its sick and wounded onto the pier. A great recycle of soldiers’ flesh was in progress.

On the wharf, the Durance sisters were permitted to stand aside and transact their own leave-taking. They shared an umbrella and wore their gray overcoats, newly provided through Colonel Leatherhead’s marvelous intrusion into their lives.

How long will there be hospitals on Lemnos? Naomi asked as a form of speculation.

There’ll be no end to them, since there is no end to Gallipoli, Sally declared, utterly convinced. For an end to it could not be foretold for this year or the next.

If you are stuck here, said Naomi, then I must do my best to get back. I don’t care if they make me carry buckets of diarrhea for entire shifts. Because you are my sister. And you have been the same person throughout. Steady. No, don’t dare protest. You have been calm and brave and solid. And better able to govern yourself than others have been.

What about your own courage? What about you breaking in to see Nettice?