Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

They were acts of pure ratbaggery. Done out of hopeless anger.

Sally wondered what a person could do when being praised so wildly for calmness and valor. And by your sister! It felt close to being wrongly accused of theft or treachery. She was persuading herself not to say so when she saw Sergeant Kiernan in the line of men waiting for the launches. He was overcoated and carrying a kitbag on one shoulder and the normal duffel bag. He saw them and came over.

You are both about to escape? I’m so pleased.

No, said Naomi. I’m the only one going. I’m not escaping. I’ve been thrown out.

You can describe me in the same terms, Kiernan told them. He looked at the gray bulk of the troopship standing offshore in the gale—and then up the long road to Turks Head—as if weighing all that was about to be lost.

I felt powerless, he said. I knew what was happening to you where you were. All I could do was tell the officers at the rest center and write to my father. He’s a friend of the alienist Dr. Springthorpe who is treating men in Egypt and has a lot of influence. So he wrote in turn to Springthorpe—enclosing my letter. The counsels of impotence. But I hope it did some good.

When he turned his eyes back to the Durance sisters, there was none of the normal humor in his face.

Laws against fraternization, he confessed, were all the rage at our general hospital. And I was cowardly enough to obey them.

You couldn’t have done anything, said Naomi.

I must go back to my fellows, said Kiernan. It will be easier to speak on board, Miss Durance.

He turned to Sally. I do hope we meet again. Though not on this dismal island.

So you’re cured of all those mythologies?

There was a stutter of laughter from him. Yes, they can keep the whole lousy lot of them. I’m sticking to modern history. It seems to be an absorbing enough study to me.

Sally watched her sister’s launch depart the shore. Despite the dimness of the day she also saw it arrive at the bottom of the ship’s stairway and at last the tall figure of Naomi ascending. Sally had once thought of a ship as fortressed against all elements except internal fire. Now she saw it as a flimsy tube—or an egg awaiting the hammer. When Naomi had vanished into the ship she turned away from the bay and climbed the hill to be ready for the ambulances now beginning to roll along the pier. We’ll all grow old in our work, she decided. She felt aged already beneath the low, malicious clouds.

In her three-berth cabin on deck two Naomi received by way of a steward a letter from Lieutenant Shaw, whose femur wound was sending him home too. “A bit down at the moment,” he confessed. “But there has to be something I can do in the military sense. If you see me, I’ll be the one who walks at an angle of 45 degrees—unless the ship is at 45 degrees, in which case I’ll be leveled out completely.”

She hoped Shaw wouldn’t plague her. That thought was unworthy—for his kindness on Lemnos he deserved to be humored. But she needed a certain solitude to absorb what had befallen her and to contemplate her Australian future. Her vanity when she first presented herself at Victoria Barracks had been to think she would return home with legible success on her brow. Now she was to return as one of the rejected. She was weighed a failure. That would show on her brow. Her father and his new wife might not see it. Yet—knowing it was there—she would cramp in all she did.

Cheers rose from other and incoming troopships as the nurses showed themselves at the railings to take a last view of that isle whose hard edges were veiled by rain. Naomi did not go up there to see her sister’s island shrink away in veils of dimness and downpour. She stayed below to sleep as soon as the ship began to move. But once stirring and turning on her bunk she promised herself that should the ship sink during its weavings across the rough surface of the Mediterranean, she would let herself fall straight to the base of the ocean without waking.

She heard no more from Robbie Shaw the next day and spent her time reading Punch in the lounge. At dawn the next morning they approached the coast of Egypt. But the waves breaking along the Corniche, the apartment buildings which looked like confections of icing sugar, the buildings dreamed up by an architect who had then taken decoration a step too far, the lighthouse where Pharos had once stood, one of those wonders of the world which children were required to number and write down—the whole fabulous city—was a scene she now lacked the means to relish. The Qaitbay citadel they used to see from the docking Archimedes was today like a fortress from a flick or a novel. The British flag above its turreted central tower suggested war was a simple thing—achieved by musketry from battlements aimed at some unwashed tribe.

Nettice was comforted that her troopship had so easily quartered the Mediterranean. She had been busy, in any case—using a steward who attended to their cabin to carry messages to Lieutenant Byers in his quarters one deck up.

They were rested in nurses’ quarters at a British hospital in Alexandria until their train was ready the following morning. At that ornate railway station in Cairo—through which Mitchie had long ago led her untried charges to board the Alexandria train—they set out for Port Suez.

Out of the windows Naomi found camels and their owners on the roads they passed and green crops tended by unaltered, strong, black-clad, bent women so much more unchanged than the world at large. The sky above Suez grew murky and yielded a gray evening—like a scowl from the Red Sea Moses had parted. She saw—as their train rolled into the port—British army and navy officers sitting at tables under the porticos of the Grand Pier Hotel, men still engaged in a rearwards sort of way with the war Naomi and the others were now departing. The sight made her feel excluded from life rather than fortunate in it.

The train came right to the wharf. Orderlies bustled in to help them with their bags. A cluster of wheelchair cases began to form on the station. The amputees on crutches—their trouser legs bravely pinned up to about knee height—tried not to collide with rushing orderlies. Smoking casually, those who missed an arm walked with a balanced air that claimed they had always wanted to sport an empty sleeve.

Their ship looked—according to Carradine’s habitual assessment of vessels—around sixteen thousand tons. It possessed what people called “good lines” and was named the Demeter . The great doors of the lower deck—more or less at dock level, the same doors which on the Archimedes had been opened to admit horses and gun carriages—stood agape.

Those chirpy on this grim Egyptian afternoon cried, Make way, boys! as they stood back to yield the nurses the gangplank. Their wounds were not visible—were covered by their uniforms—and some of them were possessed by the happiness of valid homecoming. But not all. Some were dreading it like she was.

From the deck, she saw below on the pier a contingent of blinded officers—each with a stick held edgily and unfamiliarly in his hand—advancing towards the lower doors in a line. The first had his free hand on the shoulder of an orderly and the second his hand on the shoulder of the first. And so on. She had never seen the blinded so arrayed or in such a force. She noticed Lieutenant Byers in the midst of the column. He looked lost in the mass.

The nurses were now the first to be let below. The steward who led them told them that their cabins were A1. Walking further forward in the ship the women saw what could easily be imagined as peacetime salons and libraries and smoking rooms. And the promenade deck they had been ushered across felt just that—a deck for promenades and not for heaping the wounded. Nettice praised the ship endlessly and kept some of her applause for the spacious ports in their cabin. Naomi suspected that it was Byers’s presence onboard that brought out this applause in her.