Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

At dinner—seated with the captain and his third officer—they began with an entree of fish in a near-vacant dining room. The captain was a Scot and of a certainty, a gaze, a solidity that would not easily yield to any projectile thrown by an enemy. Other nurses they had not yet met arrived in the dining room in their long gray dresses and jackets. Some looked to be women as old as Mitchie and were puffed from climbing the gangplank and companionways. They were all from the great barn of a hospital in Cairo known as Luna Park and from a hospital at Ismaïlia. It turned out that at least two of them—having lost a brother each—were being sent home to console their parents.

The matron of the Demeter spoke at the end of dinner. By then they’d had some miraculous beef and roast potatoes and pudding with custard. The matron was broad-shouldered—she looked like a country girl grown up—and had an eczema outbreak on her cheeks. She enumerated the range of work they would need to do according to a light, six-hour-a-day roster. The demands of the eight-week journey home would tend to be medical rather than surgical. So there were the two small medical wards—for officers and men—and a contagious ward. There was also a small mental ward. Most of the patients here were depressed or suffering delusions harmless except to themselves. Forward and on a lower deck lay the living quarters for some fifty syphilitics. Smile on them, issue their medicines, and then leave them to the orderlies. In the meantime, the majority of the men—in stable condition—would occupy the normal cabins and bunk spaces.

Nettice’s face bloomed and the knot which had fixed her features in place seemed suddenly to release itself.

Naomi’s job some days was to take blinded or lamed men for a turn on deck. Nettice thought it was against the spirit of the matron’s lenient instructions that she should always accompany Lieutenant Byers—she found other ways of meeting him during the day. Naomi was therefore in the company of Sam Byers amidst a now-vivid-blue Red Sea when she saw Sergeant Kiernan in overall control of a string of orderlies guiding blinded men on a spin around the promenade. He stepped aside from the procession a moment to speak to her and Byers.

Sir, he said to Byers, I hope you’re well.

Who is this? asked Byers with his head cocked in a way which had now become habitual to him. Kiernan introduced himself. He wondered whether the lieutenant would allow him to have a word with Naomi.

Byers laughed. Pardon me, he said, but I was never used to such courtesy from my platoon.

So Kiernan turned to Naomi, calling her Sister Durance. He said he had undertaken to produce a newspaper for the ship. Could she write something about the sinking of the Archimedes for him? He said he would publish it after they’d left the Cape and got into safer waters.

Her very blood revolted at the idea. To put the thing down in ink would be a form of self-exposure and would profane the drowned. She told Kiernan she was sorry but she could not do it.

Oh, go on, Nurse, said Byers. It should be recorded by somebody. I have been at Rosie Nettice to set something down but she won’t consent.

Naomi challenged Kiernan. Why don’t you write it?

I think it will have greater authority coming from a woman. And I remember that you were very conscious throughout. I might have approached Matron Mitchie but I doubt she remembers much. But if you like, I could write it and say how thoroughly brave you were and that you deserve the Military Medal.

That idea appalled Naomi. She felt rage towards him, that he would play such mean games when it came to the Archimedes .

I beg you not to do that, she told him. You will never be my friend if you do.

Yes, he said, chastened. That was a stupid joke. I’m sorry.

There was much wire netting on the Demeter , and as the ship reached the end of the Gulf of Aden the nurses—if stifled by heat in their cabins—were permitted to sleep under distractingly brilliant night skies in a wired-off area at the stern of the promenade deck. They made their way there each evening carrying their palliasses and pillows. Beyond a canvas curtain they disrobed to their slips. There was some conversation here before women trailed off into sleep.

Drowsy Carradine told Naomi she had met Lieutenant Shaw while he was undergoing a strenuous massage of his upper leg and hip in the room off the officers’ medical ward. He had promised them a stroll around the deck but he wanted to get his leg fit so he did not hold them up. Though she wished him a normal gait, Naomi was pleased to be free of social duties. The literary ones were enough for the moment. Kiernan’s request for an account of the Archimedes had unexpectedly started in her a compulsion to set down the whole business in ink without exaggeration or vainglory. It was an imperative that came from within her—not from Kiernan. She still had time and space for dutiful strolling with blinded or lamed soldiers. But not yet for Shaw’s bush whimsy and flirtatious chat.

Two days’ sail from the equator—when both the starboard and port decks seemed open to the withering sun, and the tar in the deck became liquid—Naomi went into the officers’ library. Here nurses were permitted amongst all those writing letters home and reading bound volumes of Punch , and it was here she continued her account.

“The Sinking of the Archimedes, ” she wrote after she’d chosen a desk.

Whether nurses or doctors or orderlies, we had all come to think of the Archimedes as our full-time home. It was also our post of duty from the first time a barge from the beach at Gallipoli came alongside with wounded men on its decks. Some of the men on the Demeter might even have been nursed on the Archimedes at one stage or another. We were not to know that our ship—which seemed as solid as a town or as a hospital in a city—would soon be taken from us. But not before it had brought many damaged men to Alexandria and to the harbor of Mudros.

What a delight it all at once was to write of this—even in the plainest terms. But the horses and their terror. How could that be conveyed? And the boyish apathy of those who slipped away and yielded themselves up? And Nettice—the layers of ocean through which she sank and rose. The horror of men hitting the propellers—as if they preferred to be obliterated quickly by the mechanical instead of slowly by the weight of water. Could all this be put down?

As she went on, Kiernan drifted into her imagination, grabbing on to his copper cube. He had been a full partner in her command of the raft. She remembered having been loud and high-handed. For the torpedo had strangely restored her authority when it took down the Archimedes . (That was something not to be included in the account.) The Archimedes had taught her about her weakness and yet educated her in the nature of the woman she was.

As she was writing, too, the idea of Kiernan having been admirable—of his proving he’d probably be admirable anywhere he was put—took hold of her imagination. The word itself seemed lodged in her brain for the two days she was engaged on the task. When she later saw him on duty, he seemed to her to be placed in the midst of people with a special distinctness other figures lacked. This sharpness of outline was not a form of infatuation but rather a new version of seeing things. It was more akin to identifying a prophet.

The captain recommended that they be at the railing to see the coast of South Africa and the approach to Cape Town.

Naomi and Carradine caught a grimy little train to town. The city was comparable to towns they had known in girlhood—with the strangeness, though, of African women in their swathes of wildly colored cloth selling flowers and fruit from baskets on the footpaths. Black children harried Naomi for money, shouting, Australia! Rich Australia. Give us some.