Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

One might have had a hope of turning back and retrieving him had it happened in the stern. The captain did of course turn the ship and stop the engines. Lookouts were posted and the decks became crowded with unofficial searchers—officers, nurses, and men. On the sea’s brilliant surface a little white froth gave a mimicry of a floating head. Hence, many at various stages yelled, There! No, no. I thought…

The idea of suicide was now unleashed. And they all knew that according to the ruthlessness of physics the padre had been drawn straight under by the ship’s motion and bludgeoned and hurled along by its hull and thrown into the sweep of propellers. The idea shook Naomi. She knew what propellers could do.

The ship continued to circle but everyone knew it was futile. Naomi consulted her watch.

I should take you down below, she told Robbie. I’m sorry, my shift’s beginning.

Shaw said almost as a complaint, Do you think I’d do something like that if you left me up here?

No. I know you wouldn’t.

But she insisted he come too. There was nothing he could do for Harris by staying on deck. And the chop was too pronounced for him to stay there alone.

Now a fatal trend was in place. Though two young men afflicted with syphilis had thrown themselves over the railing, it was Padre Harris’s example in particular that confirmed the availability of such a release. Within an hour orderlies armed with rifles had been placed on sentry duty on the decks. Perhaps—as Nettice said with dry humor—to shoot anyone who thought of killing themselves. As for aft, it was believed that even a halfway-alert orderly could intercept a blinded soldier or a fellow with amputated legs or a man with a ruined face. But two guards were put there anyway.

In the evening the mood in the mental ward was solemn as Naomi handed out the pills which were meant to keep these men equal of soul. Eyes strayed towards a particular lieutenant colonel named Stanwell. He was a man who sat that night smoking on his own but who was not often seen there in the reading room. Like Harris he had been on dosages of ethanol, but even higher ones than those given to the unfortunate padre. Most of the time he could not sit upright or perform the functions of lighting a cigarette. Since there was concern that he might fall asleep while smoking and incinerate himself, his former batman had been assigned to sit in a chair in his cabin and mind him overnight. Naomi understood too that Lieutenant Colonel Stanwell had the respect of young officers—it was apparent in the concentrated concern they radiated towards him. It had a quality very different from the purely professional care Padre Harris’s two fellow clergymen had extended to that unfortunate man.

Colonel Stanwell—with the same sudden and urgent and remote seriousness as Harris—had enough clarity to ask Naomi later that evening, Did you know, Nurse, how many of my men could be mustered after Krythia? Ten percent of them. That’s the number. Ten percent! Have you heard of such a percentage rate since Hannibal defeated the Romans at Cannae?

That is a very sad figure, Naomi agreed.

And real, he said. And real! Not invented.

But you are here and your family will soon see you, Naomi promised him.

She settled pillows too. Nurses with nothing further to say punched pillows as if to drive the trouble from patients’ heads.

Stanwell asked her, How did I dare lead men down streets in front of families? To speeches by mayors? How did I have the arrogance to do that? Mocking the wombs of mothers and the breasts of wives? Mocking them!

A hill and a ridge on Gallipoli were named after him and he had raised a battalion from the Victorian countryside.

That night a young man from Hobart—his chin had been severed in two by an ax of shrapnel—noting on paper that he possessed twin half-faces, threw himself over the stern into the wind and a sea running in long, foamy swells. It developed that the orderlies on guard there had strolled together around the deck to shelter and share a smoke with those amidships. They were just returning when they saw him on his perch above the sea. Then they saw him drop into the dark. The ship was stopped yet again. The difficult ocean was swept with lights. A boat was lowered to seek the boy in the area where he had thrown himself. But nothing was found. Guards were doubled and the shirking provosts deprived of a month’s pay and given three days in the ship’s cell. But the contagion was rampant.

At breakfast their matron now told the nurses to do their best to anticipate the suicidal impulse in men. Suddenly the women—who had been required on Lemnos to talk as little to men as could be managed—were to talk to them as cheerily and as long as was needed to thwart self-destructive daydreams. In the meantime, Naomi got her draft of “The Sinking of the Archimedes ” done and polished.

The ones I felt sorriest for were those who gave up and slipped away when, had they waited two more hours, they would have been saved for a longer and fruitful life. So might the young man with the broken face, the one who recently threw himself off the ship. For, after all, the surgeons had still much to do and skills to do it and might have given him a decent life in the end.

She did not see these reflections as moral. She saw them as embodying the tragic—and in pretty plain and ordinary terms. She delivered the pages to Kiernan’s office two decks down. Here—in congealed heat not penetrated by the colder air above—a clerk typed. But there was for the moment no Kiernan.

He met her on deck later. She was no longer with an officer but escorting a Western Australian boy suffering from the effects of a bullet through his lung. She listened to stories of a childhood she thought of as rougher by degrees than the one people lived on the Macleay. He had grown up in a hut set on a creek bed which flooded and drowned a sister and brother. Western Australia seemed another rung down in the scales of civilization than the place—narrow in mind and spacious in geography as it was—that had bred her. She advised her charge to sit and rest on a rudimentary bench riveted to the bulkhead. Kiernan passed her with a section of orderlies on their way to some duty. He paused, broke away, and spoke to her in a hurry.

I saw what you wrote, he told her. It’s a parable exactly suiting the need. It will do more than sermons and better by far than a dozen sentries.

What of the accusations against generals?

Let them stand. The senior officers can make a fuss about them after I’ve published them.

She wanted to deny she was capable of anything as high-flown as a parable. Yet she was also suffused with literary vanity.

I shall be distributing it about the ship tomorrow, said Kiernan. The Demeter Times . I have to go. Forgive me.

Kiernan had infused a new soul in her. And now that she was in the soldiers’ wards, it was Sergeant Kiernan who invited her on a promenade the following morning. Kiernan had fixity. In his presence the universe was still.

You said, she asked, or Sally said… you are a Quaker?

A Friend. As in “the Society of Friends.” It’s a matter of argument, you see, whether any Friend should wear a uniform. It’s true we have always done our best work out of uniform.

She asked him why he had got himself into uniform then—and with stripes on his arm.

Oh, he admitted. Innocence. Vanity. Ignorance—I was not aware that there would be volunteer ambulances that weren’t military. And I might have been caught up in my own way in that war fever. The whole of society was swept up, and I was part of society and wanted to belong in it. I got the simpleminded sense that this was a furnace we all had to be tempered in, the fierce and the peaceable alike. I wanted to be part of it.