Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

On the station at Arles, French girls gave crucifixes from large baskets—one for every passenger who would accept it. The wives of the town offered apples and oranges and wine at the carriage windows.

They sat in a siding for four hours near Avignon and saw beyond a bridge the heights of its papal palace and its skirt of humbler buildings obliquely visible across fields violet with dusk. At Lyons they queued with soldiers at the station’s taps with the water jugs from their compartments and a wash basin loaned by the porter. Sally filled one of those decanter-like water bottles and stood up and looked straight into the face of Karla Freud.

I saw you, said Freud in a tight sort of voice. She carried a decanter too. It was exactly as if she was continuing an unhappy conversation begun on Lemnos. How are you?

Karla! cried Sally with a complicated joy. She put her decanter on the ground and hugged her.

Ah, said Freud, you missed me, did you?

Yes, of course we did, Sally claimed but already she felt guilt. It was a revelation: they had tried—in fact—to forget her.

I wouldn’t have known you gave me a thought. No letters. No visits in Alexandria.

Freud was located far beyond complaint and blame though. The accusation was sad but absolute.

They didn’t give us time, Sally told her. They sent us straight across to Heliopolis.

She knew she was equivocating.

Yes, and I suppose mail didn’t occur to you. May I use the tap, if you don’t mind? There’s a bit of a queue behind.

Sally moved away and picked up her decanter. She waited for Freud to be finished. Honora and Leo appeared and also waited to talk to Freud. That was it, they couldn’t help solemnly waiting. And solemnity was the wrong mode.

Freud finished filling her own decanter and walked to where they stood. Honora and then Leo kissed her on the cheek.

We had no idea where you were, Leonora claimed.

You must have really searched, said Freud. She let them stew a while. Then she said levelly, I know how it is. You thought rape was catching. I was as good as dead. Don’t worry. I might do the same as you, mutatis mutandis . You didn’t know what to say and I’d probably have resented anything you did say.

Sally said, You’re absolutely right. We were a disgrace.

Naomi writes though, Freud told them. Naomi always has the right word. But anyhow, they put me in a British hospital in Alex. It was good. I could start from square one. So forget what I said.

But still—in the midst of all the milling around the tap—it astonished Sally that she had not thought to chase up Freud; that she had considered her at an end.

What I won’t stand for, said Freud, is if you start any gossip about me here. I’ll hate you for that all right.

What sort of girls do you think we are? asked Honora.

Well-meaning. So were the generals at Gallipoli.

Oh, I don’t bloody well know what to say, Karla, Honora continued. But at least the fellow’s dead…

That makes everything all right, doesn’t it? asked Karla with an extraordinary and withering combination of forgiveness and irony. Look, I’ve got to take this back to the girls. But I might see you somewhere. Don’t worry—I mean it. We’re all stupid bitches on our day.

She raised and tapped the decanter. They went back to their carriage too since the engine was making head-of-steam noises.

After the train moved out again they awoke often—it was frequently sidelined and being static was what kept them awake most, with thoughts of their neglect of Freud. As morning came they looked out from the moving carriages across flat fields where old men dug. Bluebells and irises could be seen pocking the edges of copses and promising a vivid destination. Nearing Paris, though—they could even sight the Eiffel Tower—they veered away towards Versailles and looked at the vanishing promise of the great city. They assured each other they’d get there soon.

At some stage—while Sally slept—the men started to leave the train. She woke to see long lines of them shuffling onto double-decker buses—the first such contraptions she had ever seen. Were the men to be carried by bus straight to the front? After they had gone, the nurses and orderlies were asked to descend and climb on old-fashioned buses to be taken to a number of destinations they had been allotted. They were allocated to Rouen, but saw Freud climb on a separate bus, which someone said was bound for the British hospital in Wimereaux.

The fairly plain little villages they passed through—the doors of houses crowding to the edge of the narrow road—lacked the charm of the awakening fields. They were no longer, in any case, in a mood to be fanciful. They were willing to believe that the people who lived here were as plain as the people of Dungog or Deniliquin. Sally received small thrills of difference at the sight of a bakery in a square or of crossroads Virgins and crucified Christs in their little shrines. Even over there eastwards—on the way to the front—Christ and the Virgin obviously presented themselves village by village to the French soldiers as a small promise of protection and another scale to a man’s armor. Nurses drowsed and shifted irritably by the misted windows of the bus.

After rolling through a half-rustic suburb of Rouen and glimpsing the dull river—the same Seine which ran through Paris—they entered some ornamental gates with a stone arch proclaiming in metal script Champs de Cours de Rouen and—on a sign beyond the gates— Hippodrome de Rouen . Their bus ground past a few stables on which soldier carpenters were working. They saw before them then a metropolis of huts and marquees, and were delivered to the open yard beside an assembly of these huts marked with signs and corps and divisional colors and a kangaroo and emu. Orderlies—already standing with clipboards in hand—met the bus and directed nurses to their tents down firm-surfaced roads lined with sandbagged walls to waist height. Birdwood Street, they might say, number seventeen. They would point to a veritable street—with a pole and a name on it, as in a township. All the streets were named after an Australian general, and one of them after the director of medical services. And in the midst of a vast racecourse—with the distantly glimpsed railings of the course and a brick wall marking the perimeter of the medical town—was the Australian general hospital.

As Honora, Sally, and Leo found their way down General Bridges Street, a number of men came out of a tent—their faces bandaged, their arms in slings—to watch them. They were Tommies. Honora waved her hand not occupied by a valise towards them with the ease of a spoken-for woman which Carradine had once shown. So they found their tent. To enter beneath the canvas did not feel at all like entering the canvas of Lemnos. The beds looked better. Each woman had a cupboard to hang her clothes. Pleasant orderlies brought their heavier luggage in and told them where their mess tent was. In the mess tent were apples and porridge—or a decent stew and fresh bread. So now—they decided—they were located in the kindly stream of a good supply system. They received the standard lecture on flirtation’s limits. They were to use proper titles when speaking to matrons—not least because it shocked the British Red Cross volunteers if they didn’t. They would notice that most of their patients were—for now—Tommies and Kilties and Taffies and Paddies.

After their meal they strolled back, restored, along the hospital roads and said hello to Frenchmen and Britons to calls of, “Wotcha, luv” and “ Quelles jolies Australiennes ” and so on.

Sally was sure they were all still thinking in part of Freud and their stupidity in her case. Yet they devoted themselves to issues such as whether the stove in their hut needed to be lit. Honora declared it was no colder than a mild winter’s night at home. Then they slept.