Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

When they awoke late that spring afternoon they gradually became aware that the patient capacity of this city of a hospital at Rouen racecourse was two thousand—and it was a hospital of beds, not just mattresses. As a sign of its seriousness there was a well-set-up dispensary from which in an orderly manner drugs were given out on doctors’ prescriptions, as happened in the civil world. This too—as the establishment prepared itself for a war-ending spring slaughter—was a sign of good order. The conclusion the women slept under was that this French affair was a better-ordered war altogether than the hit-and-miss affair of Gallipoli.

When they rose they reported to the reception ward where men were brought on arrival at Rouen. The first ambulances to arrive were full of German wounded. Some came in by the rail spur which ended near the gates of the racetrack. Others arrived by motor ambulance—even by the barges which docked at the quay on the river. Sally was impressed that the more severely wounded Germans were carried in on stretchers which proved to have a blanket not only over the patient but underneath. Femur wounds were splinted and amputees draped over by protective canopies. Many of the supposed enemy wore only tatters of gray uniform and some of them entered the hospital tents on crutches. Others already wore smocks which were marked with the letters “POW.” Many of them ridiculously retained their military caps—those with peaks for officers, and those without for men, and the little button of German colors in the center on the front. It was hard to believe in their culpability. Sally nonetheless could not help studying the faces of the enemy for signs of difference. She gave up the effort as the medical demands of moving bodies for washing and dressing took over. Flesh was flesh.

In the morning a matron called them together in the mess and—using a compliant British Tommy and one of his number of shrapnel wounds for illustration—demonstrated how to irrigate wounds with the newly appointed official disinfectant and method called Carrel-Dakin. A Frenchman—peppered by a bursting shell with extensive but non-fatal wounds—was also brought in on a stretcher for them to practice irrigation on. He lay without complaint throughout the demonstration smoking cigarettes provided by orderlies.

Their sleep that afternoon was broken by the cries of Australian carpenters and of German captives in “POW” smocks who worked as their offsiders. Language incomprehension added to the noise both made as they hammered and sawed in the evening light and tried to convert the stables for thoroughbred racehorses into wards.

The matron-in-chief now called the ward doctors and nurses together and addressed them. The spring and the summer and their battles were on the way and there was something those from Lemnos or Alexandria, Cairo or Heliopolis had not seen yet. There was gas. Yes, they would be taken on a tour of the gas wards.

This was a dimension of barbarity that had not existed on Gallipoli and had been undreamed of in the Archimedes . The nurses were required to take notes on the variety of gases, and all this felt to Sally like a forewarning that there was an even less contained savagery in France than there had been in Lemnos. An unease kept the palms of her hands wet as the matron enlarged on the array of afflictions contained under the general term.

A chemical gas recipe—said the matron—devised by this or that German gas officer is projected towards our poor fellows in a cloud from a line of cylinders. Or else shells full of a recipe are fired by batteries and land with a thud amongst them. We have our own chemical officers since the Germans forced us to retaliate in kind—they began the practice by firing grenades full of tear gas almost as soon as the war started.

The poison gases fell into four distinct groups, the matron instructed them. They were told to make notes, and Sally ended up with dismal columns she would never remember—“Acute Lung Irritants,” “Lachrymators,” “Sternutators,” “Vesicants.”

There were also superficial irritants such as tear gas—although those attacked by them might not consider them superficial but grounds for fleeing trenches. The acute irritants were capable not simply of irritating but of killing by pulmonary edema. Some were solids packed into an exploding shell. Microscopic particles of them could destroy men’s lungs. There were also liquids or liquefied gases, such as chloropicrin, phosgene, and chlorine, and these were dispersed as sprays by cylinder on the right wind, or, increasingly, in a shell by a small explosive charge.

The malign inventiveness of it all made Sally think that she had entered a new continent of human bile.

They should approach these cases with confidence. Most of those who suffered lethal effects had already died closer to the front than this. Here the cases were chronic. They still needed oxygen and—in the case of lachrymatory gassing—care of the eyes. And even here, pulmonary edema could strike a man.

She was brisk—this matron. She had the hydra-headed vileness of gas under her management.

But there was something else they would not previously have seen on such a scale. They should follow the matron—out of the mess into the last lilac light. In the fine spring afternoon day nurses and orderlies who had had the patients’ beds out in the sun were now moving them indoors. Nurses helped the blue-pyjamaed wounded on a last evening stroll. At the end of General Bridges Street there was a crossroad named in honor of a racehorse—Carbine Street. Here the matron-in-chief led the women into a long tent with a cardboard plaque on the door that read NYD. A few dozen of the German prisoners the British had caught in the shock of their first spring foray lay on beds or walked about arguing amongst themselves in German or sat rigid on chairs under the care of a number of orderlies. Some of those who at first looked tranquil on beds were—on a closer look—convulsed into shuddering balls. Some of those who walked about began pushing themselves against the tent wall and bulged it out in terror when an orderly approached.

The matron gathered her nurses about and spoke softly—a tour guide in a strange church.

On both sides of the line, said the matron, whether in clearing stations or general hospitals, lie men who show no wounds but who are afflicted in some disabling way. Doctors believed this mental disablement was funk at first. At the other end of the scale there were even alienists who claimed it had nothing at all to do with a man’s mental history. They argued that such was the absolute shock of the war—the shock of high explosives or of being buried alive—that the invisible disablement might befall any soldier, however brave. Unlike inmates in many mental wards, these men never or rarely show violence.

She walked the nurses down the aisle under a guard of orderlies. Sally knew that even in Egypt the term “shell shock” had escaped as if from a burrow and run through the wards and was picked up by some doctors and debated by others. Its relationship to cowardice—that was the debate.

What is NYD on the door? asked Leo softly.

There is always doubt, said the matron. So it stands for “Not Yet Diagnosed.”

They were permitted to sleep longer that night and were awakened later in the morning by an Australian orderly with a Scots accent. He rang a bell and walked amongst the tents singing genially that his heart was in the Highlands a-chasing the deer.

They die so quietly, said Leonora of the British and the Germans they nursed. It’s just like Lemnos that way.

If conscious, a man might announce his awareness of death in the quietest tones—as if telling a friend that he was going to a shop on the corner to buy tobacco. Some of them were more appallingly young than in Egypt. Britain was scraping boyhood’s barrel. Some were chatty—telling their horrifying stories of the hours of being carried back out of the trench system. Or else they had limped rearwards on shattered limbs or with chest wounds against the tide of reinforcements and supplies—ammunition boxes, cooking boilers, barbed wire—making for the front trench. The worst of cases died at the regimental aid posts or the forward dressing stations. If not there then at a casualty clearing station.