Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

But the wounds of those who reached Rouen were still full of murderous potential. One night in the ward labeled “C” and reserved for Germans Sally watched the heart rate of a young prisoner who had suffered a mere upper-arm flesh wound climb ferociously as his temperature rose in concert. She and Honora watched him gasp and were pleased to see early morning, when he could be sent to the theatre. Here, his arm was amputated. But the bacteria had beaten the surgeon’s knife and entered his system. Or else, some meningeal infection had been provoked in his brain. The boy died not with the quiet Leo had remarked on, but raving. His corporal grasped his hand and gave answers to his hectic, fearful inquiries.

Because Rouen was so large—and authoritative in its bulk and marked streets—it struck Sally as a hospital where men were kept for their entire medical care. But the ward doctors had nurses mark the British and Canadians and Indians with a “1,” “2,” “3”—according to their readiness to return to the front (1), their likelihood to recover within three months (2), or their unreadiness for battle for at least six months—if ever (3). If marked 3, they would be taken by ambulance to the port of Rouen for shipment to England. The recovered—of course—went in the other direction. Back into the threshing machine.

A Melbourne late summer day. The desert that had killed Burke and Wills was breathing on the city. The air moved as fiercely as anything Naomi had known in Egypt. And in that furnace heat she saw from the deck of yet another sister—the Alexander —a thousand young reinforcements sitting on their kits on the blazing wharf where tar melted beneath their boots. They shouted to each other and endured the withering day. Maybe they thought, If we can’t put up with a hot Melbourne afternoon, how will we put up with other places?

Across the wharf came a party of nurses in summer straw hats and the same lightweight gray Naomi wore. They were led at a sedate pace by their matron, who moved stiffly on a stick and bore in her other hand an unfurled parasol designed to fight the sun. This party was not delayed on the wharf at all, but—reporting to a sergeant-major at the gangway—immediately permitted to climb the gangway. They were slow. The younger legs of the nurses were inhibited by the awkward gait of their leader. Even though she was so lamed, this woman leaned on her walking stick with a flamboyance which falsely suggested it was an implement of gesture rather than something needed. Naomi saw then it was Matron Mitchie. A nurse behind her carried her satchel. On both feet—including the one that was prosthetic—she wore black shoes. She rose up in the fierce air, with the wind tearing at and buffeting the face veil which hung from her hat. Naomi concluded that Mitchie had been sent to conduct these girls and to advise them on shipboard life. By that night she would be back to one of the military hospitals around Melbourne to continue practicing how to walk on a false limb.

My God, panted Mitchie. She stepped off the top of the gangplank and down a little into the shade of the deck. She waved her stick for the pure joy of arrival.

My God! she called. It appears to be Naomi Durance!

She handed her parasol to her assistant and embraced Naomi with one strong arm. The other women arriving on deck looked startled. It wasn’t in the normal repertoire of matrons to caress.

Did you notice what an athlete I am these days? she asked. Not waiting for an answer, she introduced Naomi to her aide. A Nurse Pettigrew.

Poor girl, aren’t you? Mitchie asked Pettigrew. Given an old wreck to look after. And having as well to carry her satchel.

Naomi said, You must be visiting someone aboard. Or seeing these girls settled?

No, I’m visiting you. And I’m visiting France and what it holds. I may visit England, land of my forebears, though they did not frequent distinguished parts of that kingdom. But, in a word, Mitchie and company are open again for business—and not without some little argument. Come, let’s find the cabins for these girls before the officers get on board.

In the passageway inside—where the purser sat ready to tell them where their assigned cabins were—Mitchie whispered, It’s brave of you to go back. After that hospital at Mudros Harbor in lovely Lemnos. Not to mention the little bath we had in Mare Nostrum.

I felt that I had nowhere else to go, said Naomi.

How peculiar, said Mitchie. My very feeling too. We’ve been spoiled for the usual regimen.

Naomi was aware of her good fortune in finding a benign aunt aboard a vessel in which she might have been a bewildered spirit. She had already seen Sergeant Kiernan come aboard and had felt reinforced by that fact, even though they had barely spoken. But he was her seer. He was a quantity of shrewdness and wise counsel—a sort of essential store.

Robbie Shaw was not here. He would have dearly desired to be, but was still waiting—so he said—in all senses of the verb to wait . She had frequently let him know that she would not remain in Australia throughout his struggles to have military and medical boards ship him abroad again. Now she was proving it. Robbie wrote that he hung discontentedly around military offices in Brisbane where they had the hide to tell him, he said, that he had already done all that any man could be expected to. But he—having felt that attraction to horrifying circumstance too, to serving the giant mechanism—was not willing to be orphaned by it until the halt was called. What a peculiar thing it all was. This desire to find a home with the gods of sacrifice. She had assured him that she cherished his friendship and wished he could fulfill his ambition. She had once written that in her assessment he was a completer fellow than nearly any other man she had met. But though this was true, she said, she must also insist this did not mean they were suitable for one another.

Baying sergeants and the echoing, metallic thud of boots on corridors—which in more peaceful times had been carpeted and subject to less din—showed that now the ship was taking on its new warriors. She had heard the urgency of sergeants’ commands before harrying soldiers along. It was all so anxiously reminiscent of the Inniskilling men entering the Archimedes . In the meantime Naomi welcomed three new women to the cabin she had occupied on her own along the coast to Melbourne. She felt little of whatever original itch she’d possessed to know shipmates. She knew they would think she was aloof. That was the price of being a Durance.

Through the opened ports she saw thunder clouds surging in, to the relief of the city. Everyone climbed on deck again and watched the cooling electricity of the rain torrents over Melbourne and the thunderheads dropping hail on the wharf like a good-bye gift.

At Fremantle the Alexander became part of a convoy. In the Indian Ocean—in that vastness which made a pond of the Mediterranean—it was rumored that German raiders were loose. All deck lights were doused and cabin lights hidden by curtains. No French destroyer with a supply of blankets could save them in this immensity.

With the troops on deck agog, the Alexander and the other transports entered Table Bay, Cape Town’s harbor. Here it became known by rumor that they were bound direct for England or France. Naomi went to town twice on the squalid little train from the dock. The first was with Kiernan to travel to False Bay and drink tea and eat cake while watching the dazzling southern Atlantic.

The two of them exchanged tales of their homecoming. But Kiernan had not run into a wall of bogus congratulation. His father had been prayerful and rather depressed. He was developing that unjustified repute for disloyalty which afflicted all Quakers in wars. He was fighting off by every legal means a—to quote Kiernan—“compulsory offer” from the federal government to buy his engineering works for war production. He had been promised by public servants that his steel containers would be used purely for water storage. He was certain that they would also be used to store fluids of greater military intent.