Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

When Honora’s votive candle foray ended, they climbed Quasimodo’s tower where—looking down the reaches of the Seine—she covered her Paris amazement with a more earthy issue. She could see the hatted heads of men in the open-topped pissoirs , capable without embarrassment of lifting their hats to passing ladies.

The Eiffel Tower waited in its gardens for them and was reached by the Métro with its crowds of soldiers and older men in suits—all with lush Gallic moustaches—and worn-looking housekeepers, seamstresses, wives. Their weariness was unlikely to be dispelled even by a military triumph. Then, as they mounted the Métro steps— there , the tower beetling and dizzying but tethered by its four giant feet to four distinct plots of earth.

Back at the railway, they kissed Freud good-bye in the belief they had at least in part expiated their earlier crassness. She responded with a wary affection—not sure yet whether she wished to go back to full sisterhood. She found her train. Then they took theirs to Rouen, on a long-lasting spring evening.

As they ate chocolates and pastries, Leonora suddenly asked the others whether they thought there were malingerers amongst the NYD. On the table before them lay the litter of what Leonora called in her private-school way a beano—boxes which had held exuberant gâteaux and little fluted cups for the most improbable chocolates and the most fanciful confections. As Leonora raised the matter of NYD, Honora made a sucking, dubious sound through her back teeth as if uncertain that she wanted to discuss it.

Warwick thinks there are, Leo said. Not all. But a sizeable number. Malingerers.

Warwick was of course Captain Fellowes. Leo would be the sort of wife who would gladly take on her husband’s opinions and not feel imposed upon by them. She was an excellent nurse, energetic and willing, skilled and kindly. But she thought that Captain Fellowes’s ideas were worth a lifetime of assent.

Sally ran through the catalogue of cases she’d met. The young Scotsman who talked a great deal when not heavily sedated and who, as his dosage wore off, was likely to rush around the tent asking everyone where his mask was and—comic if it weren’t tragic—looking for it under beds and chairs. He had been gassed himself—though the doctor said not badly. It seemed, though, that he had seen his fellows choking to death and thereafter even the smallest residual waft of chlorine or phosgene left behind in the trenches after a gas attack was enough to unhinge him.

So was this pretense? But to pretend for weeks on end to be out of your head with shock was itself a sort of madness anyhow.

Honora gave a small chocolate burp and echoed Sally’s thought.

If any of them are fooling us, then we shouldn’t be ashamed because it means this—they have fooled their way through three levels of doctors and officers, from the front line to the dressing station to the casualty clearing station and on to Rouen. That’s what you would call a worthy performance.

I was on duty in there one day, Leo persisted, however, when I turned suddenly and saw this sly, half-smiling look on one of them. Just in the second before he went back to aphonia and shuddering away. It made me wonder.

It might just have been a variation in the condition, Sally suggested. Or it could have been a rictus.

You’re very charitable, said Leo with some of her beloved’s skepticism.

But, said Honora, even if they are pretending, something horrible made them give up their sense of honor and become pretenders.

Leo ploughed on in a way Sally now found overblown. Perhaps it was the binge of sugar and chocolate and cream that had made her uncommonly persistent.

That’s easy to say. But they’ve abandoned their comrades, in that case. Warwick doesn’t think they’re deliberately shirking though. He believes it begins with the medical officers at the aid post. If the first doctor they meet is too sympathetic, it has a knock-on effect—they act it up for the next MO they meet at the dressing station and then for the next one at the casualty clearing station. So that by the time they’ve got back here, they’re convinced they’re a complete mess and act accordingly. Warwick says he would like to be a doctor at the regimental aid post, and tell most of them they were fine and give them some medicinal brandy and a good sleep and send them back.

But he’s too badly needed at base, isn’t he? asked Sally.

Yes, said Leonora. In a sense he would be wasted up there.

They assessed that. It was true—even if uttered with a touch more certainty than required. She continued, He’s a man of kindness. He doesn’t easily suspect people. But he’s entitled to his skepticism.

As we are, said Honora with sudden sternness, to our conviction. I think it’s clear there’s such a thing as this shell shock. Most young men can’t act for two bob. You can see right through them. The cases I’ve seen aren’t acting.

Let’s not argue over it, Sally urged them. It’s been too good a day to end in a brawl. Besides, another few months of nursing, I think, and we’ll all know for sure.

I wonder, will there be less of it when our Australian boys go into the line, said Honora in a whisper.

Warwick believes so, said dutiful Leo.

This was in many regards a spring of jaunty hopes. Wounded Englishmen strolling General Bridges Street knew what the boomerang-shaped badges on the nurses’ go-to-town uniforms meant, and the Gallipoli “A” for Anzac at their shoulders as well. And English officers stopped them to say, We saw your chaps coming through Armentières to relieve our Twelfth Division. My heavens, they looked so robust and confident!

The influence was more in people’s minds, though, than in military dispositions. Not even the greatest Australian patriots could argue that they had the tens of millions as America did to make an army so massive that it could by mere numbers tame the year and bring it to peace. Of course, the newer women in the mess believed that each Australian was worth a number of the others. But as Kiernan had said on the Archimedes, flesh was flesh.

What could not be argued with was the fact that to other armies the Australians were like the birds of the spring. They were a sign of things turning—of the greater and greater accumulation of armies whose soldiers would resolve it all before the trenches froze again. The Australians were the harbingers.

In that atmosphere of newness and hope, Captain Fellowes and Staff Nurse Leonora Casement sent out a cyclostyled invitation to all doctors and nurses of Number 3 Australian General Hospital Rouen to attend a party in the officers’ mess to celebrate their engagement. It was considered they would not need to wait much beyond autumn to have their wedding. Speeches of praise for the couple were made by the colonel and matron. Leo’s face shone with such authority that for an hour it was easy to believe the Western Front would accommodate itself to her nuptial timetable.

Now the first of the Australians began to arrive. One was a young officer who had been training in a quiet area they called “the nursery.” But a shell had found him there and his entire head was—for the moment—bandaged. The wound beneath that was a test Sally and Honora were set. This scale of harm and outrage numbed and drove from her mind for days on end the memory of her mother and of all connivance with Naomi.

In the surgical ward—since it was considered his wound would need occasional trimming under anesthetic—the young man took in soup and tea through a tube inserted into his bandages. Other nutrients in sterile solution were infused through a vein in his arm. The ward doctor seemed pessimistic and had declared a face wound a prime site for sepsis. When they first exposed the raw meat of the man’s face by removing the packing placed there at the casualty clearing station from which he’d come to Rouen, Sally and Honora found that one eighth of a grain of morphine did not save him agony. Stutters of complaint escaped from the bloodied hole in his face. His one eye seemed to shed tears. So the dose was raised to one quarter—which left him drowsy by the hour and was a good arrangement in Sally’s estimation. When so relieved, he could dazedly attempt to speak, making words from the throat and not with his palate. The voice box was intact but many words were unformed for lack of lips. The name on his label when he’d first come in was Captain Alex Constable.