Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

This young man—whose face was steak from his upper right eye socket to the corner of his lower mouth—uttered one day after his wound had been dressed the sound “A’her ease nur.” He repeated it, quite politely but insistently. They eventually realized he wanted a pad of paper and it was all at once so obvious that he should have been given one—and a pencil—earlier. It was as if his lack of a face had somehow prejudiced everyone into thinking he couldn’t write. Honora fetched a pencil and a notebook with AUSTRALIAN COMFORTS FUND on its cover. He held up a hand—long-fingered—and had it do a form of salaam in thanks. There was humor in his remaining eye, now left uncovered by the dressings. And so he set to writing a letter. The energy and fluency with which he wrote were astounding to Sally. When he was finished he tore out the pages he had written on and coughed—that was one form of expression thoroughly remaining to him. He folded the letter in four to fit the flimsy envelope they gave him, and handed it over for postage. He then wrote on a full, unfolded page, “Nurses, could you kindly send this missive to”—and there was an address—“Mrs. G. D. Constable, ‘Congongula,’ via Narromine, New South Wales.” They said, Of course, and he nodded and began writing again. “Sorry to hold you young women up,” said the page he ultimately handed to them.

But I heard people saying I am the first Australian wounded in France. It is an annoying thing to hear. If you can find the means to do so, could you contradict this silliness at every turn? It is the one thing I cannot stand. To begin with, there were Australians in London in 1914 who enlisted in the British army. Their cases were written up in the Sydney Morning Herald. Some of them must have been wounded before now. Could you please tell people as kindly as you choose to cut out the rubbish?

Honora assured him she’d get the word out. She was not any surer than Sally as to why this concerned him. But his wound entitled him to consideration. He had no face. He might not live. At best, years of painful remedy awaited him. And the thing he claimed annoyed him was the rumor that he was the first Australian to be wounded on the Western Front.

A letter awaited Sally one evening when she got to the mess. It was from England.

16 May 1916

Dear Sally,

I am safely in England would you believe? Matron Mitchie—yes, Matron Mitchie—is here to demonstrate her toughness. Or is it stubbornness? Kiernan is here too—training at Wandsworth—and was our squire around the sights of this great city. It is interesting to us that though a Quaker and friend of man he enjoyed the Bloody Tower.

You’ll be amused that when we turned up in London—at Paddington—the only rooms we got were at the Salvation Army Home for Fallen Women. Even Matron Mitchie! They’d covered the sign with Union Jacks. Thank God for the War Chest Club in Horse-ferry Road where we can meet up and have a bit of a meal. We have not been given our posting yet but hope to see you soon in France… Have you heard from Papa?

There was soon a letter from Charlie Condon as well. He too had arrived in France and had been at first delayed in Marseille with suspected typhus. But the symptoms had misled the British doctors and he had recovered in a few days. This gave him the chance, he told her, to visit the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Marseille—it was in a palace, and the seventeenth-century sketches there put the last remnants of his fever to total flight. “When you looked at them,” he wrote, “you felt light as a breeze and you thought, I can produce a line like that.”

He was, he said, about to find his way north.

And if not immediately required to spread myself on the altar of Mars, I shall seek out your location in Rouen and come to visit you. I enjoyed greatly our trip to Sakkara. Perhaps that was because you permitted me to talk so much. But I remember your interjections as demonstrating a wisdom which does great honor to the valley I was running away from.

Matron Mitchie—refusing help—had taken the train to a hospital at Sidcup in Kent to have the bucket of her false leg redesigned to the final healing of her stump. She now returned and professed the adjustment to her prosthetic leg so satisfactory that very soon—so she claimed—she would be able to walk without that pronounced stiffness which gave away most amputees. Naomi did not understand how this would be achieved but did not argue.

Nor did she when Mitchie told her to pack up for a move. Mitchie had already packed under her own steam. She had not long tolerated the personal nurse Pettigrew. Not that Pettigrew was lacking in skill. But Mitchie was a woman who wanted to attend to things herself.

Are we all packing? asked Naomi.

No. You and me. We are off to improved digs. A bit of an undemocratic arrangement vis-à-vis the other girls. But they’ll survive.

Descending the grim institutional stairs of the Home for Fallen Women an hour later, they found waiting for them an enormous white limousine trimmed with black—a Vitesse Phaeton no less surprising than if Elijah’s chariot had descended on this bleak street. Naomi’s dun uniform and gray hat were a welcome option when faced with such a vehicle. She would otherwise have had to find something up to the style of the thing—for which she had neither the resources nor the gift.

A middle-aged chauffeur in a uniform of cap and jacket and leggings stopped and opened the back door to admit them. He introduced himself as Carling. Once amidst the splendor of upholstery, they were driven through the center of London and across Hyde Park and its exercising cavalry and baby-walking nannies to the Dorchester Hotel, where they were allotted rooms they had no time yet to see. Instead, they left their baggage and returned straight to the enormous car. Then the great vehicle found its way into Mayfair, whose astonishing townhouses seemed as gratuitous and wonderful to Naomi as buildings on a different planet designed to house a different race.

Well, said Mitchie to her, now we’re ready for socializing in London.

As the Phaeton slowed, Mitchie told her, The people we’re meeting here are the clever Lady Tarlton and her total donkey of a husband, Viscount Tarlton. He was governor-general of Australia for a time until the prime minister got fed up with him. That’s all fine with you, I assume? I’ve kept it as a surprise.

The house they arrived before was tall and painted a jovial cream color. The driver helped them out and they rose up the steps to be met by—what else?—a doorman in livery. He made a hand gesture that they should enter the great circular lobby which rose to a brilliant dome trimmed with gold-leaf moldings. Naomi thought it must be a stage set. It was surely not for occupation by people.

A servant who looked more like some masquerading duke in morning suit took their entrée cards and pointed them towards the large room beyond the lobby. At the double doors into the room stood another servant in morning suit next to a most beautiful, upright, muslin-draped, and well-bosomed woman wearing her brown hair informally ribboned at the back and—unlike any of the other women who were arriving, including Mitchie and Naomi—with no gloves on her hands. A slim, slightly shorter man with a ginger moustache stood on the other side of this woman. He was dressed in a suit which so exactly fitted him that it was like an outer skin. His face was handsome in a boyish way but his eyes were vacant. The morning-suited servant—having got their names in whispers from Mitchie and Naomi—muttered to the gentleman and the smiling, splendid woman that these newcomers were Miss Marion Mitchie and Miss Naomi Durance.