Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Occasionally the grand Vitesse Phaeton collected Michie and Naomi and took them to the dazzling house in Mayfair, where Naomi attended to the filing of requisition forms and receipts for all that could be needed for a genuine hospital. The requisition forms represented what Lady Tarlton was asking the army to provide. But the receipts represented what she had bought with her own money or that of the unspecified rich Anglo-Australians whom she held in the palm of her hand. Naomi filed as well letters on hospital rations—right down to the level of salt and mustard and thrice-weekly oatmeal—which Lady Tarlton had exchanged with members of her London Committee. Amongst Lady Tarlton’s personal purchases were autoclaves, arm and leg splints, bedsteads, and two first-class theatre tables. She had elicited from a medical supply company an X-ray machine. The requisitions addressed to the army were for disinfectants, antiseptics, dressings, sutures, surgical instruments, and all that the army should—in good conscience—provide its wounded. One letter assured her that once the voluntary hospital was established in the Boulogne region—where advice from the office of the director of medical services had suggested it should be located—a body named the Advanced Depot of Medical Stores would be ordered to supply said hospital. Supplies and equipment appropriate to a pathology laboratory would obviate the necessity of sending samples to the already busy pathology sections of the army general hospitals.

The range of the letters and forms—the number of folders to which Naomi had to take recourse—was itself a measure of the seriousness of Lady Tarlton. If Naomi had believed that Lady Tarlton was going into the hospital business on a genial whim and as an amateur, her filing of the woman’s letters—sent and received—dispelled it.

On a clear spring morning—when it seemed the entire width of the Channel could be seen with all its shipping and scampering destroyers—Mitchie and Naomi occupied a state cabin along with Lady Tarlton in a troopship on its way to France. They drank tea and were permitted by a lieutenant general—who touched his cap to the viscountess and with his staff made way for her and her two comrades—to descend the gangplank first.

As Southampton had offered so little of ideal Britain, the basin in which they landed at Boulogne offered nothing of France. Though a distant castle could be seen on a rise, it was a mere token. They were separated from it by a vast, squalid railyard, where troops who had arrived fully equipped on earlier ferries waited and smoked by companies and battalions amidst shuttling trains. Here, loneliness in crowds and expectation and fear seemed to create their own odor. Soot lay over all. The absolute khakiness of the mass swamped the few tokens of difference—a group of kilts here, a slouch-hatted Australian there. But chiefly masses of undifferentiated men in steel helmets. And all of them nutriment for cannon.

They watched from the pier as from a shipboard crane onto the wharf of their cross-Channel steamer descended the great white-black Vitesse Phaeton with its driver, Carling, in a military uniform supervising and yelling extraneous advice to the English crew above and the French stevedores below. The Phaeton landed on the wharf with a small mechanical squeak. Carling opened its back door and ushered in the ladies. They sat within and waited for the bags to come—Lady Tarlton’s great traveling trunk and the more modest luggage of Mitchie and Naomi. Carling—Lady Tarlton explained—had been Tarlton’s batman in the Dardanelles. Tarlton himself, she said, had for a time served as a brigadier general there but had been recalled.

Now that Tarlton himself is hors de combat—his yeomanry regiments were wiped out, you know, poor chaps, and the War Office decided he should abandon soldiering—Carling has become my—as the Australians say—“offsider” and “rouseabout.” No, offsider. You’re the rouseabout, Matron Mitchie!

Naomi wondered what indiscretion committed by Lord Tarlton or what shock suffered by him had caused them to tell him he was no longer required to lead yeomanry into the face of machine guns.

All packed up, the Phaeton drove them out of the great railyard and past a fish market. Women in the ordinary streets of the lower town were cooking pancakes on charcoal stoves. Soldiers and children in sabots waited for their order to be finished. The Phaeton then rose uphill into the town proper—which now revealed itself to look like the France she had expected. There were tall old buildings from what she would learn to call the Second Empire period. Naomi noticed the words “Angleterre” and “Anglais” on stores and streets. And yet little looked English. A mere twenty-six miles across a stretch of water made everything look somehow not-England. You traveled twenty-six miles in Australia and nothing altered. Two hundred and sixty miles, ditto. Here, it was a mere ferry ride between strangenesses.

At a Second Empire hotel called the Paris Grand, their luggage was unloaded under Carling’s direction and morning tea was—as Lady Tarlton said—“taken” in a high-vaulted lobby. The lobby was drenched with light from vast windows and seemed to exist in warless parallel to the business they were about to launch on.

And Miss Durance, said Lady Tarlton, shaking her head, as if it were a means of seeing her more clearly, what is your history?

I’m afraid I don’t have a history, Lady Tarlton, Naomi said, unaccomplished at answering that kind of question. You know Australia, Lady Tarlton. I’d had a life—as people do there.

Lady Tarlton laughed—a fluting but genuine sound, with too much body to it for it to be merely patronage.

I like the directness of your answer, she said, looking with her left hand for stray strands of her auburn hair—there always seemed to be one.

Matron Mitchie said, Ma’am, Miss Durance took control of our raft. I think had it been left to a man, I might not be here.

Naomi felt powerless to correct this kind of palaver. But Lady Tarlton tossed her head and cast her hands eastwards as if the front line were only a block away. Well, we see what happens when things are left to men. Tell me, though, Miss Durance, did you train in the bush?

Two years in a country town, ma’am. Then the city.

Tell me about the obstetrics in the country town.

Puerperal fever was not unknown in the Macleay District, said Naomi.

She did not mention that much evidence for this killer of young mothers could be found in the cemetery just below the ridge from the hospital. Poorer people upriver were forced to depend on a dairy farmer’s wife with some midwifery experience to deliver their babies. When things went wrong the women might be two or more days’ ride up the valley. They were brought to town only after the fever had already taken hold.

Lady Tarlton looked intently at Mitchie. You see, Marion. You see! If we had had more time…

In the Western District, said Mitchie with forgivable pride, we had bush nurses visiting women all through their pregnancies. Any chance of a problem and the woman was moved to town. But… the whole thing has languished without Lady Tarlton there to look after the financial side.

To harry donations, Matron Mitchie means, said Lady Tarlton with a wink. If the Australians had not begged the secretary of state for the colonies to relieve them of my husband’s presence, we would have put a scheme in place throughout the country so that it would have been normal and unassailable. But my husband can’t tolerate the Labour prime ministers the Australians have the ill grace to elect. Tarlton refused to allow the election the prime minister asked him to call. And so it was—as a wag in the Sydney Bulletin wrote—“Farewell Lord and Lady Tarlton, Sprigs of a Noble tree, We cannot tell you how pleased we are to see the back of thee.”