Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Again—amongst the mass of these British—the nurses were faced by an astounding and unearthly lack of raucous complaint from men getting to know their wounds. Even some of the amputees had abandoned their screams in the regimental aid post or the dressing post and clearing station and were now left with mere crumbs of complaint which nurses went about soothing with hypodermics full of morphine.

Only after the turmoil ceased and men had been carried away to appropriate wards was Sally sent back to the post-operative ward or the gas or thoracic wards. It was a broad education you got in Rouen.

She was sometimes sent to the gas wards for night duty. Usually it was days since the men had inhaled the stuff, yet the taint could still be smelled on them and their eyes were still wide and alarmed—their eye sockets and lips blue, their breathing tormented, froth around their mouths. Orderlies came round with hypodermics and atropine sulphate solution and Sally injected them. A device named “the octopus”—many masks running from an oxygen cylinder—was designed to give simultaneous comfort to a number of men. Revisiting them before going off duty at dawn, she saw that it had little effect. The gas was still working on their hidden membranes.

The shelling and roar and night illuminations in the east continued but there was no conclusive news—it appeared that no climax had been reached and little had been won. When it was adjudged safe by the ward doctors, amputees were taken out to the hospital ferries at the port of Rouen. So were some thoracic and abdominal cases—and head wounds and the blinded and gassed. Honora said with some credibility that they were making room for Australians—for they did not doubt Australians had now been thrown into the furnace and were on their way. That was the arrangement—clear the Australian hospitals for Australian casualties. In any case—Sally reflected—in this hectic season, Lady Tarlton’s hospital would not beg for patients. Such was the weight of daily arrivals.

On the strength of her Archimedes experience, Sally spent three nights in the theatre giving anesthetics—more precisely, ether—for the nerveless and level-headed Dr. Fellowes. Ether was considered safer and more mistakeproof when you had an occasional anesthetist, which Sally was. But her work became necessary because in suddenly warm weather and over a day and a half, convoy by convoy, the Australians did indeed arrive—up to a thousand a day. They were nearly too numerous—too smeared in feature and too blurred in endeavor and pain—for her to look for Charlie Condon amongst them and see if he had been punished for knowing so much about Rouen Cathedral.

The men arrived with a word on their lips—Pozières. It might have been a village but it was vast in their minds: the birthplace of their pain. The English newspapers had a name even broader than Pozières. The name of a bloody river previously unremarked in the earth’s imagination. The Somme ran scarlet and was vaster than the Nile or Amazon now in the imagination of all those in France. It was the altar on which Abraham did sacrifice his son, and no God spoke out to stay the knife.

The name ran around the reception ward while, with an orderly’s help, Sally took a fouled dressing off the groin wound of a weathered, young-old man, when his femoral artery began to gush. Just stop the bleeding, Nurse, he said reasonably, and I’ll get back to the missus and kids. All the pressure she and the orderly could apply did not save him—this man they knew could hew timber and hand plough and be unwearied at the day’s end. He shuddered and then yielded up his existence.

The name Pozières was uttered by a boy with a chest wound who told Honora that he was too tired to sleep. In the theatre—before he was etherized—he admitted to the theatre nurse and the surgeon that he was only sixteen. The walking wounded from his unit pronounced the name too, as, getting ready to be sent back to the front or on to England, they paid him a visit and brought him cigarette cards they had collected for him—comic scenes of bulls charging tigers, of parrots shocking maids with the viciousness of their language, of cowboys and Indians, of soccer players, and trout fishermen.

A newspaper in the nurses’ mess declared: “Huge Losses to the Hun. ‘Fritz Is Running,’ Says General.”

Captain Constable remained at Rouen through the melee and treatment and transfer of men that Pozières created. The name seemed to call up a private crisis for him. Sepsis had broken out at the edge of his wound, a peccant tooth needed to be removed under anesthesia and the pus drained. And so England and its promised round of face-remaking surgery receded for him. As thousands came and went, he remained fixed in place. For it was axiomatic that no work could be done in England to repair him until he had been free of sepsis for six months.

At the Château Baincthun, Lady Tarlton had just two surgeons and two ward doctors on the day the Australian casualties began to arrive to join the small numbers of British officers of middling or light wounds so far sent there. Someone in the office of the deputy director of medical services clearly thought that a titled woman like Lady Tarlton should be confronted only by officers. But now Australians of all ranks turned up in motor ambulances.

The military had sent an apparently robust surgeon named Major Darlington. But he had a distant manner, and to Mitchie and Naomi it became clear that Lady Tarlton suspected he was a military reject—not for surgical reasons but perhaps for social ones. Immediately and unsuccessfully she set the Red Cross in London the job of recruiting another civilian surgeon—as if that could be done these days.

Darlington was a lanky man with a slight stoop that made him seem attentive but whose sentences sometimes were ambushed by thought and trailed off. But it was not long before he was seen as the essence of the place. Word of his competence came from theatre nurses. And from his side, he was pleased to be placed at an institution where he had control of his own pathology laboratory.

His junior was a young woman named Dr. Airdrie, a small-bodied and frizzy-haired volunteer with the Scottish Women’s Hospital who was sent to Baincthun at Lady Tarlton’s request. She too came to be considered a treasure of the place. But Darlington remained an odd treasure.

Mitchie walked the admission ward with Major Darlington, Naomi with Dr. Airdrie, and they directed where men were to be taken next. Airdrie still wore a little of her resentment at being sent here. She had been heard to say in her brogue, I didn’t volunteer just so I could be a hobby doctor in fooking Boulogne. Her mind had been on the Mediterranean or Mesopotamia. But these ambulances grinding up the elm-lined drive of the previously undervisited Château Baincthun were changing her mind about Lady Tarlton being just a gentlewoman hostelier.

Soon Airdrie and Major Darlington became so busy in the theatre—and the two young ward doctors so overburdened—that Mitchie and Naomi became decision makers. They instructed the few newly arrived Australian nurses and others from the Red Cross, whom Lady Tarlton had gathered in to keep penciled records of wounds and treatment on sheets hung at the base of each man’s cot—just as in the best-run hospitals. They announced dosages of morphine and other drugs and decided on the changing of dressings and irrigation of wounds. Naomi behaved with a confidence she had not felt at all on the Archimedes . She had learned somehow not to fret about decisions made in good faith. Men grinned up from the admission-ward cots when they heard her and the other Australian nurses talk. Could an accent be curative to those who shared it?