Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Naomi worked by timeless routine in which hours did not exist. Only the seconds of pulse measurement meant anything. There was no leisure to observe the larger areas of time their watches proffered. A convoy of ninety wounded from Pozières arrived and Naomi worked for more than a day without being aware of it—except through a contradictory lightness of her upper body balanced by a sense of the gravity dragging at her legs. As well as acting as a virtual matron, she had in a day and night herself dressed wounds and hauled oxygen cylinders for the nurses to administer to the gassed. The roster she had worked at in the Dorchester Hotel might as well have been a transcription of Paradise Lost for all the relationship it bore to the days after Pozières.

By early August of that year—the predicted year of triumph, 1916—the wards were crammed with Tommies and Australians and a few Indians. Another young ward doctor—a rejectee of the Medical Corps for some reason of health—arrived. So did a squad of voluntary aides summoned from London—of course through Lady Tarlton’s airily deployed influence over the Red Cross.

My husband is hopeless, she hissed at Naomi and Mitchie one morning as they drank tea—scalding their mouths—in the mess room. He doesn’t like my doing this and my being importunate with some of his chums. So he tells me he lacks any power. He’s a whisperer, that’s what he is. He can undermine, but he can’t build.

And then—being herself a woman of action rather than whispers—she went to see what the volunteer English women were making for men’s breakfasts.

It was easier for a man to get to Blighty from Baincthun. Major Darlington was kept busy making these assessments, which came on top of his surgery and work in the pathology lab. Dr. Airdrie and the ward doctors joined Darlington in their reluctance to send a man back to the front until he’d had at least a little Blighty leave. Rhetoric about shirking had no impact on them. Except in the rarest and most blatant cases of recovery—or in the face of furious insistence by a soldier that he should return to the fighting, they sent all who could travel—including the battle shocked—by ambulance to the ferries. And recuperation at the Australian Voluntary was no idle business. In the summer garden, Lady Tarlton used men to dig drains or stoke boilers or milk the three dairy cows she had acquired so that the wounded should have fresh milk. Carling was their inexhaustible foreman.

Those military satraps still hate us, you know, Lady Tarlton announced as a boast to all her staff.

The young Scots woman, Airdrie, had a melodious laugh and clearly admired Lady Tarlton. Since she was freshly minted as a physician, the Australian and English nurses muttered that she lacked a mentor to turn her into a fully accomplished surgeon. She was not haunted by that. The wounded Tommies and Australians who came under her knife all said—those who could—that they trusted her for her lack of airs. Men found the presence of a woman surgeon a strange thing only once they had outlived the pain of wounds and surgery.

Naomi worked—according to need—as theatre nurse and anesthetist for both the surgeons. Mitchie’s Australian and Red Cross nurses became the sort of fast learners and expert dressers that she and her sister had been—under necessity—a year before. Mitchie nicknamed the Red Cross women “the English Roses,” but some of them were from the women’s suffrage movement, of which it seemed Lady Tarlton had herself been a member. Many were from what the British called “better families.” Their accents were not so far removed from that of Lady Tarlton. Their parents probably knew and trusted her as a mentor for their daughters. Others of the English Roses were not nurses and insisted on being cooks and scullery maids—a form of rebellion against the cosseted lives they had led, an assertion that women were equal in the moils of the earth and were all subject to the same condescension from the male world. Naomi and Mitchie’s group delighted in telling them that Australian women had had the suffrage for—how long was it now?—twelve years. But they could not pretend it had delivered women from care—from being aged beyond their years and strength by labor and concern.

Major Darlington’s slightly dazed belief in the uses of pathology was unshakeable and he promoted it even—or perhaps especially—in conversing with nurses and orderlies. He had quarreled with his superiors over the wearing of face masks in the treatment of wounds. The Australian Voluntary and its little pathology lab—which he equipped at his own expense—was his chance to manage experiments on the issue. To it he summoned nurses and orderlies and took swabs from their throats. He ordered that in certain wards nurses and orderlies dressing wounds should wear masks—a prominent placard marked MASKS was placed at the doorway of two wards. A NO MASKS sign was posted at the door of the other two. The wards in the newly built huts in the garden were not included in the experiment because that might make the numbers too hard for him to get his work done, either as pathologist or as surgeon. He came around the wards—himself wearing a mask—to take samples of wound tissue. He put them in a glass dish and bore them away. As he worked he told nurses in wafting and often broken sentences that he suspected streptococci in their throats were a peril to wounds. Not that, he laughed—in one of those near-silent laughs uttered with lowered chin and like a series of nods—their having streptococci was in any way a jailable offense. Streptococcus likes us, he told Naomi and some of the other nurses. He likes to take us dancing.

At this he uttered coughs of laughter.

His lean face—sallow on his arrival, and watchful and sour—then composed itself into an expression of calm purpose.

The masses of wounded and gassed of the bloodiest and most chemical-doused summer in human knowledge continued to arrive. They were at least two-thirds Australian—to justify the establishment’s name—but frequently more. The hospital did not receive the shell-shocked, even though there were men with wounds who woke at night hyperventilating or screaming. But the Australian Voluntary was not equipped with alienists.

At the Voluntary there were separate messes for officers and men who were well enough to sit at tables. As summer progressed the tables were sometimes put out on the pavement in front of the château, where officers and men began to mingle as they had in the battles which brought them here. At Lady Tarlton’s insistence a glass or two of wine was served with dinner for anyone fit to desire it. She had put together a subcommittee in London who put up the money for such delicacies. These seemed to be placed democratically on the tables without discrimination—preserves and condiments and shortbread from Fortnum & Mason were made available to the officers and men alike. It honored the reality, Lady Tarlton said to Naomi one day as they looked across the terraces at the walking wounded and recuperants at the sunny tables, of a citizen army in which some privates were schoolteachers, religious ministers, and journalists. She did not mention the hard-fisted country boys and the worldly innocent children of the slums. Yet—contrary to normal military credos—the firmament did not crack open when Lady Tarlton permitted this mingling.

Faster than Naomi could have believed, the days began to shrink and leaves reddened and withered to warn generals of their failed summer. The wildflowers of the hospital grounds of the Australian Voluntary Hospital—hyacinths and primroses—closed up. The sky turned a stubborn gray and descended on the château so that it seemed within reach of the gray slates of the roof. The mornings were misty with vapors the sun could not always burn off. Heaters were moved into the wards. The rain grew colder and even more slanted than on Lemnos—driven before a wind that swept in from the Channel and froze puddles overnight on the doorsteps of the château and in murderous little patches on the pathways to the huts. An English nurse broke her ankle in a journey between the reception wards in the garden and the house. Another scalded herself carrying cocoa across an open stretch. But the volunteers did not leave—as they had every right to. Lady Tarlton was a magnetic figure and the English Roses proved strong-willed young women who stuck. And where else would they go on the Western Front to see their suffragist principles in practice?