Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

But as she got close to the surgeon’s door and stooped to knock secretively, she heard conversation inside. It was nothing too loud but was definite discussion of some kind. She could hear the piping voice of a particular tone and rhythm. It was one of the English women—one of Lady Tarlton’s elegant young suffragist women of good family.

At once Naomi lost all sense of cold. Astonishment created its own friction in her blood. Surprisingly, she was amused. This was Dr. Airdrie’s version of love! She had grieved Naomi’s refusal—if at all—a week at most. Or maybe she was just cold too and had found another girl who possessed the desire for warmth. But if Airdrie had been in love with Naomi, she had found new consolation pretty quickly. Alone and in an army coat and socks—unlovely and freezing and shamed and amused by her own innocence in believing Airdrie—she turned around. Remorse and hilarity had both begun to warm her and to prickle along her veins.

Though she was grateful to reach her room and be taken in by its particular freezing air, once she lay down in cold sheets the idea she’d been infected by after the Archimedes came to her again with new certainty. I am not a complete or sealed person. If I was, why did I set out for Doctor Airdrie’s room? Why did I find cold unbearable then and now find it tolerable? I am a string of recoils from circumstance. It was a matter of a mere filament whether I went to be warmed by Airdrie or not. If I had stayed in my room I would not have known why. And I don’t know why I went.

So there was the Naomi who stayed in her room with the threat of ice, and the parallel Naomi who crept down the hall to be warmed by a surgeon. This was simply an echo of her suspicion that there was the Naomi who fell deep down with the Archimedes living in the same flesh as the Naomi who refused to. And so—with her parts and actions scattered all over the atmosphere and cold earth—she could not but deny the glacial night and fall into a profound, accepting sleep. There are men in frozen trenches tonight, she mumbled as a last conscious reproach. They all lacked an Airdrie.

Major Darlington became exercised by the number of men at the Château Baincthun taking up beds in summer and winter because they had been disabled by trench foot or frostbite. Around the bed of a trench-foot–afflicted Australian private who had lost toes to surgery, he gathered Dr. Airdrie and all the nurses—both the half-dozen Australians and the English Roses.

Cripes, a man might as well be onstage, the Australian mumbled as they all gazed at him.

Here is a case, Darlington told them, of quite needless damage—though not, I hasten to say, through the fault of the man involved.

He addressed the Australian, who was clearly embarrassed by this jury of nurses.

Not your fault, eh, old man?

I wouldn’t say so, said the soldier. I mean, sometimes a man got distracted with everything that was happening. Gas was more important. And no use changing your socks if your legs are likely to be blown off pretty soon.

I am sure, said stork-like Darlington, nodding and nodding again. Now, if we want to prevent this sort of thing, we simply must provide a dry, warm place in the trench where men will attend to the problem, have leisure to rub whale oil into their feet and change their socks and—if necessary—boots. For want of such precautions, this will happen, he said, nodding to an orderly, who removed the private’s dressings and exposed the scabbed stumps and blackened flesh of his feet.

Did you use whale oil, my good man?

Everyone just gives up on the whale oil, the private told him. Five minutes after we do it, we’re back up to our hocks in mud again.

You see? Darlington asked his audience. You see what happens?

What puzzled Naomi and the nurses was the question of what—at this distance from the front—they could do about the issue except adopt a stance of impotent protest. But Darlington had not finished.

On the front line, he intoned, men are allowed to stand for days in glutinous muck. Until a chap inevitably becomes a casualty. And sometimes staff officers in clean socks and polished shoes want to punish men, you see, to punish and harangue them for their functional disablement, for a condition which is the fault of the generals. But this, you know, this disablement takes beds from other wounded. No offense intended, old chap. But obviously someone must bear responsibility for the condition of the trenches.

This is not so much a military matter, declared Darlington, as an industrial outrage.

But, Major, asked Airdrie, in what way could we do anything to amend the mistakes of the front? We seem to be a wee bit removed from it.

Major Darlington was in no way aggrieved but raised a finger in the air.

Well, Doctor Airdrie, I intend to frame a letter on the matter which I would be obliged if those of you who felt so inclined could see your way to sign. The letter will assert the necessity of a boots-and-socks officer, to whom a section of men in every company will be assigned with the objective that they will deliver fresh boots and socks every two days to the men in the front. I admit that this might seem at first glance a comic suggestion, or one which is uneconomic. Well—if so, let them come to the rear and count the beds devoted to this curse. What will be done with the boots and socks replaced? Let our chaps throw them at the Huns if they care to. Money can be squandered on high explosive but not—so it seems—on footwear. Ah, now I think I have reached the end of my peroration on the matter. I must thank you for your attendance. And a round of applause, please, for our demonstration soldier.

All felt compelled by Darlington’s zeal and gave a spatter of applause.

Mitchie murmured to Naomi as they left, None of that is as mad as it seems. Can you see any of the young lieutenants you know wanting to be appointed boots-and-socks officer though? Doesn’t sound heroic, does it?

Naomi saw a second’s contact between Airdrie’s hand and the wrist of a handsome English Red Cross nurse whose name she was uncertain about. She would not have welcomed such a touch herself. So why was there a second’s strange envy?

In the autumn Sally heard rumors running around Rouen that nurses might be put in casualty clearing stations located in the region of peril called “up the line.” These were not quite believed at first. Yet the matrons came around the wards that November asking for volunteers for such places. Nurses had not been permitted to work in them before. So there were many applications. Sally, Honora, and Leonora Casement nominated themselves and were accepted almost automatically because of their long experience of wounds. There was the attraction as well that appointment to a casualty clearing station brought with it an immediate ten-day leave pass for England. This—pleasant in prospect—did not count with Sally. In so far as she understood motives, she realized that there had arisen in her a curiosity like Charlie Condon’s before he knew what it would be like. Women too—she realized—might want to be sucked closer in to the fire.

The news had to be broken to their long-standing patient Captain Constable. Sally and Honora still worked regularly on the crater of his face, the screens drawn around to save him embarrassment. Yet he was ambulatory now and sometimes went out for walks bandaged—moving at a processional pace but without a stick along the streets of the Australian general hospital. The matron had at first an eye out for the growing friendship between Slattery and Sister Durance and the unreplying Captain Constable. But it was as if his injury was considered to have unmanned him. Since it was reasoned a nurse was unlikely to be infatuated by a faceless and wordless man they were permitted to become his friend. And they knew that as they were going elsewhere, so was he—earlier perhaps than they. For the wound—considered purely as a wound—was healing over. Easing the packs of gauze out of the mess after one dressing, Honora said, You’re as clean as a whistle these days.