Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Honora, however, was chary of telling him they were going. Sally did it straight out.

Honora and I have been appointed to a casualty clearing station. We’ll be leaving the racecourse.

Constable shook his head a little in spite of his massive wound.

Honora told him, You’ll be off to Blighty yourself soon—I’d say within a week.

He reached for pencil and paper. “Clearing stations are too close to things,” he wrote.

He passed it to Sally since Honora had the irrigation syringe suspended in her hand. Well, that’s part of the attraction, Sally told him. You know what I mean.

He wrote and then displayed. If you had seen me there—when I first came in, filthy and all—you would have left me for dead.

No, said Sally with genuine conviction. I would have seen your eye. It is a fine eye. As for you, I was looking at a book in the mess on maxillofacial surgery. There are charts of how thoroughly they can remake your face. There are photographs of other men… You just wouldn’t believe it.

He scribbled, “Do you think I could see this book of yours? Or will it give me the willies?”

She read this and answered, It’s been rubber-stamped on the title page NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM OFFICERS’ MESS. But I’ll steal it.

She would too, said Honora, safely back on the whimsy track. Light-fingered, this one.

There was an amused grunt from deep in Captain Constable’s throat.

The tome contained graphic news that some might think a patient should not be burdened with. A matron would not have been amused to see Constable skimming such a volume. To save the chance of being detected by day concealing the heavy, glossy-paged manual in her clothing, Sally brought it in one night after dinner. Advancing through the tobacco fumes emitted by recovering men, she came to him and put it in his bedside locker.

Look at this tomorrow, she said, when we put the curtains around you. Honora and I will leave you alone then to consider it. I have marked the places with paper. I know you. And I believe you’ll be encouraged instead of depressed.

That was how it happened—he kept the manual conscientiously hidden in his locker and, after studying it behind screens, gave it back to Sally the following night. He wrote, “I see they’ll take skin from over my ribs.”

Yes, she said.

He wrote, “God made Eve out of a rib. The surgeons will make me. Flaps of skin, they talk about. For a while I’ll look like someone’s rag doll.”

Sally read this. Then he wrote, “The surgeons seem pretty impressed about what they can do. I notice though that the book doesn’t ask the patients what they think.”

Sally regarded him earnestly. You can’t let me down by getting sad about the book. I gave it to you because you’re the sort of man who can deal with the brass tacks.

He wrote again. “Brass tacks it is!”

Honora and Sally saw him leaving the ward the following morning, escorted by an orderly because of his single eye and the problem it might give him between there and the ferry. They had time for the briefest exchange of sentiments.

On a streaky winter’s day they were driven through tranquil open countryside until they came to a dank tent near a crossroads. Here they were hastily fed and received a day’s instruction on the operation of a clearing station. Put bluntly, a medical officer told them, patients arrived, and within two days, and with a few exceptions, they had either succumbed or had been transported back to base hospitals such as Rouen or Boulogne or Wimereux. The nurses would be presented with a range of cases and with such suddenness that—as the first rule—they must never let themselves feel as if things were out of control. We want women, said the medical officer, who will not be put off, either by the frequency of unfriendly aeroplanes or proximity to shelling.

The clearing stations were anomalous, the medical officer told them. They were close to the front, five to seven miles back, yet sufficiently hard to reach via the communication trenches that sometimes, as an instance, gas gangrene—the buildup of gas in the tissues—had already struck by the time the patient reached them. And particularly so if the wounded man had been retrieved from No Man’s Land after lying out there for a time.

He unscrolled a chart and hooked it onto a tripod. It was a pleasing chart in its rationality and design. The ambulances came to the admission ward and those who did not die there would be taken in a fanned-out pattern to a series of huts or wards beyond—medical, resuscitation, preoperative, chest, minor wounds, or gas. Patients in the preoperative surgery were taken quickly into X-ray and on to the operating theatres. Those in resuscitation would need surgery—but must first be made stable. A further diagrammatic arrow led into the postoperative and evacuation wards from which the gas and minor wounds cases would have been early transported to the general hospitals of the rear. All this rationality in the diagram seemed to contradict the medical officer’s allusion to possible chaos.

Now, look here, he said, at the ward marked “Resuscitation,” for those suffering wound shock.

They listened to him talk quite graphically—and even with narrative force—about how in shock the peripheral vessels of the body could not contain fluid; about violent variations in blood pressure; about coronary embolus; about the rapid pulse that then became almost imperceptible. In the worst cases a transfusion of isotonic fluid and blood plasma could be given. Or direct donations could be made by a paraffined glass tube between a donor vein and the recipient vein. Each orderly, each nurse, each doctor would be blood-typed at the clearing station pathology lab in case of the need for a transfusion.

Indeed, glass transfusion devices—needles, bottles, corrugated tubes, the latest gear—lay on a table by the diagram waiting to be demonstrated by the matrons. But staff engaged in resuscitation—the medical officer continued—should be prepared for death to occur in patients without warning and despite the best efforts.

As the Rouen women left the tent for their buses and took their minds off wound shock to contemplate their leave, they saw Freud talking to another woman. Freud had volunteered from her hospital at Wimereux and now greeted them with her usual careful intensity. She was still a grave personage. The theatrical Karla Freud remained hidden. But she joined Honora, Leo, and Sally at a table in the ferry from Boulogne to Dover.

So, said Honora, there’s ten days of muck up and then we’re chucked in the deep end.

As long as a person can keep afloat, said Freud, the deep end’s the right place.

Freud’s eyes glimmered with the promise of pride.

So I’m very happy, she announced. And I’m happy to see you too.

She seemed almost like the old Freud, and was pleased too when they met up with her again in their London hostel—the grand Palmers Lodge at Swiss Cottage. The location was stimulating—Piccadilly and Green Park just a short train ride away, with Fortnum & Mason and its fancy tearooms, and then a stroll on to the theatres of the West End!

An English officer with sleeve ornamentations—which showed he belonged to an ancient British regiment that probably fought at Waterloo, if not Agincourt—had spoken to them before the show and insisted on bringing them champagne at the interval. This gave him the indulgence to wink at his companion officers and ask, This is a British show, this one. Isn’t it?

They were attending a performance of Chu Chin Chow , a phenomenon of the stage, it was said. They had let build in themselves a nationalist radiance at their connection with the most famous show in the West End—for the author and leading actor–singer was Oscar Ashe, an Australian. This was the show men were advised they had to see in case they were killed before their next leave. The War Chest Club across from the Australian Headquarters on Horseferry Road had bought up the tickets and sold them cheaply to those on leave. The only disadvantage to visiting Horseferry Road with its ugly barrage balloons floating in its grimy sky was that yellow-faced munitions girls—pretty despite the tinge the picric acid in the shells they made gave their complexions—waited around there to make extra money out of the young Australians emerging with their leave pay. But the benefits of Horseferry Road and the War Chest Club included the cut-price delight they were now enjoying at His Majesty’s Theatre. They behaved like girls who hadn’t seen the apocalypse. That was the way the soldiers behaved too. They shared a box of chocolates between them—Freud and Honora and Sally, Leo having been taken out to a dinner by Captain Fellowes. They absorbed the fantastical shifts of light and scenery and let the music reduce the world and its clamor to a string of gloriously vacuous tunes and primitive sentiment.