Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

That was the sort of thing Condon wrote—not things to be embroidered on battle flags, or promises of an early close. Charlie defined a state of being and that somehow consoled Sally more than the hollow assurances she heard from others. The Kellys brawling and the miners arguing politics made the trench like something domestic and tedious. That was what—for Charlie’s sake—she wanted it to be.

A convoy of Ford motor ambulances arrived outside the admissions ward on the very first evening at Deux Églises and before all was ready. Duckboards were not yet laid down in the big marquee t o make a floor. The question of how many cots were needed was still being debated between the chief medical officer, Major Bright, and the matron—a seasoned-looking, robust woman named Bolger. From the numbers of ambulances appearing that night on the frozen road outside, it was now clear that if this was the season to let the armies settle into their miserable lines and simply outwait the cold, the generals had not taken the message.

In the great bare-floored admissions marquee, the neatly made little man Major Bright, wearing a surgical coat, moved about energetically with the ward doctor and inspected the men laid down on cots or on the ground. Bright walked around the tent of perhaps forty stretchers giving brisk instructions for the disposal of the stretchers. He needed to clear the tent so another forty or more could be brought in.

For the early phases of arrivals, a large number of the nurses, including Sally as a ward sister, were there to deal with what must be dealt with at once—hemorrhage or agony or the coldness of shock. Other nurses waited in the wards beyond this great tent in which the needs of the harmed would be decided. So from their tables stocked with medical equipment—from dressings to opiates to hypodermics and sphygmomanometers for blood pressure, which in the stretcher cases who had survived the ambulance might well be diving fatally—nurses moved under the measured orders of Major Bright, calm Matron Bolger, and the ward doctor to inject morphine or to fill in names and conditions and dosages and the ward destination of each case. Orderlies carried the uniforms and kit taken from the wounded and hurled them into the tented gear room attached to the main marquee, which was drenched in electric light from a generator thundering outside.

Some men brought into the reception tents were found by this hard light to have died on their stretchers and were taken out to the morgue shed. The gray, ageless, unseamed faces of the chest or stomach wounded raised in Sally the ridiculous but angry question of why they had been carried so far to die, as if the surgeons further forward at the main dressing stations—and the stretcher bearers—had deliberately passed them down the line rather than deal with the deaths themselves.

A small mess annex opened out within the marquee. The walking wounded—wearing tags which said “D”—were given hot tea and cocoa. Men with “NYD(S)”—the “S” signifying not physical but psychic shock—pinned to their uniforms by dressing station doctors stood shuddering amongst the walking but could not be trusted with scalding fluid.

On the main floor there was an attaching of labels. Bright and the ward doctor moved about allocating “A,” “B,” and “C” to the stretcher cases—but other labels were also attached—with notations reading “Urgent,” “Abdomen,” “Chest,” “Spine.” Sally remembered having read such scrawled notes pinned to men arriving in Rouen. A nurse must admire the system, though it was one whose structure was under great pressure from the time the first raving head-wound case was laid on a cot or the ground and a deathly abdominal case was placed beside him, and staff nurses rushed in to stem sudden hemorrhaging.

Sally found herself taken back also to the Archimedes —the fetidness of uniforms or bits of them—and the stink from souring blood and that general stench of wounds turning towards sepsis or gangrene or gas gangrene. There was also the threat of panic in the air, lacking at tidier Rouen.

Supervising the movement of the nurses and having now the eminence of being a sister—the subaltern of a matron—Sally had asked to be appointed to the resuscitation ward up the slight slope towards the tent she shared with Honora and Leo and Freud. Her motives—apart from the fact that new methods were used there—were not fully apparent to her. As soon as men began to be taken there she would need to leave the admissions tent and go with them.

The night outside—when she left the admissions hut—carried intimations of madness. There were continuing barrages at the front and planes could be heard overhead. Sally had charge of two young staff nurses who walked with strange calmness beside the stretcher of a chest wound being carried by orderlies to resuscitation. His blood pressure had plummeted and they were in a hurry to get him into a place of floorboards and stoves. They laid him on a bed and piled on the blankets. Sally cannulated his arm while the young nurses set up a frame and hung from it a saline solution they connected by tubing into the vein. The orderlies then covered his body with a canopy to retain all warmth. A little double Primus burner with a metal dampener on top of it to give safety to its flame was lit by an orderly and placed in a concave space at the bed end. And now all else must wait. A ward doctor appeared and the canopy was lifted so that he could consider the man’s pulse and ponder whether he would need to give the patient blood by transfusion. Plasma was promised, he said, but had not yet arrived.

Sally was busy in the resuscitation tent for twelve timeless hours. By then the numbers to do with wound shock—the expectations of anyone working there—had been established. There had been seven who could not be revived and eighteen sent on to surgery—where their fate would be a matter of margins. Four cases remained in the ward—their organs plugging along on the fuel of low blood oxygen.

She connected a healthy orderly’s blood flow into that of a threatened case through a glass connector tube. She saw lesser wounded men turn up to ask reverent questions about some of those the resuscitation ward had handled. And then it all stopped. Nearly everyone except some thoracic cases had left for the base hospitals by ambulances. More patients might come that night. But until then there could be sleep.

The name that Sally began to hear this time from the walking and those with conscious speech left to them was Bullecourt. The parents of soldiers would not have heard of it. A month before, soldiers themselves would not have heard of it, or that the village of that name had been subsumed into the great defensive line named after Prussian General Hindenburg. Nor was Bullecourt over swiftly. A number of crowded convoys had arrived at Deux Églises and been “cleared,” the men sent off with their records and X-rays. But still three Australian divisions—amongst whose numbers were Lionel Dankworth and Charlie Condon—were in place there and ready to advance again.

There were other meaningless names she would hear from the shocked and the wounded—from that portion of them that was talkative. Le Barque and Thilloy, Bapaume and Malt Trench, Lagnicourt and Ecoust, Doignes and Louverval. Time accelerated at Deux Églises. The passage of men, the evacuation of most cases by motor ambulances lined up in the lane or on the road to Deux Églises—all that had become a rhythmic phenomenon. The relief came on nights when there were fewer arrivals, or even from the closure for a day or so of the station.

Nurses were in the meantime rotated ward to ward—the aim being that they would learn all the medical functions of this endless war. Freud clung to her theatre work—assisting a Captain Boyton from Chicago who had become a member of the Royal Medical Corps to honor his British mother and who had somehow ended up with the Australians.