Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

They were all so close to the earth as to give Sally a sense of their impossible speed. The German aircraft now headed northeast. But it took a little time for its pilot to achieve his full, desperate pace. She heard the British machine guns prattling away loud and harsh. The German turned and dived—trying to lose himself in terrain or the trees along a canal—and the three British planes clamored on his tail. And then came a detonation that vibrated the rural air and was distinct from the artillery background. Beyond the village a cumulus of black smoke arose. The grin of the young fellow who’d waved at her was consumed by fire. Some orderlies grabbed an ambulance and raced away to bring in the two Germans, but they were both dead. And just as well—for their faces would have been smashed to fragments on impact by the coping of their cockpits and the butts of their machine guns, and the rest of them burned.

The meeting of eagles above Deux Églises—the fact the man had waved, gallant and amusing while seconds from death—showed her yet again that Charlie Condon, who possessed grace and style of a much higher order, must surely be in someone’s sights. It was possible to deny it during hectic duty. But she could become immobilized for an instant on the pathways and distracted by anxiety even when entering the wards.

I have been deluding myself, Honora all at once confessed to her companions that evening at their dinner of army stew and beans and good bread. Would they search the body of a putrefying man?

Her use of the word “putrefying” shocked them. They would not have believed Honora would admit putrefaction to the catalogue of her possibilities for Lionel Dankworth. It is very likely, she said, he is buried with my letter still on him. There’s something of me, of my hand. It means that he has a little monument in his pocket.

The nurses looked at each other.

Yes, said Leo, whose beloved Fellowes was working at a clearing station thirty miles off. And he’ll have more monuments in the end.

At this time Germans were being brought in. Some walked. One of them—Sally would remember amidst the flux of cases—had a pitiable bayonet wound to the sternum. It crossed Sally’s mind to wonder if Honora might be vengeful with them. But from what anyone saw she was businesslike and attentive in a normal sense. Why would you expect otherwise? Sally asked herself. But then she noticed that with the German walking wounded Honora sometimes briskly removed their jackets and exhaustively searched their pockets—almost as if there might be something sewn in the seams. She did not ask their permission, and they submitted to her search with a frown. She would obviously search the entire German army—all without hatred—to find the one who had her letter and thus knew Captain Lionel Dankworth’s place on or beneath earth.

Naomi had not expected or wanted a reply from Robbie. But one arrived, in a Comforts Fund envelope from which she could tell it had come through the army postal services in France. Her impulse was to leave the thing unopened, but there was a sense in which she was too busy to develop any habit of delay.

Miss Durance,

Your letter followed me from Australia from where I was finally despatched to France to be an RTO—Railway Transport Officer—and where I hoped to visit you at your posting. To say that I am disappointed is to put it very light. What I am most disappointed in is your delay in telling me to give up hope of your affection. I can only believe you when you say that my damaged gait has nothing to do with it. It is that you put off so long letting me know where I stand that I can’t respect. You always seemed to me to be made of more forthright material. You did warn me that when I saw something in you I was fooling myself. So I can’t say that you missed out on telling me to use caution.

But I must say once more—so many months! On the transport I daydreamed how we would meet up in France. Well, I was a fool. And you were not genuine with me. Since there is nothing more to be said,

There was first a rush of shame when Naomi read this. It was followed by anger at Lieutenant Shaw’s moral haughtiness. He wrote as if she had as good as been engaged to him. That was his delusion. She walked the wards directing the work of the English Roses but rage would take her in the midst of sentences and she would forget their purpose.

What dosage did you say? an English Rose would ask, and Naomi would need to begin again.

But within a mere handful of hours, she was overtaken by a sense of reprieve. She had sidestepped the obvious but most lethal marriage. Kiernan had helped her do it.

As Naomi savored freedom from poor Robbie and anticipated a letter from Kiernan, Matron Mitchie had caught a cold which developed very swiftly into pneumonia. She gasped and became distressed about some jangled, fearful terror of childhood or girlhood. Or even of the Archimedes . The Archimedes must be there, Naomi was sure, in Matron Mitchie’s delirium, since Naomi hadn’t been able to eradicate it from her own dreams.

Doctor Airdrie was the one who diagnosed Mitchie’s condition. Major Darlington also visited Mitchie and took her vital readings and weighed her general condition. Lady Tarlton sat by her bed reading softly to her while—in her own fevered privacy—Mitchie rattled away at phantoms. Even while levering herself about on walking sticks, Mitchie had mesmerized them into the belief that her energies had never been diminished. After this, Lady Tarlton muttered to Naomi, she should be sent at least to England to be built up. She should then go home, wouldn’t you say?

Lady Tarlton looked like a woman due for a collapse herself. Her face had been pinched to thinness by the winter. The spring had not yet fully restored her. She remained recklessly devoted and palely beautiful. Her gloriously disordered hair flowed from the French mountaineer’s cap she wore for warmth. Her arguments with generals had still taught her no subservience. She was talking about starting an Australian Club in Paris this coming summer. Because whenever the boys went to the capital from the trenches, they had to hunt around for accommodation. They were left to the mercy of the YMCA, she said, and hung around on the pavements outside estaminets and the tourist sites trying to convince themselves they were having a good time.

Lady Tarlton had been to Paris looking at buildings, seeking help from generals and making small progress. Her contempt for some of them was probably mutual, but her certainty she would override the generals of the rear was still girlish and bracing.

Floating about the wards, she was willing to talk about her battles with generals in front of anyone, and the Australians loved it—all her lambasting of the heroes of the desk. You’d think, she complained one day in that airy, nose-high, chin-jutted way of hers, I had asked them to open an Indian brothel.

Darlington remained her helpmeet. Not only did he serve his long hours in wards and perform surgery as sepsis bloomed in wounds or limbs were deformed in their healing, but he filled in forms, wrote letters, and then spent time examining tissue from the living and the dead in his pathology laboratory downstairs.

Naomi continued to meet now and then English nurses in Boulogne or Wimereux who had heard of Lady Tarlton’s Australian hospital and thought of it as an amateur affair run by eccentrics. The place was rendered more laughable because gossip of the rumored love affair between Lady Tarlton and her senior surgeon was no longer confined to the château. The fact was that their own surgeons and doctors encouraged their nurses to believe Château Baincthun a farce. A nurse she met in Boulogne asked her, Isn’t there a crackpot doctor there who wants you to wear a mask all the time?