Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

She saw Honora emerging now from the thoracic ward—why had she gone there?—with yet another man on her shoulders. What are you doing? Sally—clearheaded now on the subject of Honora’s lunacy—called out to her.

I am putting patients in the trenches, she shouted back. I put the first one in and he turned out to be a German. Imagine that!

She had mad purpose in her eye—she would carry every man in all the wards into slit trenches if she could. From within the gas ward Sally’s own orderlies began helping their patients past her and to the shelter of trenches and dugouts.

Honora ran on. Sally turned back into the gas tent and passed the remaining wide-eyed nurses and orderlies, who were aware something momentous and ill defined had occurred. The ward doctor was with the gas cases who could not safely be moved. Two nurses were going about placing basins over the heads of the patients. It was a halfway rational idea to save them from shrapnel and it possessed for the nurses the comfort of acting to defy events.

The ward doctor told Sally something had happened near the theatres. They could smell the chloroform, and mixed with it was the penetrating stench of ether. If there was a fire out there then all the gas cases would need—whatever the results—to be moved.

Sally joined a nurse who was already at the rear door of the tent. From the hut steps they saw the surgical theatre hut begin to burn. The air was anesthetic from the shattered bottles of chloroform but it was the ether supplies that were burning, releasing vapors that the fire instantly sucked back into itself.

Sally heard people lamenting. Someone shouted, The hoses aren’t working! A bucket line of nurses and orderlies attempted to stanch the flames. Were surgeons, theatre nurses, patients caught in there? Water wouldn’t do anything, she knew. Earth or sand was needed to quench blazing ether. It was now that she reachieved her reason fully. She turned back into the gas ward and shouted without reference to the ward doctor that nurses and orderlies must hurry all possible cases into slit trenches.

You go, Sister, said the ward doctor.

No.

You go ! he roared. I’ve sent off all the other nurses.

All right, she said. She would be a free agent once she was out in the night.

As she stepped forth she heard another inhuman impact some distance off, but it was not close enough to bear her mind away. She began pushing and dragging demented, howling, praying men towards trenches they did not want to enter. She thought of the thoracic ward and crazed Honora.

A Klaxon which had not rung at the start of things to warn anyone sounded now to reassure everyone. Silence all at once finally manifested itself like the clap of a great hand and stunned the earth. Voices and even yells were minute within it. The air was full still of the stench of the theatre fire and the embers seemed to fall like an incandescent snow.

Sally heard men’s plaintive voices from a half-collapsed tent. Inside, Honora was lifting patients back onto beds, one bleeding from the ears from a nearby detonation. Am I too? Sally wondered, and began to help. Orderlies arrived to readjust the tent poles. At last, according to some dazed, unspoken accord between them that their job was done, she and Honora left the restored tent. The remaining heat of the theatre blaze wafted across the station. Sally set out back for the gas ward and skirted her crater—the one which held unscannable fragments of the gas case and an orderly. She saw Freud and Leonora coming from the lost fight with the fire, walking towards her and the untouched thoracic ward as if no shock had overtaken them and as if on normal duty. They stepped carefully but without amazement around obscure body parts that covered the paths and other spaces. As Leonora reached Sally, she said, An orderly told me. They blew up the morgue. What a triumph, eh?

Some NYD(S) were still wandering the station—quivering and dazed or making speeches—and it turned out an orderly had chased one down on the Deux Églises road. Orderlies retrieving such men were leading them back to their ward by the hand and shoulder, brotherly to a degree which caused Sally to shed tears as she returned to the gas ward. She wondered how it had been in the resuscitation ward during all the noise and fire and with the bombs making their random and absurd choices.

When day broke there was time for the nurses to return to their mess, glimpsing beyond the wards—more clearly now—the two-thirds-burned-out theatre hut. By accident—so Sally understood from Freud—it had been near empty at the time. The surgeons were in the admissions hut. Two orderlies had been blown wide.

At their mess table the women bolted down sugar-laced tea and ate bread which they doused in Queensland treacle as if to reembrace their dear, safe, sleeping home continent. Major Bright came in after beating on the door and told them with a mannish innocence and irrelevance—almost touching—that he had recommended them all for Military Medals. Those who stayed in their wards or had worked at the fire or had mercifully dealt with others or had placed tables or basins over men to make them feel safer or had put others on the floor and beneath their beds—even as orderlies yelled at them to get into the trenches. But, he said—as if it were a great concern arising from that mad night—it was a military lottery that would define who got the decorations.

They listened because he was such a good man. But military ambition burned very low in the women. It was amusing to Honora that the man she had carried from the chest ward was not after all a German but an English captain—and not only an Englishman but a German-speaking, renowned novelist named Alexander Southwell, the nephew of one Lord Finisterre who had been formerly a British cabinet minister. It was idly assumed that if there were medals they would go Honora’s way. But the chief remark her act attracted was wonder at how a woman of five foot six inches had—in the fury of the moment—carried a six-foot man, limp and awaiting chest surgery, from his ward to the trench.

It was an issue which did not delay Honora in the least as she went back to duty immediately after breakfast. She was all business. The mere sentiment of compassion had left her. She pursued it all in a fierce, mechanical way. There was something to do with Dankworth mixed up in it.

Let her go, Matron Bolger said. I’ll fetch her back for a rest in an hour or so.

Sally went back to her ward too but returned to the mess for a cup of tea before collapsing. Most of her gas cases had been moved to evacuation ambulances. Now it was up to the base hospitals to soothe and save them. Rest lay ahead since nothing could happen until the surgical theatres were resupplied. Honora returned with Matron Bolger—you could hear their chat before they reached the tent.

Karla Freud also arrived. She had been helping in the evacuation ward that morning—attending to men as they were loaded on rear-bound ambulances. Entering the tent now, she saw Honora and Sally and a few others—Leo too—and stood contemplating them. Honora was writing something on the card table—they all feared it was to that bureau and that the blasts of the night had unsettled her again.

Look, you’ve probably heard of my surgeon, Karla Freud stated. Boyton. He’s an American from the British Medical Corps transferred here. Well, you can stop speculating. It’s all true. I’m letting you know in case anything happens. Both of us might have been incinerated together last night, and weren’t. That means there are two reasons why my friends from Lemnos can stop thinking, “Poor old Karla.”

Then she sat down. Sally did not know whether she was supposed to congratulate her or be silent. Are we all suddenly mad? she wondered.