Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

That’s good news for us too, said Leo—exactly the right answer. I hope you have a happy life.

All right then, said Freud. Thank you.

And so? asked Leo. A few more details, please.

His mother’s English, father’s American, his practice is in Chicago. He’s not Jewish and that means lamentations will be uttered in Melbourne. But in Chicago I won’t hear them. Only thing…

She winked here.

It’s the end of my dreams of the stage. Women are fools. We can’t help offering ourselves up. Living sacrifices. That’s us.

She turned to Honora, who was back-on at a side table writing her fluent letter.

Honora, she called in a frank but soft voice. Honora, dearie! Listen to me. He’s dead, that kind picnicker from Lemnos. He’s dead. He doesn’t deserve to be, but he is. There aren’t any more theories you can make up. No more letters, for God’s sake.

Honora ceased writing but sat rigid and without turning. Freud moved to her and put her hands on those stiffened, raised shoulders. But a particular sound—of air being shredded—arose again. The Klaxon began to wail. The planes had returned and could be heard, low and fast. Sally stiffened to withstand the first jolt of a dropped bomb. The women rushed outside—they could not help themselves. When the reverberating explosion came—though it must have been a kilometer along the road—it threatened to loosen Sally’s bladder. An orderly sergeant came yelling, Dugouts, ladies. Not wards! Split trench and dugouts!

But Sally ran to the resuscitation ward to see how many of last night’s cases were too damaged to be moved. There was nothing to be done for these men, but she wanted to know the numbers. Two pale-faced staff nurses were there, looking startled but steadfast. They had been tending perhaps four cases of whom any informed assessor would say at least three would die. The way the girls stood—so professionally, with their hands half folded in front of them—reminded Sally of Karla Freud’s phrase. “Living sacrifices.”

Yet she too was willing to lose herself.

At her suggestion the three of them did the basin trick—the near-comic business of covering the patients’ faces. It was ridiculous, an exercise in flimsiness and capable of adding to damage. It would be laughed at later. But it seemed a serious duty now. Anything more—to move them beneath their beds—would certainly finish them. For these were men too far gone to survive the journey to the remaining operating theatre, let alone the anesthesia once there. But the idea they would die without nurses present was abhorrent. Meanwhile the Archies provided the continuous rhythm like minor instruments, the screaming descent of those explosive cylinders adding in the symphonic climaxes.

Sally uselessly took a hand of one of the patients—gently, as if feeling for a pulse. As she stood she saw Major Bright in the doorway. Will you, for God’s sake— he yelled. But an explosion along the road made him repeat it. Will you, for God’s sake, go to the dugout? Sister Durance, set an example, for God’s sake!

Her two young women stared at him without comprehension.

It is General Birdwood’s order, he roared. She waved the two girls to follow him. She wanted urgently to urinate and feared that if a bomb came near she might be concussed into this indignity.

Bright ran at their side, shepherding them to a slit trench, helping them jump down and leading them along the trench to a dugout—a covered structure Sally had never entered before, a dark pit thickly roofed with timber and loads of sandbags. As she went in, Bright held her elbow. His face was red. You have years of training and I have years more. How dare you risk all that!

There were a number of nurses inside sitting on benches. Honora was one of them. There was Freud, who had so recently tried to cure Honora of her delusions. And Matron Bolger.

Honora cried, Matron, this is an absolute bulldust order. The men hate us going.

These are today’s men, the matron told her. Who will nurse tomorrow’s men if you get blown to shreds?

Honora looked sullen. The matron took out a book from her pocket. She patted it with her hand and yelled against the continuous but blessedly distant explosions of bombs. If you do not come here when the Klaxon goes, she told them, it is very likely they will move us out of the casualty clearing stations. The general says he will not have us in danger and will move us if we expose ourselves to the Taubes. You understand?

She waved the book in her hand. For now, she announced, I want you to pay your mess bills. Don’t tell me you don’t have money on you.

She opened her book and began to go through the amounts each nurse owed for sherry or lemonade or ginger beer or wine or brandy, and made arrangements for payment—whether or not she received it then and there.

A titanic detonation of the surface above their heads occurred—as these things did—without introduction. They were jolted against each other by the brutal and bullying sound and then drew together and found themselves half deafened. But the matron continued to read.

Slattery, eleven shillings and sixpence. Freud, twelve and eight-pence. Casement, eighteen and seven pence—a lot of extra chocolate bought there, Casement…

The Klaxon declared temporary safety had returned long before the matron was finished. But in successive days the sound of aeroplane engines made daytime sleep hard and a woman could not take sleeping draughts at night for fear ambulances would arrive. After the sun had set, the enemy’s aircraft traversed the sky indiscriminately—unable in darkness to tell a baby’s cradle in Deux Églises from the enormous British gun now rumored to be emplaced a few miles west.

There was nothing worse on those summer nights than abandoning the startled, wide-eyed boys—those conscious of the raid but unable to be moved. But nothing was secretly and guiltily better than leaning inwards to listen to that older woman—the matron, the plausible aunt—reading her sums above the varying racket.

These abnormal days Sally breakfasted after night duty in ten minutes. Then she slept till perhaps half past ten in the morning, when a sense of urgency woke her and sent her back to her ward. But at one of those dawns of rushed breakfasts she was interrupted. There’s a fellow here asking for you, a staff nurse told her.

At once she knew. Charlie Condon. If it were him he could annul all the awful days and nights—though that this would happen was merely a notion. She went outside and on the path by the resuscitation hut saw him. He was leaning against the building and a bike was propped up near him. She noticed first that his face had grown somehow older. The features had hardened. It was the face—she thought straightaway—of a knowing warrior. She sensed that he could not only suffer anything imaginable but that he might do it too. It was a greater surprise to see him in this new form than it was simply to see him. He is another man, she considered, as I am another woman. Can we still converse? She dearly wanted to.

Oh, he said, almost as if he hadn’t expected to see her. This has really turned out well. I’d heard you’d been bombed and—I’ve got to say—I was pretty worried. Since we’re in a rest area just now, I borrowed this bike and rode down to see if you were all right.

“Down,” she noticed. That must mean he’d traveled from further north.

Charlie, she said. So kind of you. We’re all top of our form, except not a lot of sleep.

Yes, he said. That’s the way it is up there too. Makes a person a bit crazy, doesn’t it?

But you… you look…

What? Uglier?

Are you still an artist?

I’m a sketcher still, he reassured her. Do you know, a kiss would give my talent wings. But not possible here, I suppose.