The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Read online

  By shelves of stacked and unopened surgical dressings in the nurses’ office, Sally—wearing gloves—laid out and covered the day’s surgical trays for treating minor wounds. They as yet had no autoclave. Sterilization depended on a brass spirit heater and a rustic-looking pan for the instruments. But out here the trays and the clamps and retractors, the lancets and forceps would often go unused and unbloodied, the beds as yet empty.

  The matron opened the canvas flap of the marquee. Years of gladly accepted authority hid the woman she truly was as it did other issues such as her origins and age. She said, with a pause between the words to combat curtness, You three nurses. Leave that now. Please join me outside.

  Outside, the heat fell filtered through palms and weighed on Sally’s shoulders. This was the cool season and yet there was no coolness in the glare beyond the oasis. The matron told them they were to follow her down the duckboards and gathered other nurses from other tents into their company as they went. Naomi was one of them and sent the whisper of a questioning smile Sally’s way. Carradine was with them too, the patches beneath her eyes looking vacant white as if her faint freckles had been stewed away. Ten nurses in all were led a few hundred yards out into the full light to a fence of barbed wire which surely had not been there yesterday and to a gate where four Australian military policemen kept guard.

  Freud murmured briskly, The wounds of Venus.

  The gate was unlocked and they entered the space beyond. A tent large enough for a circus lay ahead and the matron led them past other armed military policemen and through a flap left open for ventilation. The place seemed crowded by contrast with the other tents erected around Mena. There were perhaps seventy men sitting on their beds—some bored, some raising younger, softer faces of the kind a person could guess had come from the city, from work indoors. These were suburban cherubs still, untempered by military exercises and desert maneuvers. About ten orderlies moved around the tent on sundry duties. Each of the patients here wore a white armband to declare some purity they had violated. Many held their roll-your-own cigarettes as the nurses passed across their gaze. But they did not cheer as soldiers did if you met them in the bazaars—no normal hellos or queries were called out. In any case, between the nurses and them was located a barrier of five tables, as if the men were to be interviewed.

  The matron led the nurses now into a spacious, screened-off area where two large pans boiled above Primus stoves. Orderlies plied their lifters to extract syringes and needles and laid them on trays beside bottles of solution and cotton wool and medicinal alcohol. The matron made the smallest deniable nod to the bottles of clear solution and the rest of the equipment marshalled on the counter. She said, I know you will show no levity in dealing with this grievous business. The colonel’s orderlies should ideally do this work but despite his high opinion of them neither will they do it well nor will they be as safe from the mockery of the men—or the men from theirs. It is bad enough that orderlies should be the ones who treat the lesions and chancres!

  The two orderlies in the canvassed-off space worked on, extracting syringes and wide-bore, punishing needles from the makeshift autoclaves. They did not seem to notice the slur uttered against them.

  You are not deaconesses but military nurses. What you see here, you must see as a military crime. It is not your business to display distaste on the one hand or familiarity on the other.

  She weighed them with her eyes to make sure they bore the right degree of somberness. The matron spoke as if she had bought up all the real estate of comment on the issue. She continued.

  Either way it is a dosage of 8 drams solution per patient. Those men wearing a tag marked “G”—and I am sure I do not have to explain what that stands for—will attend the furthest table to the right. The patients will approach in columns of two and receive injections of novarsonobillon. As for the others, have you heard of solution 606?

  Salvarsan? asked dutiful Leo.

  All the nurses knew of 606. If they had not administered it, its myth had fallen over them. Syphilis was the wages of sin and 606 and a course of mercury pills might relieve the sinner of paying those wages fully. Thus some moralists said it was an immoral juice. But then they had never nursed congenitally poxed children.

  Will you kindly and without hesitation divide into teams of two? Do put on those rubber gloves.

  Sally paired with Freud. As they collected their trays with the syringes and needles and—in their case—the 606 solution, they could hear the matron addressing the men in the main part of the tent and telling them which tables to present themselves to. Sally and Freud and the others passed through the canvas into the main tented ward and took a place at one of the tables for the syphilitics.

  It happened that Sally was the one to swab the arms and change needles, Freud to give the injections. It fell out that way barely without their discussing it—perhaps because of Freud’s worldliness. By her presence you could sense that she really knew things that were still confusing to Sally—the difference between lust and, as they said in novels, desire. Desire was a cleaner thing by all accounts. But not clean enough to save you entirely—it seemed—unless desire was concentrated and fixed in place by a flurry of marriage vows. Sally barely had time to think how interesting the question was and how instructive was this line of men whose plentiful sweat smelled little worse than that of healthy men from the camp. Sally swabbed the arm of one who looked ahead, and another who viewed the ceiling and a third whose eyes were lowered and a fourth who wept and who shuddered so that Freud was left to say, Please keep it still, will you?

  Don’t cry, Sally told him. This will fix it.

  For this boy wanted the vows and not the blight. All the while Freud’s hand reached with a natural composure. Her movements were those of a person unafraid of contagion. But even she, Sally noticed, did not look much at the fallen soldiers who presented themselves, the casualties of the Wazzir, the suburb of hell within Cairo where the berserk arrack liquor and the women selling their diseases for baksheesh were domiciled.

  But now they were all lambs before the punishing but necessary wide-bore needle which must be driven in with force, the flesh making its resistance. No one said, Don’t hurt a man, Sister. No one said, Oh cripes, a hornet’s got me. Nothing was said because they had a lie to keep and any utterance might let it out. If—cured one day—they courted some oblivious girl in Australia, they could not utter the news that lay contained in this tent. But solution 606 could give you back your body for the battle or for the distant Australian bedroom where you might sleep a cured man and die as an honored husband and cherished father.

  Freud handed the syringe to her after brisk use and Sally replaced it from beneath the cloth on the bowl with a fresh one. In that tent they were party to a military secret. People in Australia did not know of these first casualties—that there was a desire greater than the desire for battle, that there was a bacterium as yet more grievous than machine guns.

  • • •

  Ellis Hoyle—with whom Naomi had sometimes promenaded on the Archimedes—was a man not much older than her who had been training in the vast camp out in the desert beyond Mena House and the pyramids. Naomi had asked Captain Hoyle why such displays were engaged in at two o’clock in the afternoon when the sun was—at least for that reputedly more lenient season—most blatant and when light bounced off the gravel and sands to strike the men in the face under the brims of their bushmen’s hats. He said that the generals thought this weather steeled men for unspecified worse things.

  In the evening—along with a number of other officers, including Carradine’s husband—Hoyle was regularly down at Mena House having tea with the nurses on the hotel roof or on the veranda. He and his friends—young officers barely converted from their normal callings as farmers, bank clerks, sheep breeders, schoolteachers—arrived by commandeered khaki cars. There was even a journalist or two and a very determinedly jolly young Anglican minister from Melbourne who did not serve as a chaplain but as
an infantryman.

  Since the nurses were not overworked, they slept adequately and their faces gleamed with the strangeness and ease of things as they prepared themselves for these evening visits from officers. They had time to change into their uniform jackets and skirts and good shoes in case the evening developed and they all had dinner together or went on a jaunt after dining in the mess.

  Captain Ellis Hoyle was a tailored young man, an inch too square in the jaw so that you could bet he’d turn jowly when he was older. His mouth was long enough for his fellow officers to nickname him Duck. He was a solicitor from the Western District of Victoria and he spoke as if he loved the area in a way that Sally and Naomi had never managed to like the place they came from.

  All the young men—like Ellis—had been to Cairo tailors and had light, well-cut uniforms of fawn which had saved them from the heavy serge the government of their Commonwealth had first handed them. Their conversation was by now that of men who knew much about Egyptian gharry drivers, peddlers and tailors, of men in dirty jalabiyas selling red roses for “the lady.” No mention of the dens of the Wazzir. These young men might recount amusing tales of this or that soldier, the hard cases, the rough men from the bush. And all the chatter called forth out of Sally unexpected laughter, as if they’d been sent to teach her that old skill. By their energy as much as the force of parody or satire they diverted both the Durance sisters—the conversation so much livelier than anything Sally had ever known.

  There was always though in the end the matter of where she came from. Soldiers felt the presence of women couldn’t console them unless geography was cleared up first. These young men were all from more favored homes and places than the Durance sisters. However, Naomi had the presence for their sort of company—the capacity to carry it off and seem worldly and not to be overwhelmed by social castes. By escaping the Macleay early she had rendered such matters as of no importance. Sally had not learned the same skill yet. Naomi looked like she could be some pastoral magnate’s daughter. On the strength of that she might one day grow into being a squatter’s wife or some such thing and no one would be able to sniff out that she was born of a mere one-hundred-and-fifty-acre dairy farmer and had trodden in manure on the way to school.

  One of the men would suddenly mention dinner in Cairo—at the Shepheard Hotel or the Windsor or at the Parisiana. The idea was sure to capture other officers and the nurses with the novelty of an invention. Nurses took the arm of a particular officer. Naomi willingly took the arm of Ellis Hoyle. But some were left unattached, of whom—by firm choice—Sally Durance was one and Nettice another. Freud too was sometimes an unaccompanied woman since she possessed a dark grandeur that scared men.

  Then—at the end of dinner when the last of the wine was served—a proposal would arise that everyone go out by gharry and see the pyramids and the Sphinx by starlight. Drivers would bring up the cars later to take the party back to the hospital and the camp. All of them had of course been to the pyramids many times—all the nurses had hired horses at Mena and ridden out by late afternoon. But night-time was different and emphasized the stone eternity of the things. Naomi and Ellis Hoyle rode in the one gharry, engrossed. How strange to see Naomi prefer someone openly. For there was a bit of surrender in that—and Sally hadn’t thought her sister was a girl for surrender.

  Sally’s own companion—though the gharries could carry more than two, the unuttered rule was that people should travel in couples—turned out to be a tall, rather florid officer named Lieutenant Maclean. He was well-built but not exactly muscular. His heavy body was a bit too present, though not objectionable. Sally wondered whether that meant he would make an easier target than the others. He draped a horse blanket over his knees because it was now cold. But Sally was too squeamish to share it and waved it aside when by gesture he offered it.

  You see that, he said, pointing across her body—but his arm not too close—to the gutter full of cabbage leaves. See the leaves stirring there?

  The leaves were stirring. Now she could see there were at least two children sleeping amongst the husks.

  Poor little beggars! he said. It doesn’t matter who wins, they’ll still sleep out in cabbage leaves.

  Though if the Turks came, Sally argued, things might be worse still.

  Well, we like to think so, don’t we? I wonder what they’d say if we asked them. In any case, the Turks aren’t coming yet, it seems. Our masters marched us out there and told us to make the chaps dig trenches in the desolation of gravel. But the Turks didn’t come.

  He laughed but didn’t seem angry enough to wish any great harm on Turks or the Ottoman Empire. Even here it was the Germans—advancing on Paris—who held the imagination.

  They were on the edges of the city now and Maclean looked up at the dazzle of stars. You’ve seen more of the enemy than we have, he remarked dreamily. I’ve got to say, you’re all real bricks, you girls. A credit to Australia. Whereas we don’t know yet whether we’re a credit or not.

  Since his doubt seemed sincere, she assured him, I can see you striding on—no matter what.

  Perhaps she had volunteered too much admiration of his coming warriorhood. For there he was turning to her and leaning forwards so that he could see her eyes, though they were not quite able to be studied under starlight.

  Thank you very much, he said. That’s a reassuring thought.

  They heard laughter from the gharry ahead. Captain Hoyle, said Maclean. He’s keen on your sister. You might find a brother-in-law there. Barring accidents.

  This astonishing news did not raise or answer the question of whether Naomi was as eager for Ellis Hoyle.

  A further tumbling laughter from ahead—but it flirted a little more with the limits of what was considered proper control. Honora. She was with a man named Lionel something-or-other. She was popular with men. Perhaps they misread her by thinking her Celtic loudness meant something else than it did. Sally could tell meanwhile that Maclean didn’t laugh unless a walk into a closed door or the collapse of a chair justified it. He was what they called sober. This suited Sally. In the sport of jollity and chat she was by temperament and by her crimes a nonstarter.

  Maclean said suddenly and with apparent embarrassment, That Freud girl? Did you know her before?

  No. She’s from Melbourne.

  Jewish, isn’t she?

  Yes, said Sally and was surprised to find she was envious, in a remote way.

  The chaps who were on the Archimedes say she has a top-rate voice. But what sort of girl is she? In temperament, I mean.

  She is very much a city woman and very amusing. We’re all pleasant people as yet, of course. We’re on a wonderful journey and we see marvelous things. We haven’t been stung so far by anything inconvenient. But I don’t think Freud will get stung badly by anything.

  Well, he said and chuckled as if he were happy with that degree of information.

  She thought all at once it was a bad thing for a man to quiz one woman about another. He should not be allowed too easily to get away with it.

  You didn’t want me to be your stalking horse for Nurse Freud, did you?

  Oh my God, no! Oh no, that would be a terrible thing for a fellow to suggest. Besides, my questions about Miss Freud were simply idle chat.

  She didn’t quite believe him. The triangles of blackness ahead were the pyramids as sharp as a knife in a brilliant night sky. To underline the central role of the Sphinx, someone—one of the drivers or a guide who slept out here all night—had climbed the paws of the great stone beast and was holding a sodium flare in his hand, so that the wonderful and frightening face of the thing glowed from beneath, more terrifying and more godly than by day.

  This is definitely the way, said Lieutenant Maclean, to see the Sphinx.

  She hoped he would not take those great, glowing features dominating the dark as a lofty mandate to reach out and attempt something. They were shoulder to shoulder and that was enough for her. Any closer and her warmth would turn to revulsio
n.

  Do you know, he said, pointing towards the diminishing radiance of the Sphinx’s features, that there are chaps in our battalion who came here just to see this and not to fight? They’re quite frank about that. Chaps who wanted a trip. I bet they turn up at your hospital pretending to hernias and bad hearts.

  Sometimes, she admitted, there’ve been pretend patients. Men pretending tachycardia. You know, irregular heartbeat. Men can mimic tachycardia by sniffing cordite.

  A young red-headed medical officer on the wards, Dr. Hookes—a general practitioner from the Western District of Victoria, of which, like Hoyle, he was willing to speak as the region of the earth which gave all other terrestrial regions any radiance they had—would say, Nurse, go and get the Faraday machine. And to the patient, Your heart needs an electric shock. And Sally would turn away to fetch this dreaded machine. There was such a device, but malingerers did not need to see it wheeled in. They would reassure Dr. Hookes that they thought their heart had settled. But one young man—very fresh-faced, perhaps a year from school—came in with a fibrillating heart and died on the bed in mid-sentence.

  I do enjoy your company, Miss Durance, said the lieutenant all at once but not without consideration on his side.

  The statement did not seem to plead for some short-term gain. But why and how could he know enough to like her? They were not much more than walking distance from Mena House, and she felt an urge to excuse herself, dismount the gharry, and start off overland. It took her seconds to understand that this would be correctly judged as madness.

  I like spending a bit of time with you, he went on, because you’re not a light-headed girl.

  There was a gush of laughter from the gharry shared by Honora and Lionel. Maclean gestured in that direction. You see what I mean? he asked.

  She was beginning to feel sorry for Maclean’s men. They would have no trouble seeming to agree with him and then probably mocking him rotten in the bars available for non-officers in Cairo. He wasn’t a bad fellow but had not yet recovered from his school-prefect self. He might now have been able to sense that his strict principles were not charming her as he thought they might have been.