The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Read online

  She turned to Honora. Now, with a name like Slattery you’d know about horses, since all the good papists are horse-crazy and gamblers? Isn’t that so?

  The words might in another’s mouth be malice but it was somehow clear they weren’t that here. Sure, said Honora, as if in imitation of her Irish parents, if you don’t gamble on horses, you’re denied the Christian sacraments. Too much drink is merely venial. Anything else, including talking to Protestants, is a mortal sin that’ll send you straight to the pit without appeal.

  The train seemed to have left the main channel of the great river. Sally saw Naomi squint out of the window and try to decipher some diagonal of desert they were crossing. Sometimes the whole apparatus would—with a huge groan of steel and snort of steam—haul up at a tiny desert or oasis station, and in dim light Egyptian effendis and their wives would get down or would board, on business beyond Sally’s knowing. A dark and silent scatter of flat-roofed buildings sat behind the kerosene lanterns of the station. Sally saw one stationmaster escort a well-dressed Egyptian couple off the platform and into the mystery of the town. But sometimes the mystery was that there was no town behind the station at all.

  When Matron Mitchie excused herself and vanished from the dining car, going either to the lavatory or for a snort from the whisky flask she was rumored to carry in her big valise, Honora started up on the question of whether Mitchie had ever been married.

  Could she be a widow? Or did her husband do a flit?

  Men often do with the best of women, said Nettice with conviction. They don’t know when they’re well-off and go looking for harpies.

  Sally said she had always assumed that matrons were above the married state.

  Honora argued Mitchie’d got too much sauce in her not to have led men on.

  Well, said Naomi, exchanging a sliding instant’s glance with her sister, I think she’s wise enough to know being married’s not the greatest state open to a girl.

  What about you and that Captain Hoyle? asked Honora like a challenge.

  There was a silence since it was somehow not exactly normal to ask a woman with an air of such austerity as Naomi a question about men.

  Naomi said, If sharing a gharry means an intention to marry a fellow, I’d be married to half the Australian Imperial Force.

  When the engine stopped nowhere and they sat still, the voices of the women in the dining car and their talk when they returned to their compartments seemed shrill. With a great gulp of air another train would pass—carrying English troops in one direction or the other—and you could see soldiers’ faces close as they smoked and laughed at each other or lay with their heads back. It was the business of the army not only to fight wars but to shift the soldiers in Alexandria to Cairo and those in Cairo to Alexandria—and then for extra pleasure of authority to do it again.

  The Alexandria Misr Station into which they came in the dark of three o’clock had a great dome, and the forecourt was like a Greek rather than an Egyptian palace—all to honor Alexander the Great. A few peddlers were around them even at this hour, selling replicas of Pompey’s Column. Tommies in kepis—ready to outface heat wherever they were sent—sat on their kitbags or leaned against walls. They puffed smoke from blank faces and made tired comment from the corner of mouths.

  Into a glass-windowed transport office Mitchie went to speak to a harried-looking officer and an NCO. The man she made her demand for transport to threw up his hands as if he had expected Mitchie to be the ultimate trial and here she was. The Australian orderlies marched up in less than military exactness—led by the tall surgeon Fellowes who was not yet comfortable with drill. The party was trailed by Lieutenant Hookes. All nurses looked at Leonora, who was assumed to be infatuated for life with Fellowes. They had learned from Leonora he was an ear, nose, and throat expert of little militia experience. Sally had seen some more militarily vain medical officers who even rode mounted in front of their precise-stepping men.

  At last Captain Fellowes handed Mitchie out through the door, and it was clear they had won the transport argument. Mitchie invited her women to follow her two by two out of the main door and past the Greek columns to where trucks were backing and grinding in chilly air. Orderlies held the women’s elbows as they ascended the steps to the back. The trucks drove them through night streets full of high-walled villas and tall blocks of flats, all quieter than Cairo. They spun a small way along the Corniche whose fame they were as yet ignorant of. The sea lay to their right with the water maintaining a kind of deep purple, lit only by the moon and the lights of the Corniche.

  Then they swung onto an electrically lit mole crowded with ships both civilian and military. The trucks rolled as far as towers of boxed supplies and crowds of men smoking or slouched by stacked rifles—and opposing automobiles honking for leeway—would permit them. Mitchie’s platoon of nurses got down onto the wharves. The orderlies from the trucks ahead came to carry their bags and portmanteaux and even their valises.

  Some two hundred paces along the harbor pier the Archimedes came up like an apparition. E73—as naval notation had it. By the lights burning along the pier its wide bulwarks towered and its huge crosses were deep scarlet. British soldiers were guarding the gangway. The ship was not to be boarded until seven ack-emma, one of them said. Meanwhile there was a waiting room.

  That’s impossible, young fellow, said Mitchie. My girls must be fit and rested by breakfast time.

  Be a good fellow, said Fellowes. There’s a brick!

  The young man—hating having been called “good fellow”—went off to confer with superiors. Fellowes shook his head and openly laughed at the military ridiculousness of it all. Leonora raised a gleaming face—whitened abnormally by the lights on the wharf. For she and they all somehow loved it that Fellowes was still a young civilian surgeon and was far from converted to war’s protocols.

  The soldier came back with a stiff, permissive, even herding gesture of his arm. So they went aboard—onto decks they knew, down corridors they knew, into the cabins they were familiar with.

  The Archimedes II

  That first night on Archimedes—when it lay on the level surface of the East Harbor—in the cabin she shared with Carradine, Honora, and Naomi, the unconscious Sally came to a sleeping awareness that there was no separation between her dreams and those of the other three women, and that just as she shared the cabin’s air she also shared its phantasms.

  The dawn entered and hurt her eyes. She awoke in the upper bunk and adjusted to the trembling of metal bulwarks, the throaty howl of a steamer beyond the porthole, and the musk of the women—a peppery, flowers-on-the-turn smell with the honest overlay of clotted talcum. She saw Naomi at the porthole, peering out. At least one ship was passing and perhaps two or three were edging about and getting ready for the ocean. Each seemed to engross her sister. Then Naomi turned. Still in her bunk, Sally gazed back at her. Our mother’s lean face, she thought.

  Have you seen anyone you know? Sally whispered.

  No, it’s impossible, Naomi said quietly. It’s just that the men line the decks of the ships and they’re so excited. Can’t wait to be in battle. It’s contagious too. Come on deck with me.

  Sally secretly assessed whether they were far enough away from home for it to be safe. Far enough away from the memory of complicity.

  All right, she said.

  They dressed stealthily while the other girls still slept and left the cabin and went up the companionway to the promenade. On the East Harbor, seaward side of the deck, an intoxication came on the northeast breeze from the decks of the transports. Men were drunk with possibility—the approach of the revelation, the core of meaning. The world had become simple for them. You could nearly feel it simplifying itself.

  Their anchor raged upwards and they passed the Pharos lighthouse at midmorning into a vacant sea the transports had already committed themselves to. It was a sea a person wanted to watch at length, the deep blue of what was called spring in Europe—and Alexandria was hal
fways Europe. Nothing like the Pacific off New South Wales she had scanned from the Currawong. Its vivid and dark blue scared the watcher with depths that could eat you alive. Whereas this—this invited you and admitted light deep down inside it and seemed willing to let you plumb it. But no time to stand long on the deck of Archimedes and ponder that invitation.

  Dr. Hookes began the day after a plain breakfast with a talk on splints directed at the nurses who sat on one side of the lounge and the more numerous orderlies who sat on the other. From his report, it seemed the bush town where he practiced was rich in fractures. The Liston splint was just the ticket for very dangerous fractured femur wounds which were to be expected in battle. Some orderlies smirked and nudged as Hookes expatiated on cock-up splints which forced the hand upright in cases of wrist fracture.

  Then an older officer came into the salon—the colonel of the ship, in fact; a slightly dreamy-looking Englishman. He wore the same uniform as the rest. He had been converted to Australian-ness by immigration or secondment. He talked about the treatment of bullet wounds in the South African war. It required patience, hydrogen peroxide, and tweezers to extract uniform threads which had entered the flesh in company with the bullet. Do not forget, said the colonel, that the bullet is not a sterile instrument—it has been loaded by an almost certainly filthy hand, perhaps by a disease-ridden one. When it strikes the victim, it introduces dirt from the exposed part of the struck body and fibers from uniforms and thus—microorganisms!

  The colonel went on to the question of morphine dosage. Sally observed Naomi. Her chin was undauntedly raised. The colonel’s prescribed dosage for abdominal wounds seemed niggardly. The highest he sanctioned was a quarter grain for abdominal and thoracic wounds. But, he said, regularly and mercifully repeated as necessary. Everyone made notes in pads with pencils sharpened by penknives they carried in deep pockets in their skirts. Bullet wounds had not been spoken of before today when—supposedly—they were all on the lip of the cauldron.

  The afternoon was taken up with crepe bandage preparation—running it through boiling water and eusol, hanging it out on rods to dry, winding it up. Cotton bandage was stored ready—soft and pure enough for the wounds of heroes—or so it was hoped, though there had been impurities reported in bandages and dressings opened in Egypt. But, as they still thought, they were about to treat the strong and not the weak—young men of good constitution purified by battle.

  A dusk lecture was delivered by Captain Fellowes on sepsis and gas gangrene. He had seen it develop from wounds inflicted in the rough streets of Melbourne while an intern in an emergency ward.

  With all this absorbed they were by now flattened by exhaustion. A little energy was left to climb the stairs to observe the half-moon above the sea. Others visited the lounge where Freud sang “Little Sir Echo” at the insistence of nurses and medical officers. The word was running around the ship. The troops were already landed in the Dardanelles. What-for for the poor damned Turks! Sally heard Lieutenant Hookes say.

  Still—that evening and night and the next day—no one knew for certain where they were bound on their course across this Mediterranean Sea. The sun was on what they called the starboard beam both in its rising and then—rather astern on the port—in its setting. This meant a northwest direction.

  At making up the cots fixed in their floor sockets the orderlies proved—it seemed to many—willfully clumsy. A handsome young medical corps sergeant was observed going around exhorting them towards a better performance. Forward, a former library had been set up with tiered bunks for walking wounded. Cabins forward on the promenade deck were to be reserved for recuperating or lightly wounded officers. Below—on a deck once used for second-class travelers—the pattern was repeated to accommodate humbler ranks. Mitchie warned the women they might not always be able to tell the difference between officer and man.

  They wore their aprons and made hundreds of beds while the orderlies scrubbed steel doors and bulkheads—a job with which they seemed strangely more content than with bed-making since it left their pride in place and was clearly proper work for men. Only the nurses were permitted to scrub the floors and walls of the operating theatre and any stray surface therein bold enough to present itself. On Sally’s count four doctors and a pharmacist were aboard, and if at dinner that night Dr. Hookes seemed wan and distracted, it was said to be because he might be called on to leave the wards and take on the role of surgeon. But one wondered why when the wounded might be a mere handful.

  The women were given time to watch small Greek islands float past and to squint towards the coast of Greece, sadly over their horizon. There were a few orderlies on deck. One of them—the sergeant with the lean, darkling, and refined features who had harangued the other orderlies on their lack of competence with bed linen—said hello briskly and identified a mountainous ridged creature ahead. Its name was Lemnos. The sergeant’s manner was that of someone who had been here before. And his uniform and the sort of khaki puttees that distinguished the ordinary soldier was also a relief from too much polished leather, too many moustaches and neat leggings. His name was Ian Kiernan.

  He gathered a crowd of the nurses to consider Lemnos and instructed them without too much sign of wanting to be thought clever. When Hephaestus was kicked out of heaven by his father, Zeus, said the sergeant, he had settled on Lemnos and fathered a bandit tribe with the nymph Cabiro. Hephaestus’s forge was there, on that island. Then, when the women of Lemnos were abandoned by their husbands for Thracian women, they killed every remaining Lemnos man in vengeance—which seemed a bit unfair to the virtuous. The Argonauts, landing there, found only women left and created with them a race known as the Minyans whose king, Euneos, was Jason’s son.

  If the women were in charge, why wasn’t it a queen? asked Freud softly and not expecting an answer.

  Good point, Nurse, Kiernan admitted. If I ever get back to Melbourne Uni I’ll ask Professor Challenor that one.

  On the starboard abeam, he then told them, could be seen a hazy outline of Imbros associated with Thetis, the mother of famed Achilles.

  Some of the orderlies were said to be men dropped from the infantry for incompetence with rifles and bayonets and even for unruliness. But Kiernan resembled a man who was precisely where he wanted to be. Still, he was wary with what by their standard passed as scholarship. He was aware of the taboo which until now had existed between the orderly and the nurse, between the carriers of water and stretchers—the hoisters of supplies and porters of nurses’ bags—and the daughters of succor who had the theoretic power to command his labor, just as he had the unacknowledged but genuine power to harry them.

  On that third evening they could see the sky in the east lit by a storm. Everyone rushed to deck on the rumor that there was what could be called “thunder.” The word failed this clamor up ahead. The lights in the sky would dim and then fill it again like the pulse of that Greek’s forge Kiernan had already summoned up. That wasn’t Lemnos though. That was the Dardanelles, the peninsula of Gallipoli. Those are the Turkish guns. Krupp guns from Germany but manned by Turks, Kiernan asserted, who was on deck with all the others. The Germans have seduced the Turks to their side, he told them. And now—here we are!

  The Archimedes had dropped its speed the closer it got to the illuminations from the heights ashore. It edged its way in towards the fury at perhaps seven knots. All around were its new companions—transports and cruisers and destroyers with their guns leveled at the eastern heights but silent. One other hospital ship was there on the starboard and displayed its crosses. And everywhere smaller ships, as if waiting for daylight, and barges running errands between ships and the shore. Sally wondered how all this—the campaign seen there and set up ahead of them so hugely as to fill a half of the sky—had started without her knowing. When had it begun? How could something so colossal have been kept a secret as they had rolled along in trucks under the lights of the Corniche? She had thought from school that battles were the business of a single day. Hadn�
�t it been so at Waterloo? But this clearly was a battle with some days’ history behind it, and operating by night as well. It worked many shifts. Like a factory.

  They landed about the time we left port, said an orderly with a cigarette at the railing. I know that. They must be giving the Turks what-for.

  It could not be guessed from the deck of the creeping Archimedes who was giving who what-for. Matron Mitchie appeared amongst them as if likely to issue an order.

  She turned to the scene ashore. Cadences of cannon light and quivering flares demanded all the available attention.

  My dear God, said Mitchie. Do they go at it twenty-four hours a day?

  Five minutes on deck, girls, she called above the massive metal roar of the unleashed anchor cable. By your watches. Then to rest. You understand we can expect some labor to come?

  A spout of water rose beyond an anchored transport. Some of Mr. Krupp’s manufacture had that ship, then, in its intentions. That fact was something that stretched the mind.

  Look there, said Carradine. Men.

  By the glimmer of flares, the beach ahead—about two miles off—could be seen and even looked as if it might be an illuminated fair. A place for Jason and the Argonauts to meet those Lemnos women. There were men on it though—mere dots but plentiful and busy.

  Carradine and Sally and their small, dry-featured, reticent senior, Sister Nettice, showed here an even more heightened spirit of obedience. They expected a little sleep before the patients turned up. But at the companionway, Sally saw a pale Naomi in her pinafore standing as a triage nurse with Dr. Hookes and amongst orderlies—the men who would deliver the damaged to the doctor and her for assessment. Naomi’s face showed that resolute nature which had murdered their mother. She would not get sleep. She had to stand and wait. Whereas they would be awakened to duty according to what Naomi and Hookes received.