The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Page 8

  They went down to their cabins beyond the hospital deck. Half an hour ago it would have seemed ridiculous to go to rest with Mr. Krupp as a sleeping companion. Now—even knowing Naomi must stay wakeful—it seemed the simplest sense. In any case, by the early hours of the morning they were all awoken by the hammering of an orderly and told to stand by at their nursing stations. The large hospital deck was divided into imaginary wards with whose dimensions they were familiar now, and Mitchie told them to take a lie-down on the cots meant for the wounded. Some lights were switched off to reduce the glare from the white bulkheads. Thus, in half light and with the noise of the barrage lessening, no one slept. At three in the morning a stillness had set in. The Krupp cannon rested. Naomi had seen the shore darken and return to its mythology. Night became absolute.

  At that hour a minesweeper came up beside the Archimedes with wounded men on its decks. Matron Mitchie descended with the loud news that there would be patients now. The nurses stood a little more rigidly at their stations in the vast hospital than before. Tightness had also entered the demeanor of orderlies. They were like maids and porters in a great hotel awaiting the coming of guests. At central tables here and there lay untouched their hydrogen peroxide, their scissors, hypodermics and needles, thermometers and blood-pressure cuffs, cotton wool and gauze, dressings and bandages.

  Initially, the harmed arriving on the hospital deck was a scatter of men who could move by their own power. They had come aboard up the lowered stairs. They were cheerful and rowdy and almost in a mood for celebration. As they entered the hospital they seemed restrained by a fear of appearing too willing to escape the shore. Most of these had labels pinned on their shirts or jackets marked “3.” Mitchie told the nurses to put on their rubberized gloves.

  The first of all the wounded Sally saw was a dark-haired, lanky young man whose face had gone yellow. He seemed confused. The young ward doctor they barely knew allocated him a cot and inspected the clotted mess of bandages at his arm. It would prove, Sally would ever remember, that his elbow had been shot away—a tourniquet was tied high on his hanging arm. The doctor ordered a quarter grain of morphine. Slattery went with hypodermic and needle to draw it up in the nurses’ station. A half-dozen nurses had the time to aid or stand by each patient and in this case to witness the dampening and tender removal of the filthy bandages and the peroxide soaking and drawing out of the packed bloody gauze with tweezers. Someone ashore had put the gauze there. Someone careful amongst the lights and fire. As the dressings came off, it was clear that the brachial nerve was borne away and the humerus and the bones of the lower arm shattered. The young man snuffled and muttered, vomited, then swallowed his drowsy pain. An orderly supported the upper arm and there made his own pleading noise as Slattery and Sally attended to the swabbing of the bloodied and palsied forearm near the mess—until Dr. Hookes came along and punctured their solemnity by declaring that the man would need surgery to see what could be salvaged. Even so—Sally knew—the arm would dangle a lifetime. His hand would be forever a senseless withered fist. Orderlies put him back on a stretcher and hauled him off to the theatres forward.

  Sally and some of the nurse witnesses were drawn off to attend to the second case, a man whose jacket hung over his shoulders and whose chest was swathed. Orderlies gave him a cigarette and settled him down as Slattery and Sally came to him. “Shrapnel chest and shoulders,” someone had scribbled on his label. Sally was not sure what shrapnel was.

  Now a number of men on stretchers were arriving down the main stairwell bearing filthy scribbled labels marked “1” and “2.” Mitchie and the ward doctor inspected each and directed nurses to them. The colonel and Captain Fellowes and the Archimedes’s third surgeon came stalking for candidates for their operating tables and discussed the need of this man and that with the ward doctor and Mitchie.

  To Sally and Honora’s station was carried a craggy-looking young man whose features seemed to draw in on themselves. Under an opened uniform jacket—put on him as if to shield him from nighttime cold—the upper body was bare and his wound in bandages. The orderlies moved him with genial roughness onto a hospital cot. The stench of soured and recent blood, the exhalation of the wound and of excrement and of his fouled remnants of uniform puzzled Sally. It was as if he had been campaigning a year and not a few days. But there was no doubt of the rights his wound gave him. His “1” label had “thoracic” scribbled on it and a morphine dosage in dim pencil. Also—upstairs on deck—Naomi had attached to his bandages a red card to signify the urgency his wound stood for and had scribbled “lower right anterior of the chest with likely pulmonary involvement and exit.” The bandages below his open uniform jacket were dark and saturated. He was unearthly silent and calm and his mind seemed to meditate on this wound which should have killed him by now except that it might have skimmed major organs.

  Matron Mitchie went amongst the nurses not yet engaged, telling them there would be twenty-three stretcher cases in all. The finite number was a motivation and a comfort. Sally heard Carradine and Leo Casement reasoning with a man with a bloodied head wound who talked like crazy but in a rapid, unknown tongue. His chatter competed with orderlies’ shouts and dominated the deck and ended with a slur as Carradine stanched his rattle of discourse with a morphine injection.

  Similarly Honora arrived back from the dressings room with a hypodermic—a quarter grain. With this boy to command the entirety of her brain, Sally thought for an instant only, and with a little spark of memory and relief, that morphine had nearly lost its history here. It no longer stood for theft or guilt. A small patch of the arm must be cleansed with an alcohol swab and the stuff got into the body of this weather-beaten young thoracic case who had not received any mercy since he was bandaged on the beach. The lifting onto a barge, the lifting off—how had he lived through that?

  The orderly assigned to Sally and Honora was a fellow of perhaps thirty-five years with eyes that might have been stunned or else sullen. His name was Wilson. He lifted and adjusted the young body’s posture, dragged away the man’s foul jacket and let it drop to the floor while Honora and Sally soaked the areas near the wound with hydrogen peroxide to dilute the sticky adhesions of dressing to wound. With the man eased sideways and then on his back and sideways again by their helpmeet orderly, by cutting the bandages they found both wounds: sockets of raw meat front and back with the bullet having made its exit five ribs up—the seventh thoracic vertebra as she must write on his chart—and about two inches from the spine.

  Sally and Honora looked at each other since they shared a strange hesitation—not that the wound was beyond their comprehension or even beyond their expectation. It was the inadequacy of their functions and small medical rites in front of damage as authoritative as this. The orderly held the boy with gentle force, and Honora cleansed the flesh and the lips of first one wound and then went around the cot to cleanse the exit, while Sally probed with forceps for impurities and fibers. The patient took to shuddering all at once and the orderly—thinking it his duty to restrain him—pressed down on the man’s shoulders. The pallor of the face turned to deep, cyanosed blue. This was the face of the human creature drowning in his own blood. Sally needed a trocar from the central table and by an apparent chance Matron Mitchie was by her shoulder with such an implement.

  Mitchie commanded the orderly to let the man lie on his back. Then she drove the wide-bore trocar needle into the man’s right chest cavity while ordering Sally to fetch rubber tubing and a kidney bowl—both of which someone of surpassing wisdom had placed on the equipment trolley in the ward’s midst. Mitchie murmured good girl when Sally, perhaps instantly—because it was all an instant, immune from the fall of seconds—arrived back with them. Blood began to flow into the kidney bowl Honora grasped. Then it overflowed. Let it. It stopped, then flowed again over Honora’s gloved hands. It was hopeless now. The soldier convulsed at an awful length of seconds, and that ended it. Mitchie nodded to Sally and Honora. Can’t be helped, she said. Clean y
ourselves up, ladies.

  They ran to do it. They said nothing as they shed gloves and scrubbed in a basin at a nearby table. Orderlies were to replace these once used. But as a first sign of plans breaking apart, a basin of bloodied water stood unremoved on the table beside their basin.

  The ward doctor pointed them to a further patient in their section of the vast barn of white space. They stepped amongst discarded and sullied bandages and scraps of uniform waiting on the deck and reached their new case, his jaw bound up. He must have been forty years when judged from his forehead and eyes, and his eyes were awfully calm. An eighth of a grain to begin with. After the easing off of bandages, bone fragments showed in the mess of the wound. The bullet must still be in there somewhere—netted by bone. What was he doing on that beach and fighting for the heights at his age? It seemed willful idiocy for him to be here—a determination to get away from something such as family or else undignified or uncertain work somewhere.

  Captain Fellowes walked by, surgically coated, and inspected the long, explosive mess Sally had revealed and was swabbing, and looked for the degree of tooth and mandible loss and claimed him for surgery. Fellowes must believe that this mayhem could be fixed with screws and wire under anesthetics and with surgical tools passed to him by brave Staff Nurse Freud.

  So what have we done for the wounded? Sally had a second to assess. But Mitchie directed them on. Sally was—in a sense—ready. She was bolstered by hearing Honora say to a patient, Look at me. Come. Look. Can you see me, my fine fellow? It sounded as if she were talking to someone concussed in a football match. He looked at her as if he recognized her, she said later, but realized she wasn’t the woman he expected to see and closed his eyes—done with the world of women. He was a man with a stomach wound who by some pointless mercy had not hemorrhaged to this moment. Crying for water he too was taken away to the theatre. Apart from him, the groans were less rowdy than the shrill suggestions of matron and doctor. This was strange and certainly a mystery.

  Their orderly traveled around the ward with them wearing the same unreadable face as before. He looked world-worn but accustomed to labor, to lifting loads and digging hard soil. A young officer lay before them, his stomach swathed and wearing a soiled number 1 label from ashore and a red one Naomi had probably put on him. He was writhing and trembling, but with a sort of good-mannered lack of excess. Quarter grain, Mitchie instructed them, as he had not had any morphine—it seemed—since the shore. By the blood at his back, Sally saw another through-and-through wound. But when the dressing was rinsed off she saw a cavity created by something larger than a bullet—a shard of shrapnel, say—and edging from it an unexpected snake of the stomach lining named omentum, yellow amidst blood, lacy and frayed, hanging out of the slashed gut. While not letting go entirely of his surprisingly gentle hold on the baby lieutenant, the orderly Wilson turned his head aside and vomited on the deck and it seemed as if he might let go and clean it before someone of higher rank abused him for the mess. No, said Sally, leave it, Mr. Wilson.

  He was older than she was and deserved the title.

  Two beds away, Matron Mitchie called for orderlies to take the thoracic patient to the morgue. Where was the space for mourning in this air of blood and acrid wounds and unwashed men? Sally, Honora, and Wilson applied a Liston splint then to a man with a broken leg who had been knocked back into his trench by a glancing leg wound and who for some reason apologized to them for the ridiculous head-over-turkey act that had landed him here.

  That was the lot for now. But the old rifles the Kaiser was said to have off-loaded onto the Turks had obviously not been entirely lacking in effect on the flesh of the legions of the good. At the end of the ward, nurses washed their hands at the basins refilled with water and disinfectant. They went to their mess, where a steward had placed tea and much buttered bread.

  Great nurses us, eh, Sally? said Honora without seeming to grieve or ask for apology or consolation. We were busy, she continued, but we didn’t do much good.

  She stood at the porthole through which morning had selectively begun to pastel her face.

  Sally felt her own less expansive soul preparing to be inconsolable, but then there was a yell from a staff nurse in the door. A minesweeper was alongside with decks covered by stretcher cases.

  In a few minutes—it seemed no more—all the cots on the hospital deck were filled. Men carried in were laid in their stretchers on metal floors. Orderlies were looking for pantries or small offices in which to lay down the men. The neat divisions of responsibility blurred under this torrent of the harmed. Only those who were used to dealing with confusion—those who could see through the turbulence because of having come, like Honora, from turbulent families—could have decided where to begin. And Mitchie herself and Sister Nettice too—who moved and spoke without panic—resolved bewilderment by calmly directing the traffic of stretchers.

  The ship began to tremble to renewed thunders outside. Large guns were firing by land and sea. These furies may or may not have been directed at them. But Sally became used to that steel shiver. It was the barely noticed pulse behind what she now did. She seemed after an hour to have been feeling that tremor all her life.

  And every time Sister Nettice or Matron saw a man weep fiercely for an inability to utter pain, morphine was ordered.

  Where are you from, Sister? a pale older man with a chest wound demanded, looking up above his bandages for an announcement of the place name that might save him. There were more of such older men than she would have thought. Men who had known labor and had been aged and hollowed by it. Again her sister on the deck—the unseen Naomi—had chosen a red card of urgency to be pinned on him. Knowing by now that men were solaced by this plain geography game, Sally told him. The idea was this, so it seemed: while I am from one quiet shire and you from another, no harm will approach us. Those who discussed locations could not die. But she knew now there was no dealing with the thoracic wound. The victim and the nurses must accommodate themselves to it. It would accommodate no one.

  I’m from Moonta from the mines there, he announced. I’m one of the lucky ones, he persisted with his blue lips barely flapping with breath amidst the graying pallor of a sun-leathered face. Just as well. God knew, see, that I’ve got a wife and three kids.

  Even Wilson had to admit he was from somewhere named In-dooroopilly, the name sounding so fantastic that some decided to laugh. Wherever he was from, he was a good fellow. He nodded with her as the place names were told. She heard all the Enoggeras and Coonabarabrans, the Bungendores and Bunburys. Her own tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and was released only to utter one plain sentence.

  You must get better then, she said.

  Bathing with gauze the skull wound of a youth deeply unconscious and finding it full of grit, its edges of flesh brittle and darkening, she saw the inner membrane torn away, the dura, the pericranium—she beheld the naked brain. It astonished her and gave her too much pause. She had taken up scissors to cut away necrotic flesh when the colonel descended in his gown and claimed the boy.

  The wheezer with three children was gone. He had lost his hold on conversation, and it didn’t matter anymore in his patch of Aegean where Moonta or the Macleay might be.

  • • •

  Sally knew something of the imperfections of men but those on this vast white deck continued to behave with a saintly forbearance. There were a few peevish cries from them of Nurse! Nurse! When you went to the caller, you might see panic in the face but were more likely to hear something almost fatuous. Very commonly the stupid thing said was that the patient had let his mates down by getting clipped, winged, hit, bowled base over turkey (as they put it even in their last etiquette of language).

  Where did this sanctity come from? They couldn’t have had it before? Not the men who rampaged through Cairo upsetting stalls in the souk and yelling curses at the gyppos and doing bad imitations of British officers’ barked commands.

  There was time for the nurses to take a
meal in the mess, and all surprise was covered by gossip and stories and guesses. Naomi—down from the deck—sat looking so reflective and pale that Sally went to her and asked her how it all was up there. Naomi put a hand to her forehead and held it out interrogatively. She said, Sometimes there are so many at once it seems Hookes is just guessing at men’s conditions. And other times he’s so slow. I’m having to do half the work and I can’t always assess them properly . . . bad light, the general mess of their uniform and clothes . . . The orderlies are confused and have been putting the wrong tags on cases. It’s too much. Too much for the ship and the orderlies and Hookes. And for me. I’ve never been tested . . .

  Sally kissed the crown of her head but then walked off as if by instinct—just to save Naomi from lapsing into dismay.

  Carradine said that in the past few hours she had been put in the walking wounded officers’ ward. When she heard the others talk about the unlikely lack of screams and pleadings on the men’s deck, she said some of these officers are utter cowering and whimpering failures.

  I’d cower, said Naomi from her place at the table with a sudden energy of conviction. I’d whimper.

  Sally—with a mug of tea but no appetite on the other side of the table—frowned at this uncommon outburst and found herself reaching a hand across and patting Naomi’s just as if they were girls without a history. As they were now. It was the now—and not memory—that had cornered all the power over them.

  I bet they were the ones, said Carradine, who cut a dash in Mena camp and in the bar at Shepheard’s. I bet they were heroes in the bar of the Parisiana.

  Everyone was silent awhile. The men were wild in Egypt, Naomi said at last. But they are holy here. They’re like monks, dying. If it wasn’t so piteous it would be outright beautiful. Their wounds are the devil but their toughness is God.

  An awed Honora suggested, Have you thought they might be better at this than they are at living contented in houses?