The Daughters of Mars (10 page)

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.

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 yourselves 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.