The Daughters of Mars (51 page)

She lay on earth where time was canceled. All lamps out, all lamps out! she eventually heard an orderly sergeant yelling.

The turning off took a little time. She could see the shattered lantern she had been following lying some distance along the gravel path and an arm and hand still holding it. It had been hooded with a metal flange but somehow the night flyer had seen it and taken to it in the utter bliss of attack. Parts of the first bearer and of the patient they had been attending to were scattered in gobbets of flesh in a crater beyond the dying lantern. The second orderly had a cut to his face and sat dazed where he had landed. He and Sally had been leaves blown in a happier direction.

She got up amidst a rain of grit and in a terrible acidic stillness which wasn’t like quiet at all but which assaulted the air and rang in the ears. She could hear more planes close above. Was it virtue or fear that sent her running towards her ward? The shadow of the Church of England padre—who officiated regularly on the hill and worked in
between as an orderly—emerged from it through the double black-out curtains and grasped her.

You must find shelter, Sister, he shouted.

The suggestion made her furious.

No, she said, I have to stay in the ward.

Jostling past both of them from within, Honora Slattery went towards the trenches with a blanketed patient over her shoulder. That seemed absurd. But Sally lacked the mind to be sure whether the sight was odd or normal. She ran into the usually dim-lit ward—bright now, since one of the Tilley lamps had shattered and set fire to the flooring. She fetched a blanket, and she and the ward doctor smothered the flames. Some men who should not have sat up were doing so and looking about with piteous eyes and shouting. The bombardment had jolted their system into life and activated their breath. Further detonations not so far away showed that planes were probably trying to destroy the barrage balloon depot—since pilots hated those contraptions.

I’m with you! she called to the patients, though she could not quite hear herself and would later think the declaration melodramatic.

Go to the door and see what you can see, the ward doctor dementedly told her.

She rushed to the door and pushed through its two flaps as if she could read from there the intentions of the planes, their number, and the likelihood and path through the air of more bombs. In the open night between the ward and the trenches, perhaps a dozen weeping men staggered about the yard and along the paths. Others knelt or cast their arms wide and raved or screamed. NYD(S).

She saw Honora emerging now from the thoracic ward—why had she gone there?—with yet another man on her shoulders. What are you doing? Sally—clearheaded now on the subject of Honora’s lunacy—called out to her.

I am putting patients in the trenches, she shouted back. I put the first one in and he turned out to be a German. Imagine that!

She had mad purpose in her eye—she would carry every man in all the wards into slit trenches if she could. From within the gas ward Sally’s own orderlies began helping their patients past her and to the shelter of trenches and dugouts.

Honora ran on. Sally turned back into the gas tent and passed the remaining wide-eyed nurses and orderlies, who were aware something momentous and ill defined had occurred. The ward doctor was with the gas cases who could not safely be moved. Two nurses were going about placing basins over the heads of the patients. It was a halfway rational idea to save them from shrapnel and it possessed for the nurses the comfort of acting to defy events.

The ward doctor told Sally something had happened near the theatres. They could smell the chloroform, and mixed with it was the penetrating stench of ether. If there was a fire out there then all the gas cases would need—whatever the results—to be moved.

Sally joined a nurse who was already at the rear door of the tent. From the hut steps they saw the surgical theatre hut begin to burn. The air was anesthetic from the shattered bottles of chloroform but it was the ether supplies that were burning, releasing vapors that the fire instantly sucked back into itself.

Sally heard people lamenting. Someone shouted, The hoses aren’t working! A bucket line of nurses and orderlies attempted to stanch the flames. Were surgeons, theatre nurses, patients caught in there? Water wouldn’t do anything, she knew. Earth or sand was needed to quench blazing ether. It was now that she reachieved her reason fully. She turned back into the gas ward and shouted without reference to the ward doctor that nurses and orderlies must hurry all possible cases into slit trenches.

You go, Sister, said the ward doctor.

No.

You
go
! he roared. I’ve sent off all the other nurses.

All right, she said. She would be a free agent once she was out in the night.

As she stepped forth she heard another inhuman impact some distance off, but it was not close enough to bear her mind away. She began pushing and dragging demented, howling, praying men towards trenches they did not want to enter. She thought of the thoracic ward and crazed Honora.

A Klaxon which had not rung at the start of things to warn anyone sounded now to reassure everyone. Silence all at once finally manifested itself like the clap of a great hand and stunned the earth. Voices and even yells were minute within it. The air was full still of the stench of the theatre fire and the embers seemed to fall like an incandescent snow.

Sally heard men’s plaintive voices from a half-collapsed tent. Inside, Honora was lifting patients back onto beds, one bleeding from the ears from a nearby detonation. Am I too? Sally wondered, and began to help. Orderlies arrived to readjust the tent poles. At last, according to some dazed, unspoken accord between them that their job was done, she and Honora left the restored tent. The remaining heat of the theatre blaze wafted across the station. Sally set out back for the gas ward and skirted
her
crater—the one which held unscannable fragments of the gas case and an orderly. She saw Freud and Leonora coming from the lost fight with the fire, walking towards her and the untouched thoracic ward as if no shock had overtaken them and as if on normal duty. They stepped carefully but without amazement around obscure body parts that covered the paths and other spaces. As Leonora reached Sally, she said, An orderly told me. They blew up the morgue. What a triumph, eh?

Some NYD(S) were still wandering the station—quivering and dazed or making speeches—and it turned out an orderly had chased one down on the Deux Églises road. Orderlies retrieving such men were leading them back to their ward by the hand and shoulder, brotherly to a degree which caused Sally to shed tears as she returned to the gas ward. She wondered how it had been in the resuscitation ward during all the noise and fire and with the bombs making their random and absurd choices.

When day broke there was time for the nurses to return to their mess, glimpsing beyond the wards—more clearly now—the two-thirds-burned-out theatre hut. By accident—so Sally understood from Freud—it had been near empty at the time. The surgeons were in the admissions hut. Two orderlies had been blown wide.

At their mess table the women bolted down sugar-laced tea and ate bread which they doused in Queensland treacle as if to reembrace their dear, safe, sleeping home continent. Major Bright came in after beating on the door and told them with a mannish innocence and irrelevance—almost touching—that he had recommended them all for Military Medals. Those who stayed in their wards or had worked at the fire or had mercifully dealt with others or had placed tables or basins over men to make them feel safer or had put others on the floor and beneath their beds—even as orderlies yelled at them to get into the trenches. But, he said—as if it were a great concern arising from that mad night—it was a military lottery that would define who got the decorations.

They listened because he was such a good man. But military ambition burned very low in the women. It was amusing to Honora that the man she had carried from the chest ward was not after all a German but an English captain—and not only an Englishman but a German-speaking, renowned novelist named Alexander Southwell, the nephew of one Lord Finisterre who had been formerly a British cabinet minister. It was idly assumed that if there were medals they would go Honora’s way. But the chief remark her act attracted was wonder at how a woman of five foot six inches had—in the fury of the moment—carried a six-foot man, limp and awaiting chest surgery, from his ward to the trench.

It was an issue which did not delay Honora in the least as she went back to duty immediately after breakfast. She was all business. The mere sentiment of compassion had left her. She pursued it all in a fierce, mechanical way. There was something to do with Dankworth mixed up in it.

Let her go, Matron Bolger said. I’ll fetch her back for a rest in an hour or so.

Sally went back to her ward too but returned to the mess for a cup of tea before collapsing. Most of her gas cases had been moved to evacuation ambulances. Now it was up to the base hospitals to soothe and save them. Rest lay ahead since nothing could happen until the surgical theatres were resupplied. Honora returned with Matron Bolger—you could hear their chat before they reached the tent.

Karla Freud also arrived. She had been helping in the evacuation ward that morning—attending to men as they were loaded on rear-bound ambulances. Entering the tent now, she saw Honora and Sally and a few others—Leo too—and stood contemplating them. Honora was writing something on the card table—they all feared it was to that bureau and that the blasts of the night had unsettled her again.

Look, you’ve probably heard of my surgeon, Karla Freud stated. Boyton. He’s an American from the British Medical Corps transferred here. Well, you can stop speculating. It’s all true. I’m letting you know in case anything happens. Both of us might have been incinerated together last night, and weren’t. That means there are two reasons why my friends from Lemnos can stop thinking, “Poor old Karla.”

Then she sat down. Sally did not know whether she was supposed to congratulate her or be silent. Are we all suddenly mad? she wondered.

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?