The Daughters of Mars (8 page)

The route march of some twenty-five thousand infantry and light horse brigades eastwards towards the Canal passed the oasis where Mena House and its medical tents stood. From the wards the confident boots could be heard in unison and the imperious orders of officers and of sergeant majors with the voices of near-mad dogs. The sounds were enormous and constant and drew one out of doors. Some of the afflicted men even emerged from the tents to watch hopelessly, and Sally and the others ended their work and were escorted out of the compound. On the fringe of the palms they saw how long it took for just one battalion to pass with its accompanying trucks and ambulances
and cooks. And then another band would come behind—blaring on yet another battalion to triumph and getting effusive with “The British Grenadiers,” “Song of Australia,” “Hope and Glory,” “Waltzing Matilda,” “Rule Britannia,” “Flash Jack from Gundagai.”

Honora Slattery announced the battalions as they passed. One, the First, was the founding stone from which the glory or the tragedy would be built, and at the head of a company within—barely to be seen in the dusty atmosphere—Captain Hoyle. And somewhere in the mass, Lieutenant Maclean. Someone—Carradine perhaps—had an operatic duty to run into the ranks and cling to her unswerving beloved. Finding then her clasp weakened by the tide of men coming behind, she should reel disconsolate from the ruthless host and weep on the verges of the desert as the regimental glory swept by. Staff Nurse Carradine did in fact appear—pale under the sun with Nettice—and they scanned the myriad of men for a sight of Eric Carradine, for the Victoria brigade was passing. The artillery came last. Tall Lionel sat on a horse to wave flamboyantly and grin crookedly in the hope his smile might reach Honora. It continued and continued until wonder was blunted. By dusk they were all vanished, and the band music evaporated from the air. Somehow Carradine’s Eric was not sighted in the distracting masses. It was because, Sally knew, he had been looked for with too much effort.

• • •

After a few days Carradine had a fevered glow in her eye and was calculating that by now her husband was—along with every man who had taken tea at Mena House—either off some perilous shore or on it. Some light horse officers still came to tea, though many of their brethren too had been sent off on the adventure. These ones, however, had to stay here to stop the Turks raging out of Sinai to take the Canal. They gave the usual reassurances that if the Dardanelles rumors were right, there would be no grief at all. Kaiser Bill had dumped all his defective arms on the poor Turks because he needed the decent ones in France and Belgium.

The hospital seemed empty—except for that outlying, guarded leper colony. New transports from Australia were imminent. But for the moment there was hardly anyone in the desert camp to be cut by wire or an unwise lunge of a bayonet. A light horseman had appendicitis, an orderly caught pneumonia even though the hot season and the blizzards of grit named
khamsin
were starting. And the matron was sent to another hospital. It was rumored she had annoyed the colonel whom they never saw by demanding menial work of orderlies that he thought “her girls” should do.

One noon scandalous Matron Mitchie, the being who had made colonels hoot aboard the ship to Egypt, arrived by car at the door of Mena House. Through the window of a ward Sally saw her disembark while receiving a halfway military salute from the orderly who had opened the door for her. Hampered only by a slight arthritic limp—as if there had to be some small imperfection in her or else the more humorless gods would be forced to take a yet more serious tax from her—she rose up the steps to the wide veranda. Later, Sally happened to be in the chief building nursing an unconscious officer whose mount had thrown him during a race, when an orderly arrived.

Miss, Matron Mitchie wants you to meet her in the parlor.
Toot sweet
, she says.

The parlor was reserved for medical officers—nurses were permitted in but had rarely taken the chance until recently when the season’s first columns of sand rose in the deserts and were blown along in the khamsin. The room reminded Sally of pictures she had seen in the
Mail
of Sydney clubs—themselves based on the clubs of London. The overupholstered chairs and the small tables of mahogany or some such wood for waiters to place drinks on were left over from the hotel days of this building. So were the racks for newspapers, the spine of each newspaper screwed between two varnished rods and hanging heavy with the weight of tidings from France, Russia, Serbia, Mesopotamia. Now there were twenty-four women or so in the room. Sally’s sister and Carradine and the sculpted Freud and Slattery and Leonora
Casement and prune-faced Nettice—all marvelously changed by the expectation of what would be said. Matron Mitchie was there not in the ward clothes she seemed to have been wearing seconds earlier but in her traveling suit with her gray cape. The transmutation might serve to show what serious powers resided in Mitchie.

Well, ladies, she said to them. New nurses are on their way, their ship just in at Suez. So you are hand-selected by arrivals and fate and what I know of you. Now we are to take ship. If you have any patients for whom you have a special concern, leave notes for those who are on their way. You must gather everything you have—your bedrooms now are marked for others. You may leave behind in a shared tea chest all your sandalwood camels and filigree work—everything you bought in bazaars. You should be dressed
comme ça.

She indicated her own formal wear.

But you must pack your on-duty uniforms and other effects. The question arises—the question of
whither
. Well, I can tell you the start of that
whither
.

On the edge of illumination, the women still laughed at her.

She raised and consulted a paper she had in her hand.

Our new station is the hospital ship—our friend the
Archimedes
. Archimedes being a Greek who liked baths and who sank himself to displace water, let us hope he looks down upon his ship and its sisters with a gentle gaze. But
à propos
earlier remarks, let me assure you, you have been chosen for your sobriety and nursing skills. You must not depart from those strengths.

Honora cried out, Our destination, Matron? I mean, once on
Archimedes
?

Mitchie leaned towards them.

Because we are a hospital ship and there will be news of all that’s happened there in days past in the papers by tomorrow, there is no prohibition placed on me against telling you it is to the region of the fabled Hellespont—the mouth of that passage where things have begun to happen, that gate running between the Greeks and the Ottomans.

Women frowned. The atlases in their brains were inexact on that geography.

The ancients knew it forwards and backwards, said Mitchie, but the world was smaller then. We’ll nurse boys who come to grief there and who certainly don’t know it any better than we do. The omens of the campaign have been excellent, and so, I warn you, it may be the Turk himself that you must nurse. His flesh is human too. He too is born of woman.

She looked around the room inviting contradiction of this humane theorem.

She made a motion as if clearing the room of small talk.

Wear your coat, for it will be cold tonight between Cairo and Alexandria and we should leave pneumonia to the soldiers, who have more excuse for it.

• • •

The charabancs took them through a city to which they had become so quickly habituated that it had begun to lose some of its power to startle and appall them. Men still—heedless of traffic—led camels loaded with firewood for sale, or donkey carts. The stubborn poor came close to hurling themselves beneath the wheels of military trucks, water wagons, the white limousines of the rich, and the women’s vehicles in an attempt to sell something or to be compensated with a coin for some maiming they had suffered.

The light was still hazy from the recent unseasonal sandstorm. The sun had frayed into a ball of tasseled edges as the charabancs arrived at the central Ramses Station. This—despite its concessions to Arabic style—was built like a fortress against the Arabic world. But of course Arab peddlers had penetrated it.

A truckload of medical orderlies—themselves assigned to Alexandria and perhaps to the
Archimedes—
followed the charabancs in trucks with all the nurses’ luggage. So Mitchie and her women carried simply their valises and their immediate needs as they entered beneath the archways and moved amongst soldiers, Egyptian businessmen,
and the poor. A person could damn well get used to this, said Honora.

Carradine, Sally, Naomi, and Mitchie had a compartment. Naomi offered Sally a seat by the cramped window of the carriage which seemed as designed to keep the world out as much as to allow sight of it.

Sally said, No, you take it.

Still there lay a distance between the sisters and it struck her that the other women could see it and were making surmises about it. But for distraction from that awkward thought, there were antimacassars to lay the back of their heads against and the seats were of the softest leather. A superior foot-warming device—a canister with hot coals over which a carpet cover had been laid—was placed on the floor for their use. The women were barely settled when a conductor in a tarboosh told them respectfully that the dining carriage was open now. Matron Mitchie asked Sally, Would you be so kind as to fetch down my valise?

Untroubled by the gentle lurch of the ambling train, Sally got the scuffed leather thing down. Matron Mitchie took an envelope from it and turned to Carradine and Naomi.

Will you take those—be dears for poor old Matron!—and give them to the girls in the compartments? Meal tickets. Be warned and warn them. They do not cover beer and wine and certainly not whisky!

The stipulation implied the women would fall to whisky very easily.

Come, Sally, said Mitchie, after Sally had been handed her white meal card.

Sally followed Mitchie as she made her broad-bottomed way down the corridor of the train towards the dining car and bounced a hip off the walls on one side and then on the other. There is useful flesh, thought Sally.

They came into the dining room and found lamps held in lotus-like bulbs burning above each table. The tables themselves were set with brilliant, flashing cutlery and filigree-work tablecloths. The women who did the fine work earned very little, and here the grace of things sat balanced
on want. And here too—as Lieutenant Maclean had said—all justice had to await the defeat of the enemy and mightn’t even happen then.

The dining room windows seemed better placed for viewing. For a time—as they rolled beside the Nile—Sally could see feluccas as black shapes on the deep-blue night-time river. By lanterns in the bows and hung from masts, the faces of men moving along the deck were vivid for an instant then gone. Members of the same humanity she shared in and carriers of the same kind of blood. Yet their lives were unreachable to her. What did they say to their wives? What did they say to their children? And what was said in return? That was travel, she supposed. A dance across surfaces to see the face of everything and learn the meaning of very little.

The other girls arrived in the dining carriage. Naomi was with them and seemed to look at everything as from a great distance.

Come on, Slattery, Mitchie yelled, pointing to the two vacant seats at her table and at the table across the corridor. Come on, Carradine, sit with a poor woman, won’t you? Empress Naomi, join us. Freud the diva, sit at that one with Leonora. Ah, Nettice, welcome.

So they settled as ordered.

Now, your father-in-law, said Mitchie, skewering Carradine with a brown eye. He’s some great man, isn’t he?

He is the attorney-general. And the deputy prime minister.

Carradine absorbed without apparent shock the news that Mitchie was aware of her marriage and willing to be forthright about it.

And your husband? Does he have political intentions?

He hasn’t said it yet. I think he finds the military ones hard enough to keep up with at the moment. Poor chap, he’s not thought of as strict enough by his colonel. But that’s his method, you see. To appeal to people’s good natures.

Well, said Mitchie, beaming. He certainly managed to appeal to yours, Nurse Carradine. Everyone seems content to ignore your marriage for now. A ministry letter said that single women were to be recruited, but it’s not the law or anything. If asked, I’ll pretend ignorance.

Carradine grew uncomfortable.

I’m sorry, said Mitchie then. I understand this should have been discussed privately.

In a kind of reparation she let nurses ask her where she was from. Melbourne, she told them. But where were you born? they asked her. She was born in Tasmania, she told them, a dairy farmer’s daughter.

At first her mother seemed very severe—a Scots woman. But that was because there was a little too much fun in her father—he loved a horse, any horse on which there was a rider wearing silks. But there are worse vices, and then he died of meningitis and that settled things and her mother could be easier about things.

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.