The Daughters of Mars (28 page)

Byers said, How do you expect me to feel though? Blameless? But, yes, to put her in the compound is a mongrel act.

My one hope, said Naomi to her sister at breakfast the next morning, is that they will ship me back to Alexandria in disgrace. Can you imagine that when I nursed in Sydney I saw myself as a future matron? But I am afraid I am spoiled goods now.

And she must endure meaningless days—all without the comforts of tending others that Nettice enjoyed. She tried to read as energetically as her sister but found her attention frayed. She was permitted to take exercise on Turks Head and favored the cliffs facing south. Her pride did not allow her to call on other women for company. She felt a long erosion of her spirit, could even sense the risk of madness.

Two days later, however—when she was dreaming of the
Archimedes
and of her failure to drown with it—an Australian medical inspector named Colonel Leatherhead arrived on Lemnos. In retrospect it seemed to all of them that Leatherhead’s appearance had the nature of an angelic visitation from the Bible. He placed himself between the world of shadows where they dwelt and a world of possible light. But none of that was clear at first. He was not built on angelic proportions. He was round faced and round bodied and his hips were wider than his shoulders. There was the possibility in his face that in a second it might slide in either direction—mercy or condemnation.

He appeared in time for morning tea in the sisters’ mess, introduced himself and spoke plainly to the nurses. He had been sent to report on the conditions they worked under. Again, he did not depict himself as some grand spirit of rescue. But he said that certain conditions had been reported by complainants. Mitchie, they thought. Even disabled, she would have chivied—and told her story to—surgeons who possessed military eminence.

He nonetheless managed to give them a suspicion that their behavior would be as strictly scrutinized as anyone else’s. For a while he
did nothing except to move about the wards and make an occasional note. Naomi, however, found that so many of her superiors had their attention fixed on Leatherhead that her movements were not strictly supervised. She used her days to walk down to the peddlers and buy cigarettes and chocolate for the patients or to visit the graveyard and study the tragic names on crosses.

Leatherhead’s presence did not in the first few days suppress the clique of abusive orderlies who—after behaving better in the shadow of the assault on Freud—had now got back to their habitual braying of commands at nurses. In the meantime, portly little Leatherhead seemed to concentrate on making notes on the theatres and wards and on the dressing and irrigation of wounds. With ward doctors he debated the use of sodium peroxide and asked whether Dakin’s solution might not be better. He came to the nurses’ mess for an evening meal and held one of the girls’ enamel dishfuls of bully beef and rice and found—as far as you could tell—the meal neither tasteful nor distasteful.

The colonel talked away unabashed whenever he was with Leatherhead. He was proud to have the excellence of the place observed by an inspector from Alexandria.

Without seeming urgency, Leatherhead had the women one by one to his temporary office in an annex off a hut where a number of medical officers had their desks. Naomi secretly had some hopes for her turn with Leatherhead. But she was nervous of how he would read her. Would he write her off as hectic or sullen? But Leatherhead was in no hurry to relieve her limbo with a summons.

It was her sister who was called to visit him first. Sally found him as precise as he had so far appeared. He had an ink blotter which he regularly applied to what he wrote. He was not a man to take the lazy way out of letting ink evaporate. His copious papers were not strewn. He had his own typewriter for transforming them into official reports. Sally felt certain in his presence that his chief concern was to expose her flaws. But the questions were not aggressive. Place of origin. Place
of training. Places and length of civil nursing. Yes, I see you were on the
Archimedes.
So of course you lost all your clothing, your uniforms, your nursing kit . . .

Yes.

And that was why you were provided with this makeshift wardrobe?

She explained that they had started off with a French navy shirt and blanket.

And those rough dresses, he declared, look like they’ve been bought secondhand from the Greeks. That aside, there have been complaints about orderlies and their treatment of nurses. What has your experience been?

We are not treated politely, said Sally. She felt a rush of released fury.

He told her please to be more precise.

And so she devoted herself to their history. The orderlies began by treating the nurses as full-time drudges and skivvies. They were commanded by orderlies to clean excrement and carry waste buckets and bedpans. To lug buckets of tissue and used dressings and amputated limbs to the furnace. None of this they were unwilling to do. But it was all they were asked to do, and they were abused by orderlies for how it was done. They were not admitted to the operating theatres except to scrub them. And sometimes called by names not normally applied to nurses. They are not all bad—the men. But the good ones seemed silenced.

By their fellow orderlies?

Sally decided to risk her entire opinion.

I see it as permitted by the colonel, she said.

He didn’t seem appalled. His head was down and he wrote with his neat fountain pen in an even, infallible hand. His bowed scalp was covered with bristly tan hair. Then he looked up.

Were any of you touched violently or improperly?

Not me. Nurse Freud . . . you must know about her.

Leatherhead leaned forward at this—like a man about to be engaged in gossip.

Did you know, however, that the young man who attacked her is dead?

I’d not heard that.

It is important for you women to know that there was a price exacted. A double price in his case. He was carrying a wounded major on his shoulders to a field ambulance when he was shot dead. His captain recommended him for the Military Medal. But obviously it could not be granted in such a case.

Even then Sally wondered how it was that the dry, non-disclosing Leatherhead had let this story out. To some it would seem gossip. But to the nurses it served as a vindication. She would conclude that he had done it so that they would somehow see the issue as settled. She did wonder if clever Leatherhead had merely fabricated the tale—his inventive way to put the matter to rest. But that would have been a touch of a storyteller rather than of a dry functionary.

He suddenly brought the interview to an end. He thanked her. She rose and was leaving. But he stood up as if impelled by etiquette and intercepted her before she reached the door.

So you did not think Staff Nurse Nettice unstable in her mind?

I think her mind is fixed on the
Archimedes
. The way the minds of some of the men are fixed at the moment they were wounded. But she is as sane as anyone else.

His dismissal of her came through turning his back and returning to his notes. His manners, his moves, his questions, his measured gossip were all so jerky and unnatural. Yet it had been a genuine cure to be questioned by him in every particular of the tribulation she shared with the others.

When she came off duty that evening she was astonished by the apparition of Nettice sitting on her own cot. Nettice looked up with her traditional frown fully in place. She said flatly, So you see, I am out.

Sally rushed over to envelop her. But Nettice showed no appetite for celebratory hugs at all.

Lieutenant Byers will be so relieved to see you. And happy as well.

Nettice said, He won’t quite be able to
see
me, will he?

Sally grew suddenly furious at Nettice’s sophistry. For God’s sake, Nettice.

All right then, said Nettice. I
can
imagine the poor boy will feel some solace now I’m back.

You sound almost as if you’re unhappy to get out of that place.

On balance I’m very happy.

You take it very easy. But did you know Naomi has been suspended for visiting you?

Nettice pondered this. I knew it was a risky business, she conceded. You will have to understand, though, that I’m not lacking in gratitude. I am just too stunned yet to fall on my knees in appreciation.

Yes, said Sally. Forgive me.

For she understood that state of soul precisely. Nettice made a better effort at sharing the enthusiasm of the others when Carradine came in. Naomi returned from one of her shopping expeditions, and the sight of her broke down Nettice’s reserve and sent her into a strange mixture of tears and hacking laughter. Would you believe it? she asked. I’m out!

Naomi said in wonder, This is the work of Colonel Leatherhead.

Carradine had a smart idea. I’ll go and fetch Lieutenant Byers and bring him for a constitutional. And you can see him by the mess tent here.

Nettice was now all at once anxious for that meeting to happen, and it was organized. She waited in the wind with Sally and Naomi on either side of her and saw Lieutenant Byers come walking forth on Carradine’s arm in his hospital pyjamas and with an army jacket over his shoulders since the evenings were turning so cold. Even with Carradine to guide him, he tested for obstructions and swept the gravel in front of him with a white stick.

Sam, called Nettice in a thin voice.

Rosie? he said with his head cocked. Darned sorry to get you into trouble.

There is no more trouble now.

He shook his head. For there was the untellable trouble of his blindness. But then he inhaled a deep breath and managed a wide, generous smile.

A triumph for justice, he said. Not a common thing in armies.

The women chose to find this heartily amusing and gave themselves up to more laughter than was perhaps justified.

• • •

Uniforms arrived from the depot ship to relieve them from the harsh oddments of coarse cloth. There was a rumor sweeping the stationary hospital that Colonel Spanner had left that morning on a ship for Alexandria. The arrival of a new chief medical officer, a Scots surgeon from Adelaide—a former civilian used to treating other civilians with at least some civility—occurred with equal suddenness. The Australian matron broke the news to them—as if they might be aggrieved at it—that they were required to wear the capes ordained by their military authorities. The near-forgotten and halfway elegant gray overcoats with boomerang-shaped “Australia” on their shoulders were also provided, and a neat array of shoes almost too refined for the mud and gravel of Turks Head.

Sheep from Salonika had been landed. On some nights fresh mutton replaced the bully beef on their tin plates.

Orderlies—former tyrants amongst them—now carried out waste buckets and limbs and bloodied bandages to their points of disposal. No “Bloody dumb cows!” anymore. This was the wonder the Leatherhead visitation had produced. He had switched the poles of the earth—or at least of that planet named Mudros. Because of her experience with Captain Fellowes aboard the
Archimedes,
Sally was asked to administer anesthesia in some shrapnel cases amongst the newly arrived from Gallipoli. She observed the vital signs as metal was removed from wounds or as limbs were taken off by amputation saws and wrapped in linen and carried out to join the heap of arms and legs awaiting prompt incineration. Honora worked as theatre nurse. Leo
worked as a scout, preparing and presenting the appropriate packs of instruments and the swabs, keeping count of them, and even supervising sterilization carried out by orderlies.

The matron-in-chief who had been Colonel Spanner’s chatelaine survived for ten days before her temporary assignment to their stationary hospital similarly ended and she was sent elsewhere. Everyone felt that the hospital had been renewed.

There had been a sad revival of the wound of Lieutenant Robbie Shaw, however, the officer who with Dankworth had taken the women across the island for a mudbath. Sally had discovered that open-handed, sociable Lieutenant Shaw lay in the officers’ medical ward with a fever and a distracting pain in his all-but-healed femur wound. Doctors and the matron conferred over his exposed hip, and the redness and swelling which bespoke sepsis.

I wish they’d open the flaming thing up, he told Sally. It’s just a bit of temporary flare-up in there. They can get it out like a core from a boil.

The ward doctor called a surgeon. By now Robbie Shaw’s pulse was racing and he had begun to rave with pain and a fever. An eighth of a grain of morphine was injected every four hours. The wound had cracked along the suture lines and foul matter seeped from within. He was taken to surgery and—with the wound opened up—had some inches of rotten bone cut out of the shaft of his upper thigh. Sally visited him in the post-operative ward and found him depressed and whimsical.

I’ll spend the rest of my life walking like a bloke riding an invisible bike.

But pain regularly distracted him from the issue of his future gait.

Honora developed a pronounced melancholy as notable as her usual elation when Captain Dankworth was sent back to Gallipoli with his artillery battery. He visited his accomplice Shaw before leaving. Sally heard Shaw tell Lionel Dankworth, Well, this buggers me for the artillery.

He was correct about his chances of more campaigning. It was mysterious that he would want it. But it seemed to be an unfeigned desire. No idea of a future profession could console him for not being capable of further gunnery.

• • •

The potent rumor arose almost as soon as the women had their new clothes on. There was to be a ship of wounded back to Australia. It took only hours before an embellishment came forth. Some of them were to travel on it. Their Australian matron—now chastened to an amenable tone by the rigors of explaining herself to Leatherhead—soon confirmed that. She read out the names a few mornings later. To show there was no full justice to be found on earth, the list included those with a reputation for giving trouble. Carradine was to make the journey—punishment for the shortcoming of being married. When she raised the matter that her wounded husband was in England, the matron suggested she leave the celibate nursing service and present herself as a Red Cross volunteer. Then, if necessary, she could pay her way back to the Northern Hemisphere and her husband’s bedside. There was no final absolution for Naomi’s rebellions of word and commission. Nettice, for her irregular ward demeanor, was to go too. And some non-offending others. But not Sally. A strange flush of relief ran through her when her name was not read. If she was sent back to Australia, she doubted she could escape again.