The Daughters of Mars (31 page)

Colonel Stanwell—with the same sudden and urgent and remote seriousness as Harris—had enough clarity to ask Naomi later that evening, Did you know, Nurse, how many of my men could be mustered after Krythia? Ten percent of them. That’s the number. Ten percent! Have you heard of such a percentage rate since Hannibal defeated the Romans at Cannae?

That is a very sad figure, Naomi agreed.

And real, he said. And real! Not invented.

But you are here and your family will soon see you, Naomi promised him.

She settled pillows too. Nurses with nothing further to say punched pillows as if to drive the trouble from patients’ heads.

Stanwell asked her, How did I dare lead men down streets in front of families? To speeches by mayors? How did I have the arrogance to do that?
Mocking the wombs of mothers and the breasts of wives? Mocking them!

A hill and a ridge on Gallipoli were named after him and he had raised a battalion from the Victorian countryside.

That night a young man from Hobart—his chin had been severed in two by an ax of shrapnel—noting on paper that he possessed twin half-faces, threw himself over the stern into the wind and a sea running in long, foamy swells. It developed that the orderlies on guard there had strolled together around the deck to shelter and share a smoke with those amidships. They were just returning when they saw him on his perch above the sea. Then they saw him drop into the dark. The ship was stopped yet again. The difficult ocean was swept with lights. A boat was lowered to seek the boy in the area where he had thrown himself. But nothing was found. Guards were doubled and the shirking provosts deprived of a month’s pay and given three days in the ship’s cell. But the contagion was rampant.

At breakfast their matron now told the nurses to do their best to anticipate the suicidal impulse in men. Suddenly the women—who had been required on Lemnos to talk as little to men as could be managed—were to talk to them as cheerily and as long as was needed to thwart self-destructive daydreams. In the meantime, Naomi got her draft of “The Sinking of the
Archimedes
” done and polished.

The ones I felt sorriest for were those who gave up and slipped away when, had they waited two more hours, they would have been saved for a longer and fruitful life. So might the young man with the broken face, the one who recently threw himself off the ship. For, after all, the surgeons had still much to do and skills to do it and might have given him a decent life in the end.

She did not see these reflections as moral. She saw them as embodying the tragic—and in pretty plain and ordinary terms. She delivered
the pages to Kiernan’s office two decks down. Here—in congealed heat not penetrated by the colder air above—a clerk typed. But there was for the moment no Kiernan.

He met her on deck later. She was no longer with an officer but escorting a Western Australian boy suffering from the effects of a bullet through his lung. She listened to stories of a childhood she thought of as rougher by degrees than the one people lived on the Macleay. He had grown up in a hut set on a creek bed which flooded and drowned a sister and brother. Western Australia seemed another rung down in the scales of civilization than the place—narrow in mind and spacious in geography as it was—that had bred her. She advised her charge to sit and rest on a rudimentary bench riveted to the bulkhead. Kiernan passed her with a section of orderlies on their way to some duty. He paused, broke away, and spoke to her in a hurry.

I saw what you wrote, he told her. It’s a parable exactly suiting the need. It will do more than sermons and better by far than a dozen sentries.

What of the accusations against generals?

Let them stand. The senior officers can make a fuss about them after I’ve published them.

She wanted to deny she was capable of anything as high-flown as a parable. Yet she was also suffused with literary vanity.

I shall be distributing it about the ship tomorrow, said Kiernan. The
Demeter Times
. I have to go. Forgive me.

Kiernan had infused a new soul in her. And now that she was in the soldiers’ wards, it was Sergeant Kiernan who invited her on a promenade the following morning. Kiernan had fixity. In his presence the universe was still.

You said, she asked, or Sally said . . . you are a Quaker?

A Friend. As in “the Society of Friends.” It’s a matter of argument, you see, whether any Friend should wear a uniform. It’s true we have always done our best work out of uniform.

She asked him why he had got himself into uniform then—and with stripes on his arm.

Oh, he admitted. Innocence. Vanity. Ignorance—I was not aware that there would be volunteer ambulances that weren’t military. And I might have been caught up in my own way in that war fever. The whole of society was swept up, and I was part of society and wanted to belong in it. I got the simpleminded sense that this was a furnace we all had to be tempered in, the fierce and the peaceable alike. I
wanted
to be part of it.

I had exactly the same feeling, she said. Certainly, I wanted to get away. But as well as that, I felt the same as you.

Even then, we make up half of our motives. All of us. Just to cover the fact that at the time we moved by instinct. We impose the reasons for it afterwards. What will you do now? Nurse in Australia?

Perhaps. But I want to go back
there
.

Oh, we all want to go back, he said, and he laughed in his secretive manner. But I think we’ll have plenty of time to organize that. No end is in sight.

I believe my file is marked so that I can never be made a senior staff nurse or anything grander than that—such as a sister. But I know I am going back.

Yes, he said. Do we want the sensational, you and I? To see how far humans will go in inflicting and enduring? I want to be with men who’ve had serious experience. If it were otherwise, I would have joined some hospital-visiting body before the war. I mean, the Friends
do
have such things.

But it is like a disease, she agreed. To want to tend deaths instead of births.

You don’t really want to see deaths, he said with certainty. I’m your editor and I know.

In the rest of the voyage, those who did not wish to perish outnumbered those who did. This was combined with the new watchfulness of sentries to ensure that throwing yourself off the ship was now difficult. Soldiers on deck told Naomi in excitement that both the padres had read from her “Sinking of the
Archimedes
” in their sermons—though
not anything on the folly of planners and generals. But on hanging on. Redemption being an hour away. So . . . a parable . . .

That Sunday afternoon a demented boy amputee swallowed caustic soda he’d found in an unlocked cupboard and died, scarlet-faced, gagging on emetics. And that was the last of it—the final act of avoidance of the home shore. His family would of course turn up at the dock in some Australian port—unless they lived too far out on remoter farms, insulated by bad tracks from any immediate crushing of hope. Their hopes would then be centered on the local railway station. They would be required in the end to swallow the bitter, tactful lie. Your son—weakened by wounds—perished of meningitis. Or pneumonia. Or jaundice.

A raging gale came on and kept men in bunks and distracted them with queasiness and the smell of vomit from concern for their testing homecomings. Naomi found herself immune from the disease. Her companion on the stormy decks was Sergeant Kiernan—the Quaker who wanted more of the war.

W
as it to cut down on dockside grief that the
Demeter
slipped southwest of Perth—that rumored western city—and sighted the sharp lines of Cape Leeuwin in a clear morning rinsed by a furious west wind and then made for Albany? Only men of Western Australia would land there—in that hugest of whaling ports and at the small town beneath its bald foreshores. Albany’s scatter of human dwellings offered a discounted homecoming, and one from which men would need to be transported to other places by railway. There did not seem to be enough people here to acclaim heroes and to utter a compacted roar of praise. The bands and families on platforms and the banquets offered by grateful shires seemed far off. A few officials came out on launches to meet the ship. Then the
Demeter
’s launches themselves began to be lowered to act as ferries.

So men who might have previously feared arrival on Australia’s mainland found this one—the huge harbor and modest whaling town of Albany—far too plain. As barges came out with fresh produce, a rumor started amongst the men that a feast had been planned to honor them in that port. They wanted to taste it, Australian beef and roast potato and currant pudding and bottled beer and all the rest. Take us ashore too! they began chanting over the stern as they saw the western men handing their sticks and crutches ahead to sailors, then following them edgily and with a jolt onto the deck of the launch.

That night twenty men of sundry wounds and experience stole a launch which stood tethered to the side of the ship. These had the small joy of walking the Albany wharfs and of a brief search for drink and for women. They were applauded when brought back to the
Demeter
under a guard of the military police. But their renown was brief. Their story depressed men in the end. They had dreamed and half feared that the Australian earth would drag them in like a ferocious magnet. But there had been no passion in the neutral arms of Albany Harbour. A late-assembled brass band ashore was heard remotely as the
Demeter
slipped out in the morning. Immediately they were claimed by the ring of storm which ran around the world at that latitude. Lieutenant Shaw—declaring himself immune to seasickness—invited Naomi to walk the decks. He argued he was expert on his legs now. It was true that he used the imbalance of his legs deftly to deal with the pitches and yaws and rolls of the vessel. Both overcoated, he and Naomi allowed themselves to be blown along the deck and climbed to the wing of the bridge. Wind threatened to whip them off it like leaves as they watched the white collisions of the ship with the ocean. There was no ship’s officer here on the exposed part of the bridge. Shaw turned to her to share his delight in the shifting pillars of spray. Flecks of it had settled on his face. Here—in the most private square yard of the ship—he was free to let that light of especial recognition shine unabated towards Naomi.

All right, he shouted, yelling because in this gale a yell was a whisper. I’ve shown enough cowardice and I ought to tell you straight. I feel a real pleasure in your company and I can see you are a first-rate soul of a woman. Me being the joker and you the rock. I reckon we could be world-beaters.

He let her contemplate that idea for a moment.

I mean to say, he continued, I read your item on the sinking of that ship and I thought it was of a pretty high order. It showed a stalwart soul. You are a clever woman too. If there are men who don’t like clever women, I’m not one of them. And then you’re beautiful as blazes—no
small thing, that! Sets off all the other qualities in a most marvelous way. A
most
marvelous way!

The
Demeter
took a massive dip into the trough between waves. She nearly lost her footing and a real baptism of spray over the forepeak wet their heads. They both laughed. It was exhilarating. It was a stimulus to Shaw.

I favor you greatly. That’s the truth. I’m saying all of it in a bit of a panic, you see, because I know that with this wind behind us we’ll be in Adelaide and all the rest in no time. So I don’t want to postpone, even though this is an uncomfortable moment for both of us. Would you consider marrying me?

That ridiculous, wind-drenched shout of a question. She did stare fullface at him. Looking off to the side wouldn’t work. Yet what surprised her was how much pleasure the offer in itself gave her. It was far greater pleasure than discomfort. He hadn’t figured much in her inner and random imaginings, but she saw he was not repellent. The idea of sharing a table and bed with him, and all that, was not unpleasant. She could also tell he’d be ardent and that it would take a lot of coldness and meanness from her to make him think she was less than a decent woman. And there was the sudden and strangely attractive possibility of being defined. The concept of a ritual sealing, a lifelong promenade with no threat from Robbie Shaw and no foreseeable tempests. It appealed to her—the idea of a companion who had come through the Gallipoli slaughter with an even soul appealed to her. The doubt was whether she could live such a straightforward and resolved life.

People do say I have a future, he rushed to tell her, howling against the wind. I mean, in my area of Queensland.

Oh, she roared, I’ve got no doubt about that.

Then what do you say?

This is how it happens with women, she knew. Independent beings one second and transformed forever the next. Just by the improbability that someone would want them. Yes, it would be sweet to be
held—though that couldn’t happen up here. Not within the possible sight of captains and helmsmen.

It’s too early, she shouted. I believe men are often early with these ideas. And often wrong. I don’t mean
you’re
wrong now . . .

He nodded. He took the point seriously. For Naomi the great question returned. There was no more honor in any man than there was in her father. There was no more fineness of soul in any woman than her mother. Yet there had been a discontent in her mother which could not be defined but could not be argued with. A particular, occasional sense of loss—of unease and genteel unrest—in her mother’s face caused Naomi’s blood to turn. In a quiet homestead, they had all crept around her mother. Yet Mrs. Durance should have been aware when she married of what her life would be—she was a cow-cocky’s daughter getting married to a cow-cocky. She knew that love wouldn’t save you from the butter churn or the chapped hands of winter milking. Eric Durance saved his daughters but not his wife from that toil. Mrs. Durance must have known it would never all be a stylish promenade on the mudflats of Sherwood.