The Daughters of Mars (24 page)

It was to the few nearest that she confided she’d been attacked. She’d been attacked not only in the face but afterwards by penetration. It could not have been a patient. The man was strong and angry in the predawn—it had happened after she left her ward and while it was still dark. She had been punched and had fallen. From behind, her blouse was dragged up and her undergarments down. She was penetrated violently while the man talked and hissed. Yes, an Australian.

One of the orderlies then, it was decided amongst the women on the basis that Freud had said he was healthy and his body had a strong odor but not that of the Dardanelles. At the memory of his smell she was ill again.

How the news of her having suffered this ultimate ordeal got around was not known. Naomi and the others who heard Freud speak swore it was too important and unhinging a matter to pass on. But the details emerged like smoke from a flame and entered the air under the force of their viciousness. It was obvious straight off that if the colonel so beloved of orderlies should declare Freud was lying—or that if the orderly’s crime were lessened or dismissed by him—then Freud would be brought to madness.

Naomi, Honora, and Sally went to speak first to their too-timid Australian matron. They found her in the shadow of the postoperative ward. They were pleased to see that this was not a matter on which she had to call on the colonel to approve her sense of outrage. She said it couldn’t be tolerated for a second. She wanted to interview Freud. En masse—in probably too many sisterly numbers—they accompanied Freud to the matron’s tent. She balked at the idea of going
inside, so Naomi offered to accompany her. Naomi was somehow up to her gravity.

They decided they needed to call as the first male ally the ward doctor—the doctor who had shown himself more than a cipher when he spoke low to the colonel about chlorinated lime. After a while those not on duty and still waiting outside the matron’s tent saw the ward doctor arrive, glum-faced, for the obligatory inspection. This would be the worst aspect of it, Sally believed—that so soon after being mishandled and possessed by the form of man, the victim must face a magistrate of the body who inspected with a purely clinical interest the same flesh that had been attacked with raw, savage force.

When he emerged he would not answer any questions. The details—I’m afraid—are for the colonel, he told them.

They were frazzled by the idea that the colonel was the sole possible punisher of the crime.

Naomi escorted the shattered Freud back to their tent and sat by her camp cot grasping her right hand. Provosts arrived at eight o’clock. An officer and a sergeant-major. Freud was sleeping—the doctor had given her barbital. But the officer told Naomi that she must be awoken. Like the ward doctor they were not unkind. If there was a small tinge of hostility, it seemed to Naomi to be related to embarrassment. This was an alleged crime of the kind they thought they’d left behind on the streets of cities.

They stood back from the cot. Naomi was permitted to rouse Freud. Karla, she whispered. These gentlemen . . .

The gentlemen moved in. The officer dragged a stool into place and sat at a distance from Freud’s thunderous dark eyes. They seemed—the clear one, the bloodshot—engorged with imminent tears. But Freud refused to let them flow in front of these men. She would await a private hour.

The officer asked her, would she know the man who attacked her if she saw him again?

Yes, she said after a wary consideration. Yes, she could tell him again.
By some light from the ward she glimpsed aspects of him as he first hit her. Then—at the end—he stood over her for a second and she turned her shoulders and saw him. The rest of the time, nothing but earth.

When they asked if she could tell them about him, Naomi hoped Freud would keep silent. What if Freud surrendered these toxic details and nothing was done? Or the man was proclaimed not to exist on Lemnos? The risks seemed gigantic at that second.

He was young, said Freud. She rushed to get it over. Maybe as young as eighteen. He had a broad face. What people call moon-faced. He had not washed lately.

She half-gagged on this remembered odor.

His hair seemed to be fair, she concluded.

The officer made notes and then looked up wanly at her.

Aren’t you pleased? she asked frantically. Aren’t you pleased I saw all that in the light there was? His damned animal face.

And you had not agreed to meet him?

Freud’s face showed the purest contempt combined with a fear of powerlessness. What do you think? she asked with a dangerous insistence.

All right, said the military police officer. Please . . . Did he say anything to you?

He said, “The blokes said!”

“The blokes said?”

“The blokes said. The blokes said. The blokes . . .”

The officer looked at his sergeant major.

A funny thing to say.

Yet you could see he believed—given its oddity—that it was the truth.

The provosts left. Naomi led her—still stupefied with sedative—to the mess tent and they drank tea. Here the colonel found her. He paused beside the flap and said, Knock! Knock! with a rusty air of geniality. Naomi got to her feet but Freud still sat. In her world all rank had been canceled.

Just to say, Staff Nurse Freud, that I have read the report and am appalled. Appalled. That one of my men should . . . “The blokes said.” Sure of that, are we?

Freud did not answer.

I’ll give him “The blokes said”! Now, my dear, you enjoy your tea and I’ll . . .

He shunted one of his arms to indicate firm punishment. When he had gone, Freud lowered her head on her hands and drowsed for two hours. At the tea table that night there was a fraudulent cheeriness as Freud sat at Naomi’s side. In the midst of it Captain Fellowes arrived from the other hospital. But, like everyone else, he was at a loss when it came to what service he might perform. At last he and Leonora went out for an evening stroll. This would have been in the past a subject for Honora’s irony. But now no comedy could be borne. All the available breath needed to be spent on comfort for Freud and the hope of punishment.

In their tent later Naomi came and stood by Sally’s bed. Sally was reading for comfort and distraction a remarkable book—
Of Human Bondage
by Somerset Maugham. If in her colonial innocence she thought of his name as “Morg-ham,” the book still spoke to her and told her things she did not know she knew. It gave her the illusion of opening doors which the outrage on Karla Freud had slapped shut. It was also a new book and smelled wonderfully of glue and pages. Someone had brought it from England and somehow left it in the small library in the mess. She was hungry for its distractions and for the variousness and sameness of humans it proved. It was an education she could resume after a day of frightful shock.

On the scale of pure information, she had learned from Maugham things about the Anglican Church she had never known. She had learned something of living in Heidelberg, which made her think of the Germans as sharing the one soul of humanity. That there were German girls on whom the character Philip could “feast his eyes” was a revelation a person had to deal with. In this book—just published
and whose buyer might have died in one of the wards or been shipped off wounded to Egypt or Malta—the author put his voyager, Philip, in the heart of German families. The subversion of that was somehow to be relished. She took a portion of delight in that the other nurses presumed she was reading some English romance. Whereas she read risky sentences such as, “Men are so stupid in England. They only think of the face. The French who are a nation of lovers know how important the figure is.”

And how did that relate to Freud? Which had the attacker wanted to punish in Freud’s case—the face or the figure? Did men divide up women in this way? If they did, it made the brutality more understandable.

And now Naomi was there. Getting down on a knee, she murmured to Sally, If Freud is like us, no periods, I mean . . . Well, at least no risk of pregnancy.

A pregnancy would be unspeakable. They could not want to understand what it would be like to bear such a child, waiting for the monster’s face to emerge. Would you love and hate it at once? Would you send it to an orphanage? Would you murder it at birth?

So nature has some wisdom, asserted Naomi. Then she kissed Sally and went.

Next morning the supreme matron—the colonel’s consort in spirit—entered the tent. She trod on ground grown cold overnight and on the rubble left by moles. She spoke to Freud, who was dressing determinedly and wanted to work. Clearly the matron was offering her a choice of wards. Post-operative, Freud decided. No, she said, she did not want to mope about, but a new ward was advisable because it was in the dysentery wards she had been seen and speculated on and become prey.

They ate their poor, cheerless breakfast of hardtack and—though condensed milk sweetened the tea—then went to their duty. Freud inherited the post-operative, the young men as dazed as she was, and the gravity of what was done to her matched by the gravity of what had
been done to them. Here, they were reduced to an awful humility by anesthesia and their wounds. Here, pale, blue-lipped boys were dependent and someone’s children. The holiness of man could be again believed in.

The following day was cold, but there was a distraction of a kind. A car grinding up the hill pulled to a stop outside the nurses’ mess tent. After car doors were heard being slammed shut, a male voice called, Anyone in?

Sally—
Of Human Bondage
in her hands—was one of the dozen or so who were in the tent. The inquiry was so genial and so markedly different from the snarls of orderlies that a number of voices called, Yes. Two Australian officers in their slouch hats entered. One was on crutches. He moved easily and had the reddish, pleasant, broad face of a future publican or auctioneer—or at least a town worthy. The other was leaner and taller and watchfully shy. He looked to Sally like someone remembered from a vastly distant time. They were both well tailored. They shamed those nurses from the
Archimedes
who, despite the kindness of their sisters, were still wearing little better than army shirts and pants or else drab skirts—the sackcloth of their survival.

Both visitors were from the rest camp of Lemnos, and a closer look at their uniforms showed them to be not quite as flash as at first blush.

The shorter one declared, We heard you were here. Our battery is over there in the rest camp. We had a visit from a certain Sergeant Kiernan, who said he had heard you young ladies have a hard time of it here. Rather upset about it, actually. So we thought we’d come over with a small box of things.

They had heard of the attack on Freud, of course. But they would not say that.

Just hang around a tick, said the lanky officer. He went out of the tent and as he ducked his head to go out, Sally remembered him. Lionel Dankworth, who’d been keen on Honora.

Well, said the genial, huskier man left behind. He rubbed his hands as if the day was actually colder than it was. This tent is a bit draughty, isn’t it?

Except when it is stifling, Naomi conceded.

Did you do yourself an injury? Sally asked him.

The old femur, he said. A bit of a knock, but a clean break. I’m hoping to go back when the boys do.

Sally and Naomi exchanged glances. Femurs took longer than that.

The tall gunnery officer was back, toting a bully-beef box. But when he put it down on the table by the giant enamel teapot there were better things than bully beef in it. He said, A little contribution.

The stockier man asked if he could take a chair. He did it with his stiff leg stuck out in front of him. He recited the contents of the hamper. Canned asparagus, he said. Canned salmon. Then there is some cocoa, he declared. Chocolate—it goes a bit white when it’s been in a ship’s hold in the tropics. Never mind. Oh, and some biscuits—macaroons, not hardtack. Marmalade too.

Lieutenant Dankworth, said Naomi. We met in Egypt. Honora’s here, but sleeping. Off-duty. I could go . . .

No, said Lionel Dankworth, let the poor girl sleep for now.

He seemed frightened of the reunion—or at least of it being public.

The women pulled the cans and packages from the box and squinted at the labels like scholars trying to read hieroglyphics. Nettice spoke.

There is a young officer who is blinded. He’s a jeweler, you see. Rather down. Since the supply in the ward has run out, if you’ve no objections I might take him some of this cocoa.

Why not? asked the tall man. If the others don’t mind.

The shorter man with the femur injury gave the sort of smile over which no shadow had ever fallen. And yet he had been on Gallipoli and been part shattered there.

Sally inspected Nettice. It was strange that she would mention one soldier in that way.

Look, said the officers, we should introduce ourselves.

The lanky one said his name was Dankworth—as Naomi had already said. The man with the femur injury was Lieutenant Robbie Shaw.

Shaw lowered his voice. We heard one of our girls was having a bad time here.

They told him Freud was on duty. At her own insistence.

We don’t like that sort of thing happening to Australian girls, the lanky one grumbled. If there is anyone you’d like us to talk to . . .

It was the normal male proposition—we can take your enemies aside and box their ears for you. That would fix everything.

She wouldn’t want you to do anything just now, Naomi told them. They have promised to find the man.

You just let us know if they mess about, Lieutenant Shaw advised.

In the meantime, said Dankworth, there’s a depot ship full of tea and frozen lamb and other delicacies in the harbor. Comfort from home. The laziness of quartermasters and other people meant the goods on board just sat there. They had the other day grabbed a fistful of quartermaster’s invoices and filled them out and gone on board and collected the goods that they’d brought here.

So this isn’t the end of it, Robbie Shaw promised.

Lieutenant Dankworth surveyed the mess. He referred to Naomi’s face and then his eyes moved to Sally’s. You young women are sisters, I seem to remember?