The Daughters of Mars (6 page)

He seemed to suggest: since you’ve insisted on presenting yourselves here, we’ll need to have you amongst us.

The matron and colonel seemed at first to be brother and sister in their contempt for nurses. For the girls were set to work scrubbing with carbolic the big rooms which had once been perhaps hotel libraries or ballrooms, while orderlies smoked and mucked about with one another in the shade of trees. Then—more normally—nurses were set to air mattresses and wash down rubber mattress covers and make beds, ready for the brave, shaking out the linen with a thud in the hot, dry air, with a whiplash beneath which their restrained conversation and their muted laughter were permitted. Next they moved out of the house to do similar work in marquees—which the colonel called “brigaded tents”—set in the gardens. A sign, said Honora, that some lunatic thought the huge hotel might not be enough for the wounded.

On a dim path Sally’s shoe slipped off the duckboard laid out to the marquee and her ankle was sprained. In her family little pains like this fell instantly under the dictum: if that’s the worst thing that happens to you . . . But with her mother—she remembered acutely as she limped—the adage had run out of its capacity to help. With their mother the worst thing had happened and set up its nest in her eye sockets.

To attempt forgetting that, she had only to step out of the grove and she was in infinity. She was sure all at once that this was why the pyramids were built. To deal with the infinity the Egyptians saw
in all directions. Desert and those towering objects were so simple and triangular and undeniable that they called up memory of other things that were elemental and undeniable—the sisters’ mercy in their mother’s bedroom at Sherwood—but also put them in place. To be an accomplice is sometimes to forget for hours that you were one. Utter guilt couldn’t be maintained nonstop in a distracting place like this.

Within a day or two they had taken to drinking tea on the roof. There you could sit in clear, cool air since this was winter, and take the improbable but giant paper-cutout-looking pyramids for granted. But if it felt at all chilly up there they convened in the officers’ lounge downstairs where Lieutenant Carradine would come visiting with a group of young officers.

The battle was in Europe. There was only a rumor of it in Palestine, where people said the Turks might be on their way to the Canal. But even now the hospital grew fuller than Sally would have expected until—though there were no aged, no children, no women—it took on some of the atmosphere of quiet bustle which was meant to be the mark of a civil hospital. In the absence of conflict men still incurred damage and illness. Because the nights were cold in their desert camps, some had even managed to catch pneumonia. A few were wounded in bayonet drill through clumsiness or the overenthusiasm of a friend they should have parried. There was a young curly-haired man who had broken his leg when a truck full of English soldiers struck him. He was in a plaster cast—the base of his bed raised, the limb hoisted jauntily to match his jaunty demeanor. My own stupid fault, Nurse. You ought to see the dent in that truck. Sorry, can’t take you to the dance this Sat’day.

Two wounded Turks—an utter novelty in their strange uniforms—were brought in from Sinai and treated while armed guards stood by their beds.

• • •

Beneath a canvas marquee in the garden of Mena House, the phenyl smell of drying duckboards—that cleansing, heavy reek—subdued
their conversation. But they were busy too, Carradine and Slattery working elbow to elbow in the canvassed-off pan room advising orderlies on what shelf to put the basins, bed blocks, pans, while they themselves unloaded—from large, immaculate canvas bags—softer things: towels, sheets, pillowcases, rubber undersheets never used before and lacking the normal cloying smells which came to attach themselves to the best-cleaned sheets in normal wards.

Slattery could be heard giving orders. Hold hard, sonny Jim. That corner there. See!

In the similarly draped-off surgical dressing room near the other end of the tent there was no traffic of orderlies and less air. Along with the young Leonora Casement, a sharp-nosed, sallow young woman named Rosanna Nettice from Melbourne, whose body was—despite her sickly look—full of the promise of energy, was unpacking drugs into the drug cupboard and recording quantities on an appropriate sheet. “Leo” they called Casement. She possessed a breezy, unhaunted soul that would never suit a Durance. A woman already at ease—with her own uncomplicated charm and with a zeal for work.

By shelves of stacked and unopened surgical dressings in the nurses’ office, Sally—wearing gloves—laid out and covered the day’s surgical trays for treating minor wounds. They as yet had no autoclave. Sterilization depended on a brass spirit heater and a rustic-looking pan for the instruments. But out here the trays and the clamps and retractors, the lancets and forceps would often go unused and unbloodied, the beds as yet empty.

The matron opened the canvas flap of the marquee. Years of gladly accepted authority hid the woman she truly was as it did other issues such as her origins and age. She said, with a pause between the words to combat curtness, You three nurses. Leave that now. Please join me outside.

Outside, the heat fell filtered through palms and weighed on Sally’s shoulders. This was the cool season and yet there was no coolness in the glare beyond the oasis. The matron told them they were to follow
her down the duckboards and gathered other nurses from other tents into their company as they went. Naomi was one of them and sent the whisper of a questioning smile Sally’s way. Carradine was with them too, the patches beneath her eyes looking vacant white as if her faint freckles had been stewed away. Ten nurses in all were led a few hundred yards out into the full light to a fence of barbed wire which surely had not been there yesterday and to a gate where four Australian military policemen kept guard.

Freud murmured briskly, The wounds of Venus.

The gate was unlocked and they entered the space beyond. A tent large enough for a circus lay ahead and the matron led them past other armed military policemen and through a flap left open for ventilation. The place seemed crowded by contrast with the other tents erected around Mena. There were perhaps seventy men sitting on their beds—some bored, some raising younger, softer faces of the kind a person could guess had come from the city, from work indoors. These were suburban cherubs still, untempered by military exercises and desert maneuvers. About ten orderlies moved around the tent on sundry duties. Each of the patients here wore a white armband to declare some purity they had violated. Many held their roll-your-own cigarettes as the nurses passed across their gaze. But they did not cheer as soldiers did if you met them in the bazaars—no normal hellos or queries were called out. In any case, between the nurses and them was located a barrier of five tables, as if the men were to be interviewed.

The matron led the nurses now into a spacious, screened-off area where two large pans boiled above Primus stoves. Orderlies plied their lifters to extract syringes and needles and laid them on trays beside bottles of solution and cotton wool and medicinal alcohol. The matron made the smallest deniable nod to the bottles of clear solution and the rest of the equipment marshalled on the counter. She said, I know you will show no levity in dealing with this grievous business. The colonel’s orderlies should ideally do this work but despite his high opinion of them neither will they do it well nor will they be as safe from the
mockery of the men—or the men from theirs. It is bad enough that orderlies should be the ones who treat the lesions and chancres!

The two orderlies in the canvassed-off space worked on, extracting syringes and wide-bore, punishing needles from the makeshift autoclaves. They did not seem to notice the slur uttered against them.

You are not deaconesses but military nurses. What you see here, you must see as a military crime. It is not your business to display distaste on the one hand or familiarity on the other.

She weighed them with her eyes to make sure they bore the right degree of somberness. The matron spoke as if she had bought up all the real estate of comment on the issue. She continued.

Either way it is a dosage of 8 drams solution per patient. Those men wearing a tag marked “G”—and I am sure I do not have to explain what that stands for—will attend the furthest table to the right. The patients will approach in columns of two and receive injections of novarsonobillon. As for the others, have you heard of solution 606?

Salvarsan? asked dutiful Leo.

All the nurses knew of 606. If they had not administered it, its myth had fallen over them. Syphilis was the wages of sin and 606 and a course of mercury pills might relieve the sinner of paying those wages fully. Thus some moralists said it was an immoral juice. But then they had never nursed congenitally poxed children.

Will you kindly and without hesitation divide into teams of two? Do put on those rubber gloves.

Sally paired with Freud. As they collected their trays with the syringes and needles and—in their case—the 606 solution, they could hear the matron addressing the men in the main part of the tent and telling them which tables to present themselves to. Sally and Freud and the others passed through the canvas into the main tented ward and took a place at one of the tables for the syphilitics.

It happened that Sally was the one to swab the arms and change needles, Freud to give the injections. It fell out that way barely without
their discussing it—perhaps because of Freud’s worldliness. By her presence you could sense that she really knew things that were still confusing to Sally—the difference between lust and, as they said in novels, desire. Desire was a cleaner thing by all accounts. But not clean enough to save you entirely—it seemed—unless desire was concentrated and fixed in place by a flurry of marriage vows. Sally barely had time to think how interesting the question was and how instructive was this line of men whose plentiful sweat smelled little worse than that of healthy men from the camp. Sally swabbed the arm of one who looked ahead, and another who viewed the ceiling and a third whose eyes were lowered and a fourth who wept and who shuddered so that Freud was left to say, Please keep it still, will you?

Don’t cry, Sally told him. This will fix it.

For this boy wanted the vows and not the blight. All the while Freud’s hand reached with a natural composure. Her movements were those of a person unafraid of contagion. But even she, Sally noticed, did not look much at the fallen soldiers who presented themselves, the casualties of the Wazzir, the suburb of hell within Cairo where the berserk arrack liquor and the women selling their diseases for baksheesh were domiciled.

But now they were all lambs before the punishing but necessary wide-bore needle which must be driven in with force, the flesh making its resistance. No one said, Don’t hurt a man, Sister. No one said, Oh cripes, a hornet’s got me. Nothing was said because they had a lie to keep and any utterance might let it out. If—cured one day—they courted some oblivious girl in Australia, they could not utter the news that lay contained in this tent. But solution 606 could give you back your body for the battle or for the distant Australian bedroom where you might sleep a cured man and die as an honored husband and cherished father.

Freud handed the syringe to her after brisk use and Sally replaced it from beneath the cloth on the bowl with a fresh one. In that tent they were party to a military secret. People in Australia did
not know of these first casualties—that there was a desire greater than the desire for battle, that there was a bacterium as yet more grievous than machine guns.

• • •

Ellis Hoyle—with whom Naomi had sometimes promenaded on the
Archimedes—
was a man not much older than her who had been training in the vast camp out in the desert beyond Mena House and the pyramids. Naomi had asked Captain Hoyle why such displays were engaged in at two o’clock in the afternoon when the sun was—at least for that reputedly more lenient season—most blatant and when light bounced off the gravel and sands to strike the men in the face under the brims of their bushmen’s hats. He said that the generals thought this weather steeled men for unspecified worse things.

In the evening—along with a number of other officers, including Carradine’s husband—Hoyle was regularly down at Mena House having tea with the nurses on the hotel roof or on the veranda. He and his friends—young officers barely converted from their normal callings as farmers, bank clerks, sheep breeders, schoolteachers—arrived by commandeered khaki cars. There was even a journalist or two and a very determinedly jolly young Anglican minister from Melbourne who did not serve as a chaplain but as an infantryman.

Since the nurses were not overworked, they slept adequately and their faces gleamed with the strangeness and ease of things as they prepared themselves for these evening visits from officers. They had time to change into their uniform jackets and skirts and good shoes in case the evening developed and they all had dinner together or went on a jaunt after dining in the mess.

Captain Ellis Hoyle was a tailored young man, an inch too square in the jaw so that you could bet he’d turn jowly when he was older. His mouth was long enough for his fellow officers to nickname him Duck. He was a solicitor from the Western District of Victoria and he spoke as if he loved the area in a way that Sally and Naomi had never managed to like the place they came from.

All the young men—like Ellis—had been to Cairo tailors and had light, well-cut uniforms of fawn which had saved them from the heavy serge the government of their Commonwealth had first handed them. Their conversation was by now that of men who knew much about Egyptian gharry drivers, peddlers and tailors, of men in dirty jalabiyas selling red roses for “the lady.” No mention of the dens of the Wazzir. These young men might recount amusing tales of this or that soldier, the hard cases, the rough men from the bush. And all the chatter called forth out of Sally unexpected laughter, as if they’d been sent to teach her that old skill. By their energy as much as the force of parody or satire they diverted both the Durance sisters—the conversation so much livelier than anything Sally had ever known.