The Daughters of Mars

Murdering Mrs. Durance

It was said around the valley that the two Durance girls went off but just the one bothered to come back. People could not have said which one, since both the girls were aloof and looked similar—dark and rather tall. There was confusion even in the local paper. And they weren’t the sort of girls whose names were called across streets—girlfriend hallooing girlfriend in the excitement of Kempsey’s big shopping days. Before the war it was the younger one—wasn’t it?—who stayed at home with her parents. The slightly shorter one, anyhow. And it was she who took her mother, Mrs. Durance, to visit the surgeon in Sydney. But what could those Macquarie Street doctors do?

After a choppy night’s passage down the coast aboard the Currawong, Mrs. Durance finally fell asleep off Broken Bay, only to be woken, as the steamer entered the Sydney Heads, by a steward bearing tea—Sally being on deck at the time for the experience of the approach to Port Jackson.

Mother and daughter had time for another cup of tea at the wharf in Darling Harbour before Sally took the exhausted Mrs. Durance to the surgeon’s rooms in Macquarie Street. After an examination by this eminent man, she was sent from his office to Sydney Hospital for X-rays. Then she and Sally met up with Naomi, the other daughter, the one who was considered a bit flash—Macleay District Hospital not good enough for her—who’d been in Sydney a few years.

They went that afternoon for a bang-up tea at Cahill’s, while they waited for the expert men who read the body’s inner secrets from photographs to discover what was wrong with Mrs. Durance. The sisters knew their mother had understated her pain to them. They knew she was secretive about the scale of her bleeding and the urine coming out of the wrong opening.

That night, Naomi put them up in her little flat in Bondi Junction—Mama sharing Naomi’s bed, Sally on the sofa. They could have all stayed at Mrs. Durance’s younger sister Jackie’s place at Randwick, but Mrs. Durance didn’t want to share news of her health problems with her sister yet. Both Sally and Naomi woke several times to their mother’s choked-down groans. But unblunted ambition seemed to declare itself the next morning in the briskness with which Naomi put on her uniform and her scarlet cape to go to her duty at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.

There had always been something larger than her beginnings written in Naomi Durance’s gestures and her long bones. Her parents knew it. She had left them for the city, but in so far as they were boastful, they boasted of her. Sally worked a mere three miles from home, across the river, at the Macleay District Hospital. Merit in that, no one denied, and loyalty. But it was news of Naomi that made eyes shine on the Durance farm.

It was cervical cancer, the surgeon told Mrs. Durance the next morning. There was no option of an operation, for it would be a very long, painful, and dangerous procedure, and could not hope to get all of the proliferating cancer. Surgery was to be recommended chiefly in the early stages, whereas metastasis had already occurred, as the X-rays showed. If she rested well and ate lots of fruit, he said, she could expect to live at least a year. She was a dairy farmer’s wife? Well, no more butter churning, he said, and no early morning milking. He would give her a script for pain medicine, he told her. He would also be writing to her doctor in the Macleay so that he could keep her comfortable.

You are fortunate to have two daughters who are registered nurses, he told her.

I am, she said, glowing with pride but hollowed by pain.

She and Sally caught the regular outward journey of the Currawong home the next night. Naomi saw them off at Darling Harbour, in the shadow of those shameful slums of the Rocks. From them bubonic plague had come boiling forth in the girls’ childhoods and been carried north on the Currawong by a rat nestled in a furniture case. Naomi waited in their small cabin until the last call to go ashore and then stayed on the wharf to wave a futile handkerchief, as if she were part of one of those heartbreaking paintings of emigrant farewell.

She’s so beautiful, isn’t she, Sal? asked Mrs. Durance, leaning on the railing from pain rather than as a gesture of languid seafaring. She has a lot of grace, doesn’t she?

As they reached on a black tide for Dawes Point, the handkerchief still waved, more luminous than Naomi’s face. Bush people did that handkerchief-waving stuff and it gave them away as hayseeds. But worldly Naomi risked that tonight. She had promised she’d come up as often as she could and help Sally out. But that she would remain a city woman was not questioned.

It was a brisk night, and Mrs. Durance developed a cold on top of all else. She again fell asleep late. Again Sally came on deck at dawn and looked out at the blue surge of the tide breaking on the yellow sand of Trial Bay and making enough water at the river bar to allow the Currawong to enter.

For six months Mrs. Durance ate her fruit and sat in sumps of sunlight on the veranda. But the cancer owned her by night. Sally still worked the day shift at Macleay District but now slept on call in the same room as her mother, her father having moved to a lean-to at the back of the homestead. Sally was to administer a sixth of a grain of morphine hypodermically when brave and reticent Mrs. Durance confessed, one way or another, to agony. Naomi took her holidays and came home on a visit and gave her sister a break from the regimen. In between, Mr. Durance paid their neighbor Mrs. Sorley’s girl to sit with Mrs. Durance by day and was attentive himself. Since Mr. Sorley had been killed by a native cedar—which when cut had slipped sidewards rather than forwards—the Sorley kids were ever ready for employment.

Sally noticed more clearly now that though her father and mother were souls of decency, Eric Durance moved about the bedroom as if he and his wife were acquaintances only. He seemed to fear he might be seen as an intruder. There had always been that distant courtesy between her parents. Sally knew they’d infected Naomi and her with it too. It might be one of the reasons Naomi had cleared out—in the hope that on a different stage she might have a franker soul.

Mrs. Durance suffered so much night pain that she frequently told Sally she was praying to God for death. These were remarkable and dramatic things for her to say and—since she had always had contempt for overstatement—would be forced out of her only by the fiercest anguish.

In the seventh month of it, Naomi came back from Sydney again to sit with her mother by day and share the night watch. The second night she was home, Sally slept in her own room while Naomi took up post in Mrs. Durance’s room on the camp cot, a surface of canvas no blanket could soften. Naomi was meant to wake Sally at four so that she could take over, but did not come rapping on her door till near dawn. Naomi was in a dress and boots and her eyes looked smeared after gales of tears.

Mama’s gone, she said. I’m sorry, Mama’s gone. I ran over to the Sorleys’ and asked their boy to ride into town to get Dr. Maddox.

Sally stammered with a confused and bitter grief and went to go off at once down the hallway. Naomi took her shoulders and gazed at her, straight into her face. Naomi’s eyes seemed full of conspiracy. To Sally she had the eyes of a co-murderer. At that instant their shared mercy and their crime drew them together so utterly that they were no longer city and country nurses but sisters once more of the same womb.

You didn’t wake me for my shift, said Sally.

It wasn’t necessary, Naomi asserted, frankly, with her gaze on her. She went before it was time to wake you.

Let me see her.

I washed her and laid her out.

Without me?

I wanted you to sleep. I burned her nightdresses and the rags she used and took all the tonics and pounded the bottles to dust. Especially that rhubarb concoction Mrs. Sorley swore by.

There was indeed still a taint of smoke in the air.

Naomi led her sister by the hand and they walked down the hallway to the plain room they had both been conceived in. Blackbutt walls hemmed in the dim corridors they loved and hated, which seemed to pull Sally closer to home but which had proved to be escape avenues for Naomi.

There was her mother—gray-faced, prepared, serene—the girl she had been at some time visible again in these features delivered of pain.

Sally heard herself howl and went to her mother’s body, kissing the face. The skin of the dead yielded differently. They were beyond pain but past affection too. She kissed the hand. It smelled of the scented soap Naomi had washed the corpse with. This too was proof of death. The living mother smelled of workaday Sunlight soap.

Sally found herself on her knees, still caressing the hand, Naomi standing behind and above her. Naomi, who always presumed to do things first. Sally did not know whether to hate her, to attack her eyes, or fall flat in gratitude and wonder. Standing with a purpose in mind, she noticed the hypodermic needle, the morphine solution they had made up of pills actually prescribed by Dr. Maddox, and the unused bottled tablets in case the old doctor wanted to inspect them or return them to stock.

She went to the dresser, was poleaxed with loss by the mother-of-pearl hairbrush with strands of her mother’s hair in it. She knew the little drawer where her mother kept her subdued pink lipstick and her beige face powder.

Yes, said Naomi, you should put some color on her poor face.

It was a prayer—not an order—and Sally set to.

The stolen reserve of morphine she had put together to finish her mother had been in the towel and linen cupboard in the hallway. How had Naomi found it? You could bet the solution Naomi had made up and injected for mercy’s sake had been poured out, and the spare illicit tablets Sally had filched from Macleay District consigned to fire with the rhubarb tonic. To Sally—putting rouge and color into her mother’s cheeks—it seemed knowledge grew between Naomi and her without them looking at each other. Yesterday they had been near strangers. Now they were altered. A different kind of reserve was imposed on them, and a different intimacy.

Is Papa up? Sally asked. Does he know?

Not yet. I was frightened. Will we tell him in a moment? Perhaps let the poor fellow rest a few more minutes.

For he would need to do the milking even on the morning of his wife’s death.

But she finds it hard to face him, Sally perceived. Naomi—who had tried to avoid the weight of home and its taint of illness—had certainly assumed the weight now. She’d taken up station on the far side of the bed, across from where Sally, on her knees, put reasonable Methodist coloration on the poor, released features.

Naomi said, I didn’t have any idea till I came home that it was as bad as that. Her pain was the whole world to her. She could see nothing but it. Well, not any longer.

Sally was engrossed with her mother.

It was easy, Mama, to steal what you needed. I cut out two pages from the drugs record book. Former nurses who had managed the drugs register had done similar excisions because they did not approve of some missed or untidily written entry. Then for your dear sake I copied the dosages on fresh pages, adding an extra dose of an eighth of a grain of morphine in this case and that, until I’d created a phantom two grains, which I then fetched from the drugs cabinet and brought home to you. It’s unlikely a doctor or matron will remember a specific dose as months go by. But I don’t care if they do.

She had kept the tablets hidden behind the bed linen in the hallway dresser. These two grains when mixed in solution and injected would bear away disease and the fuss of enduring all useless treatment. They would reach deep into the body and halt the mechanism of agony. And had now.

She kissed her mother’s brow before gracing it with the powder. Eric Durance would be astonished by his wife’s beauty in death.

Naomi declared, I gave her half a grain and we kissed and held hands, though I had to be careful—a touch would break her bones. Then she went.

You were standing over her? said Sally.

They both knew how rare it was that a patient expired while the nurse was standing there to observe and hold a hand. The dead went almost secretively.

By good fortune, said Naomi without flinching but without bothering to look at her sister. By good fortune I was there.

Again, Sally’s astonishment that Naomi had done the right, fierce, loving, and hard thing Sally had meant to do! Even in this she was not to be outshone, the half-mad Sally thought. But Naomi was there because she had found the secret cache and took the burden of soothing her mother’s breath down to nothing. A solemn loss and rejoicing were the day’s order—Mama’s freedom now from a world she had never since their babyhoods seemed accustomed to. As for her children, they must now get accustomed to something new. To new love and new hate and mutual shame.

The roads being firm just then, Dr. Maddox arrived by motor at midmorning. The town—ignorant of medicine—loved him for his kindliness and punctuality and a lack of airs in a place where a doctor could easily play the grand wizard. But the hospital staff knew he was one of those tosspots who could carry it off well; that some unforgettable and disabling past event drove him to it. Though he performed surgery only when the other town doctors were not available, he was still a better surgeon when sober than most country doctors. It was peripheral things he was negligent at—paperwork, including death certificates. His method with the town at large was to hide it all behind an air of universal brotherhood and to breathe an impeccably mentholated breath over the sickbeds of the shire.

That Saturday morning Dr. Maddox came to lower his face over Mrs. Durance and to ask Naomi about the last injection and how many grains, and to accept what she said and then breathe, Good woman—good, poor woman. Then he prepared a medical certificate, which he showed Naomi and Sally and which said Mrs. Durance had died of cancer, nephritis, and exinanition. There were in the valley many people Dr. Maddox had certified as dying of nephritis and exinanition. Nephritis and exinanition was the cited verdict all along both banks of the river and inland to the blue, wooded hills where the timber workers camped and always died of nephritis and exinanition, unless a tree fell on them. Farmers who had taken poison to escape the bank had their death certificates compassionately marked by Maddox with that saving formula.

This morning of the death, over tea Sally made while keeping her eyes from straying to Naomi, Dr. Maddox sat at the kitchen table and spoke for a while to the girls’ father. These were very much men’s mutterings, half-embarrassed and platitudinous. Their father wore large, mute features, the same he brought to his labors. They had not yet crumbled in grief but somehow promised soon to do so.

Sally had less reason to stay in the Macleay Valley now. She was maybe a year beyond the age girls left home for marriage. Her sister had returned to her Sydney duties. Mr. Durance took sturdily to his work and employed the Sorley boys when needed. But Sally did not yet feel entitled to go. To flee would be obscene. It would be an insult to her mother’s spirit. Her sister could escape because escape was her forte. She’d managed the trick before. But while it was easy for strangers to declare Eric Durance independent—a freestanding fellow—he did not seem so rugged to Sally.

The country hospital had its own retaining power too. On the Wednesday following her mother’s funeral she found that a fourteen-year-old boy with peritonitis she was nursing had died in the night, and she believed her stinging tears were a debt paid to her mother and a sort of tax paid to the valley. So by horseback, or more often by sulky, she continued traveling in her uniform—along the broad yellow-earth road and unreliable bridge over the river—to and from the home at Sherwood. She was a figure located essentially amidst the green paddocks, one who could not glibly get away.

It was in the corridors during her night shifts that the mercy they’d given her mother took on the demeanor of a crime never to be argued away. Did I do it because I was tired? Fed up with all-day working and all-night watching? In the nurses’ cubicle at the end of a public ward which contained—with all injuries and diseases there present combined and counted—no pain such as that of her mother’s, Sally wept without consolation, since no night pleadings from an entire hospital of patients seemed to come close to the daytime pleadings she’d heard from her dead but eternal mother.

This young woman of twenty-two—or near twenty-three—years was considered by those who bothered to see her to be possessed by a wistfulness which some people thought represented that greatest crime of bush towns: aloofness, flashness. Either that, or she was a cause for sympathy. A spinster-in-training.

Voluntary

Then—after eight months—the thunderclap. It would alter earthly geography. It altered the geography of duty and it enhanced all escape routes. It was not the thunderclap of war—at least in the clear and direct sense. It was not the declarations of the prime minister or the news that the enemy was in Samoa and New Guinea, and his flotilla of cruisers and raiders was already at sea, or about to take to it and make the Pacific and Indian Oceans perilous. It was not the rush to make a full-blown army out of a mere framework of weekend militias. It was not a renewed awareness that the valley was numerous in Bavarian Catholic cow-cockies, now likely to be less loyal even than the Irish. It was a letter addressed to her father and her by Naomi in Sydney.

Recently Sally had begun to favor the day shift for its busyness, leaving the house with stew and potatoes bubbling on the great iron range fueled with the fallen branches of ring-barked trees. In her noon absence her father would eat some of this and when she returned at dusk always declared it had been top-class. It was good that he was not a complainer, that his hard-mouthed taste was not broad, and any food involving meat, potatoes, and green peas fulfilled his idea of nourishment, as long as it was served scalding. But even before the great change in the world, she had known in some secret chamber of the mind that she was readying herself for an escape, one all the more—not less—daring and reckless because it did not involve tunneling or scaling walls.

On the excuse she would be home too late from the hospital, she had started to get the Sorley girl to cook her father the evening meal. Many would see what was coming their way—the womanless homestead which would be his lot—and they would rant and plead. But Mr. Durance did not show any sign he intended that. He stated a thoughtful and unblaming awareness that in the end both the girls would go, for Naomi had already proved it to him. Neither love nor blood nor begging, he wisely and grievingly knew, could hold a man and his children under one roof and unto death. At some time the roof would change itself into a wheel which spun off the children. This month—if the occasional Herald which reached the farm could be believed—the roofs of the world had become a wheel for crushing the breasts of mothers and fathers. If Naomi could be shrugged off by this roof in the Macleay, then she, Sally, was fit also to be thrown out on a tangent over earth, and perhaps over oceans—whose scope might even reduce her crimes as a daughter to the size of an atom.

There was as well a problem she had with a farmer’s son named Ernie Macallister—about whose suitability for her and her suitability for him it seemed a number of people had already decided. She’d let herself be taken to Crescent Head to swim and once to the flickers at the Victoria. The college of women—her late mother too—had just about chosen to allot her in their minds to young Macallister like real estate. The tedium of all this frightened her.

The federal letter calling for nurses arrived at the Macleay District the same day as Naomi’s and was left in the nurses’ room by the matron in case any of her four charges felt the drag of history. Sally approached her matron and told her that she would like to apply. It would probably be for nothing. The matron was, however, English-born and ardent on the Empire and the war, and she gave Sally leave.

Sally intended to try to fit the business of potential enlistment in Sydney into two days and two nights. She sent a telegram asking to stay not at Naomi’s flat but at the more spacious Randwick house of her Aunt Jackie. She knew this would be considered by Naomi as a stringent step. That it would be correctly interpreted as resentment of the urban sister and an avoidance of the unease rising from the murderous succor they had extended to their mother. But something was rampant in Sally, something that said crazily that Naomi should not feel entitled to keep the whole of the war and leave Sally with the crumbs of a languishing peace.

In Sydney by morning and rushing by tram to Victoria Barracks, Sally entered a drill hall where other women stood half-bewildered, and filled out a form about her nursing career and her own medical condition. She queued for the interview at which she was to present two papers—her nurse’s registration and a health certificate from Dr. Maddox—to an elderly militia colonel, whose manner was paternal, and a senior matron who sat with him at a table, whose manner was dry. The pressure of unconfessed murder nudged up around the edges of the two printed forms, and she was pleased to pass them over.

Even so, Sally suspected she would not be chosen. She might make this slight and feeble move and then go back tamed for years more to the duty of daughterhood. She suspected she might in fact go back with as much secret relief as disappointment. She was willing to go back. That forenoon as she left the hall, she resigned herself to return on the following night’s coaster. The tin roof would not spin her far off and had already begun its pull inwards.

She spent the rest of the day with Jackie. The aunt was the better part of ten years younger than her mother and—married to an accountant—did not seem to possess that worn quality which ultimately marked anyone who associated themselves with dairy cattle. She was jolly too, and had a genuine gift for levity, whereas Sally’s mother had maintained her silence and air of endurance rather than give way to irony. This afternoon was not marked by any particular urban excitement designed to comfort Sally for her imminent return to the bush. A journey to the Italian greengrocers; some wurst for her children’s and husband’s lunches. Though the powers of the earth had decided that wurst would be called “devon” now, the meat was still in the process of taking on that new, solid British identity. Then to the grocer’s—Moran & Cato’s. Dazzling metropolitan experiences!

It was four o’clock then. The children whom the aunt intended for university were studying in their rooms—they possessed their own desks, no homework on kitchen tables in this house—and Naomi Durance arrived. Her knock was answered by her aunt while Sally was reading a magazine at the kitchen table. Sally heard her arrival and settled herself for facing her sister. Entering the living room she saw Naomi wearing a white jacket over a light blue dress, and carrying a straw hat with a blue band. She managed with an easy, urbane air her clothing and her striking green eyes and long features and her mother’s sweetness about the long lips. She was also fit to be feared and worshipped in the best of makeup. Even their aunt greeted her as if she were an exciting visitation. The kids came out of their rooms wearing smiles of anticipation. She had brought with her a box of chocolates.

When the kids had taken chocolates back to their desks to help them with Euclid, Naomi began. What a surprise I got, Sally, when the colonel and matron told me another Durance—yes, Sally Durance—was down here.

She spoke softly like a magistrate pretending it was pleasant information but really taking it as another instance of human folly for which Sally would need to pay. This brought out something unwished-for and sullen in Sally.

Naomi said, Why didn’t you ask me, instead of bothering Aunt Jackie? I could have put you up.

Yes, Sally wanted to say. The two killing daughters together. What a happy arrangement!

I just wanted to make my own plans, Sally mumbled. No offense intended.

And who’s looking after Papa? I was just wondering.

Sally looked up into Naomi’s potent eyes. You aren’t. I’m not. But I’ve made sure he’s taken care of.

But how does he feel at the moment?

He doesn’t say. I’ve set up the Sorley girl to cook his meals. But at least twice a week Mrs. Sorley herself comes over with the daughter and brings scones and fruitcake. He may be lonely but he doesn’t say. Anyhow, all those who have grown children will feel lonely sooner or later, won’t they?

Naomi looked at the aunt as if all this were a slight against her too. Then she asked, But don’t you think one daughter away is enough?

I don’t know why it’s a law of the universe that it’s you who’s away, said Sally.

She knew this was another mistake. She was having too much of the fight before the fight had been declared. Naomi doesn’t want me to go home for Papa’s sake but because I am a walking reproach to her. As I am to myself, but I need the great distraction of distance and wounds to forget it.

I am older, Naomi said, soft but taut. That’s an accident of birth. I came here when Mama was healthy and you were training by your own choice at the Macleay. There was not so much need for one of us to be home as there is now. If you had been the older sister, you would be in my position and I would be in yours and without resenting it. But I got set up here and found new obligations before Mama got ill. It’s an accident of the situation prevailing when I came here.

Well, the prevailing situation now is this war.

Yes, and that is dangerous, you know. Father could lose us both. There are deadly ships out there, between here and France. Read the Herald. Admiral von Spee’s ships from China are already snooping about somewhere in the Pacific.

Sally felt heat enter her face. You look after your own safety, she told her sister, and I will mine.

The pretty aunt was gazing at her hands. The conversation was wearing through its fake-pleasant fabric. Rawness was eating its way out.

I am just saying, Naomi continued, that your turn will come and will probably prove a better tilt at life than I’ve had.

When will that be though? When I’m forty-five? Of course I feel uneasy about it all, and Papa doesn’t publish his feelings every morning so I don’t know for a dead certainty how he stands and what he needs. But if needs exist, it’s his right and duty to say what they are, not yours.

She had never debated Naomi in such hard terms before. Aunt Jackie was becoming anxious. It was wrong to wrestle like this in their aunt’s home.

Let’s not quarrel, Naomi, said Sally then, fearing the chasm all at once and unwilling to be sucked back into girlishness and surly debate. Let’s have some tea, eh? Because they won’t accept me in any case, so there’s no argument.

Maybe they won’t take me either. But if they do take us both… ?

Well, it’s expected to finish by next summer. Your Herald said that. If it’s right about German admirals then it’s right about that as well.

Their aunt was now occasionally opening her mouth and framing her lips.

Aunt Jackie, Sally said, I didn’t mean anything by calling for tea in what is your house.

No, said Aunt Jackie, firm at last. But I will make it now. No help required! You two sit and speak calmly, please. Because it is—as you said—my house.

Sally became aware that the young cousins had come from their rooms to linger at the end of the hallway and listen to their older cousins’ exchange. They turned back to their study as their mother moved to the kitchen. Sally sat in an easy chair, Naomi in the center of the sofa. Naomi said softly, I suppose you can still withdraw. It’s not like the army. You’re not a soldier.

Neither are you, whispered Sally across the room. We’re equal in that.

You’re starting again, Naomi pointed out. And you barely have a smile for either your auntie or me.

I am still in mourning, said Sally. So are you. That changes what we say and do.

This was so close to admitting their conspiracy that she looked away and felt a demeaning moisture appear on each eyelid. She wiped it briskly away.

Naomi rose and came to Sally and leaned down to put her arms around her shoulders. It was a clumsy caress. Durances weren’t good at broad gestures.

I always thought of you as safe back there at home. I don’t think of you as safe when you’re down here, planning on being reckless.

Sally was certain that her sister was nine-tenths genuine in what she said, and knew nine-tenths was a great deal. She rose, kissed Naomi on the spot where her black hair arched over the left ear. Sally thought as they embraced how their mother’s rivers of blood ran in them but could not concur.

The next morning at the door of the hall at Victoria Barracks sat a list of nurses acceptable to tend to soldiers in far places. Both the Durance girls’ names were on it, the name of the one who had expected to be and of the one who hadn’t.

Inside the stone drill hall was a great echo of women, a shrilling with an only partly successful contralto attempt by some matron to settle things down. Young women crowded up to take out of the hands of two confused young men—the colonel’s orderlies—a sheet of paper on which their required clothing was listed. Having received the form, some found its prescribed garments comic and read them aloud mockingly, hooting at items even as the orderlies suggested they cross the hall to a glum sergeant at a table who was issuing money orders to cover the cost of the uniforms.

At a further table, cloth bags containing buttons and insignia were handed out. These were inspected with more reverence than the list. A silver Rising Sun collar badge lay in there, to be worn at the throat, and silver jacket buttons on which Australia was depicted geographically, and two boomerang-shaped metal insignia which spelled out “Australia” on the tunic shoulders.

Sally had not laid eyes on Naomi until she saw her ahead in the money queue. This was made up of recognizable hospital types—the pretty young ones always in trouble with matrons because their beauty might render them flighty and attractive to registrars and interns. Then plump, wide-hipped little women, aged beyond thirty, medical nuns, in effect, supposed by stereotype to be sour-mouthed but in Sally’s experience often triumphant in their unfettered singleness, and smiling now at the new prospect this milling hall promised. Some severer-looking older women of the rank of sisters, who hid often genial souls but had learned that a neutral face endeared them to doctors and matrons. And, suddenly, sui generis, as they say, Naomi in her good green suit.

It is no humiliation for me, thought Sally, to take the sergeant’s money. But it was strange to see Naomi there—in line with the less august for a small sum of cash. On an impulse Sally asked the girls in front of her whether they minded if she joined her sister.

They flung their arms around each other with a force left unspent from yesterday’s quarrel. And in its compass not all grievance was tamed but at least the residue was put to momentary rest. Naomi stepped back and shook her head.

From now on, Sally promised herself, I reserve the right to be a head-shaker too. I have as much right to be amazed by her.

Then Naomi got to the sergeant and signed for the money he doled out with creaky care from a cash box. He made her sign the accounts book. Next, Sally. Naomi now went to say hello to a friend from her hospital. Sally had walked back about ten paces across the hall, a little confused about what to do next—shop for war at once or go home to her aunt’s for some tea—when she saw an oval-faced, pretty young blue-gray–eyed woman wearing an orange summer dress and a cardigan over it, with a yellow jaunty hat on her head, and her light brown hair piled up. The girl said, Miss… Nurse, I can do it for you for a guinea plus a quid for fabric. Both the jacket and skirt with the cape and the gray working dress and a pinafore thrown in. Got my own sewing machine. Good as shop-bought, I guarantee. No delays. Only got one other order. You’ve got your belt already, no doubt. Hat, veil, and shoes you’ll have to get yourself.

I’ve got the veil already, said Sally, as if this would put an end to the commercial impulse of the woman in the orange dress.

The oval-faced young woman shook her head in apparently genuine bewilderment. These girls’d rather waste their money. I don’t know what sort of homes they come from. Fathers must own a bank or all be country doctors, I wouldn’t be surprised.

The broad, easy humor of the girl’s face made Sally shy. Thanks, but my sister and I are actually on our way to Hordern’s now.

Come on, said the girl, lowering her head, looking up under auburn eyebrows. Some would consider this undue push on her part. Others, businesslike determination. Come on, dear, she whispered. If you don’t like what I do, I won’t charge you for it. I need the quid for fabric, so you’ll have to take the risk and give me that to begin with. I’ll give you that back too if you aren’t thoroughly delighted. I mean gray serge? I run it up all the time. I’ve done gray serge for nuns and they never complained.

Sally hesitated. But the absolute promise of refund fascinated her, and a suspicion of an energetic rectitude in the girl made the issue one of gambling on character as against the bewilderment and boredom of shopping. They both stood there, thinking each other over.

Look, the girl resumed at the end of a few seconds’ silence. I’m the sort of person the shops’d use anyhow, if I wanted to slave on it full-time.

A pound as a deposit then?

No, scratch that, said the girl. I can tell you’re a solid type. I don’t need anything.

But then, as if she were checking up on Sally’s bona fides: Where do you nurse?

Sally told her—a bit like a soldier from a poor regiment forced to admit its name. The other woman nodded though, finding no grounds for embarrassment in the words “Macleay District.”

I’m St. Vincent’s, she said. Nuns took me in on a scholarship. I’m Honora Slattery. Hate being called Nora though. I draw the line at that. Honora. Please observe.

Sally surrendered her name too. This was one of those Irish, Sally knew, who generally didn’t understand the line between good manners and stubbornness. They would take Australia over and downwards, her father always said, with their horse-racing and their drinking and their hidden contempt for the King.

I absolutely promise, said Honora Slattery, as if to allay Sally’s sectarian suspicion, I won’t be doing more than three girls plus mine. You see, I want to lay a bit of money up for Mama and himself. The old fella’s a waterside worker. Sometimes we’re flush, sometimes we’re eating kumquats and lard.

She winked.

And just in case the hospital ship sinks, Honora Slattery ended.

Sally laughed and shook her head at the foreshadowing of this unlikely tragedy. They exchanged addresses. You can call my aunt, anyhow, when you’re finished, said Sally. She’s got a telephone.

Mother of God! said Honora. I’ve blundered in amongst the aristocracy.

No, Sally said. I’m a dairy farmer’s daughter. But, I tell you, you’d better be good.

For what mocking, corrective words would Naomi feel entitled to utter, inspired by Slattery’s failure and Sally’s own gullibility?

Honora Slattery said, You can put the house on it.

Now a woman with a foghorn—who described herself as Chief Matron Appleton—called them to order. She had open features and that easiness of command of such women.

She told them they must meet again in a week at eight o’clock in the morning to be instructed on the army, on issues of soldiers and military units. They would be introduced to the whole gamut of duties affecting orderlies and nurses—from the front line to the general hospitals behind it. For now, they would fill in one more form to entitle them to military pay, and then could return either to their homes or to their civil nursing duties until required. Those who had more than twenty miles to travel could apply for a warrant.

They all took final turns at desks with pens and ink to fill the pay forms, women of forty elbowing their way with twenty-year-olds barely past their exams. Each form was dropped at a desk at the front of the hall where, after an orderly scanned them, they were placed in a cardboard box. The women left uncertainly. The plain dismissal—and the cardboard box where they’d left the record of their years—seemed too flimsy and insignificant to contain the shift they had managed.

At the top of the steps outside, Naomi was waiting, pulling on velvet gloves. Sally thought the question of shopping for kit would come up. Well, Naomi said instead, we must send poor Papa a telegram. He ought to know tout de suite.

Who is going to send it?

I will. That’s only fair.

So Sally pressed telegram money on her and then surrendered herself to the strangeness of looking out over the parade ground to the Georgian gatehouse, where two soldiers in their big hats guarded Victoria Barracks from the malice of the emperor of Germany. There, as well, young talkative men played around and waited in line for their chance to invade the military premises and offer themselves.

I’ll go home for a few days, Sally said. Since the sergeant’s paying. I have to square things with the matron and with Papa.

But first, for the measuring-up, Sally arrived at Honora’s place in Enmore. It proved a dim but loud home, many brothers and sisters, a thin but young-looking mother, a hulking, sullen father reading the Australian Worker in the kitchen, and beyond all a veranda set up as a seamstress’s workshop.

And that night, it was back to the Currawong. Sally loved the great coastal reach and the strenuous swell now that her mother was safe from suffering it. And the angles headlands adopted to inland mountains—which told her just about where she was on the map. She got one of Kempsey’s two charabancs which waited up the slope from the wharf and took passengers to addresses in town and round the river. At last it rattled over the Sherwood bridge. The house was empty, her father gone somewhere, and the dray gone. It suited her to walk the two or more miles over to Macleay District on its hill above the convenient cemetery and told the matron and was treated as a woman who had somehow managed an astounding stunt. She was back at lunchtime. When she faced her widowed father he answered her with a terrible uncomplaining. After all, he’d already had the telegram.

It’s a good and valorous thing to do, he asserted, nodding and weighing. And the one stipulation is you take care of each other.

When she overexplained the permanent arrangements she would make to get Mrs. Sorley’s daughter in to cook, he waved aside the idea. Then—in her fever of guilt—she rode over to the genial widow Sorley’s house to tell her what had happened. Even the red-yellow dust of the road in between had a different nature, as if it was preparing itself to be sighted by her no longer, her departure written into its atoms, making it someone else’s road. She was greeted with the widow’s full-blooded praise, a jar of blackberry jam as a gift, and an invitation to drink tea. Mrs. Sorley had never seemed reduced to an air of frailty by that freak slippage of the cedar that crushed her marriage. An ax blow left or right might have utterly altered the fall of that great hammer—the one that unluckily toppled on her husband. But these speculations didn’t fill the house.

Mrs. Sorley’s daughter had already brought the news of the original telegram the Durance girls had sent home from Sydney, so Mrs. Sorley was apprised—she said—of the gallantry of the Durance girls, and her fifteen-year-old son made muttering noises about wishing it was him. Sally assured the widow she did not expect her to take any special trouble—Papa had declared himself quite up to the business of sustaining himself. In many ways, Sally knew, he was as strong as when he was a boy. His grief as a bereaved soul was more somber than Mrs. Sorley’s, but he had hammered out a deal with it.

Not only did her father see her off again at the wharf in East Kempsey but so did Mrs. Sorley, her daughter, and two sons. Mrs. Sorley presented Sally this time with two little sacks of lavender to keep the sisters’ clothes fresh. There were a number of young men rowdy on the deck of the steamer, waving good-bye to friends and families from throughout the town and the valley. Their whistling and shouting almost swamped the hushed good-byes of her father. With this mob of overexcited recruits, escaping jobs in Central Kempsey or on some dismal farm, Mr. Durance’s own loss of two daughters did not seem as singular. Shouting went up a pitch and women’s voices from the wharf became shriller when the Currawong eased away from the pier and from the shore on which she had assembled the materials for her mother’s killing. There were men still drinking in the pub above the dock—their shadows could be seen through windows—and from the balcony of the Irish-owned general store which served the east of the town, a girl of perhaps fifteen years gazed out with the half interest worthy of the regular steamer’s going.

Already, separated from the riverbank and turned towards the greater darkness of the less-settled downriver reaches and swamps, Sally felt she was no longer held by the duty of memory and might now be free to forget who she was for long hours at a time. Concern for her father dwindled at once. She was confident again in his ruggedness. She had been taken off that subtle and self-manufactured hook.

The Archimedes I

The corps was of some thirty nurses who were put to work in civil hospitals, the military as yet having neglected to create even one of their own. Sally stayed in Naomi’s flat and worked at the Coast Hospital, which she reached by tram, a conveyance that gave her thought time. She read war news from the opened Heralds and Telegraphs of other riders. She went to Honora Slattery’s again, and the uniform and the on-duty clothes were splendid and neatly stitched as promised. And no alteration was necessary, at which Honora herself seemed unsurprised and smug.

It was not a great wait, however—perhaps a week—until they were given railway tickets to the golden city, to Melbourne—the other pole to Sydney’s civic pretensions, the two cities holding each other in orbits of mutual contempt. On the railway south—especially when they changed from train to train at Albury on the great dividing river, given neither state consented to recognize the value of the other’s rail gauge—committees of women fussed over them, ordered lumpish boys to carry their bags from the New South Wales carriages to the Victorian ones, and gave them tea and pounds of cake. Each cup of tea and morsel of cake Sally absorbed removed her further from the networks of duty and blame. Each cup was the cup of forgetfulness. For stretches of hours, she did not think of her crime or her abandonment.

The ship that would take them lay at Port Melbourne. Its name was Archimedes. They were driven to it direct by motorcar from Swan-ston Street, without being able to test Melbourne’s claim of being supreme in the Antipodes for public gardens and architectural splendor. The Archimedes shone at its dingy pier. Here was a passenger steamer painted white and banded in green with, amidships, a vast red cross. The cross bespoke their right to transit oceans and to turn up in Europe or elsewhere—they were not told where—unmolested. It was therefore unlike the convoys already departed which were vulnerable and for whose sake many—including the prime minister, it was said—held their breath. Nonetheless it was soon clear that even their ship would be darkened by night, and sailors and medical orderlies forbidden to smoke on deck after dusk. The Archimedes was estimated by Naomi—on whatever basis—to be sixteen thousand tons.

The women from New South Wales were first on board and thus created the very first echoing steely cries of their own and the Archimedes’s new careers. Their four-women cabins were forward on the same deck—one deck beneath the promenade—as a cavernous hospital space was created by the removal of partitions amidships. Here medical orderlies would sleep in hammocks as they all steamed to the conflict.

From the railing they watched women from other places come aboard after assembling on the dock. They saw the stylish Victorians in lower-calf-length skirts, and wondered in what other ways these women might assert superiority. They nudged each other at the sight of a dozen Tasmanians in long, hooped skirts which looked to belong to the old century. Yet when these girls came aboard there were hellos and swapped greetings and all the rest of the manic conviviality that suited the situation.

The vivid afternoon on which the Archimedes pulled away from the wharf, the patriots and families left behind waved with a startling energy, putting all their sinews into it as if there were a law that said the stronger the farewell the more certain the return. The band played “Annie Laurie” and those unavoidable and glib songs of departure—“Auld Lang Syne” and so on. They could still hear the plaintive brass on the wharf as the swell of Port Phillip hit them, and as the Archimedes saddled itself for its real business with real waters.

The most casually worldly nurse—Sally had heard by dinnertime in the main dining room—was a girl from Melbourne named Karla Freud. She was dark-haired and had sung for that famous theatrical company in Melbourne, the Tait brothers. But her parents had somehow dragged her off the stage and set her to nursing. Glossy-haired, lovely Freud did not stick with the Melbourne girls but seemed to seek novelty with the New South Wales women and Tasmanians. She brought to conversations with them what people called “presence.” Somehow it became known she was a soprano. Part by her own desire but part due to constant urgings that arise when an obvious “theatrical” appears in a group, she was soon singing in the officers’ mess—“Sally, Sally, Pride of Our Alley” and “Believe Me If All…” And humorous songs with a flirtatious edge, such as “Gee! But I Like Music with My Meals”—songs utterly suitable for her energy, her taste for droll fun, and her sculpted, thespian face.

Just the same, nursing’s won the fight with the Theatre Royal, she declared to her fellow nurses after returning to their table. Because I don’t have the courage to be Sarah Bernhardt.

Well, now you’re really stuck, said Honora, who suspected Freud of being a bit pretentious. Even the papers can’t pretend that the right side’s winning hands down. We might be busy for a few years.

Right, said Freud without rancor. If I take nursing as my rehearsal period, I’ll just about be back onstage at the Royal by the time I’m fifty.

A fair-haired girl named Leonora Casement—a Melbourne nurse—was a year younger than Sally. She must have begun her training as little more than a child. Yet she had confidence and wasn’t callow and was taken round the promenade deck by a tall surgeon named Fellowes. If you looked at them walk past, you thought, there goes an unblighted pair—no dishonesties, no oddities, and no out-of-control signs of attachment. Melbourne girls said these two had known each other before the war, at the Austin Hospital.

Then the great sea troughs took over—the mad pitching, yawing, rolling, and the spasms and exhausted torpors of mal de mer. The Bight that bit everyone, as someone said. By the time the ship skirted Western Australia without actually sighting it and reached north over the sweltering equator, injuries to the medical orderlies were routine in the ship’s hospital. There was one man badly beaten. A tuberculosis case as well: a nineteen-year-old of good frame, yet who should not have been recruited. But the nurses were under-employed and many were inveigled by officers, as Leonora had been, into turns on the deck.

Sally met a confident nurse named Carradine—yes, she admitted, the federal politician Mr. Joe Carradine who was attorney-general was also her father-in-law. She was quite open to letting you know she was married. It had been a secret before but on the Archimedes she needed to make it known to others lest she be pressured into man-to-woman promenades. Carradine’s reddish hair framed a bony but lively face, and her body was lean but full-hipped. Her husband was a lieutenant of infantry—in the very first regiment of the First Brigade—who had gone off on the convoy weeks before.

As Leonora Casement was an exemplar for girls’ courting, Elsie Carradine was a model for the ordained fidelities. Elsie walked by day only and with groups, to ensure nothing in her might be let loose which—through no intent of her own—would call to men in a way from which the dignity of their polished belts and insignia could not protect them or her.

Naomi amazed her sister by walking the deck at any agreed-upon time with a bulky, broad-shouldered captain named Ellis Hoyle, an infantry soldier left behind by the first convoy, who was—contrary to the letter of international law—fetching a ride aboard the Archimedes. It seemed to Sally that Naomi was thereby showing something her sister had not known was there—a lightness, a social grace. Naomi would never have done this sort of thing in the Macleay, since people there observed any sauntering pair with knowing headwags and smirks, wanting to herd them towards inept marriages. Sally walked the main deck with Honora, Freud, and Carradine, still awkward at the sight of her sister. She was fascinated that Naomi could balance the murder of their mother with a stroll alongside an officer above the ocean.

Sometimes Sally’s group were squired by medical officers. All parties were free here from the false distance which operated in civil hospitals. Sally gauged that for different reasons—larrikin raucousness in one, aloof whimsy in the other—the officers liked Honora and Freud.

Three matrons sat at the captain’s table, and the third of them—the most junior—drove the pace of talk and caused men to laugh robustly. She had done a lot of traveling while bush nursing in the Western District, Gippsland, and the northeast of Victoria. Her name was Matron Mitchie. The other two matrons—more entitled to capture the conversation—smiled thin-lipped and shook their heads in a tiny, only half-approving way at Matron Mitchie’s daredevil strut across the narrow wire strung between humor and vulgarity. They seemed to think Mitchie less than an appropriate matron and a poor exemplar for the girls. And yet where were they from? Sally wondered. Probably escaping some enslaving and skimping farm that yielded plenty after flood but was barren in drought. Their fathers, too, had in their day crept to the bank manager and feared that the big stock and station agents would take them over and send them as poor-paid managers back to their land or as less than full beings off to the city.

The reason she thought of farms was that Sally knew from her own example that country girls were fools for nursing. They believed it was the greatest thing open to them. They perhaps hoped to marry doctors. These three hadn’t married doctors, but Matron Mitchie was having so much fun on her own terms that in her case it was just as well. When she made men laugh, the laugh was not a concession to quaintness but came gushing up from the area between the sternum and abdomen.

This Mitchie woman had waddled aboard, thick-hipped, in Melbourne. From the start her eyes darted as if the more faces she scammed the happier she’d be. Yet this was the sort of matron whose frown could break a girl’s heart purely because young women would want to please her so much. Whereas the other two were in some ways what Sally wanted to become—unhumbled, immune from the normal shocks to womanhood inherent in household squalor and husbands and children, yet relentlessly careful and outside and above life. They were practiced in unmanning younger doctors and making nurses quake. Patients called them dragons, and Sally could understand how they applied and invested themselves into becoming dragons.

Across the table at which Sally sat, Honora was having on a small scale the same effect on Dr. Fellowes and other young medical officers that Matron Mitchie was having on the ship’s captain and the colonels. Her liveliness was not muted at all by the fact that the dining rooms of steamers, and officers in Sam Brownes and leather leggings, were not familiar to her. She was a fast learner. At St. Vincent’s, she told the young medical officers, they had the methylated spirits addicts in. These fellows fought each other in the park at Darlinghurst in the shade of the gaol and came into emergency wards in the early mornings displaying gashes they couldn’t remember how they’d received. She had been dressing the leg wound of a derelict, she said, when he began having fits. She ran for help but when she returned with an intern she found the man recovered, sitting on a chair and drinking from her bottle of medicinal alcohol.

It was how she told it that worked, and their willingness to be amused.

Affection for Honora had more than crept upon Sally, and she knew her to be a woman of honor by such a simple test as her dealings over the uniforms. So well finished were they that other nurses asked Sally if she had been to a tailor instead of to Hordern’s. A woman of her word, Honora! Of many skittering but honest words. She was one of those girls who said fairly frequently too, When I’m married… They didn’t contemplate any other future state and did not even take into their calculations the idea they might live on, solitary but free. Yet Honora was not anxious for doctors, or so she told Sally. Too conceited, she said. Too used to obedience from patients. Likely to bring the habit home!

That’s the sort of thing Honora might say at table now. Promising MOs—as everyone called the doctors—that none of them was human enough nor the right kind for her.

To mark their transit over the equator, the captain and ship’s officers ordered the creation of a big swimming pool of canvas on the open lower deck aft and filled it with seawater. It was to be the center of the initiation into equator hopping. Some of the others had already been across the line going to or coming from the northern world: a number of the doctors had come to Australia in the first place from Edinburgh or Dublin or the great hospitals of London and were returning to the hemisphere of their birth. But most medical officers and orderlies and nurses had been born in Australia and had thought—as Sally had—that the train between Melbourne and Sydney or the coastal steamer from Brisbane might be the greatest journey the world would ever offer them. Yet now here was the equator—the burning and uncon-sumed filament that divided the world of southern innocence from the world of northern gravity of intent, and the hemisphere of colonists from the hemisphere of the owners.

Around the pool men and nurses dressed as gypsies and pirates had water thrown on them and were ducked under and made to suffer other rituals. The nurses had actually sat in their cabins making costumes for this. When Sally, feeling that she was disqualified from this flippancy both by nature and the serious shadow of her mother’s death, failed to apply herself to that business, Honora presented her with a passable Queen of Hearts costume in any case, the red hearts applied to the puff-sleeved blouse with small, expert stitching. The casual, rapid-working love that had gone into this fancy dress frightened Sally.

On the ceremonial day she dressed with the others and moved aft. But a companionway presented itself and she took the risk of swinging herself down it to the hospital level, the level on which—much further astern—the jollity would be staged. If she was seen, the others knew she had been seasick before, so she was entitled to a little flash of nausea. She excused her way past a number of wide-eyed orderlies, opened the double doors into the hospital and rushed through the empty spaces to the nurses’ pan room a little way forward. Facing it was a further cabin which was unlocked. She entered it. This was meant to be a pharmacist’s office. But wherever the ship’s stocks of medicines were, they were not here. The empty shelves made it even more a hiding space. The Queen of Hearts closed the door. She could hear running on the deck above her. From aft arose mocking, willfully farting bugle sounds and shouts and the profound echo of men’s laughter. There was no chair to sit on in here. But she stood willingly in her vivid dress amongst the blank shelves.

Someone was passing. She heard the door open. Mrs. Carradine was there. Her reddish hair tumbled out of an eighteenth-century sea captain’s tricorn.

I thought I saw you creep down here, she whispered. Are you all right, dearie? Can I fetch your sister?

Sally’s face blazed. No, thanks, she said, surly. Look, it’s just I’m not good at all these geographical hijinks.

Carradine raised her bony nose and hooted, and Sally began gratefully to laugh with her.

I’ll get up there and endure it for Eric’s sake, Carradine admitted. He’s three weeks ahead of me in his convoy. He’s gone through something like it. Or maybe they won’t even let them have a ceremony in the convoy. But I’ll go through it anyway.

Could I ask you a favor? said Sally. Let me stay in here. I’ll be brave next time. I’m sure Naomi will be up there anyhow.

Of course, said Mrs. Carradine. Naomi seems confident in all things.

Carradine stepped up, smoothed Sally’s locks, and suddenly kissed her forehead through them.

You have lovely black hair, you know, she said. I wish I did, instead of this carrot mop. Just as well I’m married. I never thought I’d get away with it, given this head of hair.

She stepped back. Okay, Queenie, she said and then winked. She closed the door like a friend and was gone. Sally would say to Honora, I felt sick. There’ll be other fancy-dress balls, Honora, where I can wear the dress.

Naomi indeed seemed confident in all things. Taller than Sally. Tallness often imbued confidence. Even before high school Sally felt subject to bemused comparisons with Naomi by teachers and other girls. Some of it was her own sense of being less. Some of it was real. Naomi was good at the outside world. It was only with the inner world of the family that she took on an air of distance and exile. She would have no trouble with a “crossing-the-line” party. Things would falter only the next time she and Sally met up.

Across glittering, tepid seas they put into Colombo. With sailors and non-officers confined to the ship, unruly orderlies climbed down the anchor chain at night to steal launches and go ashore. The nurses and medical officers were permitted to land. Met at the wharf by various British middle-aged gentlemen, who assured them that they were in the most beautiful segment of the world and that the Singhalese people were the most handsome on earth, they were taken through a city of stalls and temples and giant Buddhas rising above shops at the end of thoroughfares, and then out along a lovely coast, where women in vivid fabric and brown-faced compact men—machetes in hand—watched them pass. They walked on the ramparts of Galle as the middle-aged men expanded on the subject of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and now the British ownership of the bright-though-hazed reaches of the harbor, and drove away some poverty-grimed members of the most beautiful race on earth, who were trying to sell the nurses fake coins from Dutch wrecks. Lemonade on a hotel veranda of the Amangalla Hotel beside a Dutch church was different from Macleay lemonade—redolent of an extra layer of spice and strangeness.

Oasis

Sally wrote to her father every four days or so, letters replete with a relentless newsiness designed to mask any shame at marooning him on his farm. Now he could be charmed awhile—her theory went—by stories of alien marvels and puzzles.

She used all powers of language and scene-making she could—casting Port Suez as a town of many-storeyed buildings and pink hills in the background.

That last sentence written with edginess and with eyes half-closed.

She could barely make a stab at writing letters about Cairo. It overflowed the borders of any possible letter. Here at the railway station they were loaded by a transport officer—four at a time—into open gharries, each one driven by a soft-speaking brown man in a tarboosh and wearing a crisp white jacket over a jalabiya. They were carried out in late afternoon into a frenzy of people and traffic. A city that was everything, too many people moving with too many ambitions, too many hopes and destinations. It was at the same time a glimpse of moored riverboats on—could it be?—the Nile. (These were officers’ clubs where Nubian waiters in red tarbooshes and long white robes glided along with drinks trays held high.) It was people carrying all possible items on their heads—a child’s coffin new-bought, a lounge chair, a haunch of camel meat, a bed. It was camels and donkeys on pavements and the smell of their urine, and men seated by them on mats working with sewing machines or turning furniture legs on little lathes. It was car horns of the army and of the rich blaring at one time with the clang of trams and the trumpet blasts of tram conductors. It was street sellers leaning into your gharry trying to sell flyswatters and whisks, scarabs and lottery tickets, and passing British soldiers telling them darkly to clear out—imshi!—and leave the ladies alone. It was raucous native bands in unexplained processions booming and howling—brass and trumpet—and shoe shiners crying, “’Allo, George” to the soldiers, and the soldiers with cockney accents calling, “’Ello, sweetie” at the nurses’ gharries. Whistles from Australian soldiers—wandering the streets like men used to the place—frosted the hubbub with levity. And then the strange sight of the dragoman—who could translate a letter into English or Arabic or Greek or French—trudging along with his portable desk, pens, and ink and looking for business without business looking for him. Effendis—Egyptian gentlemen in well-cut suits and tarbooshes—sat at café tables talking at an impossible pace yet like centers of calm in all the fury. There were acrobats, fire-eaters, snake charmers—all yelling out at passing Australian and British soldiers for baksheesh. Shocking beggars—young girls with infants, crippled crones, their hands stained pink and yellow, and every kind of blindness and crookedness of body and amputation—as if these people themselves were the ones who’d taken part in a recent and very savage war. And if you looked at the sky you saw kites circling above the putrid streets, waiting to descend to their abominable yet cleansing meals of flesh. Even amongst the more talkative women in the gharries making for their hospital across the city at Mena the chatter stilled a little.

All this just the surface anyhow, the visible part of the crammed ocean of life here that you were not equipped to deal with in any way other than by looking at it—if at all—at a tangent.

As the city was crossed, the peaks of the pyramids showed up ahead in a dust-tainted twilight. They had been heavenly creatures from picture books, gigantic entities in everyone’s imagination, and it was hard now to believe they were tethered to a specific patch of earth—that they could be casually seen and perhaps approached and then passed by as you’d pass a town. Sweat ran down the sides of Sally’s face and she could hear girls even from other gharries swearing they would wear their straw hats full-time. Bare, hard ground led to groves where their hospital lay with the pyramids blue now and pressing closer, pushing their reality on the women. The palmed oasis ahead seemed flat as a stage painting and defied belief too. The road took them into the trees to a flat-roofed mansion with a red cross on its veranda-ed wall. Once a hunting lodge—they’d been told—where the kings of Egypt invited their friends to shoot gazelles. More recently a hotel. Now a hospital.

The women were quartered in small rooms with spacious windows on the upper floors. Three beds waited in the room Sally shared with Carradine and Slattery—with Naomi next door, since they still kept their distance. One large lowboy and one deal table and a chair completed the amenities of the room. For bareness, said Carradine, it put a boarding-school room to shame. Yet from these windows could be seen across treetops—in the phenomenal blueness of dusk—the pyramid of Cheops.

Eric Carradine was in the Mena camp out there in the desert and that evening turned up suntanned and handsome to visit his wife. His brow was a bit foreshortened, women said, but he was A1 apart from that. It was apparent that Elsie and Eric Carradine were the least striving, most relaxed of people, with the long frenzy of searching for each other behind them.

One of the senior matrons spoke to the nurses in their mess on the first night and convinced them that in these premises their conversation must not be above a murmur, their laughter suppressed, their talk with patients reduced to the minimum of politeness and information. The chief medical officer—whom they had never seen before but who had come in now—was very elderly, well over sixty. Well, welcome then, ladies, was all he said. Matron will tell you the rest.

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.

There was always though in the end the matter of where she came from. Soldiers felt the presence of women couldn’t console them unless geography was cleared up first. These young men were all from more favored homes and places than the Durance sisters. However, Naomi had the presence for their sort of company—the capacity to carry it off and seem worldly and not to be overwhelmed by social castes. By escaping the Macleay early she had rendered such matters as of no importance. Sally had not learned the same skill yet. Naomi looked like she could be some pastoral magnate’s daughter. On the strength of that she might one day grow into being a squatter’s wife or some such thing and no one would be able to sniff out that she was born of a mere one-hundred-and-fifty-acre dairy farmer and had trodden in manure on the way to school.

One of the men would suddenly mention dinner in Cairo—at the Shepheard Hotel or the Windsor or at the Parisiana. The idea was sure to capture other officers and the nurses with the novelty of an invention. Nurses took the arm of a particular officer. Naomi willingly took the arm of Ellis Hoyle. But some were left unattached, of whom—by firm choice—Sally Durance was one and Nettice another. Freud too was sometimes an unaccompanied woman since she possessed a dark grandeur that scared men.

Then—at the end of dinner when the last of the wine was served—a proposal would arise that everyone go out by gharry and see the pyramids and the Sphinx by starlight. Drivers would bring up the cars later to take the party back to the hospital and the camp. All of them had of course been to the pyramids many times—all the nurses had hired horses at Mena and ridden out by late afternoon. But night-time was different and emphasized the stone eternity of the things. Naomi and Ellis Hoyle rode in the one gharry, engrossed. How strange to see Naomi prefer someone openly. For there was a bit of surrender in that—and Sally hadn’t thought her sister was a girl for surrender.

Sally’s own companion—though the gharries could carry more than two, the unuttered rule was that people should travel in couples—turned out to be a tall, rather florid officer named Lieutenant Maclean. He was well-built but not exactly muscular. His heavy body was a bit too present, though not objectionable. Sally wondered whether that meant he would make an easier target than the others. He draped a horse blanket over his knees because it was now cold. But Sally was too squeamish to share it and waved it aside when by gesture he offered it.

You see that, he said, pointing across her body—but his arm not too close—to the gutter full of cabbage leaves. See the leaves stirring there?

The leaves were stirring. Now she could see there were at least two children sleeping amongst the husks.

Poor little beggars! he said. It doesn’t matter who wins, they’ll still sleep out in cabbage leaves.

Though if the Turks came, Sally argued, things might be worse still.

Well, we like to think so, don’t we? I wonder what they’d say if we asked them. In any case, the Turks aren’t coming yet, it seems. Our masters marched us out there and told us to make the chaps dig trenches in the desolation of gravel. But the Turks didn’t come.

He laughed but didn’t seem angry enough to wish any great harm on Turks or the Ottoman Empire. Even here it was the Germans—advancing on Paris—who held the imagination.

They were on the edges of the city now and Maclean looked up at the dazzle of stars. You’ve seen more of the enemy than we have, he remarked dreamily. I’ve got to say, you’re all real bricks, you girls. A credit to Australia. Whereas we don’t know yet whether we’re a credit or not.

Since his doubt seemed sincere, she assured him, I can see you striding on—no matter what.

Perhaps she had volunteered too much admiration of his coming warriorhood. For there he was turning to her and leaning forwards so that he could see her eyes, though they were not quite able to be studied under starlight.

Thank you very much, he said. That’s a reassuring thought.

They heard laughter from the gharry ahead. Captain Hoyle, said Maclean. He’s keen on your sister. You might find a brother-in-law there. Barring accidents.

This astonishing news did not raise or answer the question of whether Naomi was as eager for Ellis Hoyle.

A further tumbling laughter from ahead—but it flirted a little more with the limits of what was considered proper control. Honora. She was with a man named Lionel something-or-other. She was popular with men. Perhaps they misread her by thinking her Celtic loudness meant something else than it did. Sally could tell meanwhile that Maclean didn’t laugh unless a walk into a closed door or the collapse of a chair justified it. He was what they called sober. This suited Sally. In the sport of jollity and chat she was by temperament and by her crimes a nonstarter.

Maclean said suddenly and with apparent embarrassment, That Freud girl? Did you know her before?

No. She’s from Melbourne.

Jewish, isn’t she?

Yes, said Sally and was surprised to find she was envious, in a remote way.

The chaps who were on the Archimedes say she has a top-rate voice. But what sort of girl is she? In temperament, I mean.

She is very much a city woman and very amusing. We’re all pleasant people as yet, of course. We’re on a wonderful journey and we see marvelous things. We haven’t been stung so far by anything inconvenient. But I don’t think Freud will get stung badly by anything.

Well, he said and chuckled as if he were happy with that degree of information.

She thought all at once it was a bad thing for a man to quiz one woman about another. He should not be allowed too easily to get away with it.

You didn’t want me to be your stalking horse for Nurse Freud, did you?

Oh my God, no! Oh no, that would be a terrible thing for a fellow to suggest. Besides, my questions about Miss Freud were simply idle chat.

She didn’t quite believe him. The triangles of blackness ahead were the pyramids as sharp as a knife in a brilliant night sky. To underline the central role of the Sphinx, someone—one of the drivers or a guide who slept out here all night—had climbed the paws of the great stone beast and was holding a sodium flare in his hand, so that the wonderful and frightening face of the thing glowed from beneath, more terrifying and more godly than by day.

This is definitely the way, said Lieutenant Maclean, to see the Sphinx.

She hoped he would not take those great, glowing features dominating the dark as a lofty mandate to reach out and attempt something. They were shoulder to shoulder and that was enough for her. Any closer and her warmth would turn to revulsion.

Do you know, he said, pointing towards the diminishing radiance of the Sphinx’s features, that there are chaps in our battalion who came here just to see this and not to fight? They’re quite frank about that. Chaps who wanted a trip. I bet they turn up at your hospital pretending to hernias and bad hearts.

Sometimes, she admitted, there’ve been pretend patients. Men pretending tachycardia. You know, irregular heartbeat. Men can mimic tachycardia by sniffing cordite.

A young red-headed medical officer on the wards, Dr. Hookes—a general practitioner from the Western District of Victoria, of which, like Hoyle, he was willing to speak as the region of the earth which gave all other terrestrial regions any radiance they had—would say, Nurse, go and get the Faraday machine. And to the patient, Your heart needs an electric shock. And Sally would turn away to fetch this dreaded machine. There was such a device, but malingerers did not need to see it wheeled in. They would reassure Dr. Hookes that they thought their heart had settled. But one young man—very fresh-faced, perhaps a year from school—came in with a fibrillating heart and died on the bed in mid-sentence.

I do enjoy your company, Miss Durance, said the lieutenant all at once but not without consideration on his side.

The statement did not seem to plead for some short-term gain. But why and how could he know enough to like her? They were not much more than walking distance from Mena House, and she felt an urge to excuse herself, dismount the gharry, and start off overland. It took her seconds to understand that this would be correctly judged as madness.

I like spending a bit of time with you, he went on, because you’re not a light-headed girl.

There was a gush of laughter from the gharry shared by Honora and Lionel. Maclean gestured in that direction. You see what I mean? he asked.

She was beginning to feel sorry for Maclean’s men. They would have no trouble seeming to agree with him and then probably mocking him rotten in the bars available for non-officers in Cairo. He wasn’t a bad fellow but had not yet recovered from his school-prefect self. He might now have been able to sense that his strict principles were not charming her as he thought they might have been.

I mean, these girls, he said, they’re fine girls. And earnest when it comes down to nursing. They just don’t seem as reliable.

I’d say my sister was most reliable, she said, boasting despite herself.

But she has a decent reserve, he said. It seems to me a decent reserve is a family trait of yours.

I hate that word “reserve,” she told him, just to rout him further.

So that was the end of the debate about shyness or reticence or whatever.

I don’t think I should be hard on our chaps, he said—an attempt to win her back. But what should alarm us a bit and be a salutary lesson is that the men pretty much beaten at Mons are British regulars. Is an Australian militiaman-cum-citizen soldier worth three of such men—as our boast goes? The fellows in the camp think so, but I believe a man is a man, Australian or not. And no question but that our chaps are better types. But not trained, you see, and hating to train. They hate it.

From the hospital roof they look as if they’re training pretty hard, she argued.

Yes. But half of them don’t even think it’s necessary. Just give them a gun and let them loose, they think, and off they’ll go like so many dingo-shooters.

She could feel his hand reach out for her wrist with particular intensity now. But no vein of fear seemed to throb in it—nor was there any sweat. It was a dry, calm hand. She felt it would be churlish to object. She let it lie there, passive, as long as it did not become part of an argument or consider advancing itself further.

You see, he said, returning to his theme, I wouldn’t talk that way to one of these other girls. I simply wouldn’t. I certainly wouldn’t voice them to the adjutant or the lieutenant-colonel. So that leaves you, poor girl.

She found herself laughing low.

Shall we get out and go for a stroll? he asked. The cars are over there.

He helped her down onto the rubbly floor the pyramids grew from. There would have been other couples out there in the half dark staring at the great shapes as the flare beneath the Sphinx’s chin burned out and left them half blinded. They all hoped that this place would elevate their evening jaunt in one way or another. But the conversation between her and Lieutenant Maclean dwindled out here—there was too much space for words to make a dent. Soon the nurses and officers transferred to the cars which had followed them, and in a final burst of squeezed-in merriment, they reached the hospital.

All the rumors were of something named the Dardanelles. Staff Nurse Carradine said, It’ll be better than France. Because in France, everyone knew by Christmas and New Year, there had been that great sacrifice of young men and the near capture of Paris. It developed that the Dardanelles were Turkish and closer to the seat of the Ottoman Empire than Sinai. And although all this evoked ideas of the scimitar and the harem and the torture chamber, these old-fashioned implements and places seemed to make the Turks less accurate and less well-trained shots than the Germans—the malign Huns who had molested Belgian nuns but clearly knew how to string out a battle.

In the mauve dusk Sally and the others sometimes stood on top of the flat roof of Mena House and looked at the battalions marching back out of the desert to their tents, all in good order—ambulances trailing behind as if purely for the experience of it. She watched the light horsemen wheel in fairly modest plumes of dust, and the infantry battalions surge—without effort, as it seemed—over empty spaces. Gradually, distant band music entered the equation. Perhaps only a hundred boys suffering from heat exhaustion had been carried to the hospital for treatment lest their dehydration and core temperature be allowed to affect their brain.

The leisurely night excursions to Cairo were gone. When Lieutenant Eric Carradine arrived to see his wife, his face looked older. So did the other men who turned up in the evenings for a while and sat in the cane chairs on the roof with the nurses. One Lionel Dankworth—who to his disgust had been made a gunnery officer—was seen nuzzling the side of Honora’s face, and handsome Ellis Hoyle sought Naomi’s hand while—most astoundingly—Naomi at one stage yielded it up to him.

When do they do it, d’you think? Honora asked Sally over tea later. Elsie and Eric—when do they manage it? You don’t see them sneaking out, do you?

Honora the earthy woman asked such lusty and practical questions. One day, during tea in the mess, little sharp-nosed Nettice teased Honora by asking her, did she tell her chaplain about all the officers she’d hugged and kissed.

Yes, she said. But I tell him I do it only out of mercy, not because I’m a low girl. It’s work to make men brave, I tell him, and they can’t be brave unless they’re happy.

Sally and others were inside the venereal compound again. There were the new victims of overestimated Venus. And ones who out of shame or recklessness had neglected to present themselves till the thing was established in them. Some had become accustomed to their shame or bad fortune and seemed to enjoy their leisure. They passed newspapers around and rolled cigarettes and discussed race results from twelve thousand miles away at Randwick or Flemington. But one day even the most unrepentant began to look bewildered and displaced when the bugles—as in an opera—began to draw nearer from the direction of the camp.

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.

When Matron Mitchie excused herself and vanished from the dining car, going either to the lavatory or for a snort from the whisky flask she was rumored to carry in her big valise, Honora started up on the question of whether Mitchie had ever been married.

Could she be a widow? Or did her husband do a flit?

Men often do with the best of women, said Nettice with conviction. They don’t know when they’re well-off and go looking for harpies.

Sally said she had always assumed that matrons were above the married state.

Honora argued Mitchie’d got too much sauce in her not to have led men on.

Well, said Naomi, exchanging a sliding instant’s glance with her sister, I think she’s wise enough to know being married’s not the greatest state open to a girl.

What about you and that Captain Hoyle? asked Honora like a challenge.

There was a silence since it was somehow not exactly normal to ask a woman with an air of such austerity as Naomi a question about men.

Naomi said, If sharing a gharry means an intention to marry a fellow, I’d be married to half the Australian Imperial Force.

When the engine stopped nowhere and they sat still, the voices of the women in the dining car and their talk when they returned to their compartments seemed shrill. With a great gulp of air another train would pass—carrying English troops in one direction or the other—and you could see soldiers’ faces close as they smoked and laughed at each other or lay with their heads back. It was the business of the army not only to fight wars but to shift the soldiers in Alexandria to Cairo and those in Cairo to Alexandria—and then for extra pleasure of authority to do it again.

The Alexandria Misr Station into which they came in the dark of three o’clock had a great dome, and the forecourt was like a Greek rather than an Egyptian palace—all to honor Alexander the Great. A few peddlers were around them even at this hour, selling replicas of Pompey’s Column. Tommies in kepis—ready to outface heat wherever they were sent—sat on their kitbags or leaned against walls. They puffed smoke from blank faces and made tired comment from the corner of mouths.

Into a glass-windowed transport office Mitchie went to speak to a harried-looking officer and an NCO. The man she made her demand for transport to threw up his hands as if he had expected Mitchie to be the ultimate trial and here she was. The Australian orderlies marched up in less than military exactness—led by the tall surgeon Fellowes who was not yet comfortable with drill. The party was trailed by Lieutenant Hookes. All nurses looked at Leonora, who was assumed to be infatuated for life with Fellowes. They had learned from Leonora he was an ear, nose, and throat expert of little militia experience. Sally had seen some more militarily vain medical officers who even rode mounted in front of their precise-stepping men.

At last Captain Fellowes handed Mitchie out through the door, and it was clear they had won the transport argument. Mitchie invited her women to follow her two by two out of the main door and past the Greek columns to where trucks were backing and grinding in chilly air. Orderlies held the women’s elbows as they ascended the steps to the back. The trucks drove them through night streets full of high-walled villas and tall blocks of flats, all quieter than Cairo. They spun a small way along the Corniche whose fame they were as yet ignorant of. The sea lay to their right with the water maintaining a kind of deep purple, lit only by the moon and the lights of the Corniche.

Then they swung onto an electrically lit mole crowded with ships both civilian and military. The trucks rolled as far as towers of boxed supplies and crowds of men smoking or slouched by stacked rifles—and opposing automobiles honking for leeway—would permit them. Mitchie’s platoon of nurses got down onto the wharves. The orderlies from the trucks ahead came to carry their bags and portmanteaux and even their valises.

Some two hundred paces along the harbor pier the Archimedes came up like an apparition. E73—as naval notation had it. By the lights burning along the pier its wide bulwarks towered and its huge crosses were deep scarlet. British soldiers were guarding the gangway. The ship was not to be boarded until seven ack-emma, one of them said. Meanwhile there was a waiting room.

That’s impossible, young fellow, said Mitchie. My girls must be fit and rested by breakfast time.

Be a good fellow, said Fellowes. There’s a brick!

The young man—hating having been called “good fellow”—went off to confer with superiors. Fellowes shook his head and openly laughed at the military ridiculousness of it all. Leonora raised a gleaming face—whitened abnormally by the lights on the wharf. For she and they all somehow loved it that Fellowes was still a young civilian surgeon and was far from converted to war’s protocols.

The soldier came back with a stiff, permissive, even herding gesture of his arm. So they went aboard—onto decks they knew, down corridors they knew, into the cabins they were familiar with.

The Archimedes II

That first night on Archimedes—when it lay on the level surface of the East Harbor—in the cabin she shared with Carradine, Honora, and Naomi, the unconscious Sally came to a sleeping awareness that there was no separation between her dreams and those of the other three women, and that just as she shared the cabin’s air she also shared its phantasms.

The dawn entered and hurt her eyes. She awoke in the upper bunk and adjusted to the trembling of metal bulwarks, the throaty howl of a steamer beyond the porthole, and the musk of the women—a peppery, flowers-on-the-turn smell with the honest overlay of clotted talcum. She saw Naomi at the porthole, peering out. At least one ship was passing and perhaps two or three were edging about and getting ready for the ocean. Each seemed to engross her sister. Then Naomi turned. Still in her bunk, Sally gazed back at her. Our mother’s lean face, she thought.

Have you seen anyone you know? Sally whispered.

No, it’s impossible, Naomi said quietly. It’s just that the men line the decks of the ships and they’re so excited. Can’t wait to be in battle. It’s contagious too. Come on deck with me.

Sally secretly assessed whether they were far enough away from home for it to be safe. Far enough away from the memory of complicity.

All right, she said.

They dressed stealthily while the other girls still slept and left the cabin and went up the companionway to the promenade. On the East Harbor, seaward side of the deck, an intoxication came on the northeast breeze from the decks of the transports. Men were drunk with possibility—the approach of the revelation, the core of meaning. The world had become simple for them. You could nearly feel it simplifying itself.

Their anchor raged upwards and they passed the Pharos lighthouse at midmorning into a vacant sea the transports had already committed themselves to. It was a sea a person wanted to watch at length, the deep blue of what was called spring in Europe—and Alexandria was halfways Europe. Nothing like the Pacific off New South Wales she had scanned from the Currawong. Its vivid and dark blue scared the watcher with depths that could eat you alive. Whereas this—this invited you and admitted light deep down inside it and seemed willing to let you plumb it. But no time to stand long on the deck of Archimedes and ponder that invitation.

Dr. Hookes began the day after a plain breakfast with a talk on splints directed at the nurses who sat on one side of the lounge and the more numerous orderlies who sat on the other. From his report, it seemed the bush town where he practiced was rich in fractures. The Liston splint was just the ticket for very dangerous fractured femur wounds which were to be expected in battle. Some orderlies smirked and nudged as Hookes expatiated on cock-up splints which forced the hand upright in cases of wrist fracture.

Then an older officer came into the salon—the colonel of the ship, in fact; a slightly dreamy-looking Englishman. He wore the same uniform as the rest. He had been converted to Australian-ness by immigration or secondment. He talked about the treatment of bullet wounds in the South African war. It required patience, hydrogen peroxide, and tweezers to extract uniform threads which had entered the flesh in company with the bullet. Do not forget, said the colonel, that the bullet is not a sterile instrument—it has been loaded by an almost certainly filthy hand, perhaps by a disease-ridden one. When it strikes the victim, it introduces dirt from the exposed part of the struck body and fibers from uniforms and thus—microorganisms!

The colonel went on to the question of morphine dosage. Sally observed Naomi. Her chin was undauntedly raised. The colonel’s prescribed dosage for abdominal wounds seemed niggardly. The highest he sanctioned was a quarter grain for abdominal and thoracic wounds. But, he said, regularly and mercifully repeated as necessary. Everyone made notes in pads with pencils sharpened by penknives they carried in deep pockets in their skirts. Bullet wounds had not been spoken of before today when—supposedly—they were all on the lip of the cauldron.

The afternoon was taken up with crepe bandage preparation—running it through boiling water and eusol, hanging it out on rods to dry, winding it up. Cotton bandage was stored ready—soft and pure enough for the wounds of heroes—or so it was hoped, though there had been impurities reported in bandages and dressings opened in Egypt. But, as they still thought, they were about to treat the strong and not the weak—young men of good constitution purified by battle.

A dusk lecture was delivered by Captain Fellowes on sepsis and gas gangrene. He had seen it develop from wounds inflicted in the rough streets of Melbourne while an intern in an emergency ward.

With all this absorbed they were by now flattened by exhaustion. A little energy was left to climb the stairs to observe the half-moon above the sea. Others visited the lounge where Freud sang “Little Sir Echo” at the insistence of nurses and medical officers. The word was running around the ship. The troops were already landed in the Dardanelles. What-for for the poor damned Turks! Sally heard Lieutenant Hookes say.

Still—that evening and night and the next day—no one knew for certain where they were bound on their course across this Mediterranean Sea. The sun was on what they called the starboard beam both in its rising and then—rather astern on the port—in its setting. This meant a northwest direction.

At making up the cots fixed in their floor sockets the orderlies proved—it seemed to many—willfully clumsy. A handsome young medical corps sergeant was observed going around exhorting them towards a better performance. Forward, a former library had been set up with tiered bunks for walking wounded. Cabins forward on the promenade deck were to be reserved for recuperating or lightly wounded officers. Below—on a deck once used for second-class travelers—the pattern was repeated to accommodate humbler ranks. Mitchie warned the women they might not always be able to tell the difference between officer and man.

They wore their aprons and made hundreds of beds while the orderlies scrubbed steel doors and bulkheads—a job with which they seemed strangely more content than with bed-making since it left their pride in place and was clearly proper work for men. Only the nurses were permitted to scrub the floors and walls of the operating theatre and any stray surface therein bold enough to present itself. On Sally’s count four doctors and a pharmacist were aboard, and if at dinner that night Dr. Hookes seemed wan and distracted, it was said to be because he might be called on to leave the wards and take on the role of surgeon. But one wondered why when the wounded might be a mere handful.

The women were given time to watch small Greek islands float past and to squint towards the coast of Greece, sadly over their horizon. There were a few orderlies on deck. One of them—the sergeant with the lean, darkling, and refined features who had harangued the other orderlies on their lack of competence with bed linen—said hello briskly and identified a mountainous ridged creature ahead. Its name was Lemnos. The sergeant’s manner was that of someone who had been here before. And his uniform and the sort of khaki puttees that distinguished the ordinary soldier was also a relief from too much polished leather, too many moustaches and neat leggings. His name was Ian Kiernan.

He gathered a crowd of the nurses to consider Lemnos and instructed them without too much sign of wanting to be thought clever. When Hephaestus was kicked out of heaven by his father, Zeus, said the sergeant, he had settled on Lemnos and fathered a bandit tribe with the nymph Cabiro. Hephaestus’s forge was there, on that island. Then, when the women of Lemnos were abandoned by their husbands for Thracian women, they killed every remaining Lemnos man in vengeance—which seemed a bit unfair to the virtuous. The Argonauts, landing there, found only women left and created with them a race known as the Minyans whose king, Euneos, was Jason’s son.

If the women were in charge, why wasn’t it a queen? asked Freud softly and not expecting an answer.

Good point, Nurse, Kiernan admitted. If I ever get back to Melbourne Uni I’ll ask Professor Challenor that one.

On the starboard abeam, he then told them, could be seen a hazy outline of Imbros associated with Thetis, the mother of famed Achilles.

Some of the orderlies were said to be men dropped from the infantry for incompetence with rifles and bayonets and even for unruliness. But Kiernan resembled a man who was precisely where he wanted to be. Still, he was wary with what by their standard passed as scholarship. He was aware of the taboo which until now had existed between the orderly and the nurse, between the carriers of water and stretchers—the hoisters of supplies and porters of nurses’ bags—and the daughters of succor who had the theoretic power to command his labor, just as he had the unacknowledged but genuine power to harry them.

On that third evening they could see the sky in the east lit by a storm. Everyone rushed to deck on the rumor that there was what could be called “thunder.” The word failed this clamor up ahead. The lights in the sky would dim and then fill it again like the pulse of that Greek’s forge Kiernan had already summoned up. That wasn’t Lemnos though. That was the Dardanelles, the peninsula of Gallipoli. Those are the Turkish guns. Krupp guns from Germany but manned by Turks, Kiernan asserted, who was on deck with all the others. The Germans have seduced the Turks to their side, he told them. And now—here we are!

The Archimedes had dropped its speed the closer it got to the illuminations from the heights ashore. It edged its way in towards the fury at perhaps seven knots. All around were its new companions—transports and cruisers and destroyers with their guns leveled at the eastern heights but silent. One other hospital ship was there on the starboard and displayed its crosses. And everywhere smaller ships, as if waiting for daylight, and barges running errands between ships and the shore. Sally wondered how all this—the campaign seen there and set up ahead of them so hugely as to fill a half of the sky—had started without her knowing. When had it begun? How could something so colossal have been kept a secret as they had rolled along in trucks under the lights of the Corniche? She had thought from school that battles were the business of a single day. Hadn’t it been so at Waterloo? But this clearly was a battle with some days’ history behind it, and operating by night as well. It worked many shifts. Like a factory.

They landed about the time we left port, said an orderly with a cigarette at the railing. I know that. They must be giving the Turks what-for.

It could not be guessed from the deck of the creeping Archimedes who was giving who what-for. Matron Mitchie appeared amongst them as if likely to issue an order.

She turned to the scene ashore. Cadences of cannon light and quivering flares demanded all the available attention.

My dear God, said Mitchie. Do they go at it twenty-four hours a day?

Five minutes on deck, girls, she called above the massive metal roar of the unleashed anchor cable. By your watches. Then to rest. You understand we can expect some labor to come?

A spout of water rose beyond an anchored transport. Some of Mr. Krupp’s manufacture had that ship, then, in its intentions. That fact was something that stretched the mind.

Look there, said Carradine. Men.

By the glimmer of flares, the beach ahead—about two miles off—could be seen and even looked as if it might be an illuminated fair. A place for Jason and the Argonauts to meet those Lemnos women. There were men on it though—mere dots but plentiful and busy.

Carradine and Sally and their small, dry-featured, reticent senior, Sister Nettice, showed here an even more heightened spirit of obedience. They expected a little sleep before the patients turned up. But at the companionway, Sally saw a pale Naomi in her pinafore standing as a triage nurse with Dr. Hookes and amongst orderlies—the men who would deliver the damaged to the doctor and her for assessment. Naomi’s face showed that resolute nature which had murdered their mother. She would not get sleep. She had to stand and wait. Whereas they would be awakened to duty according to what Naomi and Hookes received.

They went down to their cabins beyond the hospital deck. Half an hour ago it would have seemed ridiculous to go to rest with Mr. Krupp as a sleeping companion. Now—even knowing Naomi must stay wakeful—it seemed the simplest sense. In any case, by the early hours of the morning they were all awoken by the hammering of an orderly and told to stand by at their nursing stations. The large hospital deck was divided into imaginary wards with whose dimensions they were familiar now, and Mitchie told them to take a lie-down on the cots meant for the wounded. Some lights were switched off to reduce the glare from the white bulkheads. Thus, in half light and with the noise of the barrage lessening, no one slept. At three in the morning a stillness had set in. The Krupp cannon rested. Naomi had seen the shore darken and return to its mythology. Night became absolute.

At that hour a minesweeper came up beside the Archimedes with wounded men on its decks. Matron Mitchie descended with the loud news that there would be patients now. The nurses stood a little more rigidly at their stations in the vast hospital than before. Tightness had also entered the demeanor of orderlies. They were like maids and porters in a great hotel awaiting the coming of guests. At central tables here and there lay untouched their hydrogen peroxide, their scissors, hypodermics and needles, thermometers and blood-pressure cuffs, cotton wool and gauze, dressings and bandages.

Initially, the harmed arriving on the hospital deck was a scatter of men who could move by their own power. They had come aboard up the lowered stairs. They were cheerful and rowdy and almost in a mood for celebration. As they entered the hospital they seemed restrained by a fear of appearing too willing to escape the shore. Most of these had labels pinned on their shirts or jackets marked “3.” Mitchie told the nurses to put on their rubberized gloves.

The first of all the wounded Sally saw was a dark-haired, lanky young man whose face had gone yellow. He seemed confused. The young ward doctor they barely knew allocated him a cot and inspected the clotted mess of bandages at his arm. It would prove, Sally would ever remember, that his elbow had been shot away—a tourniquet was tied high on his hanging arm. The doctor ordered a quarter grain of morphine. Slattery went with hypodermic and needle to draw it up in the nurses’ station. A half-dozen nurses had the time to aid or stand by each patient and in this case to witness the dampening and tender removal of the filthy bandages and the peroxide soaking and drawing out of the packed bloody gauze with tweezers. Someone ashore had put the gauze there. Someone careful amongst the lights and fire. As the dressings came off, it was clear that the brachial nerve was borne away and the humerus and the bones of the lower arm shattered. The young man snuffled and muttered, vomited, then swallowed his drowsy pain. An orderly supported the upper arm and there made his own pleading noise as Slattery and Sally attended to the swabbing of the bloodied and palsied forearm near the mess—until Dr. Hookes came along and punctured their solemnity by declaring that the man would need surgery to see what could be salvaged. Even so—Sally knew—the arm would dangle a lifetime. His hand would be forever a senseless withered fist. Orderlies put him back on a stretcher and hauled him off to the theatres forward.

Sally and some of the nurse witnesses were drawn off to attend to the second case, a man whose jacket hung over his shoulders and whose chest was swathed. Orderlies gave him a cigarette and settled him down as Slattery and Sally came to him. “Shrapnel chest and shoulders,” someone had scribbled on his label. Sally was not sure what shrapnel was.

Now a number of men on stretchers were arriving down the main stairwell bearing filthy scribbled labels marked “1” and “2.” Mitchie and the ward doctor inspected each and directed nurses to them. The colonel and Captain Fellowes and the Archimedes’s third surgeon came stalking for candidates for their operating tables and discussed the need of this man and that with the ward doctor and Mitchie.

To Sally and Honora’s station was carried a craggy-looking young man whose features seemed to draw in on themselves. Under an opened uniform jacket—put on him as if to shield him from nighttime cold—the upper body was bare and his wound in bandages. The orderlies moved him with genial roughness onto a hospital cot. The stench of soured and recent blood, the exhalation of the wound and of excrement and of his fouled remnants of uniform puzzled Sally. It was as if he had been campaigning a year and not a few days. But there was no doubt of the rights his wound gave him. His “1” label had “thoracic” scribbled on it and a morphine dosage in dim pencil. Also—upstairs on deck—Naomi had attached to his bandages a red card to signify the urgency his wound stood for and had scribbled “lower right anterior of the chest with likely pulmonary involvement and exit.” The bandages below his open uniform jacket were dark and saturated. He was unearthly silent and calm and his mind seemed to meditate on this wound which should have killed him by now except that it might have skimmed major organs.

Matron Mitchie went amongst the nurses not yet engaged, telling them there would be twenty-three stretcher cases in all. The finite number was a motivation and a comfort. Sally heard Carradine and Leo Casement reasoning with a man with a bloodied head wound who talked like crazy but in a rapid, unknown tongue. His chatter competed with orderlies’ shouts and dominated the deck and ended with a slur as Carradine stanched his rattle of discourse with a morphine injection.

Similarly Honora arrived back from the dressings room with a hypodermic—a quarter grain. With this boy to command the entirety of her brain, Sally thought for an instant only, and with a little spark of memory and relief, that morphine had nearly lost its history here. It no longer stood for theft or guilt. A small patch of the arm must be cleansed with an alcohol swab and the stuff got into the body of this weather-beaten young thoracic case who had not received any mercy since he was bandaged on the beach. The lifting onto a barge, the lifting off—how had he lived through that?

The orderly assigned to Sally and Honora was a fellow of perhaps thirty-five years with eyes that might have been stunned or else sullen. His name was Wilson. He lifted and adjusted the young body’s posture, dragged away the man’s foul jacket and let it drop to the floor while Honora and Sally soaked the areas near the wound with hydrogen peroxide to dilute the sticky adhesions of dressing to wound. With the man eased sideways and then on his back and sideways again by their helpmeet orderly, by cutting the bandages they found both wounds: sockets of raw meat front and back with the bullet having made its exit five ribs up—the seventh thoracic vertebra as she must write on his chart—and about two inches from the spine.

Sally and Honora looked at each other since they shared a strange hesitation—not that the wound was beyond their comprehension or even beyond their expectation. It was the inadequacy of their functions and small medical rites in front of damage as authoritative as this. The orderly held the boy with gentle force, and Honora cleansed the flesh and the lips of first one wound and then went around the cot to cleanse the exit, while Sally probed with forceps for impurities and fibers. The patient took to shuddering all at once and the orderly—thinking it his duty to restrain him—pressed down on the man’s shoulders. The pallor of the face turned to deep, cyanosed blue. This was the face of the human creature drowning in his own blood. Sally needed a trocar from the central table and by an apparent chance Matron Mitchie was by her shoulder with such an implement.

Mitchie commanded the orderly to let the man lie on his back. Then she drove the wide-bore trocar needle into the man’s right chest cavity while ordering Sally to fetch rubber tubing and a kidney bowl—both of which someone of surpassing wisdom had placed on the equipment trolley in the ward’s midst. Mitchie murmured good girl when Sally, perhaps instantly—because it was all an instant, immune from the fall of seconds—arrived back with them. Blood began to flow into the kidney bowl Honora grasped. Then it overflowed. Let it. It stopped, then flowed again over Honora’s gloved hands. It was hopeless now. The soldier convulsed at an awful length of seconds, and that ended it. Mitchie nodded to Sally and Honora. Can’t be helped, she said. Clean yourselves up, ladies.

They ran to do it. They said nothing as they shed gloves and scrubbed in a basin at a nearby table. Orderlies were to replace these once used. But as a first sign of plans breaking apart, a basin of bloodied water stood unremoved on the table beside their basin.

The ward doctor pointed them to a further patient in their section of the vast barn of white space. They stepped amongst discarded and sullied bandages and scraps of uniform waiting on the deck and reached their new case, his jaw bound up. He must have been forty years when judged from his forehead and eyes, and his eyes were awfully calm. An eighth of a grain to begin with. After the easing off of bandages, bone fragments showed in the mess of the wound. The bullet must still be in there somewhere—netted by bone. What was he doing on that beach and fighting for the heights at his age? It seemed willful idiocy for him to be here—a determination to get away from something such as family or else undignified or uncertain work somewhere.

Captain Fellowes walked by, surgically coated, and inspected the long, explosive mess Sally had revealed and was swabbing, and looked for the degree of tooth and mandible loss and claimed him for surgery. Fellowes must believe that this mayhem could be fixed with screws and wire under anesthetics and with surgical tools passed to him by brave Staff Nurse Freud.

So what have we done for the wounded? Sally had a second to assess. But Mitchie directed them on. Sally was—in a sense—ready. She was bolstered by hearing Honora say to a patient, Look at me. Come. Look. Can you see me, my fine fellow? It sounded as if she were talking to someone concussed in a football match. He looked at her as if he recognized her, she said later, but realized she wasn’t the woman he expected to see and closed his eyes—done with the world of women. He was a man with a stomach wound who by some pointless mercy had not hemorrhaged to this moment. Crying for water he too was taken away to the theatre. Apart from him, the groans were less rowdy than the shrill suggestions of matron and doctor. This was strange and certainly a mystery.

Their orderly traveled around the ward with them wearing the same unreadable face as before. He looked world-worn but accustomed to labor, to lifting loads and digging hard soil. A young officer lay before them, his stomach swathed and wearing a soiled number 1 label from ashore and a red one Naomi had probably put on him. He was writhing and trembling, but with a sort of good-mannered lack of excess. Quarter grain, Mitchie instructed them, as he had not had any morphine—it seemed—since the shore. By the blood at his back, Sally saw another through-and-through wound. But when the dressing was rinsed off she saw a cavity created by something larger than a bullet—a shard of shrapnel, say—and edging from it an unexpected snake of the stomach lining named omentum, yellow amidst blood, lacy and frayed, hanging out of the slashed gut. While not letting go entirely of his surprisingly gentle hold on the baby lieutenant, the orderly Wilson turned his head aside and vomited on the deck and it seemed as if he might let go and clean it before someone of higher rank abused him for the mess. No, said Sally, leave it, Mr. Wilson.

He was older than she was and deserved the title.

Two beds away, Matron Mitchie called for orderlies to take the thoracic patient to the morgue. Where was the space for mourning in this air of blood and acrid wounds and unwashed men? Sally, Honora, and Wilson applied a Liston splint then to a man with a broken leg who had been knocked back into his trench by a glancing leg wound and who for some reason apologized to them for the ridiculous head-over-turkey act that had landed him here.

That was the lot for now. But the old rifles the Kaiser was said to have off-loaded onto the Turks had obviously not been entirely lacking in effect on the flesh of the legions of the good. At the end of the ward, nurses washed their hands at the basins refilled with water and disinfectant. They went to their mess, where a steward had placed tea and much buttered bread.

Great nurses us, eh, Sally? said Honora without seeming to grieve or ask for apology or consolation. We were busy, she continued, but we didn’t do much good.

She stood at the porthole through which morning had selectively begun to pastel her face.

Sally felt her own less expansive soul preparing to be inconsolable, but then there was a yell from a staff nurse in the door. A minesweeper was alongside with decks covered by stretcher cases.

In a few minutes—it seemed no more—all the cots on the hospital deck were filled. Men carried in were laid in their stretchers on metal floors. Orderlies were looking for pantries or small offices in which to lay down the men. The neat divisions of responsibility blurred under this torrent of the harmed. Only those who were used to dealing with confusion—those who could see through the turbulence because of having come, like Honora, from turbulent families—could have decided where to begin. And Mitchie herself and Sister Nettice too—who moved and spoke without panic—resolved bewilderment by calmly directing the traffic of stretchers.

The ship began to tremble to renewed thunders outside. Large guns were firing by land and sea. These furies may or may not have been directed at them. But Sally became used to that steel shiver. It was the barely noticed pulse behind what she now did. She seemed after an hour to have been feeling that tremor all her life.

And every time Sister Nettice or Matron saw a man weep fiercely for an inability to utter pain, morphine was ordered.

Where are you from, Sister? a pale older man with a chest wound demanded, looking up above his bandages for an announcement of the place name that might save him. There were more of such older men than she would have thought. Men who had known labor and had been aged and hollowed by it. Again her sister on the deck—the unseen Naomi—had chosen a red card of urgency to be pinned on him. Knowing by now that men were solaced by this plain geography game, Sally told him. The idea was this, so it seemed: while I am from one quiet shire and you from another, no harm will approach us. Those who discussed locations could not die. But she knew now there was no dealing with the thoracic wound. The victim and the nurses must accommodate themselves to it. It would accommodate no one.

I’m from Moonta from the mines there, he announced. I’m one of the lucky ones, he persisted with his blue lips barely flapping with breath amidst the graying pallor of a sun-leathered face. Just as well. God knew, see, that I’ve got a wife and three kids.

Even Wilson had to admit he was from somewhere named In-dooroopilly, the name sounding so fantastic that some decided to laugh. Wherever he was from, he was a good fellow. He nodded with her as the place names were told. She heard all the Enoggeras and Coonabarabrans, the Bungendores and Bunburys. Her own tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and was released only to utter one plain sentence.

You must get better then, she said.

Bathing with gauze the skull wound of a youth deeply unconscious and finding it full of grit, its edges of flesh brittle and darkening, she saw the inner membrane torn away, the dura, the pericranium—she beheld the naked brain. It astonished her and gave her too much pause. She had taken up scissors to cut away necrotic flesh when the colonel descended in his gown and claimed the boy.

The wheezer with three children was gone. He had lost his hold on conversation, and it didn’t matter anymore in his patch of Aegean where Moonta or the Macleay might be.

Sally knew something of the imperfections of men but those on this vast white deck continued to behave with a saintly forbearance. There were a few peevish cries from them of Nurse! Nurse! When you went to the caller, you might see panic in the face but were more likely to hear something almost fatuous. Very commonly the stupid thing said was that the patient had let his mates down by getting clipped, winged, hit, bowled base over turkey (as they put it even in their last etiquette of language).

Where did this sanctity come from? They couldn’t have had it before? Not the men who rampaged through Cairo upsetting stalls in the souk and yelling curses at the gyppos and doing bad imitations of British officers’ barked commands.

There was time for the nurses to take a meal in the mess, and all surprise was covered by gossip and stories and guesses. Naomi—down from the deck—sat looking so reflective and pale that Sally went to her and asked her how it all was up there. Naomi put a hand to her forehead and held it out interrogatively. She said, Sometimes there are so many at once it seems Hookes is just guessing at men’s conditions. And other times he’s so slow. I’m having to do half the work and I can’t always assess them properly… bad light, the general mess of their uniform and clothes… The orderlies are confused and have been putting the wrong tags on cases. It’s too much. Too much for the ship and the orderlies and Hookes. And for me. I’ve never been tested…

Sally kissed the crown of her head but then walked off as if by instinct—just to save Naomi from lapsing into dismay.

Carradine said that in the past few hours she had been put in the walking wounded officers’ ward. When she heard the others talk about the unlikely lack of screams and pleadings on the men’s deck, she said some of these officers are utter cowering and whimpering failures.

I’d cower, said Naomi from her place at the table with a sudden energy of conviction. I’d whimper.

Sally—with a mug of tea but no appetite on the other side of the table—frowned at this uncommon outburst and found herself reaching a hand across and patting Naomi’s just as if they were girls without a history. As they were now. It was the now—and not memory—that had cornered all the power over them.

I bet they were the ones, said Carradine, who cut a dash in Mena camp and in the bar at Shepheard’s. I bet they were heroes in the bar of the Parisiana.

Everyone was silent awhile. The men were wild in Egypt, Naomi said at last. But they are holy here. They’re like monks, dying. If it wasn’t so piteous it would be outright beautiful. Their wounds are the devil but their toughness is God.

An awed Honora suggested, Have you thought they might be better at this than they are at living contented in houses?

After lunch, Carradine later reported, Mitchie visited the officers’ walking wounded quarters and asked them—good fellows that they were—to treat her nurses with respect. They were not chambermaids nor private soldiers.

Carradine later told the others this—and that an Australian colonel, a broad-faced, good-looking but portly man, was in the corridor on crutches listening to her speech and now entered the room. His accent might be British but he had the sort of complexion you could get only under the Australian sun.

Good for you, Matron, he said. Go for the bleeders!

So by evening Carradine told the mess that some of the officers were decent people, and many walked who should have been on crutches.

At some ill-defined hour they returned to their stations. Outside—for inscrutable reasons—shelling had paused. Dressings needed changing again. Wounds irrigated. Pulses taken. Recurrent morphine doses given. To Sally the swabbing and dressing was more like a preoccupying mercy to herself rather than the soldier. By these exercises she kept saneness amidst the stench and the weighty tang of blood. The customary nature of these small ceremonies of nursing kept her eyes from taking in the broader scope of injury from bulkhead to bulkhead.

On a cot before them now lay a man whose wound once unban-daged showed a face that was half steak, and no eyes. The lack of features made his age impossible to guess. He had a young chest though—it was naked. Even mercy was bewildered here. In a fresh surgical gown Captain Fellowes appeared and let out a little professional groan that declared this degree of harm beyond his powers. Wilson held the man’s head by the intact side and Honora cleaned his face. The murderous streak in Sally emerged here. This man should be given three grains of morphine to save him from the improbability of what had befallen him.

He lived on. Others died with a sigh or strenuous gurgle and were carried away by orderlies, their places taken by others from above decks. All pinafores were bloodstained and there was no time to change. Mitchie moved down this deck herself in stained apron, and her air of purpose told you that this was all usual—this havoc could be reduced to order in the end.

Good girls! she called out in a busy but undistracted voice. The chief noise other than the shiver and now and then complaint of the ship’s steel walls came from orderlies holding the handles of stretchers. They demanded room for their present burden of man and searched angrily for places to drop it. In that time they shouted and raged with questions and profane advice. They too had not thought they would be engaged in such events or would see their ship transformed so suddenly. And their knowledge of things had also been expanded beyond the reasonable. You knew therefore that some dropped the wounded too hard or at unlucky angles in which splintered bone might cut open arteries, or a shell fragment plugging veins or arteries be shifted by some minor nudge that let the dammed-up blood flow.

One man—younger than Sally—wept as she and Honora tended him because he had seen his brother killed. But unexpectedly he howled for the agony of his wound. Whatever chemicals of shock protected some men from pain had not flowed in this boy. Honora stayed on her knees pulling muck from the flesh beneath his ribs.

What is your name? Honora asked.

Peter, said the boy. And Edgar, my brother. How will I write?

Sally went to the trolley to collect the quarter grain his grief and pain entitled him to, and there was none. Then in the dressings room she found a rubber-capped solution bottle with dregs left and many used needles scattered about it. She came back with a hypodermic containing an eighth—she had felt bound to leave the dregs of the dregs for other men. Once he was soothed Honora drew the calipers from the wound.

At some hour all peroxide, all iodine too were gone. Orderlies came round with bread and “bully” beef and pannikins of tea for those wounded who could eat.

Good girls, good girls, said Mitchie passing amongst them.

Sally went on cleaning the flinching wounds and dragged the muck of the Dardanelles and the uniform out of holes in jaws and legs or from places close to the heart or from the neck—on the pretext of saving men for a disfigured life or even afterlife. With morphine gone, the distress of the injured was getting louder. The amputees—legs and arms lost ashore or in the theatres of the Archimedes—were some of them observant of the scene around and seemed ready to give bright-eyed if feverish assessments on the skills of the workers. When Sally and other nurses had eased the stumps clear and swabbed the sutures they saw some of these wounds had rubber drains emerging and others were stitched up fully to keep their inner processes secret. Therein lay a controversy of surgical procedure.

Hookes—it was said—was going by launch to surrounding transports and a British hospital ship begging for morphine. He came back with some too. It was to be rationed.

An Indian in a turban—wounded in the side—told her what an honor it was to be nursed by a memsahib.

From a further barge nudging alongside came walking men—jaunty—with their shattered or punctured upper bodies. She believed she could predict how they would behave—she felt she had encountered them a hundred times before, as if her memory and history was completely what had happened in one night and a day and was now set to recur forever without pause or surprise. New stretchers now. Where? Where? the orderlies howled.

Earlier, the brain. And now the heart. They were working with Dr. Hookes, down from the deck. When at his orders Sally eased the surgical dressing away from a right breast with forceps, they all saw for a few seconds the wondrous upper outline of the heart. Air sucked into that revealing cavity and releasing itself with a terrible low whistling. They pushed on the wound with pads and Hookes left to inspect other arrivals, writing this one off.

Later—dazed—some women were washing themselves at communal tubs near their cabins. They had stripped to their shifts, but the smell of blood had penetrated even as far as skin. Without false modesty they undressed and swabbed all the taints from their breasts and bellies. Naomi appeared, her eyes stark ovals. Though newly washed, Sally herself went to her and they embraced with a fierceness impossible to imagine somewhere normal—in some place where shared crimes counted. It has taken horror, Sally thought, to make us sisters.

I was so bad at it, said Naomi, beginning to sob. I was so bad at it.

They got lethal wounds ashore you know, said Sally, soothing the back of her sister’s head. And not by you.

None of this is at an end, said Naomi.

Half-naked across the floor—and leaning bare shouldered against the wall—Carradine was also weeping. The fact that her husband was ashore, and today, gave her the sense that no one there could live.

We’ve all killed men today and yesterday, Sally confided to her sister. The orderlies killed men. Surgeons killed men—you can be sure. We were all out of our depth. But the ship’s full now.

Going on duty to the hospital deck again, Sally intercepted Mitchie who was passing and made a pleading she did not even know she would make until an instant before.

Don’t put my sister on triage again. It’s really distressed her.

Mitchie leveled her eyes at her. How astounding that she should not have slept at all yet still have the means to extend a hand and say, Well, she has nothing to reproach herself for.

And then Mitchie said, Would you do it? By would, I mean, are you halfway trained?

Terror filled Sally. Look, said Mitchie, triage at a Sydney hospital is not like triage here. You must be willing to take a sane attitude. Can you?

She nodded.

Take the colored cards and go now.

Mitchie told Naomi some saving lie and left her below to work with Carradine amongst the walking wounded. On a bright and crowded morning deck gusted by an offshore breeze there were orderlies but no doctor. Hookes had now been conscripted below. A barge lay beside and cradles were being lowered to it. For the moment Sally was alone with colored cards in her hands and a sense of rawest and clumsiest knowledge. As well as all else there were detonations from ashore again, and shells aimed at ships around. This fire impressed a person more here in the open and made sure that you understood you were part of their business.

The lean sergeant named Kiernan who had a knowledge of Greek islands was there and raised his head a margin to greet her and allow her his brotherhood. Out on the bright sea yet another barge—on which Englishmen in pith helmets swayed on their feet in the bows—was edging across her vision. There were barges at all places—attached to the sides of ships like piglets on sows. They were at troopships which had just delivered more armed men to great Moloch ashore. It was obvious that this was not the way things were meant to happen. In what Sally had read, the disasters of empires took centuries to ripen. Here it had all matured in days.

A new Turkish barrage of shells arrived, howling, and displaced the Aegean’s surface water into fountains whose spray—Sally was sure—reached her face on the main deck. The great missiles bracketed a British cruiser a bare four hundred yards off and the detonations conveyed their power through the water. A few seconds later, she heard an orderly say in the hollow quiet—in the hope the whisper would reach powers beyond the Archimedes—I wish that bloody cruiser would move.

And, grateful for its luck, it did begin by inches to turn its bows and seek a new location to test out the Turkish gunners all over again. But then she could see that a launch and its tow—a barge full of damaged men—had become separated, the cable that connected them cut by a piece of shell. The swamped and torn-apart barge was sinking. Men floated face down or seemed to be waving sodden bandages like a flag signal. Oh Christ, said orderlies. Oh Jesus, oh Mother of God. For what of abdominals and thoracics and amputees in that stinging water? Where was mercy there? Other barges and the launch whose line to the sunken vessel had been cut began to nose about the area and sailors began to drag at the floating wounded with boat-hooks, throwing out lifebuoys and leaning over the bulwarks, extending both hands to those who still had the power to reach.

On the Archimedes’s deck, men from an intact barge were now being winched up in cradles four at a time to make their own demands. The first crate carrying a cot case drew level with her and was dragged down onto the deck by men under Kiernan’s orders. The soldier had a head wound and bore the normal filthy number 1. When his stretcher was lifted out of the cradle, his gaze was wild and unknowing. He would never remember his rise up the flanks of the Archimedes. He might never remember anything. Sally attached the red card to him. The color game!

Put him forward near the theatres, she told the orderlies, not that she knew if there was room forward. She wondered if she would want to give each of them a mothering red until the reds ran out and the anesthetics and morphine. She felt the panic Naomi had on the bad-lit deck last night, all alone in authority over the shades of life and death that were so hard to tell from each other.

Wounds smelled. But she worked hard and without too much doubt. The cases arrived in numbers and she felt competent at numbers.

There were four cradles at work on the stretcher cases. With a part of her vision she could see orderlies signaling to the winch men on the upper deck to ease off on the handles and then they were swinging her candidates for triage on the deck, one every few instants, it seemed. Stretchers were accumulating. She speeded up. A quick reading of the label applied by the casualty clearing station doctor and a mere touch of the pulse, that was all. Kiernan—moving in to apply a blue tag to a boy of perhaps sixteen years who was bare-chested except for bandages—murmured, We can do only what we can do, Nurse.

Later she thought there could not be a more obvious thing to say, but it seemed utterly novel to her then—a new first principle mined by Kiernan’s cleverness. A spate of walking English—Tommies in their quaint music-hall pith helmets—all seemed to say, Hello, Nurse, as they were asked to settle themselves in the shade along the open deck. One of them had it in him to bow, but in a kind of cockney mockery that was all right by her.

At an hour of the day she could not have named—there was not even time to consult the watch her parents had given her—the cot cases had suddenly been all taken down. The variously afflicted walkers sitting in patient exhaustion by the railing now came forward. Shell splinters in arm or leg or shoulder, bullets in soft tissue or peripheral bone. Orderlies had however been serving them pannikins of tea—the grand sustainer, a remedy itself and promise of further remedy. One man with his mid-face wrapped in bandages said in brittle, feverish humor, Nose shot off by some bludging Turk, Nurse. Wasn’t my best feature anyhow!

He too had been lucky by fractions of inches in his distance from some propellant or other.

She dealt then with the men from the barge. Slattery told her that below on the crowded, enormous hospital deck, they had hauled Dr. Hookes off to the theatre and he’d looked like someone summoned to the gallows.

Through opened portholes the sun struck this man and that as if bent on dazzling them to their graves. But there was a different thunder now. It was the sound of the anchor chain rising. Everyone seemed to pause, the nurses at their hectic stations and the wounded in their anguish.

Half the nurses went back to work in the night reverberating with the Archimedes’s deep-set engines. To see who slept first, they drew numbers from a soldier’s slouch hat Mitchie brought round. The fortunate—Sally included—fell into bunks so oblivious they were confused as to where they were when aroused the next dawn. Before rest they took turns at the basins and perhaps for the one time in their lives hitched their nightdresses in common for a brisk cleansing between the legs.

By morning the morgue was overcrowded. Men were committed to the sea. And at their tea break there was a sort of hissing girlish mutter amongst some—a particular sniping expression had come to several faces. One of them was Honora’s. Honora—it would need to be said—had not slept for more than forty hours and had become mean and in-the-know and au fait. Something bitter and catty was arising—all the more because they were smashed with tiredness. Freud entered with her dark, large eyes rimmed with exhaustion after hours as theatre nurse. She looked pale and stayed by the door as if she were waiting for a welcome from one of her sisters to bring her completely into the mess.

Are you still under the influence of the chloroform fumes, Karla? Honora asked with a squinting intent before Karla could find a seat. Freud shook her head and looked at the coven of knowing women at the table.

No. Sorry, she said. Just distracted.

She yawned.

Singing any songs lately? asked Honora.

Where did that edge she had now come from? Her eyes were suddenly ablaze with ill feeling. Beside Honora, Leonora Casement stood up with tear-streaked eyes and left the mess. The tears were an assertion particular to her and nothing to do with the hours of peculiar nursing labor they had all been involved in.

What’s this all about? asked Freud, though she could not choke back the yawn that overcame her.

I believe you’re singing to the surgeons.

What? That’s ridiculous.

Honora blazed. In falsetto she sang, “Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary…”

Are you barking for yourself? asked Freud with a new iciness, or are you someone else’s watchdog?

Captain Fellowes likes it a lot, I believe, and has told people so. He is suddenly song struck. I’d keep it up if I were you. You might net him yet.

And then it all developed.

Freud: Tell me what you’re saying.

Honora: You choose what to make of it.

Freud: I want to know, Honora.

Honora: You can have any man. They all sit at your feet. Leo has the one who’s fixed as the pole star. And you’re trying to unfix it.

To hell with you, Freud told her.

She had a fine rage, Sally thought. Her stark eyes showed she was no average opponent. Do you know where I’ve been the last two days?

Same place as all of us, said Honora. Except you’ve been serenading blokes blown to pieces.

What if I were asked to sing, to calm the patient?

Naomi stood up all at once. She was rigid and intent.

Bloody well stop it! she yelled.

It was not typical. Sally had never heard from her such a roar and even for the others it had total authority. Freud and Honora were brought to a stop by this fury.

Don’t you remember? There are men hemorrhaging—internal and external—while you squeal at each other. There are men hemorrhaging, for dear God’s sake!

Honora’s high feelings were all at once punctured. The anger she had accumulated on Leo’s behalf seemed to drain from her, and the chance of tears of regret or repentance arose. Freud took her own dark-faced, unappeased place at the table.

If only you knew about me, Freud told Honora.

But Honora looked like a person who has just woken up to the fact she’s betrayed herself. She was willing now to let Freud be whatever she chose. She could not concede it, of course. That wasn’t her nature.

Sally slept two hours in the early morning and—wide awake then—put on a fresh white blouse and skirt and shoes without stockings and went on deck. It was a brilliant, kindly, salmon dawn. It did not seem to deny any of its children its even blessing, and there was no other ship and no spine of land in view. The rest of the world had made such a claim for so long that it was hard at a level beyond reason to work out where it’d all gone to. A man at the railing—tall, in loose uniform—stood upright as a courtesy to the new presence. He was smoking a Turkish cigarette. At home they had changed enemy names. But—as far as she knew—Turkish cigarettes were still Turkish.

Now—seeing it was a nurse—he yielded up the railing, even though there was no one else there to compete for its entire length. He was getting ready to walk off.

Sergeant Kiernan, she said.

That’s right, Nurse. Caught smoking. Don’t tell my parents.

He had dark hair, wind raked and so a little unmilitary. And his gaze was direct, as if there was still a lot of civilian in him. He had even, long features, no Irish or Scottish freckles. It was the sort of face people described as “honest” when they meant it didn’t quite manage to be handsome.

So, she said, Alexandria then? Someone said Malta, though, because Alexandria’s full.

No, Alex, he nodded.

He turned only his head to scan the deck. He knew that at the official level he was not supposed to fraternize with nurses. But the scales that measured infraction were missing for the moment.

He said, I don’t like to call an ancient place like that by a short name, “Alex.” Almost an insult. Such an old, old city. It deserves its title.

She admitted she was fussy herself about using short forms. I hate it when they call a surgical operation an “op,” she said. And the Mediterranean is much too deep and wide to be the “Med.”

I’d say it was, he agreed. Your name is Durance, Nurse, isn’t it?

He crushed out his cigarette but placed its remains in his jacket pocket. So he hadn’t repented of it yet. Also—she was sure—he was embarrassed to toss it into the fabled Mediterranean.

I think that’s a pretty fine name, he said. I mean, if you put an “en” in front of it, you have one of the most flattering of words.

He saw at once that “flattering” was going too far for her tastes.

Well, if not flattering, he admitted, then at least sturdy.

She smiled. It was, after all, a soother of a word. En-durance. This wasn’t the first time the obvious point had been made, of course. Old Dr. Maddox was just one who’d noted it. A few teachers had played on it too when she didn’t understand mathematics or got the order of the coastal rivers of New South Wales wrong.

I doubt I want to carry a motto for a name, she confessed. It’s better to have something people can just take or leave.

Like Kiernan, he said and smiled. Common Irish name. Slides right past people. Australia’s full of Kiernans. Hordes in America too. I mean the family is Irish. But my grandfather became a Friend—I mean a capital F Friend—when he saw the work the Quakers were doing in the west of Ireland.

She could not comment. There were no Quakers in the Macleay.

I have taken to filthy tobacco, he said, only since Egypt. I intend to renounce it though. I have, thank God, stayed teetotal. When I’ve been most tempted there hasn’t been anything around except surgical alcohol—which isn’t a good place to start. But that has sometimes been a near thing. I was amazed. No brandy on the Archimedes. Not this trip. They should rectify that for the next trip. I saw a few fellows who needed it.

Then he turned his face back to the sea and made up his mind to go silent. He clearly thought he might have traveled too far in conversation.

Just to keep things going—as she wanted to—she herself played the geography game. He had mentioned the University of Melbourne earlier. Was he from that city? she asked.

Like all people from Melbourne, he rushed to say he was. Melbourne, he affirmed. South Yarra. A city boy. No hardihood at all. You can tell the hardy people. I bet you’re from the bush. The land doesn’t always sustain people but it does teach all its children to have a certain robust air.

That’s city talk, she told him. There’s no nobility in milking cows. And they would pretty soon complain, the farmers and their wives, if they thought they’d be listened to. It’s the lack of a complaints department that makes people look hard. And it ages people as well. South Yarra. Is that nice? Broad streets? Trees?

Copper beeches, he said. And the river near where we live.

We have a river too. But it floods.

And so it does test you, after all.

It makes us take the cattle uphill. It makes some people sit on their roofs, and sometimes it drowns people. And so they fail the test you’re raving about, Sergeant. En-durance!

Struth, he said like a non-Quaker. You know how to wing a man.

She laughed. That sounds like another girl altogether, she thought. So she decided to go easier.

Now, where did you learn about these places? I mean these around here.

School, he said.

Well, she told him, I left at the end of my third year of the high school. I learned a tiny piece of French. Plume de ma tante. And the angles on the square of the hypotenuse. That was about the lot. So where did you get all your knowledge?

All my knowledge? There’s no all about it. There could be more, if I hadn’t been such a clown when I was thirteen, fourteen. A wildness came out in me. My father blamed an uncle who was a drunk. However, there was a Classics master, wonderful fellow, splendid cricketer, all boys adored him—you’ve heard the story. He taught me to read Latin and Greek. And, you know, I fought him but loved it at the same time. Greek I was lazy at, but I relished knowing the alphabet, and it worked pretty well as a code for messages I wrote to other subversive boys. So I was much taken with the Greek world. And here we are in it. But I never thought it would contain what is on this ship.

Then university? she asked.

I’ll admit to that, as long as you don’t make much of it when there are all these doctors aboard. They’ve graduated, some from Guy’s Hospital or Trinity or Edinburgh. High-school scholarship isn’t a lot of use here. It’s my honor to be a carrier of water—boiled if I can manage it—and a bearer of stretchers and linen.

No, you have leadership, Sergeant. You should be an officer.

I would never be an officer, he said, shaking his head. I have some convictions that prevent that.

He took a glance at the strengthening light and consulted his watch and excused himself. But he had somehow returned her to a settled state with the sort of palaver and primness that had characterized Lieutenant Maclean at the pyramids.

Did the Archimedes’s crowded decks and floors and corridors render it a ship of groans on the approach to Egypt? The supplies were teased out and young soldiers swallowed complaint in their peculiar way. And much had been learned—enough for despair and enough for improvement.

Near Alexandria the Archimedes emerged from a haze above limpid water and saw the East Harbor far off with the old fortress at its root to endow it with a remnant of historic authority. Across the harbor the fabled city looked bleary. Briefly on deck Sally felt none of the stir of arrival and none of the usual urgency to get ashore and see wonders by daylight. The great white mansions and hotels did not look connected to earth.

The lesser wounded were marshaled on the shaded starboard deck where it was cool to the point of chilliness. Some with blankets around their shoulders were at the rails. Others sat, sipping tea from enamel mugs, seeming sicker and paler and barely more pleased with arrival than she was. Of course they had had their shock as well. They had lost the wholeness of their bodies. Bacteria were working in their wounds and keeping them in suspense.

She went below to the wards again. Near the main stairs Naomi worked at washing a soldier, and the others about to come off duty were variously busy. The squall about Karla Freud’s enchanting of surgeons was over and everyone—even Leonora—had chosen to write it off to the surprise of events and exhaustion. Honora seemed to have forgotten her own venom.

Sally could tell by looking at Naomi there had been a change that might last a time. She had not in a lifetime looked fraught but now had a peculiar, harried frown on her face. With that there, Sally could no longer envy her. The first night’s triage had swept away all her smoothness and her air of knowing. Had she ever seen a rifle wound at Royal Prince Alfred? It was unlikely.

Nurses washed men and re-dressed wounds for the departure. There was something left in them that wanted nurses in hospitals ashore to marvel at what had been achieved at sea.

When it was reported ambulances were on the wharf, Mitchie was sent on deck to manage traffic and took Sally with her. The lights on the wharf burned biliously in the hazed night. As the two women appeared on deck, some walking cases rushed the gangway and—once down on the wharf—moved between trucks and ambulances like men looking for taxis.

No more of that, Mitchie announced. Other walkers, smoking by bulkheads and waiting for stretcher-case friends to be unloaded, disapproved of the stampeders with dark utterances of Bloody awful way to act!

The red-ticketed appeared—mute on their stretchers—and were put in cradles and winched down. The sight of them being loaded into ambulances was so pleasing to Sally that she felt a form of joy. We have managed to deliver them—that was her jubilant thought. Every man descending by winch or stairs now consoled and invigorated her.

Mitchie made a decision that Freud—no longer needed in the theatre—should be fetched and sent ashore to see that the loading occurred in correct order. There were no doctors to do it, for they were still working in the wards. Sally watched Freud’s back and veil descend the gangway and then saw her enlist the aid of a young officer. Together they made trucks and ambulances wheel and edge beneath the sickly light and turn for the city. They struggled by quarter inches past vehicles arriving and choking the route to the city’s military hospitals. Some military policeman gifted in initiative took a stand and held the returning vehicles for now and let the waiting ones escape. If he did nothing else for the business of war and brotherhood, thought Sally, he had done enough.

When the last stretcher had been lowered, Sally went below to feel and hear and smell the echoing deck. She fetched a bucket of carbolic and joined the nurses scrubbing surfaces. Blankets were folded and sheets soiled with blood and excrement collected for an intense boiling somewhere. The meaty smell of wounds still competed here with the sharpness of carbolic.

Making Friends

They were oblivious in their cabin—profoundly unaware of their own breath—when a polite but not-to-be-denied knocking on the door awoke them. Half-conscious in her upper bunk, Sally saw night-gowned Honora answer it. Because events had in a sense concussed her, Sally could not have safely named the time or the day or the place. It was Mitchie at the door and fully dressed. She had a telegram for Carradine. While Mitchie waited on with narrowed eyes in the doorway, Honora roused Carradine from her bunk.

The news soon broke in all the cabins, of course. Carradine’s husband was a casualty. He was in Alexandria—brought by one of the transports—and located somewhere named the British Fifteenth General Hospital. All the women rose and dressed quickly, fussing over Carradine. Girls with aghast eyes came in from other cabins. Carradine was flustered—given that “casualty” could mean so many things. But they were all solidly with her. Leonora kissed her cheek. The meanness of a few days back—if any had lingered at all—had been utterly borne away by Carradine’s stricken eyes and the fact that somewhere ashore was a wound whose owner they knew.

Mitchie had a truck for them. At the commandeered hotel and now British General Hospital near the old fortress, a clerk told Carradine, Mitchie, and three other nurses who had escorted Carradine from the truck that this was indeed the Fifteenth General Hospital and Lieutenant Carradine was on the list. But he could in fact be in any one of four or five places—convents and Greek mansions—overflow branches of this one.

Carradine stood by in her gray uniform with her face gray as well. Under Mitchie’s intense gaze, the man decided to write out the addresses of the other hospitals. Mitchie took the list in her hand and waved it like a guarantee. They returned to the truck. As she settled herself on the hard bench opposite Carradine, Mitchie said, You must realize, dear girl, that this cable is signed not by some flunky, but a British brigadier. This would mean to me that your husband is being attended to at the most exalted level. They do not want to let down his distinguished father. That should be a matter of some hope.

They drove southeast, away from the sea, along a European-style boulevard towards a great parkland where an ornate building with old-fashioned curlicues and flourishes—a place now absorbed by military necessity—declared itself by an engraved legend over the main gate to be the Australian Hospital for Women. They got down and went inside the gate and up the path to search. The gardens were full of untended walking wounded smoking and chatting and contrasting their histories. Once inside, the women introduced themselves to British orderlies at desks. As Mitchie negotiated, the women spotted an occasional British nurse whose eyes glided across theirs and they felt comforted that the same bewilderment which had earlier afflicted them was here as well.

There was no Lieutenant Carradine in this place. They traveled eastwards now, past the ancient city. No interest in the meaning of ruined columns and tumbled stone was roused in them. As the road swung back to the coast and glitter of sea, their driver pulled up at what had been a French convent—Les Soeurs du Sacré Coeur. Beyond the gate, they saw that marquees had been set up in the garden and men on stretchers had accumulated amongst the shrubs. Mitchie and Carradine and the others entered the office of the former convent and the clerk identified Lieutenant Carradine’s name. Are you all going up there? he asked, not having the authority to stop a matron.

Outside the office, Mitchie suggested only she and Carradine should go on upstairs to conclude the search. The rest should wait down here in the smell of new paint. Young nurses rushed by on their way into the garden or from the garden into the house. The women left behind felt odd and superfluous and lost for somewhere to stand.

They would find out that for Mitchie and Carradine it concluded thus: Carradine found her husband on the wide upper balcony above the garden, lying in clean linen but with a stained dressing on his head. A young doctor was leaning over him inspecting his eyes and pulling a lower eyelid down. This is my husband, Carradine told him.

Aug, said Lieutenant Carradine at the sight of her. Aag gaut nair.

They would all—when they eventually visited him—hear him speak in these terms. Oh be quiet, Eric, she said, falling down on her knees beside his bed and kissing his chin. But he would not. His brain had been roused and sent on the wrong tangent and he refused to cease speaking in tongues.

It’s normal, the young medical officer told her, as if he’d seen this phenomenon through a long clinical life. It’s normal for head wounds.

Yes, it is, said Mitchie at Carradine’s shoulder.

Daug ack raga, said Lieutenant Carradine and began to weep.

No, said Carradine. No. Don’t cry.

Mitchie went and at Carradine’s urging let the other women come in one at a time. When Sally’s turn came, the lieutenant was sleeping uneasily and with a face utterly pale. He pleaded once in his sleep. Au rog, he said.

None of them stayed long. Nothing could be said. They left Carradine there with her husband.

There were other nurses who lived splendidly at the Beau Rivage Hotel. But the Archimedes remained the home in port of Mitchie’s women. They were meant to do their routine work and have their siestas and go ashore to take a cab and see those things they’d flitted by in their seach for Lieutenant Carradine—the Caesarium, which Cleopatra was said to have built out of love, and Pompey’s Pillar and all the rest. Nurse Carradine had other urgencies. Mitchie was stuck between not mentioning Carradine’s marriage to those in power while getting her privileges because her husband was wounded and uttering gibberish. Somehow—during the previous night—the permission had arrived for Carradine to special her husband—to devote herself to his care. She wanted them to visit him, she said, and speak to him so that his brain reaccustomed itself to normal talk. She packed a bag and rushed with Mitchie to take an ambulance to the Sacré Coeur.

From the mess table, where oatmeal and tea and peacetime crockery steamed amidst dishes of boiled eggs and French-style rolls of a kind no baker in Australia made, four of them—Naomi, Nettice, Freud, and Sally—descended the gangway. That day the air was suddenly clear and pleasantly cool, and the city defined itself in sharper lines beyond the mole. With the help of a British military policeman they found a taxi, and told the driver their destination. It was the Sacré Coeur. For they felt they must accede to Carradine’s call to speak to her confused husband before they did anything else.

They got there and entered the garden where the marquees did not now seem quite the sight of confusion they had been yesterday. In the lobby they saw Mitchie introducing herself to an exhausted-looking and restive matron. Mitchie declared that one of her nurses was here specialing a relative, a Lieutenant Carradine, whose father was known throughout the Empire as a notable statesman of the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth? asked the matron. Do you have Cromwell down there in Australia or something?

Mitchie let it go—it was just a kind of frankness minus eight hours’ sleep. They were familiar, said Mitchie, with the arrival of a mass of wounded men, and had been through the same thing themselves on the Archimedes hospital ship. They didn’t want to take her time. They knew where Lieutenant Carradine was. What if she took Staff Nurse Carradine up there and introduced her to the ward sister. All the paperwork, she said, had already been handed in at the office.

The four nurses waited like applicants for a job inside the door. They felt superfluous and tried to make themselves small and—but for Carradine—thought of leaving.

Matron, said an English nurse coming up and addressing the British matron. She wore no red cape. General Archibald has arrived.

A group of officers, one of whom wore the red tabs appropriate to a general—his uniform and those of his entourage without stain and their leathers from Sam Browne to boots unscathed by the fracas across the Mediterranean—entered the hospital and the British matron nodded to them and led them up the steps. General Archibald was—as they would discover—a legend in British neurology, and on his way by request of the Foreign Office to inspect Lieutenant Carradine’s head wound.

In his wake—discreetly—followed Mitchie and Carradine.

It came to Sally’s turn to visit Lieutenant and Staff Nurse Carradine on the balcony. It happened that though he slept, his dressings were temporarily off and the ripe wound discharged pus. Carradine sensed Sally’s shadow and turned and with a small raise of her gloved left fingers indicated the hole in her husband’s—or as the British matron possibly thought, her brother’s—head.

It was a very dirty wound, said Carradine in a low voice. But Sir Geoffrey Archibald says he will talk and walk again.

The foulness of the wound cast its doubt over the blithe opinion of Sir Archibald.

Help me dress it, will you? There are gloves on the trolley.

Sally fetched and donned the gloves and rejoined Carradine and her husband. She lifted the head a little from the pillow as Carradine began to swaddle it in fresh bandages. A young man in a halter of bandages and one arm in a sling emerged from the door to the veranda. Over his shoulders he wore a lightweight officer’s jacket with one pip on it and “Australia” on the shoulders. He had a precocious moustache, grown before the rest of the face had achieved the seniority to justify it. He looked feverish as so many did.

Miss Durance? he asked in familiar accent. I found out by accident you were here.

She faced him and said hello and asked how he was.

Have to say I felt a bit chirpier a year back, said the young man.

His eyes looked as if they were rimmed with soot. He told her, I regret to say… you might have heard… Captain Ellis Hoyle took a knock on the second day. Did you know? I’d hate to be the bearer…

She kept her hold on the back of Lieutenant Carradine’s head. Carradine kept briskly winding the bandage.

I didn’t know, Sally said. But my sister…

He was clear-headed to the finish, you know. He gave me something he wanted you to keep.

He reached into his pocket and produced a silver watch.

It has his name, you see, on the back.

He had the look of a man who was already looking forward to a rest after this task was done. It was painful to tell him it wasn’t.

Oh, she said. But it isn’t me—I’m sorry. It’s my sister who knew Captain Hoyle. She’s somewhere in this building. If you’re tired I’ll hand it on to her.

A shadow came over his face. He lowered his eyes. Look… kind of you. But he asked me to do it and I reckon I should.

He seemed to consult himself again on this proposition.

Yes, he concluded. That seems to be the fair thing.

And he nodded and drifted through into the ward, looking for a corridor to take him to Naomi.

Carradine murmured, Poor Hoyle. Half of them gone in a few days! You know—the teatime group. The Sphinx group. Maclean’s dead too. The lieutenant.

Sally went on supporting Eric Carradine’s neck. A child is dead, she thought. None of Maclean’s earnest boyish theorems would ever be tested. She considered yielding to tears on his behalf. But there was nowhere to put them. Both her hands were full of Eric Carradine.

Carradine finished the dressing and pinned it and Sally gently lowered the head. Lieutenant Carradine woke and said, Aag. Bewl. Carradine hushed him and touched his cheek. He gave one bleat and sank asleep again.

Carradine said, Did Maclean…?

No, honestly. But Maclean was a boy. He hadn’t worked out what he knew. That makes it sadder.

Carradine nodded. Sally collected herself. Carradine said, I didn’t know Naomi was so… you know… so keen on Hoyle.

Sally didn’t either.

A sly one, said Carradine. We’re joining some of the other girls at five, for tea at the Beau Rivage. Will you be in it?

Sally was there—but not Naomi. Officers came up and offered to take them to dinners. Some of the nurses consented. There was something too Maclean-ish about these men, and Sally made her excuses. Freud took up an invitation from a major and did not insist he take others with him for her protection. She was her own protector—that was the air she gave off.

As if to amuse them Freud said, Not to raise our little quarrel again. But you might be interested to know I was nearly stuck with a surgeon. I was about to marry a surgeon from Melbourne. Bornstein—you can look him up. My whole family was in an ecstasy apart from me. Thank God for the war, that’s what I thought. No more listening to my aunties’ Yiddish lamenting. “A girl who can spurn such good fortune…”

So, might she be really telling them, I do not intend to get easily tangled with any surgeon again, or with stray majors taking me to dinner?

Now they were going back—without Carradine—on a sea that had chosen to be rough and under a steel-gray canopy of cloud. These deeps no longer beckoned either to heroes of history or to boys from the bush or anywhere else. Sally was on deck because Naomi had asked her to meet up there in a squall when even the orderlies had given up the effort of keeping their fags alight and gone below. Naomi must have had to struggle with the door onto the deck, yet was all at once silently there. Her hair was blowing out from under her cap. She had not been at the tea party at the Beau Rivage. Everyone knew she had chosen not to be there because of the Ellis Hoyle news.

So, I have Ellis’s watch, Naomi announced into the wind. I believe, she continued, the young fellow offered it to you first.

Yes, said Sally.

Naomi’s lips began to work like an older woman’s—accommodating such an intimate and unlikely gift from the dead.

I don’t have any idea, said Naomi, why he’d want me to have it. There are even nods and winks. He’s dead. He’s killed. And yet girls say things like, You two were sly, weren’t you? As if he was still here and sticking around as a quiet mover. And if poor old Ellis and I were sly and were secretly set for each other, then they know I must be pretty upset. They get solemn and creep around me. Which I can’t stand.

Sally reached out to put a hand on Naomi’s shoulder. Naomi looked her full in the face in return but all the airiness of an innate seniority had gone from her. She asked, Why would he do it? Send me a watch? And a watch with a gold chain on it too. All that stands for. And… poor man… who am I to say no to it anyhow? But we weren’t… we just weren’t… And that’s flat.

Maybe men aren’t clear in the head when they’re shot, Sally offered.

Naomi set her eyes on the middle air. She said, A machine-gunner killed him and the others, I hear, but the watch is running on. Not a dent.

This was a strangeness that weighed on her.

Don’t read too much into it, eh, Sally urged her. He just thought of it. A gift for a friend. That’s all. It’s not as if it weighs a ton. And you can put it in your kit and forget it. Or send it to his parents.

Where are they? Naomi asked petulantly. I don’t know.

We can find out when we’re next in Alexandria. There’d be military records.

He talked to me no more than he did to Honora, murmured Naomi. He might’ve decided he wanted to be closer. But I didn’t choose he should.

When you’re a dying being, God knows what will come to your mind. And what seemed little beforehand might all at once seem large. Anyhow, don’t you think the poor fellow’s entitled to send you his effects? The dying have their rights…

Naomi did not believe it and put her long splayed hand to the side of her face as a kind of denial.

Then if you don’t want it, Sally said in a half-annoyed way, why don’t you toss it over the side? Give it a burial at sea?

You know I couldn’t do that.

Sally imagined the ticking mechanism tumbling over itself in the famous water. They both stared at the uneven, blank waves. But it was clear to Sally that what seemed easy to her was a mountain to Naomi.

Again, the Business

There was a tentative feeling in the nurses’ mess, a different air than on the first journey. The women had no reason to think that on Gallipoli, off the Dardanelles, the Hellespont, and all the other names that hung over the geography of the murders and manglings, the abattoirs had closed down for a second. It was normal hospital shifts and bed-making with unspotted linen while the orderlies scrubbed and Leonora watched Captain Fellowes walk slowly through—casually inspecting—as much calculation in her face as longing. Leo was too strong-minded or practical a girl to pine.

Now there was more of the necessary things—where on the first journey two Primus stoves had been placed in the sterilizing room, there were now eight of them. Autoclaves were promised. Orderlies were hauling boxes of a new local anesthetic drug named Novocain into the storage forward. “Novo” seemed to bespeak newness. Maybe it had power to change the whole equation when they anchored and the barges and sweepers came alongside.

As on the second afternoon, when they neared the peninsula, the doctors stood in an earnest conference at the forward part of the hospital deck. They had a new ward doctor and were proposing to use Lieutenant Dr. Hookes as a surgeon again if that were necessary. Freud—despite and because of her singing of tunes from “I Won’t Be An Actor No More” to “Little Tommy Murphy”—had a strict mind when it came to the surgical theatre and would continue there.

Captain Fellowes was to be looked to as a man unaltered by that first chaotic journey. He and Mitchie approached Sally while she was on an errand to the pan room and she saw calm assessment in his eyes.

I would like you, he said, to be my anesthetist on this trip. Nurse Carradine did it for a time last journey. Have you ever administered anesthetics?

She said she had. But in Macleay District there was no center of the anesthetic arts. She doubted it weighed in the scales of ability. It secretly occurred to her that she and her sister did know how to bring oblivion.

Fellowes told her, I have a copy of Peel’s volume, “On Anesthesia.” I shall send an orderly to you with it. I suggest you go to the nurses’ salon and have a look at its major recommendations which are at the close of each chapter.

She read Peel in the salon. In her accustomed but half-forgotten country hospital—anesthetizing for old Maddox—she had been following simple rules using a simple mask and an ether droplet dispenser. It had all been innocent of the range of chloroform and ether and chloroform dispensers and machines and masks she saw in Peel. The Yankauer mask was very like the one she had used when Dr. Maddox—to give him credit—removed a timber-feller’s leg so neatly. It was at the time presumed by her to be the sole species of anesthetics mask on earth.

But there existed as well an entire zoology. The Schimmelbusch, the Vajnas. The Hewitt airway. The Boxwood wedge. The fanciful de Caux’s inhaler, which was apparently not within the expense range of the Macleay District.

Fellowes and Dr. Hookes passed the door of the nurses’ lounge to go to their own salon forward. Fellowes was working with a pencil and paper and paused to allow Hookes to look at a diagram before they moved on. Hookes’s complexion was blotchy with sunburn. His hair was erratically brushed and his little russet moustache looked spiky. From the medical officers’ lounge they could still easily be heard, Fellowes saying resonantly against the muted hum of the Archimedes’s engines, Look, Ginger, it has to be done. My God, the main danger lies ashore. Not at your hands here.

Hookes’s reply couldn’t be heard in detail. But what he said had the tone of a pleading. She thought, Like Naomi he hasn’t got over the first night.

But you’re needed, Ginger, simple as that. These ships have not been staffed according to the reality of things…

They were arguing about his transformation into a surgeon. Dr. Hookes’s should be a man who—whatever his competence—could forget his own bush clumsiness in the same way she was trying to forget hers. He should consider all this a medical education. Doctors, she thought, were generally good with these adjustments of the mind.

From Hookes came something indistinct but still with the intonation of pleading. Fellowes sighed hugely. Then no more was heard. It was as if the two men had settled themselves in chairs to read newspaper reports about battles elsewhere. Hookes’s anxiety hung in the air and reflected Sally’s own.

There was, however, only so much study that was useful. Mind gorged with obscure considerations and chances, she visited her cabin to drop Peel on her bedside table and climbed again to the deck. There were other women there letting the saffron kindliness of these late hours above the ocean soothe them. She saw a group further along the deck. Freud was there, and Naomi, Leo and Honora and Sister Nettice. They seemed utterly restored to harmony. Women did not carry grievances here as long as on land. Sins massive on the earth were venial at sea and even more venial on this sea which had led them to that place.

Just now—weighed down by what she had absorbed of Dr. Peel—Sally chose to spend a few seconds on her own. She noticed that on the forward deck the orderlies were being instructed in bandaging and splinting. They and the Archimedes were protected by a law which all nations were said to accede to. But how firmly? Sometimes the threat of those modern wonders and undersea beasts—the idea of the torpedoes—stung the imagination and made a person think of climbing to the highest deck and casting a penetrating gaze across the seas.

At last she approached the others.

Here she is then, said Honora, slapping the rail beside her as if the space there had been reserved by them. Is it true you’ve been asked to do anesthetics?

Freud asked in self-satire, Will you sing to the patients?

They would already be suffering enough, said Sally. She saw her sister smile at the witticism and was delighted. They kept an eye out for Kiernan’s lean presence. He was their favorite. Trustworthy in conversation. Our professor, Honora called him.

Kiernan did emerge from some task below.

Tell us all that’s happened here since the last time we came this way, Honora demanded. Any new shenanigans with gods?

Only with men, he said.

Honora Slattery narrowed her vivid eyes. For who would have thought the Turks could do that much damage?

Our men are merely men, Kiernan asserted.

I’d have never known that, Honora told him with a sniff.

Kiernan conceded them the laugh they all had at his expense. No, what I mean is, it’s important for newspaper editors and generals that we believe we have special gifts. We blessed Antipodeans. Worth ten of anything else. But by all accounts the Turks aren’t aware of it.

You sound pleased about that, Freud accused him and frowned.

No. I’m not pleased at all. It would be unspeakable to be pleased. But one worries about shells, said Kiernan. How individual virtues can stand up to them. I would be happy if it were all over. I would be happy had it never started.

That sounds almost disloyal to me, said little Nettice, bunching her features in conviction. In spite of all, that sounds disloyal, she persisted.

It sounds something like the truth to me though, said Naomi, who was determined not to let such silliness reign. But territorially, Sergeant? We must be doing well in terms of territory.

Freud half closed her eyes to remember the news reports. There have been attacks from the toe of the peninsula, she announced. French and British. All still in process. The Australians in the west…

And everywhere the Indians, said Kiernan, who must wonder how they find themselves here.

For the very same reason we do, surely, suggested Nettice. It’s either yes to the Empire or it’s no to it.

She clearly suspected Quakers.

The second dusk after they left Alexandria, the Turkish guns were heard from a dark spine ahead. The Archimedes edged in towards Cape Helles where—with equal convenience—the Australians and New Zealanders, the Indians and British and French could all be welcomed to the ship. Before reporting to the theatre, Sally climbed to the deck in the last light. From the direction of the beach she heard a bugle call—apparently on Gallipoli the bugle did not lead men to battle but was blown to warn ships when wounded were on their way. Some little way off, destroyers were worrying and jerking about the sea in a motion bespeaking threat and fear. A minesweeper with a sailor in the bows—signaling by lantern swing—edged in to the Archimedes’s flank.

The anchor cable was let clatter, chaining them to their captain’s choice of this acre of sea. Sally went below and washed and robed and stood in one of the small cabins set up with an operating table and with a bench for Freud’s instruments, newly arrived on a tray and covered with a towel. Sally inspected her own equipment at a small table beyond the head of the operating surface. Well, said Freud. Freud and two orderlies in white coats and with a scout nurse—a young woman whom Sally did not know—arrived and maintained their restless posts in their surgeonless theatre.

Freud said to them all, It takes a little time before they come in.

Sally heard the barges bump alongside and winches paying out under the power of stuttering motors as the surgeons waited in the wards to choose their first candidates. Hookes would be there, Sally knew, maybe needing a choice forced on him.

Freud gave her long-lipped smile and gestured to the tray of covered instruments.

This is how I met my fiancé, she confided to the room. Even the orderlies. Your fiancé? asked Sally. The surgeon?

Yes. I was handing him a retractor. Not something simple and pure like a scalpel or a lancet. After all, they call that journal The Lancet. No one would ever call a journal The Retractor. A retractor’s the turnip of surgical instruments. Anyhow, for him and for me it was a case of “eyes across the retractor.”

Other women would be reticent about mocking such events—the weight of engagement. And of breaking it.

The hollow ship was ringing with the shouts of healthy men delivering the maimed. At last Fellowes accompanied a case carried in—the man yelping like a dog. Head wound—that was why. As with Lieutenant Carradine, the loss of the hold on language but not on the impulse to make one. Orderlies either side of him held swabs to the skull. The journey from barge to deck or from deck to ward must have somehow moved bone and brought on this frenzy. Orderlies dumped him—in his shirt and bandages—from the stretcher onto the theatre table. They held him down and called for reinforcements to help them restrain him in his demented state. Big enough to hold a bull out to pee, she heard an orderly wheeze. Quick, Nurse, said Fellowes. One of the dressings fell away and Sally saw through blood the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. The square-headed, sturdy boy looked up at Sally with the eyes of a demented animal and though two orderlies managed to hold his arms, their strength might not last. Sally felt that her movements were heinously slow but took up the anesthetics dispensing bottle and the mask and poured chloroform on the pad without letting any of it too close to his thrashing face. Near enough, however, for the fumes to dope him down and to numb that frantic brain and render him drowsy. The chloroform filled the theatre with its sweet, heavy fumes as she clamped the pad inside the mask. Fellowes—beside her—spoke urgently to an orderly. Hold him. And to Sally, Mask down now. Mask down.

She forgot dosages as she dripped further chloroform onto the mask which, for the first seconds of its tenure, needed all the force of her left arm to keep it in place. Then the patient made a bleat like a child and was under and the orderlies drew back panting, before leaving for more stretcher work. Sally flicked open the young man’s left eyelid. The pupil was appropriately dilated and she felt grateful to the numbing chemicals.

Now she placed the airway device in between his teeth. They were a bush kid’s teeth, with some gone and some fixed with fresh amalgam—for he had been to the army dentist in Egypt. His respiration was ragged. But what was to be expected? She moved to one side of the body to let in Fellowes and Freud and placed the cuff of the blood-pressure device on his arm, pumping it up. She saw a low diastolic and then felt his pulse, which was thready and leaking along the artery. She reached for a thermometer but Fellowes said briskly, Don’t bother. For what if he somehow woke and filled the theatre with chaos before she could get more chloroform on the mask. Fellowes did his work. Retractors were involved, the unglamorous tools Freud had mocked. And the rest of the armory, which Fellowes nominated calmly and Freud passed to him. Sally took notice only of pulse, which maintained itself at its present unsatisfactory level.

The blood pressure had fallen, she saw. She called out the figures. Ninety over fifty. Her dread was the two figures meeting. Fellowes cried to the surgical orderlies, Elevate the table six inches. They got six-inch blocks from the corner and one lifted the end of the table. Gently, cried Fellowes and there was despair at their lack of skill in his voice. You could not get men to stay in the theatres and wards and become proficient at one thing. They thought it feminine work. They would prefer to lump the wounded or supplies around the ship. She wondered about her amenable old ally—Wilson—from the last trip. For he had not seemed humiliated to work with women. These fellows finally propped the blocks under the end of the operating table to stop the blood fleeing the abused brain. The scrub nurse received bone fragments in a bowl, Fellowes saying, I want some of that back, Nurse.

He would in part rebuild the skull with suitable pieces. He asked for blood pressure again. It was not a good tale—the number for the heart under pressure falling to meet the measure for the heart at rest was a lethal union occurring one instant before the final heart fibrillation.

It happened. A tremor through the body. Oh damn, said Fellowes softly. And no adrenaline on board. Take him away.

Somewhere was an ammonia-refrigerated place where such men went. There he would be stored for an Egyptian burial amongst the other children of shock and hemorrhage—until it filled and the sea again became an option.

No sense of failure delayed things in the theatre. Orderlies washed down the surface of the table with soap and water and briskly dried it off. There was at once another boy. He had a shattered femur wound and was brought straight to her with a splint of dowel stick tied with rags from thigh to foot. He could smell the fumes and obviously feared anesthesia. Sally put the mask down and could hear him beneath it bravely counting numbers. When the putrid bandages were gone, there proved to be two wounds, one made by a bullet, the other by the upper end of the fractured bone showing itself jaggedly through the bloody hole it had made an instant after the bullet struck. After probing the wounds, Fellowes ordered the upper leg lifted and dragged by an orderly and the scout nurse. A traction splint was strapped on, and this man-boy was now destined to walk crookedly for a lifetime.

Amputations occurred at times on the Archimedes—in spite of the rocking of the sea—and when an overhopeful surgeon ashore had cut the limb off below the knee of another man brought onboard, the sutures were cut and the stench of the wound competed with the chloroform. A new and graver amputation must be done above the knee. With the big strap tourniquet around the thigh, Fellowes’s lancet went cutting decisively through fascia—vastus lateralis and hamstring and quadriceps. A good flap left. And the wound irrigated and sutured up around a rubber pipe. And then the bandaging. Here was a surgeon! Imagine had it been Dr. Maddox, with his confident cack-handedness.

The Turkish guns exchanged their metal with the warships offshore, and the shudders of the Archimedes were something those on board dealt with without a thought. Fellowes would raise whatever instrument he held when a shell seemed near and start again once the jolt conveyed through the water to the Archimedes ended.

The timeless session in the theatre ended. Noon had eaten all time, and what was left was devoured by midnight. They were to have three hours’ sleep. At subsequent meals—when they were taken—there was no conversation of any length. Salt was pointed to. Worcestershire sauce lay untouched. They could have been an order of silent nuns.

They slept for a full afternoon before a ship’s steward—a man left over from the days of peace when the Archimedes took sane people to sane places—knocked on the cabin door and told them he had left a tray of tea for them. The bugles had sounded ashore. More barges on their way. More sweepers.

Nearly eight hundred men were on the Archimedes when the anchor was again raised—another battalion of men treated brutishly by metal but better accommodated now on new cots crowded in. This time more were dysentery and typhoid cases and so a hasty readjustment had to be made to the ship to create a contagious ward. It was a short run this time, a matter of four or five hours. From the ship they saw arid mountains in the sun—the harbor of Mudros on that island of Lemnos whose myths Kiernan had explained but which Sally had forgotten. Tales of man-murdering women and the furnaces of gods had become thin and tame, even here. Military tents filled the valley between the two great heads of the port. Hospital tents had begun to colonize the headlands as well. The camp’s roads were marked out in brown earth by prim, white-painted stones. The olive and orange orchards grew inland—on hills—and meadows beyond the coastline were green. The hills looked enduring and real—whereas the camp looked like a giant and hasty misconception. A new order was to land the urgent cases here. Egypt for the walking wounded, the stable, the uninfected wounds. Lemnos for the rest.

That day in the harbor of Mudros, the women—their bloodied clothes being washed in a huge boiler by a Greek crewman—were served soup with some genuine beef in it. Sally watched her sister’s head bent to the plate and its earnest concentration evoked a pulse of love in her. A conversation in the corridor nonetheless arrested their attention before they had finished eating. They could hear Captain Fellowes’s voice and that of Lieutenant Hookes in a conversation Sally thought she had heard the beginning of some days back.

Fellowes: My good chap…

Hookes: No, it won’t do. I’ve never dealt with anything like I am asked to deal with here. In the bad light and all the shudders and the mess of the wound, I cut a femoral. That’s bad enough. But the nurses knew I had.

He repeated it. Do you understand, I cut a femoral? Drop me off here, for God’s sake, where I can work in a ward.

Fellowes: Are you worried about the nurses seeing, or the mistake? A doctor is always a peril to people, dear Ginger. As well as a rescuer. How many have you saved in the past few days? Ask yourself that.

Hookes: I told you, I can’t do it anymore. I’m tuckered out, can’t raise a sweat. I don’t care if they shoot me. Either let me go ashore here or I’m going ashore in Alex. I’ll get a job, any job, in the hospitals there. Don’t stand in my way, Fellowes. You’re too kind for that.

Fellowes: I won’t consent. The colonel won’t.

Hookes: Then you will find I’ll hang myself like Barcroft Boake.

Fellowes: Barcroft Boake?

Hookes: The stockman poet. He hanged himself with his own whip. And he hadn’t done anyone the same damage I have.

There were tears in Lieutenant Hookes’s voice. None of the soup eaters despised him. Something in them roared for escape too.

Fellowes: What can I say? The colonel wants three theatres working.

Hookes: Even if one of them is useless? Even if it’s murder?

Fellowes: I’ve had men die on the table too.

Hookes: I promise you I’ll finish myself before you can make me go again. I’m being made to do more than I’m qualified for.

Naomi looked around the table at those who shared it with her and whispered—not to them but as if to the atmosphere of authority that imbued the ship—her own pleading that he should be let go.

The two men moved on down the corridor, Fellowes murmuring now but both unconscious that their debate had been public.

Yes, said Honora. Let the poor beggar go. Some doctors wouldn’t even feel any guilt. But he does.

She declared like a sudden discovery, We can get a new surgeon in Alex.

In Alexandria, said Sally—in honor of Kiernan.

Hookes became so distressed that Fellowes moved him from his cabin to the walking-wounded officers’ ward in what had been some sort of elegant salon of the Archimedes. A young orderly was put by his bed in case he might wake and need restraining. His years as a country doctor were negated for now—doctors always being respected in the bush if halfway jovial and if they benefited even the handful of patients sufficient to get the word of their ability around the town and the region. Parks were named to honor them. Wards named in hospitals. Was that earnest future now washed away for Hookes?

Nettice was the sister on duty in here. She was a woman who rarely uttered orders. She directed tasks with a nod. She seemed to believe till proven wrong that if she could see a need for action then so could a nurse. Looking sour (that had to be admitted) she ran her ward by inclinings of the head. How old was she, this little prune? Twenty-seven? Forty-seven?

It was more like a normal hospital in this ward, Sally thought during a shift here. In the first place, it was a visible and contained ward. Here were lesser wounds already dressed and looking redressable. Morphine not called for as much as it had been in the early frenzy of overcrowding amidships and aft. Some young men lay drugged and palely still or turned slightly bewildered faces to her. Others sat on the sides of their cots in remains of Cairo-tailored uniforms they had once worn in Egypt’s fleshpots. They smoked Turkish cigarettes and chatted. Many were chirpy—aware they had been plucked out of the furnace, though they would not say so. There were bullet wounds of the hand here that had subtly borne away tissue and fragmented bone. As surely as if they had been shot in the heart they could never again use a weapon. There was a blind lieutenant with bandaged pads over his eyes of whom they said, Watch that one, Sister. He’s a larrikin.

The young man so labeled cocked an ear at Nettice’s approach. Here we are, boys, watch it. The ogress cometh.

Beyond this part-cheerful ward lay the locked doorway to what used to be the ship’s library. The typhoid ward. The women who nursed those cases were required to take antiseptic baths before returning to the messes or cabins or other wards.

When the Archimedes began hooting its way into the East Harbour of Alexandria again—amidst all the other hooting and protesting ships, the noise woke Dr. Hookes—Sally saw him stir and moved to him. He looked up at her, and his lower face formed a rictus. Will there be tears now? she wondered.

How are you feeling, sir? she asked him.

Which is it? Which of the Durance ones?

He swallowed with that audible dryness and began to weep very softly. I’m glad you’re here. Because the first time, when they all came aboard in a rush, remember, I was on deck too. I could tell how frightened you were too.

My sister, she told him. It was my sister with you. I would have been frightened though if I’d been there.

He tried to stare hard enough to verify that this was a different Durance, but his eyes slewed about.

You would have been, yes.

He began to weep again. It was time for more of the valerian that had been prescribed. With the smallest movements of hands and eyes, she motioned the grubby orderly to be vigilant while she fetched it.

Naomi arrived to relieve her at her shift’s end—since it might be some hours before these officers were taken ashore. Pinned to Naomi’s white breast was not the normal nurse’s watch but the gold-plated watch of Ellis Hoyle. They managed to say little to each other.

All right then?

Yes, you go and have dinner.

Ellis Hoyle’s watch was no larger than the one their parents had bought Naomi. But in a sense it was huger than any other timepiece. Should it be mentioned? Sally asked nothing about it. But she knew all her sister’s walls of reserve had been shaken down. Naomi sat within ruined battlements. Her safety was gone—the safety of the polished country girl who chose the city. There was a risk she might join Lieutenant Hookes in his mania. Because she believed she shared with him a kind of clumsiness.

Sister Talk

When the Durance sisters chose to, without saying anything they each had the gift to warn the other of people who might approach. In a palm court full of officers, any who might come within a certain distance would suddenly see they were absorbed in each other and feel the authority of their aloofness. The fact was clear that they weren’t here to meet people, or to expand a circle of acquaintance, or to satisfy the inquiries of any young man—neither of one likely to be sent to Gallipoli as reinforcement nor of one slated to ride into the Sinai to face the Turks. When they first made their way in their approved uniforms—boomerang badge at their breasts and their nation’s name at their shoulders—from the ship to the place down the hill where the gharries waited for fares, they had already taken on something of that preventive air almost without thinking about it.

The palm court at the Metropole was a bazaar of officers—if that was what a girl wanted. There were even some in kilts—and an occasional Frenchman carrying his pillbox hat under his arm. And there were few other nurses to satisfy the surmises of these fellows. So it was just as well that they were not gifted with airs of acceptance. Their airs of rejection were of a high order.

The surprising thing was, though, that—within this ring of immunity they made so easily for themselves—Sally had no idea what to say. It had been Naomi’s concept to have tea and a talk. Sally did not know if her sister had brought her here as a duty because sisters should sometimes meet up and have tea. The only men Naomi looked at, meanwhile, were the musicians in dinner suits and tarbooshes who filled the court with music as undistracting as the play of a fountain. Naomi waited for the tune to end—a Strauss waltz kind of tune—as if it would be impolite not to give it a chance to curlicue itself away.

And then she turned her face as the players let their instruments drop from their chins and eased their posture for a second or two. You look tired, Sal, she said.

Sally could have said the same. But it wasn’t a competition. One more good night’s sleep, she promised, and I’ll be right.

Some officers have invited all of us from the Archimedes out to a café, you know. I forget the name of the place. But the cars are coming for us at eight.

I think I’ll stay on board, said Sally, and have the stew.

On the other hand, said Naomi, it’s a distraction. And if I’m willing to be distracted then you should be too.

Yes, all right. But do you think going out to cafés will help us the next time a crowd comes on board?

Maybe not. But that’s not its job. Its job is to make us feel that for now everything’s A-one. Just for an hour or two. I don’t mind being distracted, I’ve decided. You’re the one of sterner stuff, Sal. You’re like Papa. You’re the one to reckon with.

They ordered their tea from earnest young waiters in crisp jackets and jalabiyas. It arrived very quickly. Sally found it strange that though there was nothing like this—the trolleys with cakes and the waiters with their murmuring politeness or the musicians in tarbooshes—anywhere in their history before the war, she and Naomi behaved as if this was their lot and they were as used to it as to the Archimedes. And cars at eight to take nurses to “dinner”—not tea, but “dinner,” tea here being this serious afternoon ritual. To “dinner” along the Corniche, and a stroll along the Mediterranean to finish things off—to see if anyone in uniform was worth talking to. The coming evening and its foreignness were the silken hours, and for enjoying them young men were willing to then be shipped to Gallipoli and give up their brains and limbs and hearts. And yet Sally could still not see how she could be enhanced by these hours.

I reckon I’ll stick with the stew, she reiterated.

Fair enough.

The band had taken on its formal posture again and had begun playing something that sounded Scottish and drippy—the-only-lassie-for-me sort of stuff.

You were in the theatre this trip? reiterated Naomi. Giving anesthetics?

Our first patient died of shock, Sally admitted. But that didn’t stop Fellowes and Freud getting on with things. It’s peculiar what you’ll accept as normal. But that red-headed lieutenant—Hookes—he can’t take it on.

I don’t think the poor fellow should be despised for that.

Though it’s a pretty basic thing, to cut the femoral.

Well, the wounds are quite a mess, aren’t they? They’re not like an illustration in a book.

They both took a spoonful of cake.

I wanted to let you know, said Naomi then, I’m back to my normal self. The first night was what you’d call a jolt.

We were all jolted, Sally told her.

Yes, none of us are quite the same. But it isn’t a jaunt anymore, is it? I mean, you go for a ride to the pyramids with a soldier and end up carrying around his watch for the rest of your life.

You don’t have to carry it round, said Sally. Where is it now, anyhow?

It’s in my bag. I keep it wound up for some reason. I think if I’d known him well, I would have found it easier to get rid of it. I’m sorry to carry on like this. I don’t normally carry on. You know that story about the man whose clock becomes like his heart…

Edgar Allan Poe? And the body under the floorboards?

That’s right. The body… I think he isn’t dead if I keep the thing going. Dad’s book, wasn’t it? That watch-on-the-dead-body story?

Yes, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Poe. They were his two. And the Bible for show.

Not bad taste, Naomi decided. When you think about it. He wanted to keep us out of the milking shed, remember. He’d employ people he couldn’t afford, just to get the milking done and keep us out of the shed. I’d see some of the Sorleys and Coulthards coming in to milk for him and I’d look away.

Naomi had her gray gloves off and her right hand reached across the table to take Sally’s wrist. I planned to have this afternoon tea to ask you something. It sounds strange. But I’ve got an idea you’ll understand exactly what I mean.

Sally’s body tensed while waiting for some unguessed-at demand.

Will you be my friend? And don’t say that of course you will be, you’re my sister. That’s not the issue. Will you be my friend?

They both knew it was something they hadn’t thought of asking before this—and would not have without the Archimedes.

Understanding what Naomi had done, taken the morphine into her hands and along with it the burden of bringing their mother to that mortal quietness, Sally had not been able to say such simple things herself. To utter thanks to Naomi—so Sally thought—would have brought the heavens crashing down. What Naomi asked was something humbler than gratitude.

I know very well, said Naomi, that I shouldn’t have dumped you at the farm. I don’t know why I wanted so badly to get away. Why can a person hate a place where every love and every kindness has been shown to her? It’s a great flaw of character.

No, said Sally. Or else I’ve got the same flaw.

Anyhow, you stayed there. I didn’t give you a choice. Tell me to sling my hook if you want. Because it’s easier to sound wise now—after the manner of the Archimedes. The Archimedes is like a telescope that makes you see far-off things in their right proportion. But I was a pretender to do that to you. I knew it, and I couldn’t—or didn’t—stop myself. That gives you plenty of grounds not to be my friend.

They listened to the teatime music for a while. Sweet scrapings. It was not momentous to them and mimicked conversation.

What I want, Naomi ventured further, if you’ll be good enough, is that we talk like friends. You don’t have to like me as much as Freud or Honora. But if we talked somewhere along those lines… That if we had to share a cabin, it wouldn’t be a hopeless cause. If we could talk woman to woman. I would love that. I hope you’d be able to imagine it.

Sally wondered if it could be done. Between such great love and great dread, something simple and little and comfortable as friendship. But she was not ready for the largest subject of all.

She said, For one thing, I was cranky about the clearing-off thing you did. But I was proud too. To have this swish sister. And you were the pretty one.

Don’t be ridiculous. You. All the girls say so.

Well, are we going to argue about that? And I don’t see the men in this room having too many arguments over it. But I ought to warn you. I’m a cold cow. I have a cold heart.

The same with me, said Naomi with an excitement—as if they were comparing birthmarks. Friendship isn’t easy with people like us. Ellis Hoyle misread me by some means. Our cold hearts are what we inherited. That’s not to blame Mama and Papa.

Sally shook her head. I wouldn’t like to blame them, she agreed.

Naomi still had her hand. Sally studied this meeting of flesh.

I can’t bubble away with conversation, that’s the problem.

Yes, said Naomi. I envy the gift to do it.

So do I, said Sally.

But if we could find friendship beyond that. If we could talk. About things held close. Secrets, even.

Is she preparing, Sally wondered, for the subject of subjects?

The cake trolley had come and they both took one more French pastry off it—winged capsules of cream.

I’ve told you about Ellis and his damned watch, said Naomi with a sort of pride. I have told you things I could not have said a year back.

Yes, said Sally. Now her hand, having been the limp object of affection, grasped Naomi’s as the band played “Rose of Tralee” and at a nearby table four officers of the Scots Guards were overtaken by gales of laughter at some folly of an absent colleague.

The women of the Archimedes visited Sacré Coeur to see Carradine and her husband. His wound was healing, but he was not yet ready for shipping to an English hospital. Apart from the wards full of long-term patients such as Lieutenant Carradine, they always found the place in partial chaos. In the lush, palmy gardens of the Beau Rivage, where the orchestra of Egyptians played sweet English ballads and lullabies and unexacting twiddly-dee pieces as tea was served, they would sometimes encounter an Australian or British girl who—utterly outnumbered by orderlies—worked alone or with one companion on these echoing troopships on which young men sang jolly songs on the way towards the great heap of debris, of rock and barrenness named Gallipoli, and swallowed down their dread. On the way back… well, they knew what was what by then.

Black Ship

The authorities now insisted that they spend two full days in the splendor of the Beau Rivage. Sally and Honora shared a room, since the friendship she had pledged her sister didn’t need to be slavish. They were told that in their absence the Archimedes would be refitted in some way, but “in some way” was not defined. By pure luck Sally and Honora were given a room appropriate for officers and with a balcony above the sea. Since it was early summer, the air was clear as the sun rose behind this piece of strand and revealed itself gigantically by breakfast time far down the coast. An embarrassment of recreations were at their command—they could ride along the coast on light horse mounts. They could attend picnics in the Botanic Gardens or accompany a British education officer on a tour of the antiquities from which their bush ignorance would come back amended. There were bathing parties they could join with swimming costumes provided by the Red Cross. And then the afternoon thé dansant— to which they were so used now and so worldly at.

It was at the end of an excursion to the Temple of Poseidon and Pompey’s Pillar that an officer approached them and asked, was it true they were from the Archimedes? In that case, what did they think of the Archimedes going black?

Black? they asked.

Becoming a troop carrier, I mean—traveling blacked-out.

He could tell they knew nothing and could barely understand him. Not to worry, he said. I believe it’s only temporary.

When they returned to the Eastern Harbour and the Archimedes, they saw Egyptian workers were hanging from the sides painting out all trace of red crosses. Approaching the ship along the mole they could also see its lower doors were cast wide open. Through these doors provisions were generally lumped aboard, but now it was mules and horses that were being led by bridles. Soldiers ascended the gangway with rifles and kit. Men with rifles on their backs already looked down from the railings and possessed the ship the nurses had thought of as theirs.

As they drank tea in their mess with jackets off to release the musk of the morning’s scurry through ancient places, Sergeant Kiernan himself arrived and said the colonel wanted to see them in their lounge. They went there straightaway. As they entered, the colonel seemed to nod to them individually. Fellowes and a new surgeon to replace Hookes stood there too—and near them Mitchie and another newer matron with set, uninterpretable features.

They all found seats and the colonel told them that for military necessity the authorities had decided to make the Archimedes a black ship pro tem. It was his recommendation that the nurses should choose to be left ashore until the higher authorities decided to transform it back to its true calling.

Nettice asked a question bearing on the point. Wasn’t it true that nurses traveled on black ships?

Not in great numbers, he said. Perhaps one or two per ship. Very much volunteers.

Captain Fellowes wanted to speak and sought the colonel’s nod.

You are entitled to leave the ship, he told them when he got it. The colonel cannot say so—but it seems to me an act of recklessness to chop and change the nature of a ship like this. For this journey we will replace you with competent orderlies. I heard a staff officer say that surely they—whoever that is—did not contemplate that you would sail for this journey, in any case. We’ll wait then and see what happens next to the ship.

When the colonel and the other surgeons left the room the nurses rose—militarily adept now—to honor their military ranks. Then Mitchie told them to resume seats.

Well, it’s all lunacy as usual, she declared like a reassurance. There’s the risk of submarines—you see—on a black ship.

That’s so, confirmed the other matron as if they might doubt Mitchie’s word. That ought to be taken into account.

The enlightened above us, Mitchie declared, intend that the ship go to the Dardanelles black and that we see these horses and mules and men off. Then the Archimedes will transform itself back to white and take on patients and go to Mudros and thence to Alex. Of course it is a folly and you must not let yourself be subject to it.

But are you going? Honora asked her.

Our situation is different, claimed Mitchie. They need us to guide the orderlies who—I am pleased to announce—fear us. But it is different with the rest of you.

But of course it was at once apparent—by eyes lowered to avoid the force of her argument as by exchanged looks with the same force—that they were all to go.

They waited all day. The loading of these men and ponies and mules of the Inniskilling Fusiliers ammunition train finished and then the soldiers sat on deck talking and smoking and contradicting each other in an accent sharp as an ax. They gave off a sort of discontent—the growls and mockeries of men who had just been worked hard and could foresee harder still. This unexpected form of soldier—all rifle and webbing—came hobnailing it through the main deck of the hospital. One of them turned on seeing nurses and—instead of the applause or the brotherliness of shouted greeting when soldiers on other ships passed the Archimedes—hooted with harsh delight.

Here come the fooking chorus girls!

Kiernan, however, tailed the soldiers and drove them along and told them that they were guests—this wasn’t their ship. They told him to get—as they said it—fooked. And their rawness did own the Archimedes for now. Even so, the soldiery was relocated by their considerate officers and sergeant majors to places where it would be harder for them entirely to take away the purpose of the ship. Towards dusk the Archimedes pulled away from its mooring with a few blows of its whistle. Even the Currawong used to leave the Macleay with more ceremony.

Dr. Fellowes passed along the hospital deck, which was now restored to quiet. Ponies all over the cargo deck, he said. They’d built stalls and loaded them last night. How well would dung sit with medical supplies? Nurses went below and saw the mule lines and fed some sugar to the rows of ponies. They saw wagons and shoulder-high green boxes of munitions mysteriously numbered for war’s purpose. Young grooms in khaki shirts looked at the nurses with a blunt hunger unknown in the world of the town and the street.

On the promenade deck, Sergeant Kiernan and some orderlies were tying ropes from the inboard handrails to the ship’s railings to keep the men of the munitions train off the starboard promenade. The work with roping-off was done and the orderlies leaned back against the walls smoking or making their narrow cigarettes, seeing nothing in the haze.

You’re a fine fellow, Honora called to Kiernan, nearly as a tease.

Leo said beneath her breath once they had passed on, A man of beliefs. A Quaker.

Holy mother, said Honora. I can imagine a girl or two quaking for him.

Sally would remember this dusk—cramped in by haze—as having an air of uncertainty in which the Archimedes itself seemed to take part. She would think later that the day was like one in which a horse who could smell a cliff ahead, and had a purpose to avoid it, did not trust its rider to achieve the same level of wisdom.

Two destroyers appeared on either side of the ship. Surely this scale of naval seriousness wasn’t devoted to them. Was it a chance meeting at sea by vessels with the same landfall?

Sally heard Irishmen doing physical jerks on the afterdeck and an NCO telling them to put some elbow grease into whatever exercise he demanded of them. It was not a comfortable sharing that existed here. The nurses felt yarded in to their cabins and their salon lounge that night. The Irish soldiers loudly occupied the bunks on the hospital decks. All the ports were battened down to enclose any chance beam of light from inside. The nature of sleep seemed to Sally different from the usual. It meant—for a beginning—that when she woke she did not know whether it was day or night unless her watch inscribed TO DEAREST SALLY ON YOUR GREAT DAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 1911 was consulted.

Next morning the women stirred—ill-humored—from the enclosed humidity of dreams.

Oh God, said Freud, as if she’d turned up in a world less satisfactory than yesterday’s.

Honora slipped warm as a loaf of bread from her lower bunk and began whispering her mysterious prayers fast. They needed to open the ports now to verify the day. Air which had lain all night on the ocean swept in. They dressed in their white ward uniforms and went up on deck to diagnose the morning. It was growing bright out there, and the sea breeze fell away to let in a torrid offshore wind from the nastiest core of Egypt. It penetrated their nursing veils and lightly flapped the red borders of their capes.

Honora asked, Could you really believe that down there below, in that great water somewhere, there is a steely tube of men who would do us harm? I could believe in a lot of things. But I can’t believe in that. The tube of steel with men inside.

They sat in the lounge reading and playing euchre. Tomorrow—after the soldiers’ last night aboard—they would be busy cleaning and readying the hospital deck. Restless by nine o’clock, they went up on deck. Naomi remarked that the destroyers had vanished. That—she hoped—had no sinister naval meaning.

The Archimedes Gone

During the nurses’ visit to the promenade, the ship swayed in a way a person would not call alarming but that they were unused to. Some of the orderlies on deck stumbled and took their cigarettes from their mouths and looked at each other with a question. They did not return their fags to their lips until the balance of the ship had been regained.

My heaven, Honora told them, we’re swerving.

It’s to throw the fellows in your tube off, Honora, Freud asserted, narrowing her large eyes and sharing the joke with the glaring horizon.

They could see Lemnos—by now reduced from myth to the level of any other dreary island. The hot breath of land was left behind. The air had sharpened and there was that true sea again—that sea into which today the light dived and split apart and met again at some visible point far down—a gem of light beneath, hard to take your eyes off. It imbued Sally with a welcome if temporary joy.

They remained on deck that morning and Captain Fellowes—no surgery to perform—appeared looking grave and in the full authority of his uniform. He said, Ladies! But his nod—or so they liked to think—was directed at Leonora.

These Irishmen never stop saluting me, he said of the interlopers. I’m not used to that from orderlies. And have never had it from nurses.

They all laughed along a little creakily. He was almost too perfect a creature to exchange banter with. He tipped his cap and moved forward.

Oh well, said young Leonora then. She seemed happy with the exchange—if you could call it that. She nodded to them and went below.

Freud raised the old question. So do you think they’ve done it? You must understand what I mean. Fellowes and Leo?

There seemed no malice in the question. She appeared scientifically interested.

No, said Nettice. Nor should you ask.

Freud declared, Doctors are the men who know how to manage these things. Without damage to the girl, I mean.

What of the moral damage? asked Nettice dryly.

No one had asked Freud, Do you know these things from experience? But they presumed she did and gave her credit for her urbanity and the possibility of her glamorous sins.

Well, said Honora, moral damage or not, done it or not, she’s crazed for the man!

And why shouldn’t they have gone further? Naomi said as a sudden late challenge.

Oh, Mother of God, murmured Honora. Even the Methodists are voting for jig-a-jig.

Honora and Freud and Nettice and the Durance sisters decided amongst themselves to shift subjects by going to view the sea from the uppermost deck. They ascended a stairway or companionway and stood exposed totally to the sky with mysterious equipment and winches and piping for company amidst vibrating cowlings and heavy painted grilles. The two great funnels dominated, but the Egyptian painters had been here too and their red crosses were submerged behind a layer of white. The water seemed greener and vaster still. They all at once saw their future approach them like a fish—coming straight at them. You could faintly hear it thrash the water.

Look how straight it is, said Honora in a kind of doltish admiration.

There was a profound thud of impact and a shattering and steely explosion which, had they not been young women, would have knocked them off their legs.

Life belts, said Honora almost lightly then. Their life belts were in their cabins. Come on, she said.

They flowed down the stairs. On the main deck forward they could for a moment see the soldiers leaning over the bows and looking for enlightenment on what had happened to the Archimedes’s flanks. Below—running through the hospital decks nearly empty of soldiers—they reached their quarters and their life belts and calmly put them on. Sally felt an abstract and intense curiosity on what was to happen next and they all seemed averse to any rush. They walked in good order back to the companionway that would take them to the deck. On the way Naomi approached Sally and disapproved of the way her belt was tied. A double loop, I think, she said as she adjusted the belt with strange cheeriness.

When they got up to the deck again they found it was already slightly angled sideways and forwards. It didn’t seem likely to Sally that the threat would become more severe than that. Forward there was a melee of ship’s officers and sailors and soldiers who seemed to have the same conviction that the Archimedes had become unstable only in a minor way. An officer said on a foghorn, Please, ladies—forward. Thank you. Plenty of time. Plenty of time.

Mitchie stood back and ushered her women along the deck. In passing her, Sally could sense at once that water—now that it had become a serious issue—frightened Mitchie. She was palely and only by a margin in command of herself. Kiernan and his orderlies bearing stretchers were making their way urgently towards the melee. By their rush they introduced a new level of concern in the soldiers they pushed through. A hatchway had exploded up forward where the torpedo had struck. Men had been wounded by fragments of steel. Mitchie saw the bearers pass and caught up with her women and faced them.

Quick, she said. Two nurses. We must attend to those fellows.

There was a ship’s officer with a beard like that worn by the King of England who said, No, they’ll be attended to. You must take boat number two forward.

Mitchie called for Karla Freud and Nettice and bustled past the man. Sally struggled to follow.

Mitchie turned and screamed at her, Get back! This was in all the hours they’d been at sea the first time Mitchie had become a fury. Someone was blowing a trumpet in a way that was not triumphant, and then the captain let the ship’s siren sound endlessly. Sergeant Kiernan was back, and he and the officer who looked like George V began hurrying women along the downward-leaning deck, where suddenly you had to walk by shortening a leg and reaching with another.

Honora stretched out her hand in panic. Hold my hand, Sally. Hold your friend’s hand, for God’s sake.

Naomi, Sally called, and Naomi called back. Here, here, behind you! We should take off our veils. Nurses made a neat pile of their veils against the bulkhead. They still seemed sure of what Sally had begun to doubt—that they would simply collect them again when the small emergency ended.

Mitchie and Freud and Nettice had been driven back by orderlies to join them. Two dead, said Karla Freud, and the others are on stretchers with tourniquets.

We ought to take off our skirts, yelled Nettice. She immediately and functionally did it herself. The others began to obey by dropping their skirts until they were all in drawers. That would have amused the Fusiliers had there been time for hilarity and perhaps had the deck been level. A lifeboat was being cranked down from the upper deck and swung way out. It was unreachable because the ship was listing and at the same time inclined by the bows. But there were men with boat hooks to haul it closer. Sally held Honora around the waist.

Honora muttered, Sea bathing. I never understood the charm of the thing.

Are you saying you can’t swim? asked Sally.

In my book it’s not a natural thing to do, said Honora in defense.

The noise from the unwounded soldiers surging from the bows and climbing up the deck towards the stern was like the hubbub of a football crowd and seemed almost as innocent. But that was now joined by the sound of braying mules and screaming ponies. For far below them some brave man had opened the double door on the livestock hold and offered them a hope of escape.

They’re trying to make them jump into the sea—all those horses, said Freud, looking at Sally starkly. Mitchie herself had taken off her skirts and showed her plump, bloomered thighs amongst the shuffling girls. But then she broke off and went forward against the tide to direct orderlies with half a dozen stretchers. She looked helplessly at the deck where stretchers might be laid. But it was taking on an angle which—as yet not decisive—would become comic pretty soon. Two of the wounded were howling.

Ladies, said the George V officer, whose men had secured the swaying boat to the fixed starboard railing by its down ropes and who had opened the removable railing to allow easy boarding. Come aboard quickly. No false bravery or hanging back now. Up you step!

Four sailors were already aboard the boat to act as oarsmen. Their oars were held vertical. Nurses stepped over the gunwale to board the lifeboat with a display of reluctance—just to show the others they were not panicked. Last—determined to speed things up—Mitchie edged Naomi ahead of her and stepped off the ship and into the boat, where the upraised hands of her women helped her down.

Sally, called Mitchie, aware that Sally was still on deck.

I’ll be in this one, called Sally. Already a second boat was being cranked down from the upper deck. The Fusiliers still maintained decent order. Officers arranged them in ranks now, as they watched the boats further aft descending to receive them. The nurses’ second boat was lashed to the railing at a steep angle some might consider perilous. The officer gently but with an increased urgency pushed the women aboard. Sally traversed the tilting boat and took a seat on the seaward side. At her angle she could see—in Mitchie’s boat lower than this one—her sister’s face frowning up.

Sally’s boat filled up with women whose upper bodies were bulked out with life preservers. Sally held Honora’s hands, which were blue with fright. A few soldiers came aboard—almost apologetic. Peril had civilized them. The rope that attached the boat to the railing was let go and they swung wildly into the air with a joint female scream that lacked any composure. And so the Archimedes’s daughters dangled over the sea and were lowered away an inch at a time.

Other boats were descending further aft—but so slowly. Sally saw the ranks breaking up at the officers’ permission. Resignation and calm were no longer the day’s order. And the swinging out of boats seemed to present technical difficulties and was not occurring fast enough. The rake of the far side of the ship must be presenting awful difficulties for boat lowering. So men were now permitted to seek their individual rescues. Soldiers milling at the railings seemed to speculate on what the canting of the ship might mean. Then they climbed the rails to come splashing down into the sea all around the boats. Sailors hurled rafts from both the bows and aft.

Sally’s boat—descending by its hawsers—now picked up too much downward speed. Looking over the gunwales she saw that because of the growing steepness of the deck her sister’s boat had swung in part below hers and had stuck in place, dipping unevenly. A mere instant later it dropped hectically and splashed into the sea. The ship was nose down and Sally saw that her boat would slam the stern of her sister’s and Mitchie’s unless it could be detached from its hawsers and rowed clear. Still attached to the Archimedes by its thick cables, the boat below them—with her sister in it—now turned crazily beam on and crosswise.

She looked up and cried to the sailors at the winches, Stop!

But her lifeboat smashed into the midsection and across the thwarts of Naomi’s. It wildly jolted Sally and Honora, and they could hear the screams of those below them.

This was the place where Sally’s memory changed or died. The thud of the one boat atop another numbed the brain. Sally and Honora were thrown by the impact head and shoulders first into the water and their hands separated on their individual arcs. Time ceased. Only the nurses’ watches—till choked by saltwater—kept it. But the time of the heart and brain vanished now in the minuteless, hourless, choking sea. They flew through an atmosphere of lusty but impotent shouts from men and were unhearing then in green water where she went so much deeper than was justifiable for someone wearing a life belt. She had a memory that this was the way of water in the muddy Macleay too. This was why—unlike other farm children—she had never liked to drop from tree branches into it. Rising by painful inches rather than as a cork, she squandered all the air in her lungs. In her aching want of breath, she wondered remotely—though without intimate concern for anything but air—about Honora. But breaking into air and light she rejoiced to see her friend bobbing in her dun life jacket with its collar pushed up high around her ears. Sally could hear Honora utter a gasp that was halfway to a scream—like a picnicking girl ducked in the surf by a lout. She was slick-haired but she seemed to Sally a breathing promise that this might be an adventure after all.

Sally? Honora shouted, wanting identification. She gave the impression she really wanted to have all this explained to her. We’re fine now, said Sally.

Wine-dark sea, be fucked! yelled Honora. Kiernan had told her that Homer called the Mediterranean that.

Suddenly Sally could not contemplate the fretfulness of losing Honora and knew she must lead. Stay close! Sally called like a woman with a plan. All around, nurses in life belts were thrashing with unnecessary zeal—as if they had lost any water skills they had once possessed. In front of Sally—as she spun—was the blank steel flank of the Archimedes, and forward the upper rim of a part-submerged hole, which the green sea was entering like a tide invading a grotto. Its upper shredded contours were visible—complicated by explosion. Its irregularities were known only to God but otherwise were savage and unreadable. She saw the two lifeboats—one atop the other crosswise—and sensed they were about to sink. Naomi agreed, for she could be seen lowering Matron Mitchie into the water. Mitchie displayed all blood from the waist down. It shocked Sally like nakedness. Mitchie’s mouth gaped, and she did not seem to know her circumstances. But Naomi had soon skidded into the sea beside her. Ah yes, Sally remembered. Naomi was the family swimmer. Jumping from Sherwood bridge or tree forks into an opaque gray-green mixture of topsoil and escarpment grit from up as far as Armidale.

Sally saw the midships doorway open and tilted a few feet above the water. Protesting horses were jumping, their hooves stuttering on the last plates of steel beforehand. There were men in there, screaming at them to go and lashing their hindquarters. Mules fell gracelessly on their flanks as the Archimedes’s own leaning flank loomed above them. Two nurses and some orderlies walked down the canting ship’s stairs a step or two and launched themselves. Still looking out at the sea from the rail Nettice could be seen—squinting like a woman trying to recognize a face at a tea party. How had Nettice missed the lifeboats? By choice or accident? Already Sally and Honora and the remnants and population of their own shattered boat were sliding astern of the Archimedes and could see a little of the great rump of the ship rising by degrees. They could at once see men dropping from the lower port side closest to the shadowy surface of the water as well as others—by choice it seemed and with the howl of their lives—throwing themselves from the upmost, portside railing. They slid down the ship’s sides. Why did they choose that? What did the rivets do to their flesh? But men were queuing for the fright and abrasions of it.

The thing will drag us under, called Honora. The bloody thing!

Sally saw Naomi swim one-armed—a true surf Amazon indeed—dragging Mitchie by the collar of her life jacket. The water was full of claims to mercy. There was a soldier with a bandaged arm dragging another whose face had no flesh. Mitchie and Naomi were not any longer in the nursing and tending business, however.

Some boats seemed to get away easier than hers and Sally saw two of them rounding the low but visible bows. The high tail of the Archimedes was exposed—its screw turning and turning in air and still driven by unknowing engines.

Rafts everywhere! Sally yelled to her sister. Black, rubber—square-thwarted and unsafe-looking things with maybe a sailor aboard or a few Inniskilling men. A soldier was kneeling on one near them and dragging a boy soldier aboard. Soon it would be loaded to sinking point.

It isn’t as cold as it could be, is it? Honora asked hopefully. Like a girl in a bathing party again.

Cold or warm, Sally had not taken account. It seemed up to the massive sea to decide what it was. It had absolute rights to impose its temperature.

Other lightly populated rafts were revealed by the rhythm of the sea but with no guarantee they would stay that way should you take the trouble to approach them. One came close, though, with a soldier sitting atop. Sally saw Naomi haul herself to it and supporting Mitchie with the vigor of a woman making a claim. She linked her free arm through the loop of rope on the raft’s side. Sally forgot Honora and swam up behind her sister but remembered then to turn. Honora was like many others—making a mimic of swimming and chopping the water with exaggerated liftings and plunges of her arms. But she was worthy of encouragement. Naomi attached the dazed or perhaps comatose Mitchie by both arms to a rope loop. Then she herself sprang aboard. She was so lissome. It was a gallant emergence into the air and an exhortation to strength in others, the way she levered herself from shoulder deep up and aboard without any help from the soldiers, who were distracted entirely by their own needs. Mitchie lay still in the water. Her black hair was plastered to her blue-white face and her smashed lower body made dark clouds of blood around her in the ocean. Oh, said Mitchie and became aware of Sally’s arrival at the raft and of Naomi’s attention from above.

Oh, don’t heave me, she pleaded. Let me drift.

No morphine for her. Yet she said plaintively, Oh, and, Don’t heave me, when she was entitled to her screams. Her wounds were full of saltwater and her bones might be splintered in unknown ways.

Sally hooked her own arm into a rope and dragged Honora the last yard to share it with her. Naomi hauled Mitchie up. From below, Sally hugged her and—with little leverage in this water—lifted her by the waist and then the buttocks. Honora too—turned by the security of the rope loop from a panicked girl back into a hoister—gave one arm to the effort. But the chief lift came from Naomi, who was full of frantic energy. Argh! cried Mitchie loudly and ceaselessly as she emerged from the water and Naomi laid her face-up in the raft. From Sally’s place at the rope loops Mitchie could no longer be seen. She could be heard plaintively saying, What a thing to happen to a woman! What a thing!

Naomi negotiated with the soldier the use of his belt and was applying it—as far as Sally could tell from this angle—as a tourniquet on one of Mitchie’s thighs. More raucous cries came from Mitchie. Mitchie’s wounds justified at least that much sound.

Sally remained in the water for she was uncertain if she possessed the athleticism needed to get aboard. Honora stayed with her—both arms hooked through the rope. She seemed now almost at ease with the power of water which lay around and so massively underneath her. More men were struggling up to hang from the exactly angled side of the raft and its other vacant loops. There were unseen men hanging on the far side too. Two or three lifted themselves onto the raft. Yet it still felt balanced. The men aboard and those in the water called to each other in their raw accents. Their words seemed the remnants of sounds from old battles. Don’t push, said Honora to one oblivious youth wallowing up. She had regained her former self.

Since she had recovered the breath for it, Sally half turned her body towards the ship. Once she saw it she could not take her eyes from it. Its stern was rising from the water. There were still soldiers milling around its canting decks and the stern railing. They tried to keep their footing and were reluctant to leave the steel plates that had pledged a solid foothold to them. Poor Rosanna Nettice must be lost amongst the splashes and threshings between the raft and the Archimedes. The mast and funnel rose higher all the time and with more authority than they had had when the ship was solid. They reached up at a sharp angle and this looked more like a boast of power than a submission.

Honora too was watching.

That mast will thrash them, she screamed. For it looked as if the masthead would come down like a huge log as the ship heeled. The door from which the mules and horses had left was nearly under. Yet still one pony seemed to lower his head and scrape through. She could hear screaming like humans from the animals who had not jumped for fear or lack of time—a massed animal shriek of blocked escape. Men still on the ship were now reduced to jumping from the stern or sliding down its curves. She saw two land in the churning propeller which cut them to sections and threw their blood about in a terrible mist so instant you could doubt it had happened. She began to weep silently. This was a thing that stretched imagination and defiled at the last second what she thought of as the kindnesses of the Archimedes. Far down in a half-flooded deck where stokers drowned, the engines still churned and the unwitting screws spun in air.

Quick, said the older soldier from the raft. He leaned over the side with a canoe paddle which must have been part of the raft equipment—it would turn out the other one had been lost. This was a useless implement anyhow. But he was like a man awoken.

You in the water there—paddle, paddle!

Paddle yourself, yelled Honora. He was at one blunt end of the raft frenziedly plying the thing. Like a homing compass the raft swung nonetheless head-on to the Archimedes. Huge metal shrieks and thumps could be heard within the ship and the unearthly lament of mules and ponies went on. There was a blast within the skin that sent itself through the water and buffeted Sally’s spine and tried to wash her under the raft. The Archimedes used this great sound as a pretext to jerk its stern as high into the air as it could reach. More thunders and great iron scrapings and crashes came from within. Mother of Christ, said a soldier hanging in the water. The boilers are breaking loose. Brace yourselves.

But the Archimedes had found its desired angle of glide and now entered the water fast and smoothly. It left steam and a mist of coal in the air. The wave, called the sergeant with the paddle. Hold on.

The raft dipped by one of its corners, then conceded itself towards the ship’s suction. The vanished ship sought to drag them away by the legs. But there was a wave, high enough to be called surf, a strong swell at a beach. Sally held Honora by one arm. The wave did not break. They rose on it and a beam of wood broke down on the raft and bruised her shoulder but then swept away quickly. It lowered and pitched them and moved on with a tolerable smoothness to meet the floating faces of the Archimedes’s other orphans further out.

Now that the Archimedes had orphaned them, there was a hubbub of conversation across the face of the water, echoing as in a cathedral, spiked here and there by howls of grief or fear or pain and desperate yells of insistent advice. Many voices rose in heated expressions of opinion. It seemed perhaps a thousand spoke at once. So many in the water? So much life thrown out of the Archimedes and fretfully determined to deal with the sea. A mule swam by with its glazed eye fixed on Sally. It found no succor there and blundered on. An Irish sergeant swam up with his chevrons showing below the armpit of the life preserver. He was a large, sandy-haired fellow with a sunny unpreparedness to let harm befall him and was hauling another man. He found one of the raft’s loops with his free hand. Thank Christ, he said as he attached himself to the rope. The soldier he held on to with a meaty fist had a spike of steel protruding from his face below his forehead. A man beside Honora said, Let him go up on top, Sarge. Your man there’s in a bad way.

The feared Inniskilling Fusiliers. Feared by the nurses, anyhow—perhaps without necessity. For now the sea had taken all the male boast out of them. So the sergeant rose up into the raft and pulled the boy with the lump of steel for a face after him and—Sally supposed—laid the young man beside Mitchie. Nurse, the sergeant said, acknowledging Naomi like a gent. They saw an upright lifeboat nearby and Sally envied it its substance. But it was a target now for many swimmers who were dragged aboard until its leeboard was so narrow that the yearning of those who grabbed its sides tipped it over and hurled all in it back into the sea. Those now in the water gamely set themselves to get it the right way up again. They would by great heaving from sailors and nurses and soldiers manage it at last, and climb back in. But fewer chose to do that. Some had been stunned by the capsize. Some—whacked on the head by the gunwales—were floating away.

From here advice could only be shouted. The amiable sergeant yelled to the population of the raft not to make the same mistake. There was after all a notice about capacity on the small rubber bulwarks and they had reached it. See there now, said the sergeant—who was their self-chosen captain—in his glottal voice. We can’t take on so many we go under. False mercy, you see. Defeats the purpose. We can change places later perhaps and those in the water have spells up here.

Honora—hanging by her rope—began to pray. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

The sergeant said, Keep at it, girl. That and a passing steamer will get us to dry land.

She sounded as businesslike with her religion as with her sewing long ago. Do you know contrition, Sal? she asked. We should make our acts of contrition. O my God, I am heartily sorry…

And who’s heartily sorry the Archimedes sank? asked Sally with a waterlogged fury she could not herself explain.

A horse with bulging eyes came swimming up, the sort they might use to pull cannon. It floundered and wallowed—floundering being two-thirds of what it did. Holding on to its mane and trailing and riding it in so far as it would let her was that little prune of a woman Rosanna Nettice. Her drenched face—when Sally could see and judge it—was set. It no longer looked an indefinite thing as it had in Egypt and in the Archimedes’s wards. Nettice half-rode, half-clung to the mane with small, unrelenting hands. She seemed not to notice them, and Slattery yelled, Hey, Nettice! Stick to it like a plaster! And in fact Nettice looked more suited to the horse than they were to the raft. Her blue lips were tight but she seemed in charge of the terror-stricken beast. It was revealed by the horse’s plunging that she wore on her lower body a pair of soldier’s drawers. She looked as though she would ride illimitably past even though they were calling to her—except that the horse could not overtake the drift of the raft. The animal galloped and weltered but had no traction. The splashes created a sort of surf as it tried to renew its capacity to go forward by plunging harder. It was an honest horse for a hill but now began to scream and sink. The sound was horrifying and pitched Nettice into the water. She wore no life preserver and seemed all the more a mere fragment.

Come, Nettice, yelled Sally. And Nettice swam quite functionally to the edge of the raft to be gathered in one-armed and attached to the rope that already held Slattery and her. Now there were eight people in the raft and sometimes a dozen hangers-on suspended in sea.

Are you hurt? Sally asked Nettice. But Nettice needed to wait for breath.

I got sucked down, she said, her lips beginning to shiver a little. I was very deep and gone. I was very deep.

She paused for the breath she had not yet fully got back after her long fall through the layers of the sea.

I was beyond what you could believe I could ever come up from. The horse was down there. It came up underneath me. It tangled its mane in my hand. It got beneath me and brought me up here to you. It was an instrument of God.

Some yards off, the horse was laboring and still protesting.

Save it, poor beast! called Nettice. It labored away and turned to give them one last flash of a panicked, unexpectant eye. Its neck sank and the nostrils tried to hold their place above the sea. It reached a point—fifty yards away or more—where its hindquarters began to drag it down backwards. So it went under, whinnying until choked off.

It was God’s will for you, Nettice, said Slattery crazily.

But Nettice howled for the loss of her pony. The suck of water was now what Sally heard above all. The hollow cries of others seemed to disperse somewhat as all the parties to the Archimedes’s disaster drifted further apart.

An unmeasured time passed in the water. Naomi was hushed, and reassured Mitchie still, and Honora chattered from an instinct that while she was full of talk she could not be consumed by the sea. The boy with the shrapnel spike cried out once and again. But those things were to be expected. What was not expected was that a soldier or sailor secure on the loops of rope would let go as if he had seen a better prospect nearby. The sergeant yelled after them but they were no longer regimental enough for him to stop them.

Where are all the destroyers and troopships and such? Sally heard Naomi ask. We see them all the time when things are normal.

The sergeant said, It may be they’re too frightened to come near. The U-boat, you understand.

No one tried to paddle with that little plank. Where would they paddle to? They were on a sea lane, were they not? They were on a sea that was all sea lane.

Patience, said Mitchie so clearly. Do we have water on this float, Nurse Durance?

No, Matron, Naomi admitted.

Mitchie should be raging with uncontained, overflowing pain.

Well, said Mitchie, one wouldn’t expect…

Naomi leaned over the side of the raft. She whispered to Sally. You come up here and I’ll go down there.

Not yet, said Sally. I’m happy, she lied.

She chose not to be up there with Mitchie’s great damage and be powerless before it. Honora—offered the same—said, Don’t know if I could manage it without showing the world my fat arse.

The sergeant laughed but without prurience. The other soldier with the younger boy, the original occupants, were utterly silent.

After a further interval, Naomi leaned over the side and confided to her sister that Mitchie’s pelvis was intact. The upper thighs though—hopeless. Compound fractures both. I’ve got a soldier’s belt on one and some of my blouse on the other.

Sally leaned her forehead against the raft’s black rubber flank while Naomi began to lift Nettice, who was vulnerable for lack of a preserver. Nettice was light to lift and of surprising agility. The sergeant did not help but not out of ill will. After so much presence and command he had gone suddenly silent. The high intoxication of his reaching the raft waned in him. He lost his powers of command as awful surprise and cold entered him.

When Nettice disappeared aboard Sally thought it grew suddenly cold in the water. Ridiculous to think such a thing. But you could believe the little woman—in rising to the deck of the raft—had shed off upon them the iciness of the depth she’d been to. In the surf back home, all you did was cry to your sister or to young Macallister, Getting cold! Going in! Into the golden strand where the sun was warm honey on quivering shoulders. She’d half-imagined till now that she had the same choice here. But now she knew by a reflection of her own coldness in Honora’s blue lips that she didn’t. One of the soldiers along the loops of ropes began to sing raggedly.

Through lack of memory or life force he ceased.

Thank Christ, yelled someone from the far side of the raft. Don’t need that papist shite!

For the Inniskilling Fusiliers, it was known, were from a divided Ireland—though the sea was willing to accommodate them all equally.

She could not separate herself from the cold. It seemed determined to be her. The idea of being incarnate cold put her in a panic she was hard-pressed to manage. She felt cheated that—with all it was cracked up to be—the Mediterranean could prove so bitter in the early or midsummer. Best not to say a word about it, though the useless words about the shivers pressed against her lower lip like a sneeze. Nor did she think that climbing aboard would help. She believed it would exhaust her more than give her warmth.

Are we all here then? called Naomi. She made a graceful reconnaissance over the side. No doubt over all four sides. She was the authority. Yes, Naomi could be heard, checking the unseen side of the raft. Five handsome soldiers and a sailor this side. Are we holding on? Are we downhearted, boys?

That was the stupid thing the troops always called: Are we downhearted? As their troop ships took them off to get minced.

Two of them at least replied. We’re still having a committee meeting on the downhearted business, Nurse.

Ragged half-witticisms.

You’ve got the tay going there, have you, Miss? And, What time’s the shuffleboard start?

A copper tank—a cube of about a yard each way—came cruising unevenly along. Two men held on by some sort of railing soldered to two of its sides. It seemed likely to roll at any encouragement but was kept steady by its two passengers’ life jackets.

Holding one of its handles was Sergeant Kiernan and, grabbing the other, an orderly whom Sally had seen but whose name she did not know. They were twinned. Each relied on the other to keep their cube steady.

Honora called to him. She seemed pleased to be able to make her complaint in person. This is nothing like what you told us, Sergeant Kiernan. All that Greek god claptrap. Never this cold at Clifton Gardens!

Kiernan was actually smiling! Keep angry with me, Nurse, he suggested. Angry people have a lot of staying power.

He made the water more habitable. A sort of hope floated up with him and raised the temperature for the moment.

He asked who was aboard and Naomi told him. Two wounded men. And Sister Nettice. And our three soldiers here.

Naomi—not quite in Sally’s line of sight from her position in the water—was doing a census for Kiernan. Apparently she inspected the young man with a steel fragment now.

This young fellow… he’s dead, I’m afraid.

The man’s sergeant roused himself, combating the decree. Are you right sure of that, Miss? he asked, sounding half hostile.

Feel the pulse, Naomi suggested. There is none.

Oh, Jamie, said the sergeant, doing his own assessment. Oh, Jamie.

Ease him down then, said Kiernan. That’s my suggestion.

Yes, said Naomi. I’ll take his life preserver first.

“He will swallow up death in victory,” intoned the sergeant in a grievous voice, “and the Lord God will wipe away tears…” He’s my fookin’ nephew.

What would you like me to do then? asked Naomi.

Let him go, said the sergeant with resignation. Let him go.

They could feel the jolting of Naomi and perhaps the sergeant dealing with the body. Naomi persuaded him to help her turn it over the rubber gunnels. A young body—but the face erased by a wedge of steel deck. Naomi and the sergeant operated on the reverent principle that he should not be simply dumped. Soldiers who knew him and who hung from the raft helped his descent into the sea. There for a number of consolatory seconds he floated, upright, face down, arms out. He waited until a decent space developed between him and the raft to raise his lower body and float in the posture of death. Then he gave up the surface and fell from sight. There was more discussion between Naomi and Kiernan. The ice now forming in Sally’s brain prevented her from grasping what was said. A delirious boy from further down the side of the raft was lifted aboard and Kiernan and his orderly abandoned their copper cube and took his place on the ropes.

Chafe him a bit, Miss, one of his friends called. He hit his head when we jumped.

They could feel rather than see Naomi rubbing the boy’s upper body as Mitchie, in shock, murmured half musically, “Wrap me up with my stockwhip and blanket, and bury me deep down below…”

Naomi was so busy and so much in command. She leaned over the squat rubber bulwark and said, Sally, we’ll change places now.

Sally desired it above all. But, No, she said, furious. Honora should go!

Come on now, said Naomi, with a commanding testiness. This isn’t a game of tea parties.

I’m here for good, said Honora, with stark blue-green eyes and clinging to her loop of rope. It was her pony or even her parent.

Honora, Sally insisted. And so Honora was hauled aboard and chafed. But the rubberized sides of the raft now threatened by a squeak to fold it up like a closed book, and so Naomi slid into the water, her bare feet pointed to make the entry as accommodating as it could be to everyone around the craft. There was no gasp from her, no sense of the shock of the sea.

So, are all you chaps awake? she asked after shaking the water from her hair. Their wakefulness had become her business.

Around the raft there were strange and weary cries. Yes, Nurse. Yes, Nurse. They sounded so much like a ward that they evoked the idea in Sally of the steel plates of the Archimedes and its decks crowded with cots. There was in their voice the expectation of orderlies arriving with trays of cocoa.

To Sally, her sister seemed above nature. Naomi conversed with Kiernan in tongues Sally could no longer grasp. They made their way around the raft to investigate the state of its passengers. On the raft, Matron Mitchie began singing again—this time in a finer contralto:

Once she had made the mountains run down to the sea, a few soldiers gave her a raggedy cheer.

Oh, God, she groaned artlessly.

Kiernan—floating free of the raft—frowned as he surveyed Sally. He reached out with the sort of force allowed only here and lifted her into closer connection with the rope loop. Now, don’t daydream, Nurse Durance. The current would love to take daydreamers. You should be atop, you know.

He turned in the water to see if Naomi was in reach to consult. There was no doubt at all that Naomi must be party to decisions. And it was not many seconds later that—as if to confirm Kiernan’s adage about daydreaming—a soldier simply let go of the side of the raft. He floated away a little with his head back and his face skywards. What are you doing? she heard Naomi call to him.

I’m just… he called. See!

He half raised a finger to the sky. That other one…

No! Back here! Naomi called. But not even she had the strength to retrieve him.

Indeed, there were other rafts but removed now by hundreds of yards from them. An upright boat could be seen—but too far away. Another—upside down—was further removed still.

There is no other one than this one, called Kiernan. Come back!

No, the other one, he called out in cheery exhaustion.

Come back now, Ernie, one of his fellow soldiers called. But the current cooperated with the man’s intention. He spun in the water. His face grew smaller and it had a mutinous serenity on it. He laid his head back and his naked feet rose. He adopted the posture of resignation to the waters.

Some wisdom prevented even the overactive Kiernan from trying to fetch him. Dear God, Naomi said. It’s starting, is it?

She cried loudly, We’re all staying here. There is no other boat for us. Just this one.

No one answered directly except that some communal discontent at her edict came out in groans. They speculated about the chances of something warmer and more mothering.

In the raft Mitchie berserkly said, I don’t know where I’ve been, but I’m pleased to be home again.

A large gray ship appeared and was seen first by Honora. In the north, she called out. Yes. The north.

Leaning back a little way and her flesh blazing with ice, she could see the ship revealed by a swell. The men shouted and shrilled and whistled, and she bayed too. But it was set on finding its way to deliver more battalions to that terrible shore. Too busy delivering the dead to find the living.

Bastards! yelled one of the Ulster men.

Language, called Kiernan as if the rules here weren’t different.

Go to hell, roared the Ulsterman back. When I’m dictated to by a fookin’ colonial…

But he suddenly ran out of steam.

May I point out, called Kiernan, that it’s your crowd who want us here, beating our heads against the Turks. We are doing your Empire a favor.

There was another communal outcry from men on and attached to the raft.

Nettice leaned over the side and confided to Naomi, I’m finished now. I lost too much air. I went too deep.

She slid like a dolphin and was in the water, but Naomi gathered her in with a long arm and attached one of Nettice’s small blue hands to the rope. Nettice slumped there with a disappointed weariness.

Sally wondered why others were not so incarnately cold as she was. They complained in terms she knew were understandable. They spoke of the false current. They cursed a passing ship. But no one spoke of cold. Naomi was in the water but superior to it. Certainly she had lost all her authority on the Archimedes. Triage had chastened her. Ellis Hoyle’s watch was an albatross. Yet now she had not only resumed control but done it in a particular way—by becoming the jolliest girl and the best camping companion. Sally was pleased for it since it was the accustomed arrangement which she welcomed at the moment. It was a grateful wonder. It was a light shining through ice.

There was another gray ship appearing up north and from the populace of the raft more waving and shouting and hooting and whistling in which Sally took part, but only by reflex.

Nurse Slattery, called Kiernan from the water, is there a box there, on board? One end of the raft or the other?

A box? There is a box, said Slattery. A young man has his head on it. Move him a little to the side. That’s right. So you want it, Mr. Kiernan?

Open it up, said Kiernan.

Honora said it was locked. Kiernan asked who had a knife.

Slattery inquired of the now mute sergeant if he had a knife. It seemed he produced something appropriate. Unskilled metal sounds were heard of Slattery working at the box. Fingers hopeless, she admitted. Then, Dear God, she cried. Broke the blade.

Keep working on it, said Kiernan. You see, there might be a flare.

Sally could hear Slattery battering at the box with the broken blade. She grunted, God, if you ever loved a poor girl, help me open this damned thing.

It amazed her by opening. A papist miracle of which none of the Ulstermen around and on the raft were heard objecting. Well, said Slattery, a jug of water here. Just right for Matron Mitchie.

I’ll have a sip of that too, said the sergeant aboard with a clotted voice.

In hearing that plea Sally discovered her own thirst. Dryness and ice. She was a cold desert no living water could redeem. She was not surprised to see her mother floating at her side where Honora had been. Life is sweet, said her mother but with the famed Durance frown which raised the chance that death was sweet too. Sally felt with a strange loathing pride what she had achieved—the lethal hoard of morphine gathered in as honest girls gather in… what? Linen, blackberries, peaches? Time to put her money down on the chance death was sweet. Time to discover the infinite space of what she had done. The space lay beneath her and could be explored without limit.

A bandage and this stick thing, said Honora, further reporting the contents of the box.

The flare, said Kiernan. Hang on to it and keep it dry.

But there’s nothing dry here, said Slattery.

Kiernan redefined the objective. Well, don’t let it get too sodden. And pass it to me when another ship appears. It can give you phosphorus burns so don’t let it off yourself.

I wouldn’t know how to, Slattery reflected. She sounded a bit amazed that she had neglected this section of her education.

Go aboard when the time comes, Naomi advised him. Else you’ll drop it in the sea.

Sally saw another soldier slip away and no one but she seemed to take notice or be able to afford to. She could see him floating—she believed—towards Egypt.

Does anyone here have a red handkerchief? Naomi called.

Aboard, Honora repeated the request. Then she seemed to go about rifling pockets. We’ve got gray, she announced.

Use that too! said Kiernan.

For he and Naomi spoke and thought with one mind.

We’re as good as rescued, Naomi told everyone.

Men dangling on the sides of the craft were calling for their sip of the water. Naomi handed it over the far side of the raft. It had gone to only a few men when someone—according to the yells and reproofs of men—dropped it so that it half sank before it could be retrieved, already useless and tainted with salt. There were groans and curses all around the raft. The treasure was gone. That was the conclusive disaster. And the light was growing conclusive too, the sun getting low. In dark—it came to Sally—no one can stop me going to explore. Her forgiving mother said, We’ll slip off alone. Sally looked forward to it, rejoicing. The pain of her hooked arm and the ice at her heart would be relieved.

She could not see more than the upper structure of one of them but it happened the sea was all at once full of ships. Two large shapes—Honora reported—and a smaller, faster one. The flare, called Kiernan, and Slattery passed it over the side like a baton without it being lost in the sea. Sally saw Kiernan—frowning like a prodigy of care—pull some string from it and hold it as high as he could. It blazed brighter than suns in his hand. He waved it while Slattery dared to stand in the raft and wave the gray handkerchief. One of the larger ships veered towards Kiernan’s light and Honora’s cloth. Around the raft ran a sudden, hoarse conversation.

They bloody seen us, cried the sergeant. They’ve got some gobshite there that isn’t total blind. Seen us! Seen us!

But after small hesitancy it turned broadside on, then stern on. Renouncing them.

No excuse to let go, cried Naomi at once. Everyone stay. He’s lowering boats.

A British naval launch—the smallest of the three vessels—presented itself and swept past them making a wave. They could hear the reverberations of its braked engine as it sat by a distant overturned boat to which some still clung. From the raft they could see people lifted and laid down or allowed to limp on its deck. A brisk pennant flapped above them from the mast. Then—instead of to them—it turned to another unseen raft to take its living aboard. The deck seemed to bristle with the rescued as it came onwards to their raft.

Hold on, called a fine, casual, polished voice through a loud-hailer. Hold on there. The French will get you. We have signaled them and they replied.

Their powers of reason were dimmed, but the people of the raft could see that it was so, and the launch was so crowded that its stern dipped. Sally felt a murderous hatred for those who were already on board. The raft swung in the launch’s wake, and they beheld a launch and cutter being lowered as promised from a dusk-lit naval shape. A destroyer—someone said. As the raft swirled in the vortex made by the ship’s displacement of water, they could see the tricolor on the high mast.

Boats were being lowered from a suddenly apparent second French destroyer too. Substantial rescue was about to occur.

The French destroyer held on its deck and within its bulwarks dozens upon dozens of the Archimedes’s children. After being lifted up to the deck each of them had been wrapped in a blanket by sailors with pompoms on their hats like in a play. The thoroughly dry, thick texture of the blanket was a mercy so vast that Sally—laid on the deck beside Nettice—thought the men’s foreign names should be taken by someone so that they could be the recipients of regular thanks. Matelots. They were rubbing men’s bodies but were inhibited as yet from rubbing the bodies of nurses. Nettice shivered, eyes closed—encased in her blanket, beside Sally—on the tender surface of steel reminiscent of the Archimedes’s lost bulk.

Below a hung sail was separated off part of a sailors’ mess as a women’s ward. They were each lifted onto tables and now their life jackets were cut away with their blouses and remnants of clothing. The water had made the women neuters. Sally was washed with wine-tinted hot water and was given a towel to manage her own drying. She just about could. Then a French orderly helped to dress her in the undershirt of a tall sailor. In an officer’s cabin—Honora already asleep in the officer’s bunk—Sally was given a palliasse on the floor. The hot breath of the ship’s engines entered through a vent somewhere.

She quaked with remembered and not yet dispelled terror, and found herself concerned above all with her mind. She tested it and thought she found it a stranger’s mind. Her own having dissolved in the sea, she had picked up someone else’s drifting and bobbing mind. She saw herself now not as a continuous thing. She was no more than a mute core—or a pole on which rings of a particular nature could be placed. Each ring was a successive self—that was it. Her self was utterly new and needed to be learned all over. The childhood ring of self was not connected or continuous with the morphine-stealing one. Nor did the morphine-stealing one share any fragment with the Pyramid gawker. And now she was utterly new again, she found herself alarmed to be so. The latest hard little hoop—being taken out of the water—could just as easily be lifted off and replaced by another as accidental, whose description was: drowned in the Mediterranean. Since she was so tenuous, she might still swerve at any second from her rescued state and into oblivion. There was no such grand connector as destiny at work in her and never had been. Such a thin skin existed between parallel states and chances that they could leak or bleed or be welded into one another.

An officer with a molded beard came along, bowed to her and tenderly called her Mademoiselle. A blanketed, streak-haired Naomi appeared in the doorway. Her half-demented certainty and her zest astounded her sister. She held up Ellis Hoyle’s watch which must have been attached beneath her life jacket to her blouse. She looked joyful and still in command in a way that sidestepped the command of the French officers. The sea’s finished it, she explained. It’s seized it up. It’s just an empty case now.

With her half-mad and all-commanding sister above her, she felt it safe to fall into sleep and did without further thought.

She awoke to a bright evening world and sailors carrying her on a stretcher through places full of glaring electric light. On deck a launch hung in the air and she was loaded on when it was level with the deck. She had an impression they were in a harbor—Mudros, she decided. On Lemnos. From the deck of the descending launch she could see Naomi—a blanket on her shoulders—walking the destroyer’s rail and looking seraphic. No eye had ever been clearer or readier for this place than hers. The Argonauts landed blind compared to Naomi.

Bitter Lemnos

Sally and others were carried down a cramped laneway that smelled of earth and urine and into a large tent. Naomi passed Sally’s stretcher on foot and scouted ahead. She felt canvas brush her elbow as she was brought into a tent and placed on a cot. Here she fell asleep and—after not one dream—woke in gloom lit by a hurricane lamp hanging from the central pole.

She heard a significant voice and struggled to identify who it was by the dim lamp and an early morning glimmer of light through the canvas. Carradine bent down to pull back her blanket. A band was playing in the distance, orderlies shouting—for its own sake, it seemed—and a few blowflies buzzed in the tent.

Look, said Carradine. The blanket says “RF” and then down here République Française. A bit of the old parlez-vous, eh?

Sally reached up and took her by the elbows. She found them solid and present. She gazed into Carradine’s face.

I was hoping you were all safe, said Carradine.

But we left you with your husband, Sally protested. You’re with him, not me.

Ah, said Carradine. Well, that’s a tale for later.

That awful hole in his head…

He’s well. He speaks well. He’s fit to get elected to parliament like his father.

Sally let Carradine loosen the sailor’s shirt she still wore and wash her shoulders and her breasts, and then her belly and genitals and rump and legs. All of it was the sweetest friction.

You’ve washed the others? she asked with feverish democratic concern.

Oh, yes, said Carradine. They’re all clean. And fit to talk to.

Oh, said Sally. But Eric?

Carradine said in her nurse’s whisper, The doctor in England—at Sudbury Hospital—said I was holding up his recovery. The terrible thing is that he’s probably right. Eric’s depended on me so much. But he cried when I was sent off here. He cries easily, then gets angry and afterwards never stops apologizing. It’s the nature of the wound. He gets periods of delirium when he thinks the world’s out to get him. I’ve seen more men weep in the head-injury ward in the last four months than I’ve seen in my whole life before.

The feel of the towel remained exquisite. Had such a fabric existed before the torpedo?

The problem, Sally assured Carradine, is that men are not strong. It was men who drifted away from our raft. Whereas Mitchie…

Carradine nodded—assenting to the proposition that Mitchie had endured.

Well, she’s had surgery but I haven’t heard any more… Most of the time I work as a dresser. I have a fine tent. Or if it’s possible to have a fine tent here, mine is. And everything I need—and two orderlies who treat me with contempt, the buggers.

There were suddenly tears on Carradine’s face. My God, she said, I’m as bad as the fellows at Sudbury.

She rose. Another nurse had finished bathing Honora, who had barely stopped talking in a hushed voice.

Carradine! hissed Honora, Carradine being the icing on survival’s cake.

Honora was sitting up. Sally saw an apparition of Freud stirring and settling in a sailor’s shirt on a camp cot across the tent.

Sally drowsed further now and was awakened by her sister’s lips on her cheek. Naomi was in her long sailor’s shirt and shivering beneath the blanket around her shoulders.

Imagine what it would have been like for Papa, she said. If we hadn’t been lucky. We wouldn’t have lasted the night. The night would have done for us.

I think you would have lasted, Sally insisted.

She heard a sudden wind blow grit against the side of the tent. An officer and a matron entered with an orderly. The officer was a man of middling years who held himself with that certainty peculiar to a particular kind of surgeon. He had not made any notable noise in entering, yet the women roused themselves and looked up, wan faced, and Sally swung her legs to the dirt floor and sat.

Ladies, he said, Colonel Spanner here. Welcome to Lemnos. May I present my congratulations on your survival.

Their survival, however, did not make him smile. Something in his greeting made Honora turn a mad, mocking face in Sally’s direction. Nettice frowned from the far side of the tent with that vehemence with which she had yesterday risen out of the ocean on the pony. There was something improper in his dominance of them—with them prostrate or lolling.

Are there any problems then? he asked. Concussion, abrasions, contusions, lesions of any kind?

The women all chorused their No’s and felt foolish because they sounded like a class of schoolgirls. The colonel—responding like a headmaster—asked, were they sure? The matron said there was no mention on their charts of anything beyond exposure. So the colonel turned to the orderly. Private, you are my witness that they have vouchsafed no information indicative of trauma.

Yes, sir, said the orderly and smirked.

So, said the colonel like a jolly uncle but one who could not hereafter be blamed, no grounds for a long delay in returning to work then.

Carradine stood there with narrowed eyes.

Orderly, will you see that the women are issued some clothing? Chemise, blouse, skirt, or pants… Yes, and shoes and Wellington boots.

Doctor, said Naomi suddenly, with a sort of impetus. There were more than twenty nurses on the Archimedes.

Yes, said the colonel. Six of them are missing. Please accept my condolences.

Naomi—the one nurse standing—declared, How dare they put soldiers and military equipment on our ship! And apart from the painted-over red crosses, men were visible on deck, exercising when they should have been below, hiding. It gave the U-boat its reason to sink us. I would ask you on behalf of all of us here to protest to the military command.

These are arguable points, said the colonel, but moot. Damage done now, wouldn’t you say? And don’t you normally address officers as “Sir”?

If we had a military status then we would, said Naomi with her eyes full on him.

Ah, said the colonel. A barrack-room lawyer here. You should feel free to write your own letter of complaint, if you choose. But may I say this is a small matter in a landscape of huge matters. Perhaps best forgotten in light of your deliverance.

The English matron read the names of the missing. Egan, Weir, Stanmore, Keato, Delamare, Fenwick. They were Sally’s acquaintances, but belonged to other cabins and another clique. All these lost women had sat generally at the other table of the two in the mess. So they had stuck together in the water—just as her clique had—and been unfortunate together. Someone in the tent began to grieve and her frank tears could be heard. Freud mourned Keato as a fellow Melbourne girl. Sally felt her kinship with them too. She felt nine-tenths saturated by the Mediterranean and that she might carry its weight around in her for good.

And our matron? Honora asked.

Since the question has been asked, I can tell you that Matron Mitchie has undergone an above-the-knee amputation. The second leg remains, for the moment. That is it, then.

He nodded to the matron and orderly. They left. Carradine was left gazing at the women in the tent with her mouth set.

Is he really in charge here? Honora asked her.

Carradine conceded he was.

The orderly put his head in again.

Nurse, he said as a command, and Carradine—after a pause that counted for minor rebellion—followed him out.

Holy Virgin, said Honora. Do you think that colonel creature has a wife?

Dr. Fellowes isn’t gone, Nettice assured them. I saw him on the deck of the Tirailleur, the destroyer.

Sally saw tears on Freud’s face and felt them pushing at her eyes—a little of her saturation rising. Those pitiable girls who had yelled fear and encouragement to each other in the ocean, and it had smothered them. They had howled and the water took its opportunity.

And Leonora, Freud contributed. Leonora’s not gone. They’re fated to last, she and Fellowes. They live on outside all complications.

In her conviction she looked dark and pretty and a little bit cracked. There was silence then, and a surge of wind and a scatter of small gravel and the sound of rain asserting itself.

They died in our place, Rosanna Nettice argued while sitting like the rest in a shirt that had belonged to French sailors. She did not unclench her brow. They were the tithe, weren’t they? God knew that with me he had taken too much and sent the horse to take me up again.

That was her map of what had happened, so they would not argue with her. Reveille ran with an instant’s delay from bugle to bugle and headland to headland and across the intervening lowlands of the harbor. It insisted even the dying hear it—and the women who were not as yet utterly convinced they had escaped drowning.

Other nurses arrived. They carried clothes with them—veils, blouses, shirts, and pullovers hostile to gender, some plain gray skirts, army pants, army boots. Wonderful Lemnos creatures—so assured of the air and so convinced of their own breath. They offered to show the Archimedes women where the water pump was and pointed out a washing bucket and enamel basins which were stacked by the side of the tent. They had also found for them those forgotten instruments of dignity named toothbrushes. They complained under their breath. The colonel preferred the work of orderlies, they said. He thought nurses an imposition. He was a regular soldier from India. The Australians had asked for a Medical Corps surgeon to run this hospital and the British army had taken the opportunity to dump the colonel into the job. He had brought a matron-in-chief who sided with him, and their Australian matron knuckled under to the two of them. Hence the colonel had a lot of time for both these women. But the staff nurses were supposed to be mute laborers. The man was a passable surgeon but behaved as if soldiers suffered dysentery out of willfulness.

A number of the other women who had been on the Archimedes met them in the mess tent and swapped their tales of redemption. Voraciously they ate fresh-baked bread and great cans of blackberry jam—the plainest food and the most soothing. Flies were thick around the condiments. Asked by Sally, would the rescued women have to go on duty that day, the experienced nurses of Lemnos laughed. Take it easy, you were only sunk a day ago, one said. It was an eon of a day though. It was long as one of the divine days from the start of Genesis.

And now they went in twos to visit Matron Mitchie. Sally made the pilgrimage with Naomi at her side. There were two cots in the tent where Mitchie lay with another matron—an English woman suffering pneumonia. Mitchie had color in her face. A little semicircular tent lay over what was left of her leg.

I was a dancer once, she told the Durance sisters as soon as she saw them. It was not any attempt at a joke. There was a glimmer of fever in her eye but not of delirium.

When I danced with the surgeon-in-chief at the hospital ball, people would stand by in a circle watching. I know you don’t believe me.

Both the sisters assured her they did.

A tide of pain ran over her face, and her mouth gaped like that of a woman twenty years older—a pleading, gummy mouth. So, said Mitchie when it passed, it is with a certain sadness… But poor women drowned, younger than me.

One could not doubt Mitchie’s grasp on the world. It seemed firmer than Sally’s.

They are mistaken, said Mitchie, if they think I will be hereafter content in a sedan chair.

She held up her hand.

You have met the officer commanding? I know you have. How I hate to leave you in his hands. But I am due my injection in half an hour. I have become quite the opium fiend. You’ll find me in the dens of Little Collins Street when you get home.

Her pain filled the tent and they felt forced in the end to retreat before it—to give it the room it vastly needed.

Orderlies delivered their meals in the mess. Beef and biscuit at night. Some of the men appointed to the job did not care to deliver that joyless tack with grace. They wiped their noses between placing enamel plates in front of the women. They did it because they had not been told they must not.

As Sally finished a letter to their father, Naomi asked whether she was up to an evening walk. They walked along paths marked with white-painted stones, emerged from the shadows of the Canadian hospital on the cliff and saw a lovely bluish light in a sky crowded by great fists of headlands on the low foreshores of the harbor. Vessels lay at anchor in the lazy mauve water of Mudros. In silhouette they were washed clear of any military purpose. They seemed to be there to lend perspective in the great bowl of stone and pasture and sky and sea.

In terms of their friendship, it still had the color of novelty. They chatted about the state of their gang: Nettice’s mute face but her forehead locked into an unrelenting frown. She might simply need glasses, suggested Sally. Freud, said Naomi, looked as though she’d seen everything. As if nothing surprised her. Yet she seemed very surprised underneath. Honora? Leo? Well, with those two you got what you expected or at least you hoped you did. They were more knowable than Freud was.

Who would look after poor Mitchie in old age? Hadn’t she mentioned a brother in Tasmania? Mitchie—they agreed—would make a very rebellious invalid.

Naomi then said something unlikely. I have had no periods. Not since April.

This was friendship then. This was the sort of thing friends gave ear to.

And, said Naomi, I haven’t accommodated any man. So it’s not a pregnancy.

Sally’s face reddened at this sort of unusual conversation. But Naomi reflected her own bewilderment. She too had missed what she had been trained to call her “time,” for three or four months. Had others? She had seen no sign of the curse of Eve in any of them—no bloodied cloths or toweling hurriedly unpinned from belts beneath nightshirts to be dropped in the soaking bucket.

It’s called amenorrhea, Naomi informed her. Another thing, I don’t daydream about men at all. I’m indifferent to them except as patients. Has that happened to you?

Sally gathered herself. Daydream about men? She must get used to the pace of this new friendship and even to the concept that Naomi had once daydreamed about men, however indifferent she was to them now.

Sally said, I’m still waiting for June’s and it’s already nearly August.

Poor girl, said Naomi softly. Were you worried?

I thought I might ask Mitchie… But then…

Things will return to normal. The triage and the damned wounds. And now, the Archimedes going down. That won’t help.

She took Sally’s hand. Sally could feel her own sweat-slicked palm against Naomi’s dry one. So, nothing to worry about, you see. We’ll lose Mitchie to Alexandria, and Fellowes and Kiernan have been sent to the stationary hospital across the headland. So we don’t have as many allies as usual. So be it. Things will return to normal.

But Sally could not imagine how they would. To confirm that opinion they heard from the whitewashed stone cemetery below the crash of rifle fire and the lonely bugle striving to honor someone whose body had been committed to the earth. She began to grasp her sister’s hand with more of a will now. Her fingers were no longer slack. The bugle had brought their walk to a stop. They stepped off the road to make way for three ambulances grinding their way up from the harbor.

“Hysterical women,” said Naomi when the ambulances had passed. That’s what they say when ships sink or trains go off the line. Hysterical women.

She adopted a gruff voice. “The women were hysterical.” I’ve seen it—Mrs. Carberry when the wagon her kids were playing in crushed her son’s head. But children are a special case, aren’t they? The point is, we weren’t hysterical, were we? In the water? A little bit strange now. But men are strange too. Going silent. Drifting off. That’s another mystery. Our periods are gone and our duty to be hysterical has gone too. They’ll never be able to print the story of the Archimedes because we weren’t hysterical enough.

I’m tired, Sally confessed. The exhaustion felt unanswerable.

We say it’s “the curse.” But when it goes missing we feel a bit lost.

Sally had the sudden confidence to laugh.

After three days their survival became somehow boring to them. They were sick of the burden of the gratitude they were told by all the other nurses they must harbor. Mitchie was the comfort of their days. Her conversational flurries were thinner than normal—interrupted by the encompassing sharpness of her pain. They discussed the nature of her wounds with her day nurse—an English girl as sweet-tempered as the supreme matron was sullen and tyrannous. What drained from the amputation? they wanted to know. The usual, said the English girl. Blood and serous fluid. The wounds on the other, compound-fractured leg showed no sign either of sepsis, but were even harder to attend to.

They were rostered to begin duty on the fourth day and were allocated by the junior matron—their much-dominated and dominating countrywoman—to work in the dysentery wards. One of these was located in a long hut down an alleyway from their own tents, and there was an overflow brigaded tent—what normal people would call a marquee. Nurses called it the “circus tent.” Dysentery was said to be cruel on Gallipoli these days—as lethal as machine guns. The Archimedes women advanced to these wards through a miasma of excremental stink and air spotted with blowflies. The sharp-boned faces of soldiers—flesh retracted around their eye sockets—waited for them inside both the hut and tent, where flies clamored more thickly and where their first impression was of heroic mismanagement. Other harried nurses in white aprons and skirts hurried to answer shamed and urgent cries and helped men hobble towards outside pit latrines, or rushed up with basins of disinfectant to replace linen, or wash a stained rubber mattress while a withered young man waited on a chair for his fouled bed to be remade. Bare-legged men in shirts and shorts—some hopeless cases swathed like babies in clouts—displayed their faces a second but turned them away in a kind of self-reproof for their loss of control before women.

An orderly sergeant set the women of the Archimedes to scrub out the place. They were directed brusquely to a supply tent down the alleyway and came back to the wards with brushes and buckets of ammonia-fortified water. They thus held in their hands the simplest and bluntest instruments of their trade. In fact, they had lost that trade. The idea seemed to be that they must by scrubbing earn their way from an all-fours position to become again upright nurses. They began to cut the stench with their plied brushes and were grateful as the ammonia claimed their nostrils while they blew their breath upwards through clenched teeth to gust flies from their cheeks and eyes.

The floor of the hut done, they went to the circus tent. There were no beds here, no wounds, yet it was hellish—the air dense and feverish and possessed by flies. Men lay on the floor on mattresses and were even more crowded in. Sally could smell the fetor of their breath as she scrubbed the boards between the patients. An ambulance arrived outside, and orderlies were numerous, carrying men in and finding space for them.

Get out of the fuckin’ way, the orderly sergeant screamed at Sally. Where was the kindly and urbane Kiernan? Sent to another hospital, it was said. She stood to make way and considered what had been said but could not devise anything. She saw orderlies lower men onto mattresses already fouled with excrement.

Are there no fresh mattress covers? called Naomi, suddenly rising.

What did you say? asked the orderly sergeant from the mid of the three poles of the tent.

I wondered, were there fresh mattress covers.

The man’s eyes engorged. He pointed a sort of NCO’s baton or crop at her. That is not your flaming concern!

Do you speak to your wife that way? asked Naomi.

Bloody shut up, Nurse, one of the stretcher bearers murmured. It almost sounded like well-meant advice.

You can’t speak to nurses that way, Naomi insisted—fixed on the sergeant and his poor man’s imitation of an officer’s riding crop.

Yes, you go and complain, you stupid cow, he told her. It’s been bloody tried before.

Some bearers seemed to laugh, and the faces of the upright, accustomed Lemnos nurses remained tight and their eyes sought upper reaches of canvas. One of them, however, called to her sisters on their knees, They’re not all as bad as this one.

The sergeant laughed at that—the easy laugh of a man with official permission or indifference backing him. Naomi’s reply to the sergeant was the best one that could be chosen for now. She kept her narrowed gaze on him and dropped to her knees, still gazing full-on.

Then she set to scarifying the floor again.

Sally saw a man rise from his palliasse and rush out shuffling with that dysentery urgency. He had been a soldier but now was a flue—a man in flux, paying away his stinking animal substance.

At the end of the shift, carrying basins and a jug, the nurses drew their water ration from the pump, and it seemed an inferior quantity for the task of redeeming themselves and their clothes from the foulness of the day. In the mess tent and at the nurses’ stations at the end of the ward there were at least large water-filter jars brought in by ship. From these they could drink unpolluted water.

There are said to be more bedpans on the depot ship in the harbor, Carradine told them at mealtime. But the colonel feels no rush to get them ashore. He’s got this cracked belief that it’s better for the man with dysentery to have a bit of a walk. It teaches him self-control. Besides, it punishes him in case he’s scrimshanking.

Scrimshanking?

Malingering. His beliefs belong to other wars. The wars in Africa and India that Kipling writes about.

He can’t be serious, the women protested. Doesn’t he know about bacteria?

They were on their knees all the next day in the typhoid ward. It was run less primitively—the absence of uncontrolled voiding of the bowels helped that. The ward doctor seemed more visible. Though of a colorless character, he cast at least a mild influence on the orderlies to take a less cutting air. Thus when a scrubbing Archimedes woman was in their way they emitted merely small hostile hisses. It was their ward though—the hisses stood for their title to it. There was a spirited nurse who spoke at a more than hushed volume and ignored them. There were even orderlies whose manner was inoffensive if not apologetic. It was generally older men who said, Excuse me, Nurse, as they delivered infectious cases to the beds.

The men with typhoid were apparently under suspicion of scrimshanking too. Sally saw the colonel enter attended by the ward doctor, the matron-in-chief, and a sergeant-major. They stood by to honor this high-ranked crackpot who seemed to think the blowflies represented a test of character. The ward sister inclined her head but repressed a bow.

Don’t rise, he instructed the scrubbing women airily.

As he and his orderly stopped near her, Sally could smell—even penetrating the wholesale fug of the place—the strong, masculine odor of polish from the boots of the colonel and his sergeant-major. As the medical grandee and his aides gazed across the typhoid ward, the ward doctor ventured a suggestion.

Sir, I don’t believe the creosol is working well in the latrines. The Canadians are recommending chlorinated lime and the New Zealanders blue oil.

Colonel Spanner was at least indulgent as he put a hand on the ward doctor’s shoulder. Let them recommend away, he suggested. Let them go at it as they will. Creosol is the official British army prescription and thus the Australian.

Sir, said the doctor gamely, the very proliferation of these flies…

Well, yawned the colonel, it’s summer. Of course there’s a proliferation of flies.

He chuckled then. Those Canadians, he said. Only just off the prairie and full of ideas about chlorinated lime…

He gargled some further, forgiving laughter for the raw Canadians, slapped his leg with his swagger stick, and led his party out.

Sally heard the ward doctor tell himself, There’re a bloody sight fewer flies at the Canadian hospital.

An arrival of two hundred men from a transport lifted the Archimedes women off their feet. They were allowed to disinfect their hands and put on their veils and begin work in the general wards. There had been an August offensive on Gallipoli, and now the orderlies unloaded the ambulances. Sally was sent to be Carradine’s aide. She was equipped with shears to cut away the stinking and lousy uniforms from those who wore them. She remembered the first time she had done this on the Archimedes and how fouled she believed everything was after only days of the campaign. But that was nothing to how men and uniforms were now. Her next work was to wave away flies from bloodied bandages and naked wounds. The air vibrated with ecstatic insects delayed only by questions of choice. One-handed she provided surgical scissors and the angled forceps needed to extract the gauze which packed the wound. Then the irrigation hypodermics, the new gauze and dressing and bandages.

As Carradine worked on the facial dressing of a young man with a tag which declared his wound serious, Sally labored with blunt scissors, cutting away his serge jacket. Australia—so proud of its wool—had devoted too much and too densely to this young man’s uniform.

To see the blackened wound in his mandible as the dressing and gauze was eased away was to see a monstrous man—as Sally imagined him in the future—living solitary in some hut of bark and burlap on the edge of a town and lacking the features to reclaim his life.

Oh dear, said Carradine.

She took up a swab doused with hydrogen peroxide. The young ogre groaned as his face burned with disinfectant.

It’s good, Carradine whispered to him. It occurred to Sally that a nurse was the seductress—telling her lies to coax back those whose minds licked at death.

Within the ambit of Lemnos floated a boat with four putrefying dead soldiers and three dead nurses in it. One of the nurses—identified by her watch—was the girl named Keato. All the Archimedes women were given an hour to descend the hill and stand in the neat cemetery for the commitment of Keato and the other two women—known only to God—to the earth. In the half-forgotten life before this, a nurse might die of pneumonia or peritonitis, and her parents put on her grave a shattered column for a cruelly uncompleted life. But Keato’s funeral was from this new and unprecedented order of existence and thus of death.

How the men and women buried today must have celebrated at finding their lifeboat. Had they needed to right it—and then congratulated themselves on achieving this and climbed aboard its hollow promise? To perish in an excess of air, Sally believed, was worse than to drown in water.

Nonetheless, the solemnities of the padre and the trumpeter did release the pressure of grief. After it was done, Sally was pleased to go back up to the tents from this field of putrefaction of young flesh—from this ground which lacked aged souls—to counsel the bewilderment of the lost young spirits.

In the night—under the black canvas—Sally was awakened by a hand eagerly exploring her stomach. She screamed at the outrage. She thought of one of those terrifying, sneering, venom-dripping, slash-mouthed orderlies. All the other girls rose up. Half of Freud’s face was seen as she lit the hurricane lamp which hung from the pole. Light was shed. It caught a furious rodent scurrying across the earth floor. A patch of ground was rubbled and into the rubble black fur disappeared.

Oh God, cried Freud. Remember? We were warned. Moles.

Sally covered her eyes. I was scared it was an orderly, she confessed.

Maybe the colonel, suggested Freud to make them laugh. They all gagged with mad hilarity.

I vote we leave the lamp on, Honora said.

I vote with you, said Rosanna Nettice with her weightiness. A considered vote.

A hailstorm came over the island on that same night of the mole. Its edged ice slashed the tent canvas. In the morning Naomi solemnly repaired the hole with sticking plaster inside and out. They would stir at night now and see by the lowered flame of the hurricane lantern small dark shapes scurrying or hear them shuffling rubble on the earthen floor and being busy with their nightly animal duties.

A scatter of mail always lay on a card table by the inside door of the mess tent. Sometimes a parcel dutifully sewn in cloth. The parcels created tremors and cries of joy. People ran to get scissors to undo the stitching. The Durance sisters never looked at this table. In their own minds they had passed through a veil into country that the normal postal arrangements could not reach. Oh, they could write out to others. But others, they presumed, could not write in.

So one morning they needed to be told by some other women that there were parcels for them on the table. When people rushed to put them in their hands, the Durances frowned at each other. Their parcels had been addressed to the Australian Army Nursing Service, Mena House, Egypt, and then sent on to Alexandria, where they had acquired a label on which someone had written, ON THE ARCHIMEDES—ON LEMNOS IF LIVING.

Naomi assessed her parcel and read the writing on its sewn cloth wrapping. Sally took out her penknife from her pocket and began to cut at the fabric of hers. Inside lay a rough wooden box. It looked homemade. She could see her father running it up from grocery boxes. She could as good as hear the scrape of his saw. Inside that box lay so many good things that other nurses gasped with wonder. Condensed milk, delicious in tea. Jugged ox tongue—which they had stated a taste for early in their girlhoods. Their mother had been an expert bottler and pickler of all the earth’s fruits—whether vegetable or animal—but it had been some years before her death that she had given up the effort. The girls themselves had failed to pick up the skill. So their father must have been given the tongue by a neighbor, as well as the other preserves of fruit and jam and the cloth-wrapped fruitcake. The two of them placed the jars and packages side by side and smiled at each other and at the other nurses smiling back.

Inside each package was an envelope. Naomi opened hers while Sally was still showing off her delicacies. Naomi’s lips pursed as she opened the envelope—she seemed ready for dubious tidings. Sally at last opened her own. It had a number of pages and began with “My dearest girls” in her father’s hand. It was dated 30 April 1915. Naomi and Sally compared their mail. The two letters were identical. And so they each read in silence while the other women drifted away to talk and drink tea.

Once she had finished reading, Sally looked up. Naomi’s eyes were on her. The murderous children honest with each other now. And their lesser crime—the abandonment of the father. Leaving a vacuum into which Mrs. Sorley had rushed. That reflection made them both hesitate in irrational anger. Naomi raised her eyebrows. It couldn’t be avoided.

So, she said, Mrs. Sorley has become our stepmother. The old man says that in yours?

Sally nodded. She knew there was another letter enclosed behind her father’s and whose it would be, but did not want yet to read it. She heard Naomi murmur, If I were a better daughter I’d be entitled to say, she didn’t waste much time.

Sally said, I feel exactly like that.

But it was two years and nine months, after all, since their mother was gone. An argument could be made that such a delay was just about close enough to the approved-of three years’ mourning not to matter to a reasonable observer.

The envelopes each turned to now were addressed to Misses Naomi and Sally Durance.

Enid Durance! Sally thought and was resistant to the title. Her two big boys, said Naomi when Sally had finished reading. I imagine now she’ll combine her farm with ours. Quite a fancy piece of land it will make. And she—being younger than the old man—well, she’ll get it. And her “two big boys” too, I suppose.

Do we want any of it? asked Sally.

No. We left it behind, didn’t we?

Damn her though, said Sally. Damn her for writing a nice letter.

The new situation put their mother a degree further from them now. She was growing dimmer and less plaintive out there in the space where the dead floated and wavered in memory. Yet she had the capacity always to come back to them sharper than a knife’s edge and keener than the apparent world.

In the meantime they couldn’t say too much that was snide against the Presbyterian seductress—honest and unfussed and philosophic as she’d proven to be. The size of the campaign—and the scale of stupidity at whose altar the colonel was but one regional bishop—had shown them the size of the world’s sins. Mrs. Sorley seemed minor in that regard. She was crowded out by the sequence of amazing, cruel things, by that compounded element in which time and horror occupied the same line and time’s arrow was horror’s arrow too. And all else in life was hazy as infancy.

Naomi said suddenly, You could have cooked him all the meals in the world and stayed at home and still he would probably have married her!

The thought of her father and Mrs. Sorley lying together in the bed where they had finished their mother was best not to be entertained.

Well, it is done now, Naomi said.

The Violation on Lemnos

Freud had her stylish and knowing air that was above mere fashion. She could also elegantly pass on the sort of gossip about Melbourne in 1914 which passed for knowledge with most of them. Melbourne was so despised in New South Wales and Sydney that contempt sent its way by Sydneysiders was itself a sort of awe—a kind of applause and a suspicion of undue sophistication. And Freud seemed to stand for the Melbournianism which people from elsewhere condemned but envied.

When they found her in the mess at dawn, however, all that was gone. She sat hunched with a blanket across her shoulders. Leo and Sally came in together from their night duty and paused when they saw her.

Are you tired? asked Leo.

Leo was a member of the blessed for whom sleep remedied all fret. Freud raised a tear-muddied face. A blue-black brow and blood-engorged eye and bloodied and swollen lip were obvious. Sally and Leo swooped in with consolation—hugging and assuring her and asking her what had happened. But she howled and they couldn’t get her to say anything. Other women arrived—Naomi too. Freud still answered no inquiry. It was Naomi who went to get brandy for her and who made her drink it. Freud choked on it and then vomited on the floor. At this manifestation they realized there were too many of them offering too much help. Some stepped back and hovered by the tent flap and others cleaned the mess with towels and fetched a bucket of water and ammonia. Freud gasped and composed herself, turning inward as Leo tended to her lip with a swab, saying, Sorry, Freud, whenever Freud flinched. Naomi bent towards Freud’s blanketed shoulder and Freud reached her hand across her body and—shivering with grief—took Naomi’s wrist.

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?

Yes, Sally admitted.

The two men seemed to welcome the idea, as if it were some sort of souvenir of home. On their way out, Dankworth paused by the tent flap. Remember that we are willing to protect you, he growled with his eyes lowered. But the shield he offered them was not the right one for the time.

Honora was outraged they had not woken her to meet Dankworth, but she was half pretending—she seemed invigorated to know he was on the island. Soon they’d be promenading the foreshores together, and that would restore something that had been lost here.

It was raining when the military police officer and his sergeant came to the mess tent to collect Freud. Nurses had till now been muttering about how well she seemed to be taking things. Nursing—Sally knew—was a great if temporary distraction from all memory. The two provosts shone like deliverance in their slicked waterproofs. The Australian matron also appeared in an overcoat and was a fellow authority. The provost officer asked Freud to come with them, and the matron said Naomi could come too.

When Naomi and Freud set out with the military policeman and the matron, they were themselves bulky in khaki overcoats and as good as disguised under sou’westers. Their gum boots robbed them of all grace as they tripped through puddles to the hut down the hill which served as a police station. Naomi was later spare with details about what had happened there. Freud could not be asked for fear of what the question would bring on in her. The man imprisoned and identified by Freud as the rapist was an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old who was wide-faced and fair-haired—an orderly from the medical wards and the circus tent. Freud was asked to swear that this was the criminal. She gathered herself and—as Naomi recounted it to Sally later—it was already apparent that she could swear. But the forces working on Freud for denying it were potent. The provosts and others would be pleased if she did refuse to point to the attacker.

The young man brought in front of her was blushing. Freud snorted at this—as if it were a plea of innocence.

Did you say something? the officer asked.

That’s him, Freud answered. She looked at the boy full-on. He would not look at her. At the moment of identification the boy’s mouth hung in a way which almost made Naomi pity him. He’s not clever, she thought. He’s a muscular child. Those who recruited him carry their barbarous portion of the blame. But suddenly Freud needed to be restrained by Naomi and the matron from attacking him. She managed only to spit at his face. After a second—held by the arms—she went peacefully. There was no answer for what this blundering kid had taken. The young man was charged in front of her with rape and marched away hatless. Afterwards Naomi and the matron guided Freud back to the tent and suggested they would need to call the doctor again with his benevolent sedatives. No, said Freud—upright in their hands. Whatever he gives me, I still have to wake up in the end.

She wanted to go on duty with Naomi, so Naomi was promoted to post-operative. Dysentery was declining anyhow as autumn came to the Gallipoli Peninsula and to Lemnos. The medical wards were not as full, as the armies on the peninsula dug deeply rather than raged forward. Freud worked with a neutral and measured air. She took temperatures and blood pressures and encouraged young men to wake from chloroform. She had the power now to call on orderlies to help her move patients onto their sides. They obeyed her with their own neutrality or with a strangely shy sullenness. Naomi heard one man who worked with them—an orderly who must have been near forty years of age—bend forwards and tell Freud he was sorry and that he hoped she understood they weren’t all like that, et cetera. Freud said nothing to him.

The entire nurses’ mess felt a certain solace to know the evildoer had now been arrested—and identified as barely more than a child and not a very clever child. They could not help feeling it reduced the scale of menace which had hung over them. Now—more than in the interim—it became clear to them that they had been frightened of someone satanically astute and not to be appeased. They were relieved by the anticlimax of an arrest to which one plain face belonged.

Dankworth had been back to stroll down the headland with Honora—that was a token of the normal. But the women as a group acted in Freud’s company with the false breeziness appropriate to a fatal condition. Her fatal condition was that the trial of the rapist was still ahead of her and he might get exonerated.

Lieutenant Robbie Shaw and his newly promoted friend Captain Lionel Dankworth did help ease the weight of such questions by calling at the mess again one evening. They found a small group of nurses ready to go on night duty—Sally, Naomi, Honora, Nettice, Leonora. There are thermal baths on the other side of the island, Shaw told them. We’re going to try to get a car on Sunday to take us over there. Would you like to go?

These two had a wonderful air of unstoppability about them. They walked on the island on their own terms. And behind their joking, their casual watchfulness, and their unspoken sense of affront at what had been done to Freud, Sally could tell that they were by their very instincts assessing and weighing the women as men customarily did. Is my wife here? they asked themselves. Is she amongst these gravel-dwellers with their mixed clothing and their harrowed looks?

Speaking of the coming excursion, Robbie Shaw said, Why not invite the girl who had the problem too? It’ll be good for her.

Ah, said Dankworth—sidestepping that noxious subject. That girl Carradine, is she here? We have a truckload of bedpans outside.

They went outside and there was the improbable truckload. As they carried canisters of tea and tins of fruitcake indoors under Shaw’s rowdy orders, Naomi went urgently to find the right orderly to get the bedpans unloaded. It seemed to her that these two young men of no great gifts were angels of efficacy on an island whose masters sought to forbid every gesture of cleverness and grace.

Naomi told the men that there would be at least eight women free to make the journey.

Will you be one of them? I mean, the ones who come? asked Shaw confidentially—and out of Dankworth’s hearing.

It depends. I would like an outing. If Freud comes, then I’ll go too.

He lowered his voice. Lionel likes the brunette with the eyes. And all the impudence. Could you get her to come?

I doubt she could be stopped.

It was agreed amongst the women that if anyone should have a holiday from the general hospital—assuming she could be persuaded—it must be Freud. And so Naomi must—of course—go too. Apart from that, names would be drawn from a hat.

That night in the darkened wards Sally moved amongst fevered amputees, those whose wounded arms lay in cock-up splints and legs in long splints. Taking temperatures and pulses, she was a meek inspector of frantic dreams and listened for pain and anguish in those whose sleep was shallow. She saw the English matron loom out of darkness. Her torchlight skimmed the beds and bounced off her white bosom.

Sister Nettice? the matron asked Sally. Nettice was somewhere in this darkness and still to be found. The matron’s torchlight went probing into corners. It brushed over faces in repose and eyes starkly awake.

Accompany me, Nurse, said the matron. Sally walked in her wake and they moved down the chicanes formed by army cots and came on something extraordinary. The torch beam discovered Nettice standing by a cot. Sitting on the floor in blue hospital pyjamas was a young man whose eyes were still bandaged but who cocked his head inquiringly towards the light. Nettice had been only partially successful in putting a distance between herself and the patient. The matron-in-chief hissed at Nettice and asked what she had in her hand. Nettice slowly produced something from the folds of her lumpy skirts. It was—Sally recognized—one of the chocolate slabs Shaw and Dankworth had brought them from the depot ship.

The matron gave the appearance of understanding this scene—at least in her own terms. Nonetheless, she breathily called on God to shed light on what was happening here. The young officer—a little smear of chocolate on his left cheek, a childlike and forgivable smudge—turned and began haltingly to feel the edges of his mattress. Unaccustomed to his dark within the dark, he levered himself slowly up. He intended to stand upright in Nettice’s defense. Nettice, however, reached out with authority and put her hand on his shoulder—exerting pressure so that he sat down on his cot.

What’s the problem, Rosanna? he asked.

I was taking some time, Matron, said Nettice—low but without apology—to give Lieutenant Byers some chocolate. In my estimation, it does him good and lets him know he still has a name and a future.

“Let him know?” Of course he has a name.

He had forgotten it with the blow to his face. I have had to school him in it and now he knows it again. But his memory must be fortified.

Must it be fortified with chocolate and on the floor? I would imagine not.

Nettice’s face was set. It would not change to mollify the matron. It refused to take on any trace of shame or contrition or justification. Nettice said reasonably, It’s so big here with voices coming and going. He would have forgotten who he was without me telling him. And a bit of chocolate.

Come, said the matron. We can’t go on hissing and whispering here. Come to my office.

Matron, Lieutenant Byers called out in a voice firm and loud enough for the daylight, if you are suggesting that there was anything untoward…

He stood again, as if with the intention to follow the matron and Nettice.

Here, said Sally, taking one of his shoulders and then the other. Nettice will handle it. Don’t worry.

She helped him sit once more on the side of his bed, a slight figure in his large drill pyjamas—the uniform of those lost in that confused space between soldierhood and the lesser life arising from the scale of the harm done them.

I’ve got her into trouble with the ogre, said Lieutenant Byers. Are women ogres or ogresses? Poor little Rosie.

She’ll just get a talking-to. We’re all used to talkings-to. Don’t worry.

A hiccough of sorrow came from him. She patted his shoulder.

It’s nothing at all, she said. That woman disapproves of people breathing.

He shook his head. Rosanna’s right, you know. Living here is like living in a factory.

Oh, will you get some sleep? asked or commanded a voice from across the room.

Sorry, mate, Byers called lowly. Sorry, all. No sweat. Can’t keep my eyes open a minute longer.

He gave Sally a little stutter of laughter.

That Sunday forenoon the two omnipotent artillery officers arrived in a car and a truck and with a young Greek guide to take them to the promised baths.

Listen, said Robbie Shaw, limping around the car, I hear different reports of these hot springs. But let’s give it a go, anyhow. By the way, this young bloke’s called Demetrios.

Four of them—Sally, Naomi, Honora, and Freud, who Naomi had somehow persuaded to come along—were able to sit in the car. Dankworth drove, with Honora in the middle of the front and Shaw with his legs stuck out as the window-side passenger. The truck—driven by one of the artillerymen—followed with the other women.

But Nettice was not there. Nettice had been suspended, which, in this windy island on a headland of gravel and with no place of entertainment but the mess, was a severe test of the soul. She was forbidden to enter the wards or speak to Lieutenant Byers. She amused herself by playing Patience with a dog-eared pack. She gave Sally a daily note for delivery to Byers. She seemed to look calmly on the possibility of further discipline.

Now the expeditionary path took her off-duty sisters jolting north away from the sea—from the place of ships and hutments and encampments—and upwards amidst fields in which green pasture grew. Scrawny cattle and plump goats availed themselves of this. On the hills, the lines of olive trees seethed in a brisk wind. Here, without warning, the colonel’s Lemnos gave way to Sergeant Kiernan’s. The gods were here, Sally thought, though she could not have named them. A long white wall contained a patch of hillside in which there stood a white Greek chapel and its gravestones. In the backseat of the car, Naomi pointed it out to Freud, who took polite interest. But the dazzle of Greek white walls wasn’t enough to soothe her. Most of her could not be reached by light.

They threaded between hills and exclaimed to see wildflowers on hillsides and speculate what they were. In a village of white walls and houses, Demetrios and Dankworth had a loud discussion on directions before continuing on and passing an ancient amphitheatre beyond. Before Christ? shouted Dankworth. Demetrios nodded his head emphatically. Far before Christos. Greco-Roman, he said.

The road began to wind, and the truck stopped to allow Carradine to be sick. They all got out for the occasion and picked wildflowers and looked down the long ribs of the island towards the brilliant sea. Sally demanded that Carradine take a seat in the car, and she joined the girls on the benches at the back of the truck where the wind blew their veils horizontal. Rising up a hill now, they saw the sudden apparition of mountains beyond a whitecapped sea. For that instant they were utterly released from earth and absorbed by the company of those mountains across the water and their remnant snow. The car stopped, and at Dankworth’s order Demetrios came back to the truck and pointed at the mountains for the benefit of the nurses aboard. Thrakya, he said, and ultimately the word “Thrace” was suggested and Demetrios agreed. Then earth dragged them back again and down a stony hill and into another glittering white village, where clothes blew on lines like regatta flags.

The road beyond the town ended above a bay. They gathered their bags and their bathing costumes—borrowed from the Canadians—and accompanied Dankworth and Shaw down a pathway over which sheltering trees cast shade. So they came to a long white building with a tiled roof and a disused-looking open-air café to one side of it. The bathing party milled inside while Demetrios bought tickets from an old man in a glass booth and—in a heavy atmosphere of sulphur from the baths—feverishly distributed them while pointing to the doors for men and women. Shaw apologized for the smell. I believe, he said, it’s not your normal baths. Demetrios told me it’s about smearing on mud. Some Greek saint used to do it and it cured his gammy leg or some such. I suppose it all adds up to an experience, anyhow.

An elderly woman in a scarf, with gentle, hooded eyes, smiled at the women and—holding a stack of aged but clean towels—led them into the women’s baths. They were half blinded by the miasma of hot sulphur. The foreyard of the baths seemed to be dominated not by a water pool but by two pools of gently stewing mud. The old lady mimed rubbing the mud on her body and—when the women looked mystified—smeared some on her arm and then traversed the room to a small pool above which was placed a tap and its handle. She turned on the tap and rinsed her mud-streaked arm under steaming mineral water. Then she left—satisfied that all was now clear.

There was a debate about whether they should ignore the chance of this sacred mud bath. But Carradine said that, having been brought so far by the courteous officers, a few of them ought at least to have a go. A further conference developed on the damage the sulphurous mud might do to the bathing costumes they’d borrowed from the Canadians. But Naomi pointed out that they could rinse the mud out in the surf below. Freud settled it. Still in her shift—not having changed into a bathing costume at all—she stepped forward to one of the mud pools and got to her knees. Testing it for temperature, she then lowered both her hands into the viscid muck and scooped it up and daubed it across her cheeks and forehead. Slipping off the strings of her shift, she loaded it on her shoulders and—when the bodice of the shift sank to her waist and hips—plastered her breasts. She worked fixedly. There was no cure in what she was doing.

Naomi understood at once this attempt at self-obliteration. She ran up, pulled Karla Freud upright, and held her by the shoulders, receiving broad smears of mud on her own costume. She helped Freud away and across the room to the water pool and sat her down by the tap and washed her thoroughly with a towel. Naomi left the face till last. She murmured reassurances all the time. She was telling Freud, You mustn’t blot yourself out. He is the one to be blotted out.

As a sort of duty the other women coated a few of their extremities with the mud so that they could report to the men that they had done it.

They could hear that next door Dankworth and Shaw were asking each other raucous questions and answering with barks of laughter. A mud fight had obviously developed. Since the women felt they should not leave their room until the men left theirs, Carradine had time to tell them that there had been such an improvement in her husband that he’d been to London with a theatre party. They had worn their proper uniforms. And then Sally found herself announcing as a marvel that she and Naomi had a stepmother.

He was just waiting for his daughters to get out of the way, suggested Leonora.

She’s a strict Presbyterian, Sally explained. She’s made our old man a Presbyterian as well.

But that won’t kill him, said Carradine.

I can’t imagine anyone being willing to marry my old man, said Honora. Now that he’s old and bitter. Just as well my poor mother’s still alive.

They were relieved in the end to clean themselves off and change and climb the few steps out of the baths. Dankworth and Shaw emerged ruddy. Somehow they had had a wonderful time in the fog of sulphur. What a place to bring you! said Shaw. You can get mud anywhere you like. But we brought you all this way as if it’s a treat!

This is holy mud, Demetrios reminded him.

The women exaggerated the delight of the experience. In the outdoor café, a dense coffee was served with pastry full of honey, and cakes with fruit at their center and their dough teased out into strands. All this revived the day. The chatter became hectic, and Freud—holding Naomi’s hand across the table—took trouble to keep up with it and occasionally contributed a smile. But she did not seem certain about whether it belonged at the particular point she bestowed it.

Sally saw Shaw wince as he unwisely crossed his legs. She leaned towards him.

How long were you there? On Gallipoli?

Three months or so. Hard work, positioning the guns.

Was it terrible? she dared to ask him.

Well, he said, it was hard achieving elevation for the guns. They allowed only thirty percent elevation. And we just had to try to haul them up the ravines to level ground. That was the worst of it.

He was determined to make it a problem of terrain. He wished to abstract from the blood. She did not dare push him any further on the matter.

Did you happen to know a man named Captain Hoyle? Naomi asked—still holding Freud’s wrist across the table.

Shaw’s eyes tried to measure how much grief the name might carry for her.

No, she said, he’s not a relative. Nor anything else. But I went riding to the pyramids with him once.

Captain Hoyle fell on the first day, he said. Just after we landed.

It shocked me at the time—he left his watch to me. I didn’t know what that meant. I knew him socially but that was all. The watch puzzled me and upset me at the time.

As she spoke she stroked Freud’s wrist.

Shaw had become solemn. Solemnity didn’t sit easily on him.

Instantaneous, I promise you, he said. There was a lot of “instantaneous” that first day.

They sang all the way back to Mudros. They were exhilarated—even Freud—by wildflowers, the reaches of the Aegean, the mountains of Thrace. And the holy, sulphurous mud was forever part of their comic repertoire. On the final ascent to the hospital Sally saw distantly the military stockade and men shuffling across a reach of gravel to collect a meal of what she hoped was bitter bread.

On Monday morning the colonel and both matrons came to fetch Freud from her place at the mess table. The colonel said he wished to invite her to what he called in their hearing “a parley” in his office. Naomi—given the lopsidedness of numbers between the authorities and Freud, the single victim—had risen, expecting an invitation. But the matron-in-chief said with a confident measure of scorn that Staff Nurse Durance could sit again. Sally’s suspicion was that in some way they were taking Freud onto their own ground to make her prey again.

Only those still there in the mess tent at eleven o’clock that morning saw Freud come back with a mute face and utterly dry eyes. Sally was not there. According to the chanciness of rosters she had been placed on day duty. So it was to only a few of her fellows that Freud announced they had posted her to Alexandria. But there has to be a trial, one of the nurses said. Freud’s face knotted and melted then into some ageless and unredacted mask of rage.

There will be no trial, she told them. They were all in agreement on that. They say the boy was too easily persuaded by his mates. So he’s been sent—you won’t believe it—to Gallipoli. And it’s considered good enough for me to be sent to Alexandria. The orderlies return to their ways, and the monster and I are removed.

She reflected on the inequity. Her face was almost abstracted.

We could win on Gallipoli, and men would still be brutes. And there would still be stupidity.

The news—as it spread—demented the others too. They shook their heads but their outrage was too huge and subtle to be stated. When Naomi offered to walk with her through the wards, Freud said she was forbidden the wards. But imagine the wounded over there on the land being dragged down the ravines by my monster. And falling into his hands.

So it came down to near-useless gestures and words—such as Honora telling her not to forget a rug since the cold season was coming and they all knew it could be chilly in Alexandria. Yet she and everyone else understood well that climate could not alter things for Freud. Naomi and others went to help her pack. A truck arrived for her, its engine vibrating with impatience. An unsteady Freud was helped up into the cabin. Naomi and the others could not lend enough hands to lift her portmanteau and her hatbox into the rear of the vehicle.

One last idea struck Naomi then. Mitchie is in Alexandria, she called.

But the truck had circled and was on its way, and she did not know if Freud had heard.

Nor was this the only departure that day. Nettice had by now been moved to the post-operative ward in lieu of Freud. Here, amputees and other dazed survivors of surgery from a newly arrived convoy lay in a hut amidst groans and murmurs. The matron-in-chief was flanked by two orderlies when she found Nettice there and announced that she was to be sent to a rest compound until she had recovered from her mania.

The “rest compound” was—in this case—the evasive name for the mental hospital below Turks Head. Other nurses saw Nettice refuse to go, but it was pointed out to her that the orderlies could take her straitjacketed if she chose. The Durances were sleeping at the time. It was not until an orderly clanged a series of shell casings to signal time for the night-duty nurses and orderlies to leave their beds that they and others discovered what had happened. It gave Sally that sickening sense of the authorities creating their own world, working by their baleful rules and excluding all other versions. This awareness made other nurses feel a disqualification from protest and an unfitness for struggle before the powers at play on Turks Head. The local regimens seemed more potent than the prerogatives operating in the known but remoter universe beyond the island.

Sally sensed that her own feelings of outrage—like all those of the cowed women—were secondary in their depth to Naomi’s.

But at breakfast Leo told them no visits were permitted to the rest compound. Nettice was as unreachable as Freud.

The sisters slept deeply after their morning failure. Defeat and fiasco, loss and stalemate acted on them like a drug. Yet when Sally was awakened by the evening bell, she saw Naomi across the room washed and half-dressed and still wearing an air of purpose. Sally observed her and hurried to keep pace with her for fear of what she might do when she was ready to go out. They left the tent together, and the now relentless autumn wind blew them across Turks Head and down its slope.

British hospital, Naomi declared.

They came to the British general hospital and found at last the nurses’ mess. As they knocked on the pole at the tent flap the dusk meal was in progress. Asked in, they could see at once that it was a place of far kindlier climate than theirs. Someone had had enough spirit and license to paste pictures of the English countryside on the walls. Everyone seemed properly dressed in white pinafores. The record of a soprano singing folk songs turned on a table-top Victrola. The women were talking over the music with a liveliness—thought Sally—which bespoke their greater confidence in the world. A young woman noticed them standing at the entry and rose and said, Hello there, Kangaroos, come and have some tea.

How can you tell we’re Australians? asked Naomi.

Those great gawky overcoats, said the nurse.

She made her friends move up and found them chairs at the table. They all exchanged names. The one who had welcomed them in was Angela. She had young, glittering, impressive eyes. She had not yet had the goodwill pummeled out of her. She introduced them to two other Englishwomen there. These are the poor girls who were sunk on their ship, Angela explained in wonder, as if the sinking had been an achievement of theirs.

Poor things! one of the girls said. It’s really too bad you have to wear those old clothes. We should take up a collection for you.

Please, said Naomi, don’t go to the trouble. We’re dressed the way the colonel chooses we should be dressed.

That can’t be true, said Angela soothingly.

No, we are meant to be degraded, Naomi insisted.

The three English nurses frowned at each other. Sally felt a duty to show them her sister did not overstate the case.

It’s true, sad to say, Sally confirmed.

Naomi said, One of our friends has been put in the rest compound for no particular reason than being sweet on a blind officer. You British nurses look after the rest compound. We’d like to send a message of cheer to our friend.

Oh, said Angela, you must talk to Bea over there. She’s rostered in the compound. Angela lowered her voice and confided not in Naomi and Sally alone but in her three friends as well. Bea got in hot water herself for getting too friendly with one of our boys here. You see someone with a terrible wound who looks like your brother or your cousin or a boy you used to know… It’s easy to get a bit infatuated with them. But you know that.

Naomi and Sally both studied the girl who had been pointed out. She was very pretty, with ringlets. She was the sort of girl who would have one of them hanging down her forehead—in defiance of the strictures about keeping hair enclosed. She looked childlike. But no one could be a trained nurse here and be an utter child.

Nonetheless, said Angela, I can’t imagine someone being actually binned and diagnosed as mental just because she liked the soldier. Come, we’ll see Bea.

She got up and led the Durance sisters across the room. The sisters stood off a bit as Angela spoke to Bea and indicated them. Bea scraped back her chair and got up. The four of them moved into the corner by the Victrola. Bea had a less posh accent than Angela. It was Yorkshire or some such. But she was—Sally thought—by far the prettiest mental nurse a person was likely to meet. Yes, she said, she was the day nurse in the women’s compound. She knew Nettice—there weren’t many patients in there. Just nurses who’d gone a bit unsettled. There’s a guard with a rifle by the gate but that was to protect the women patients from the males’ mental compound because the behavior from those men was not to be predicted. A boy will think he’s at home and go off wandering down to his local pub.

Some of the fellows were so awfully upset by the thunder of the other night, she said. Jabbering mad from Gallipoli and Cape Helles to begin with. There is one of yours who hid under his bed, poor kid—a boy of about sixteen or seventeen. Whoever let him into the army should be shot.

But Nettice, said Naomi, what sort of company does she have?

There are only four of them. One is a girl who got a big crush on another woman and one is a girl who doesn’t speak at all. The one who doesn’t talk sits there until she pees herself. I do the changing, of course—we couldn’t allow one of those orderlies. And then another girl who can’t stop speaking. These two are both pitiful cases and will be sent back to Alexandria, or else home. The sooner the better too. We don’t have any mentalist here worthy of the name.

But Nettice? said Naomi again.

Obviously sane as you and me. And a great help.

It’s too much, said Naomi, rendered reasonable by the geniality of the English nurses, to ask you to let us visit. But if we gave you letters for her—letters to cheer her, I mean…

Bea laughed. It was a lyrical laugh. I’m in enough trouble myself, she said.

But she had not said no. It was because she had an excess of good nature—a tendency not without danger on Lemnos.

Maybe just one, she conceded.

She and Angela provided the pencil and some British Red Cross notepaper.

You write first, Naomi said to Sally, offering her the pencil.

For Lord’s sake, said Bea, don’t mention me.

Sally wrote,

Sally passed the pencil to her sister who took it up with energy and wrote in a conspiratorial, certain, fast hand.

Just keep it brief, said Bea, brushing aside one of her ringlets.

Naomi produced from the pocket of her coarse dress a little slab of chocolate.

Is it too much to ask that you give her this too?

Bea laughed in disbelief. But she said, In for a penny, in for a pound. Don’t worry. I slip them all a few extras myself.

They could believe in this beautiful innocent who tended the supposedly mad.

Sally would stop on her rounds and talk to Lieutenant Byers, who had been moved from the general medical ward to a more sparsely populated tent. It was as if he had incurred isolation too. Her conversations with Byers needed to be discreet. There was an embargo on talking to men unless it was to ask them symptomatic questions or order them to lift an arm or a leg or open a mouth. The rules had been reiterated after the Nettice matter. After a time, the wounded themselves became parties to the discipline of the wards rather than land nurses in trouble. But Byers wanted to know everything about Nettice.

They’ve taken her off duty, said Sally. She’s having a good rest. She’s needed a good rest since the ship.

She said a horse brought her back to the surface.

Yes, it’s true. A pony. I saw it.

Thank God for ponies is what I say. Wonderful creatures! Rosie is a real brick.

I’d say so.

Yes, he said. She believes in a divinity that shapes us. And she doesn’t worry about my background in the least, you know. My father sent me to a school for Presbyterians but we were Jewish—changed our name from Myers. The other kids could tell—I don’t know how. But the young have a high degree of discrimination in some things. Is it safe to talk?

Indeed the matrons were not in sight so she said it was.

I’ll tell you something about city people who declare their belief in God too easily, he said. They’re not like Nettice, to start with. Their morality is really a kind of fussiness. Maybe jewelers attract these sorts of people. People who depend on their name and profession to avoid paying their bills. How many gold rings and brooches bought on deposit from Byers and Sons, and we’re still chasing up the full payment. And the problem is that if my father took a writ and summoned them to petty sessions, they’d say, Don’t go to Byers’s place. Why pay the avaricious Jew? So there it is. I’m Jewish as Paddy’s pigs—as a comedian once said. And Rosie doesn’t mind. I’m blind, too, and Rosie doesn’t mind that either.

She heard him give a sudden snort of grief. These humiliations of his childhood—and his father’s humiliations—seemed closer and less bearable to him than the damage to his eyes.

Well, he said, I won’t be worried that way anymore. The “Son” in Byers and Sons isn’t accurate now. I won’t be making much jewelry hereafter.

In the dark she often found a chance to talk with Byers. The more frequent her visits the more his concern for Nettice emerged.

You say she is resting? he asked one night. Where is she resting? Is she ill?

Perhaps a little influenza, said Sally. She’ll be back soon.

You’re not hiding something? Nothing’s happened?

No, said Sally. An energetic liar.

Sally knew that Nettice had become her sister’s mania as she had become Byers’s. She had let herself grow dour and hardened. But Naomi had become a fury. Her eyes darted as she looked about her for the right gestures to help rebalance the earth. Through a further visit to the good-natured English nurses’ mess, Naomi began to work at poor Bea to take her in to see Nettice. Sally could tell Bea’s general goodwill would be no protection against her sister’s tigerish resolve. Naomi planned to go down to the rest compound with Bea as a junior nurse getting an education.

Naomi recounted to her sister her persuading of Bea.

You can say, Naomi had argued, that I told you I was rostered on to the compound. You had no reason to suspect it wasn’t true. And I’ll only stay a while, I promise. But she has to know she’s not been given up.

Poor, susceptible Bea took Naomi one morning, therefore, through the outer wire. She greeted guards whose faces lit to see her and who unlocked the gate which led down a raceway contained by barbed wire on either side. The male patients’ wards were beyond the wire to the south, said Bea, but the violent ones were behind the wire to the north. They progressed between these two. After two hundred yards, they came to the small compound for women. The outlook from this part of the headland, Naomi thought, was not very curative. It was blocked off from the harbor and from at least the notion of escape by a rock outcrop.

Bea’s task—after she said good-morning to the sentry on the gate and asserted airily that this morning she had brought along an apprentice—was first to relieve the night nurse. Naomi was to watch from the tent flap as Bea went in. The night nurse proved to be a Canadian. She was writing case notes at a little table and seemed tired enough not to pay much attention to Naomi as she rose and brushed past. She went to wake up her orderly, who had been on call and who rested in a small watch house in the corner of the compound. Peering into the dim tent Naomi saw first a region with a few soft chairs and a table with magazines. There was a rough bookcase with maybe a dozen titles. On top of it lay a pack of cards and boxes containing draughts and other games. Bea—scanning the notes—mentioned to Naomi that two orderlies she called her “boys” would be along soon with a bucket of porridge and another of water and some loaves of bread. Her reference to them was nearly affectionate. This was a place where it was possible for orderlies to work with women in a manner that was not poison. Bea then left the little table and the notes and cried good-morning to the stirring patients. Her cheery voice would itself be a kind of poultice on the day.

Advancing behind Bea, Naomi saw Nettice sitting on a tousled bed beside a woman who chattered or—more accurately—spoke in tongues.

Bea said, Nettice has become her friend and is very handy to me. Keeps the poor girl less excited. And then the Sapphist is very good, too, trying to get poor Lily talking. Between us we’re a well-rounded crew.

Nettice reserved her most clenched and characteristic frown for the sight of Naomi. She rose upright in her shift but kept one hand on the chatterer’s wrist. While Naomi embraced her with two arms, Nettice had only one free hand for the task. Naomi was surprised to find there was almost something grudging in this welcome and in the pressure of Nettice’s one hand on her back. Nettice explained to her murmuring fellow patient that she was going to sit with her friend for a while. Naomi and barefooted Nettice went and sat together in the soft chairs at the recreational end of the tent.

What are you doing here, Durance? Nettice asked first of all. You could get yourself in the deepest trouble.

We thought it was important to let you know that you have not been forgotten or anything like it. They want us to forget you, but we refuse.

I already knew that, said Nettice plainly. I knew you were all my good friends. But I didn’t want you to put yourself in such danger as this.

It’s right I should be the one to visit you, said Naomi.

Nettice—as if implying she might as well ask questions while she had Naomi there—wanted to know how Lieutenant Byers was and whether he knew where she was.

Naomi reported they hadn’t told him more than she’d been suspended. But he asks after you endlessly, said Naomi.

Does he ask after me endlessly? asked Nettice. It’s not something you should say casually unless it’s really happening.

Given the trouble Naomi had taken to be here, it appeared Nettice had only a middling respect for her visit and now seemed to suspect her of deception.

Well, it is the absolute truth, Naomi insisted.

I deserve to be here you know, Nettice confessed. I had in a way gone a little mad, you have to understand. I can’t think what got into me.

But you don’t deserve to be in an asylum, for God’s sake.

The punishment is appropriate, said Nettice with a certainty Naomi hated. It was my lunacy. It’s certainly not Lieutenant Byers’s fault.

It is all someone else’s fault, insisted Naomi. Maybe not all, but whatever you did were minor crimes. If we are ratty and berserk, they have made us that way. We didn’t invite a battalion of troops onboard the Archimedes. We didn’t invent the brainlessness of the colonel and the slavishness of the matrons. Some would say that my being here was criminal. But I say that your being here is the crime.

Anyhow, she argued, you can see I have some nursing to do here day and night. So I am not empty of all purpose. If a person were to mention God, he could say that God sent me here for the sake of the mute and the babbling. We have one each of those.

Naomi should have been pleased to find Nettice so sturdy and very nearly content. And yet there was still a certain disappointment too.

In any case, Nettice conceded, please give Lieutenant Byers my warmest respects. You needn’t tell him—because he already knows—that I might have mistaken friendship and our mutual chattiness for something of a profounder nature.

Are you certain it wasn’t more serious than that? He appears to hope it was.

It is true that if you’ve been rescued by a pony from the bottom of the sea, you get ideas about yourself. Delusions, you know. They evaporate when you’re somewhere like this. As for him, tell him I won’t tolerate any palaver about him being at all to blame. If he starts hogging blame, it is actually selfishness on his part.

Bea’s “boys” could be heard exchanging greetings with the guard and came just then through the door with their buckets. Naomi got up and kissed Nettice good-bye. Then she went to embrace the generous Bea, who had been making beds and was now talking to the thin mute girl.

You’re the kindest girl in the world, Naomi told her. And I’ve taken advantage of you.

After another doubtful look and wave in Nettice’s direction, Naomi left the tent. The sentry opened the gate wide for her. At the main gate at the end of the raceway she began the ascent up Turks Head. She kept to the verge—a pathway by the white-painted stones—to make room for ambulances and supply trucks and the wagons of timber driven by Greeks. She assessed the morning and found she felt a modest sense of triumph to have broken into Nettice’s place of detention. Coming down the road as she rose was a party of people for whom even the trucks and wagons themselves pulled to the side to make clearway. A British matron in a red cape and an older man in a tailored uniform, red tabs, and gleaming boots were attended by two young aides. She stopped out of a reflex respect to let them pass in the certainty of their own authority. She moved on and only the matron glanced briefly in her direction.

That evening—when Naomi was woken by the clanging of a bell—the matron-in-chief was waiting at the door of the officers’ ward. She strode up as Naomi approached and without introduction asked what she had been doing in the rest compound. A British matron accompanying the deputy inspector had seen her leave the place and—knowing that only her own nurses were employed there—had been mystified. And—indeed—was further affronted by her surly lack of respect towards the passing brigadier general. The mention of surliness nonplussed Naomi. She had not taken any surliness she was aware of into the encounter. Had the British matron accompanying the general misread her? Or had events imbued her with that quality? The matron-in-chief now told her that she—Durance—had been at the center of all disorder since she had arrived on Lemnos. She had been grievance incarnate, the matron intoned.

I cannot see you have any future in the nursing service. You are suspended from all duty, and I do not trust you with my patients.

Aren’t you getting short of nurses? Naomi asked with a layer of genuine concern that momentarily submerged her rage and contempt.

But there was no arguing with that austere woman who spoke for the colonel and was wedded to his berserk medical creeds.

The idea of being on Turks Head, and of having no purpose to fulfill, seemed to Naomi to be a fair definition of hell. She took her sentence dry-eyed. If they wanted to see tears they’d have a long wait. Ditto repentance. There was a temptation to go and lose herself amongst the villagers on the Thracian side of Lemnos. There the landscape and the light had seemed richer.

You’ll have to take the news of Nettice to Lieutenant Byers, she told her sister.

When Sally at last saw Byers, he insisted—of course—on saying that he was the one who put Nettice there. That was understandable. But Sally felt it as an unnecessary self-indulgence.

Yes, we’re all to blame, she told him fiercely. Except the stupid generals who sent you to be blinded, and the enemy who obliged them. And those who dreamed up a terrible, oppressing place like this. They are obviously all innocent and you and I are utterly to blame.

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.

I hope I can make my way without you, she told Naomi. And this was not for form’s sake. Naomi seemed quite even-tempered about it all, neither pleased nor displeased.

Who would have thought I’d be the first back to Kempsey? I’ll have to break in our stepmother for you.

Sally became aware—the closer the departure came—that her dependence on her sister had been near absolute from the day the Archimedes sank. Naomi had stood between her and harshness. Without Naomi, she would need to become her own defender and asserter of her own dignity. But it was clear that there was no argument against these shipment orders—no matter how fretful Carradine might be at the idea of putting a world between her and her husband. It was fortunate that Carradine came from a family of means. She could possibly be back in Britain and by her husband’s bedside within three months of arriving in Australia.

The unspoken but deep, sly idea of torpedoes lay as a shadow over the nurses chosen.

Homewards with Doubts

In easterly slanted rain, candidates for the process called repatriation were loaded on launches and barges and taken out to a troopship. On crutches now and with a healing wound was Robbie Shaw and—guided along the foreshores by orderlies—Sam Byers. As they boarded, a black ship from Gallipoli disgorged its sick and wounded onto the pier. A great recycle of soldiers’ flesh was in progress.

On the wharf, the Durance sisters were permitted to stand aside and transact their own leave-taking. They shared an umbrella and wore their gray overcoats, newly provided through Colonel Leatherhead’s marvelous intrusion into their lives.

How long will there be hospitals on Lemnos? Naomi asked as a form of speculation.

There’ll be no end to them, since there is no end to Gallipoli, Sally declared, utterly convinced. For an end to it could not be foretold for this year or the next.

If you are stuck here, said Naomi, then I must do my best to get back. I don’t care if they make me carry buckets of diarrhea for entire shifts. Because you are my sister. And you have been the same person throughout. Steady. No, don’t dare protest. You have been calm and brave and solid. And better able to govern yourself than others have been.

What about your own courage? What about you breaking in to see Nettice?

They were acts of pure ratbaggery. Done out of hopeless anger.

Sally wondered what a person could do when being praised so wildly for calmness and valor. And by your sister! It felt close to being wrongly accused of theft or treachery. She was persuading herself not to say so when she saw Sergeant Kiernan in the line of men waiting for the launches. He was overcoated and carrying a kitbag on one shoulder and the normal duffel bag. He saw them and came over.

You are both about to escape? I’m so pleased.

No, said Naomi. I’m the only one going. I’m not escaping. I’ve been thrown out.

You can describe me in the same terms, Kiernan told them. He looked at the gray bulk of the troopship standing offshore in the gale—and then up the long road to Turks Head—as if weighing all that was about to be lost.

I felt powerless, he said. I knew what was happening to you where you were. All I could do was tell the officers at the rest center and write to my father. He’s a friend of the alienist Dr. Springthorpe who is treating men in Egypt and has a lot of influence. So he wrote in turn to Springthorpe—enclosing my letter. The counsels of impotence. But I hope it did some good.

When he turned his eyes back to the Durance sisters, there was none of the normal humor in his face.

Laws against fraternization, he confessed, were all the rage at our general hospital. And I was cowardly enough to obey them.

You couldn’t have done anything, said Naomi.

I must go back to my fellows, said Kiernan. It will be easier to speak on board, Miss Durance.

He turned to Sally. I do hope we meet again. Though not on this dismal island.

So you’re cured of all those mythologies?

There was a stutter of laughter from him. Yes, they can keep the whole lousy lot of them. I’m sticking to modern history. It seems to be an absorbing enough study to me.

Sally watched her sister’s launch depart the shore. Despite the dimness of the day she also saw it arrive at the bottom of the ship’s stairway and at last the tall figure of Naomi ascending. Sally had once thought of a ship as fortressed against all elements except internal fire. Now she saw it as a flimsy tube—or an egg awaiting the hammer. When Naomi had vanished into the ship she turned away from the bay and climbed the hill to be ready for the ambulances now beginning to roll along the pier. We’ll all grow old in our work, she decided. She felt aged already beneath the low, malicious clouds.

In her three-berth cabin on deck two Naomi received by way of a steward a letter from Lieutenant Shaw, whose femur wound was sending him home too. “A bit down at the moment,” he confessed. “But there has to be something I can do in the military sense. If you see me, I’ll be the one who walks at an angle of 45 degrees—unless the ship is at 45 degrees, in which case I’ll be leveled out completely.”

She hoped Shaw wouldn’t plague her. That thought was unworthy—for his kindness on Lemnos he deserved to be humored. But she needed a certain solitude to absorb what had befallen her and to contemplate her Australian future. Her vanity when she first presented herself at Victoria Barracks had been to think she would return home with legible success on her brow. Now she was to return as one of the rejected. She was weighed a failure. That would show on her brow. Her father and his new wife might not see it. Yet—knowing it was there—she would cramp in all she did.

Cheers rose from other and incoming troopships as the nurses showed themselves at the railings to take a last view of that isle whose hard edges were veiled by rain. Naomi did not go up there to see her sister’s island shrink away in veils of dimness and downpour. She stayed below to sleep as soon as the ship began to move. But once stirring and turning on her bunk she promised herself that should the ship sink during its weavings across the rough surface of the Mediterranean, she would let herself fall straight to the base of the ocean without waking.

She heard no more from Robbie Shaw the next day and spent her time reading Punch in the lounge. At dawn the next morning they approached the coast of Egypt. But the waves breaking along the Corniche, the apartment buildings which looked like confections of icing sugar, the buildings dreamed up by an architect who had then taken decoration a step too far, the lighthouse where Pharos had once stood, one of those wonders of the world which children were required to number and write down—the whole fabulous city—was a scene she now lacked the means to relish. The Qaitbay citadel they used to see from the docking Archimedes was today like a fortress from a flick or a novel. The British flag above its turreted central tower suggested war was a simple thing—achieved by musketry from battlements aimed at some unwashed tribe.

Nettice was comforted that her troopship had so easily quartered the Mediterranean. She had been busy, in any case—using a steward who attended to their cabin to carry messages to Lieutenant Byers in his quarters one deck up.

They were rested in nurses’ quarters at a British hospital in Alexandria until their train was ready the following morning. At that ornate railway station in Cairo—through which Mitchie had long ago led her untried charges to board the Alexandria train—they set out for Port Suez.

Out of the windows Naomi found camels and their owners on the roads they passed and green crops tended by unaltered, strong, black-clad, bent women so much more unchanged than the world at large. The sky above Suez grew murky and yielded a gray evening—like a scowl from the Red Sea Moses had parted. She saw—as their train rolled into the port—British army and navy officers sitting at tables under the porticos of the Grand Pier Hotel, men still engaged in a rearwards sort of way with the war Naomi and the others were now departing. The sight made her feel excluded from life rather than fortunate in it.

The train came right to the wharf. Orderlies bustled in to help them with their bags. A cluster of wheelchair cases began to form on the station. The amputees on crutches—their trouser legs bravely pinned up to about knee height—tried not to collide with rushing orderlies. Smoking casually, those who missed an arm walked with a balanced air that claimed they had always wanted to sport an empty sleeve.

Their ship looked—according to Carradine’s habitual assessment of vessels—around sixteen thousand tons. It possessed what people called “good lines” and was named the Demeter. The great doors of the lower deck—more or less at dock level, the same doors which on the Archimedes had been opened to admit horses and gun carriages—stood agape.

Those chirpy on this grim Egyptian afternoon cried, Make way, boys! as they stood back to yield the nurses the gangplank. Their wounds were not visible—were covered by their uniforms—and some of them were possessed by the happiness of valid homecoming. But not all. Some were dreading it like she was.

From the deck, she saw below on the pier a contingent of blinded officers—each with a stick held edgily and unfamiliarly in his hand—advancing towards the lower doors in a line. The first had his free hand on the shoulder of an orderly and the second his hand on the shoulder of the first. And so on. She had never seen the blinded so arrayed or in such a force. She noticed Lieutenant Byers in the midst of the column. He looked lost in the mass.

The nurses were now the first to be let below. The steward who led them told them that their cabins were A1. Walking further forward in the ship the women saw what could easily be imagined as peacetime salons and libraries and smoking rooms. And the promenade deck they had been ushered across felt just that—a deck for promenades and not for heaping the wounded. Nettice praised the ship endlessly and kept some of her applause for the spacious ports in their cabin. Naomi suspected that it was Byers’s presence onboard that brought out this applause in her.

At dinner—seated with the captain and his third officer—they began with an entree of fish in a near-vacant dining room. The captain was a Scot and of a certainty, a gaze, a solidity that would not easily yield to any projectile thrown by an enemy. Other nurses they had not yet met arrived in the dining room in their long gray dresses and jackets. Some looked to be women as old as Mitchie and were puffed from climbing the gangplank and companionways. They were all from the great barn of a hospital in Cairo known as Luna Park and from a hospital at Ismaïlia. It turned out that at least two of them—having lost a brother each—were being sent home to console their parents.

The matron of the Demeter spoke at the end of dinner. By then they’d had some miraculous beef and roast potatoes and pudding with custard. The matron was broad-shouldered—she looked like a country girl grown up—and had an eczema outbreak on her cheeks. She enumerated the range of work they would need to do according to a light, six-hour-a-day roster. The demands of the eight-week journey home would tend to be medical rather than surgical. So there were the two small medical wards—for officers and men—and a contagious ward. There was also a small mental ward. Most of the patients here were depressed or suffering delusions harmless except to themselves. Forward and on a lower deck lay the living quarters for some fifty syphilitics. Smile on them, issue their medicines, and then leave them to the orderlies. In the meantime, the majority of the men—in stable condition—would occupy the normal cabins and bunk spaces.

Nettice’s face bloomed and the knot which had fixed her features in place seemed suddenly to release itself.

Naomi’s job some days was to take blinded or lamed men for a turn on deck. Nettice thought it was against the spirit of the matron’s lenient instructions that she should always accompany Lieutenant Byers—she found other ways of meeting him during the day. Naomi was therefore in the company of Sam Byers amidst a now-vivid-blue Red Sea when she saw Sergeant Kiernan in overall control of a string of orderlies guiding blinded men on a spin around the promenade. He stepped aside from the procession a moment to speak to her and Byers.

Sir, he said to Byers, I hope you’re well.

Who is this? asked Byers with his head cocked in a way which had now become habitual to him. Kiernan introduced himself. He wondered whether the lieutenant would allow him to have a word with Naomi.

Byers laughed. Pardon me, he said, but I was never used to such courtesy from my platoon.

So Kiernan turned to Naomi, calling her Sister Durance. He said he had undertaken to produce a newspaper for the ship. Could she write something about the sinking of the Archimedes for him? He said he would publish it after they’d left the Cape and got into safer waters.

Her very blood revolted at the idea. To put the thing down in ink would be a form of self-exposure and would profane the drowned. She told Kiernan she was sorry but she could not do it.

Oh, go on, Nurse, said Byers. It should be recorded by somebody. I have been at Rosie Nettice to set something down but she won’t consent.

Naomi challenged Kiernan. Why don’t you write it?

I think it will have greater authority coming from a woman. And I remember that you were very conscious throughout. I might have approached Matron Mitchie but I doubt she remembers much. But if you like, I could write it and say how thoroughly brave you were and that you deserve the Military Medal.

That idea appalled Naomi. She felt rage towards him, that he would play such mean games when it came to the Archimedes.

I beg you not to do that, she told him. You will never be my friend if you do.

Yes, he said, chastened. That was a stupid joke. I’m sorry.

There was much wire netting on the Demeter, and as the ship reached the end of the Gulf of Aden the nurses—if stifled by heat in their cabins—were permitted to sleep under distractingly brilliant night skies in a wired-off area at the stern of the promenade deck. They made their way there each evening carrying their palliasses and pillows. Beyond a canvas curtain they disrobed to their slips. There was some conversation here before women trailed off into sleep.

Drowsy Carradine told Naomi she had met Lieutenant Shaw while he was undergoing a strenuous massage of his upper leg and hip in the room off the officers’ medical ward. He had promised them a stroll around the deck but he wanted to get his leg fit so he did not hold them up. Though she wished him a normal gait, Naomi was pleased to be free of social duties. The literary ones were enough for the moment. Kiernan’s request for an account of the Archimedes had unexpectedly started in her a compulsion to set down the whole business in ink without exaggeration or vainglory. It was an imperative that came from within her—not from Kiernan. She still had time and space for dutiful strolling with blinded or lamed soldiers. But not yet for Shaw’s bush whimsy and flirtatious chat.

Two days’ sail from the equator—when both the starboard and port decks seemed open to the withering sun, and the tar in the deck became liquid—Naomi went into the officers’ library. Here nurses were permitted amongst all those writing letters home and reading bound volumes of Punch, and it was here she continued her account.

“The Sinking of the Archimedes,” she wrote after she’d chosen a desk.

What a delight it all at once was to write of this—even in the plainest terms. But the horses and their terror. How could that be conveyed? And the boyish apathy of those who slipped away and yielded themselves up? And Nettice—the layers of ocean through which she sank and rose. The horror of men hitting the propellers—as if they preferred to be obliterated quickly by the mechanical instead of slowly by the weight of water. Could all this be put down?

As she went on, Kiernan drifted into her imagination, grabbing on to his copper cube. He had been a full partner in her command of the raft. She remembered having been loud and high-handed. For the torpedo had strangely restored her authority when it took down the Archimedes. (That was something not to be included in the account.) The Archimedes had taught her about her weakness and yet educated her in the nature of the woman she was.

As she was writing, too, the idea of Kiernan having been admirable—of his proving he’d probably be admirable anywhere he was put—took hold of her imagination. The word itself seemed lodged in her brain for the two days she was engaged on the task. When she later saw him on duty, he seemed to her to be placed in the midst of people with a special distinctness other figures lacked. This sharpness of outline was not a form of infatuation but rather a new version of seeing things. It was more akin to identifying a prophet.

The captain recommended that they be at the railing to see the coast of South Africa and the approach to Cape Town.

Naomi and Carradine caught a grimy little train to town. The city was comparable to towns they had known in girlhood—with the strangeness, though, of African women in their swathes of wildly colored cloth selling flowers and fruit from baskets on the footpaths. Black children harried Naomi for money, shouting, Australia! Rich Australia. Give us some.

They were treated with reverence by shop girls as they browsed in Cape Town’s emporiums.

A climbing party met up on the quay the next morning with robust young women who were members of the Cape Town mountaineering club. Naomi was a member of the group and suffered a phase of guilt. Given she’d felt obliged to walk the deck with Shaw for more than an hour last evening, she had deliberately chosen an outing Shaw certainly could not embark on. From the middle of the barely woken city—occupied only by black street sweepers—they caught a train which took them around the base of the mountain. The party walked upwards through scrubland and wildflowers, at the end of which great rock platforms presented themselves. Nurses and soldiers were helped upwards by young black men who climbed ahead and reached a hand down with unpredictable strength. They were not permitted to eat or swim with whites, but were essential for scaling a mountain. From massive platforms of rock along the way the local mountaineers pointed out Simonstown and—out to sea—Robben Island, where lepers were kept. At the summit of great, split-apart boulders from which grew wildflowers and shrubs, they looked down at the city and bay and could identify the Demeter—rendered minute by distance. They were exhilarated and distracted to happiness by the utterly physical demands of getting here.

Guilt made her seek out Shaw in the officers’ lounge that evening. She talked about the climb as if she had done it for its own sake—for its enlivening enthusiasm. She was pleased to see that his face as yet was the face of Shaw the Joker and not of Shaw the Tragic Lover.

He said, Lucky girl. Of course, I can fall off the donkey with the greatest of ease but I haven’t mastered Table Mountain yet. Spent all morning with massage and exercise. And it pays off, you know.

She found she liked the ease of his company. He never said anything that would make a person sit up and see the world afresh. He therefore gave her a rest from her own unchosen gravity of soul.

He said, It’s not as if I’m less a man. A man’s whole life can’t rise or fall by a few inches of bone this way or that. I’ll be able to ride a horse as good as ever if I balance out the stirrups. And my old man has a motor anyhow. But it’s true a stock and station agent ought to be able to ride. You wouldn’t want to take a motor over some of the tracks up there. Anyhow, I’m well set. And I reckon we should change the subject. We’re getting morbid.

It was to his credit that he thought these modest detours into discussing his condition were morbid. But there was another thing besides the unwillingness to look distress in the face, and that was the inability to see it in the first place.

Look, you don’t have to hang around talking to me. Like a duty to the sick and the lame.

No, please. You are a good and kindly friend and despite the wound and all the rest—despite all that—you seem to live in the sun. So you’ll always attract friends. It’s not a duty for me.

Anyhow, he said, leaning forward and keeping a half-inch or so greater closeness than was preferable, I was off on a jaunt while you were climbing mountains.

He and others had been taken to Cecil Rhodes’s home and seen the grand library with Rhodes’s bust and his last words, “So little done, so much to do,” and then his bedroom full of lives of Napoleon. Robbie Shaw said he couldn’t get over those words.

I’ve never heard a better argument for leading an easy life, he told Naomi. I mean, he ran round Africa like a demented being—diamonds here, gold there, land somewhere else. And still… he was disappointed.

This—she could sense—was like an argument for a pleasant life in a Queensland town and children running in the garden. He did not understand that a person had to possess a gift for contentment to take up what he was offering.

From the decks outside, they could hear the sounds of the Demeter unmooring. No announcement of sailing time had been made earlier. It departed of its own will. There was a rush to the deck now. Robbie Shaw insisted on taking part.

Some nights the nurses dined in their mess. But they were frequently invited to the dining room where Robbie Shaw remained one of the officers who paid them special attention in the Lemnos way. And always that glint—directed at Naomi—that suggested some shared and indefinable secret. At one of the chief tables sat Padre Harris with crosses on the lapels of his uniform. He was a harmless case Naomi had met when she worked in that small section of cabins set aside for the officers with mental concerns. There was a little cabin with a Primus stove in that part of the ship where nurses made tea and cocoa for themselves and the patients. Whenever she gave the Reverend Harris a cocoa he responded with the remotest politeness—one transmitted over a vast and disabling space. Or a display of etiquette remembered by the cells but not by the man. No doubt he had been shocked and became burdened by the men whose hands he’d held for a last “thine is the glory.” His features—which were long and lean—seemed always in false repose. Parsons had a duty to adopt the smugness of possessing the truth on free will and sin and the mind of God. That look seemed long vanished from him.

There were two other padres on board to serve the Anglicans and Catholics. So Harris was not called upon for any duties and was allowed to take his time to find his way back to sureness and solid ground. In the meantime, he was likely to say extreme things suddenly. There was no small talk in him. One evening Naomi delivered him in the officers’ salon his evening mixture of ethanol and laudanum. Other nurses were similarly dispensing pills and mixtures across the room. And after he had drained the mixture, he told her, Two of the boys from the venereal section have jumped overboard, you know. It’s been kept quiet. But shame, you see. Shame killed them.

And then he returned again to his remote self.

Naomi did not know whether this was reliable news or not. At the first chance she asked Carradine whether any men from the syphilis ward had jumped overboard.

Not that I’ve heard, said Carradine. But then they wouldn’t tell anyone, would they, in case the idea came to others.

The next evening Naomi approached the matron of the Demeter and asked the question—whispering it so that the infection did not rise into the air.

The matron inspected her and then looked at the ceiling. It was a confession in a gesture. Lowering her head she murmured, You must not tell anyone. You might start them off like lemmings.

Lieutenant Shaw seemed innocent of the information when he asked her to go for a stroll on deck. He wanted the exercise before the Roaring Forties set in. For when they did, unsteady men would need to take to their bunks. It was a brilliant morning of fierce sunlight when they met up. There was much promise of future violent seas in today’s choppy ocean. The wired-off section where the women had slept on torrid nights had been dismantled. A small section of a lower deck—where the worst mental patients exercised—had been cooped in by wire to prevent the disturbed casting themselves over the side.

Her problem in walking with Robbie Shaw was that she had entered a stage of her existence in which she could imagine the company of men as endurable and more than endurable. Was this the beginning of delusion which would suck her down into drudgery and weariness? Was it the dawn of wisdom?

Walking on the promenade that morning with Shaw she sighted Padre Harris. He strolled in the fraternal care and company of the uniformed Catholic priest and Anglican minister. He was in the middle of the two. Since—as Naomi knew—his conversation was erratic and prophetic, it was understandable that they tended to talk across him. An impulse arose in Naomi to excuse herself from Shaw and run forward to advise them that—though self-harm was unimaginable in a clergyman—they were coming towards the point in the bows where the steel canted away to become the blade which cut the water. The priest and minister were so involved in some topic now that they moved towards each other behind the Reverend Harris’s back. Whatever they discussed—the Nicene Creed or horse racing—they were distracted and barely ready for the fluid way their friend climbed the crossbars of the railings and stepped onto the polished wood at the top and let himself fall into the Indian Ocean more or less in the direction of the bows. The two padres threw themselves against the railings and shouted, and then one rushed up a companionway to the bridge. Shaw and Naomi and others who had seen it all also ran to the rail and gazed down.

One might have had a hope of turning back and retrieving him had it happened in the stern. The captain did of course turn the ship and stop the engines. Lookouts were posted and the decks became crowded with unofficial searchers—officers, nurses, and men. On the sea’s brilliant surface a little white froth gave a mimicry of a floating head. Hence, many at various stages yelled, There! No, no. I thought…

The idea of suicide was now unleashed. And they all knew that according to the ruthlessness of physics the padre had been drawn straight under by the ship’s motion and bludgeoned and hurled along by its hull and thrown into the sweep of propellers. The idea shook Naomi. She knew what propellers could do.

The ship continued to circle but everyone knew it was futile. Naomi consulted her watch.

I should take you down below, she told Robbie. I’m sorry, my shift’s beginning.

Shaw said almost as a complaint, Do you think I’d do something like that if you left me up here?

No. I know you wouldn’t.

But she insisted he come too. There was nothing he could do for Harris by staying on deck. And the chop was too pronounced for him to stay there alone.

Now a fatal trend was in place. Though two young men afflicted with syphilis had thrown themselves over the railing, it was Padre Harris’s example in particular that confirmed the availability of such a release. Within an hour orderlies armed with rifles had been placed on sentry duty on the decks. Perhaps—as Nettice said with dry humor—to shoot anyone who thought of killing themselves. As for aft, it was believed that even a halfway-alert orderly could intercept a blinded soldier or a fellow with amputated legs or a man with a ruined face. But two guards were put there anyway.

In the evening the mood in the mental ward was solemn as Naomi handed out the pills which were meant to keep these men equal of soul. Eyes strayed towards a particular lieutenant colonel named Stanwell. He was a man who sat that night smoking on his own but who was not often seen there in the reading room. Like Harris he had been on dosages of ethanol, but even higher ones than those given to the unfortunate padre. Most of the time he could not sit upright or perform the functions of lighting a cigarette. Since there was concern that he might fall asleep while smoking and incinerate himself, his former batman had been assigned to sit in a chair in his cabin and mind him overnight. Naomi understood too that Lieutenant Colonel Stanwell had the respect of young officers—it was apparent in the concentrated concern they radiated towards him. It had a quality very different from the purely professional care Padre Harris’s two fellow clergymen had extended to that unfortunate man.

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.

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.

Antipodes

Was 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.

Naomi was pleased she could not imagine a milk churn in Robbie Shaw’s future, but that look in the eyes of married women often seemed to tell you there were equivalents to it.

You have to realize, she yelled, I’m going back—at least to Egypt.

What if they don’t let you?

I’ll find a way.

He laughed, and the laughter was stripped from his face by the wind that flattened his cheeks.

I’m going back too, he asserted. They won’t stop me.

Come indoors, she shouted when he said something else she didn’t hear. The gale was if anything wilder. The wind did not tolerate cavalier movement. But with her care he came down the ladder competently. They reached the double doors that led into the greater quiet of indoors. With a whipping sound the inner door closed and the tactful shudder of engines from deep below was now dominant. Shaw looked sheepish, as if he would not have said what he had if he’d been in a place for normal speech. He peered at her from beneath his gingery eyebrows with a gaze of conspiracy which she was sure had always helped suck in lovers.

She said, With our futures so unsettled… Well, what can I say?

I will get off in Sydney, he said. If you stay a day or so we can visit the sights. We can go sailing. Do you sail?

You must get home to your parents.

I can catch the coastal steamer to Brisbane. Faster than this old bucket.

Well, I have a stepmother at home who though a pleasant woman can’t be bursting to see me, she admitted. I suppose…

Two days, he told her. Two days’ leave in Sydney. Delightful. The Australia Hotel—a fine dining room, that one.

I’ll stay at the Young Women’s Temperance Hotel.

That sounds severe.

And I’ve nothing to wear except a uniform.

The same with me, he said.

All right, she said.

If a man went to the trouble of suggesting something as eternal as a marriage then you owed yourself a few days in a place away from masses of nurses and soldiers to study him.

In Port Adelaide—where the ship moored on a bright Australian spring day and the band was close and the wharf triumphantly decked with flags—Rosanna Nettice helped Lieutenant Byers down the gangway to the brass exuberance of “The British Grenadiers.” Nettice herself was leaving the ship and had volunteered to join the staff of the Keswick Military Hospital. She left their company promising to write letters and shedding a few tears but with no apparently profound regret. She took Naomi apart for a special show of thanks—plainly uttered—but her objective to marry Byers overrode all other issues and affections. In her mind it was not for exchanging letters with them that the artillery pony had saved her. It was for Byers.

From the railing of the Demeter, Naomi saw a solidly dressed man and woman and a number of near-adult children greet their blinded son and brother. The mother began to weep on his shoulders despite the grin of reassurance that Byers wore. The father looked on from under his homburg and over his European-style, pointed moustache. He studied his blinded son with his trained jeweler’s eyes. Naomi saw Byers turn to Nettice and introduce her to his family. Was he telling them the entire story? That Nettice would devote herself to Lieutenant Byers’s battle with the seeing world? In any case, Naomi saw his mother extend her hand to Nettice and the father kiss her hand by way of courtly but uncertain thanks. But what were the clan dramas to be worked out? If the father had changed his name from Myers to Byers he was probably open to the concept of his son marrying a gentile. Nettice was conscious her friends were watching from above and as she moved away with the Byers family—a porter behind pushing his luggage and hers—she looked up. She had faced out the parents. Who—in fact—could set a test for Nettice that would defeat her purpose?

In Melbourne two mornings later, Naomi saw some of the men from the syphilis ward go down the gangway to a reunion with families who must not be told—with girlfriends who must not be caressed and wives who must not be penetrated. The homecoming wharves—where people met their variously damaged men, whose minds had been licked as with fire by the daydream of suicide—creaked with laughter and smiling which might yet prove friable. The overearnest band music was doomed to fail everyone as soon as the players stopped for breath. Carradine landed happy on her way to disqualify herself from further official duty by giving the authorities proof of marriage. And then to return as a self-funded volunteer to England.

On their one night in that city, Lieutenant Shaw took Naomi to dinner at the Windsor Hotel—once a temperance palace but now the “flashest pub in town.” He insisted on a bottle of red wine and when it was decanted, he told her he thought it delightful on his palate—though she secretly thought it was sour. Yet under its warm influence she told him about Mrs. Sorley—this woman she must visit in visiting her father.

Easier for me, he said. My family aren’t complicated. My parents are just my parents. My sis and the brothers… quarrelsome beggars. But no grievances. It makes life easy. Quarrels get settled on the spot.

My sister and I, she confessed, are just learning to do that. And making some progress.

Good girl, he said. You’ll need to be forgiving if you’re married to me.

But nothing’s been decided, she warned him. I don’t know that you’re a man for a long engagement, in any case. There’s too much life in you. And there’s no chance of it being a short one.

He shook his head. My God! Until now I’ve only met girls who are busting for marriage. I can’t imagine myself not waiting for such a noble girl though. When will this war end—next year, 1917, 1921, 1925?

Noble, she snorted. That’s you throwing a light on me. Like the Egyptian who used to stand under the chin of the Sphinx with a flare. But the flare burns out and the Sphinx stays the same.

Well, he said, the Sphinx part is right. You don’t give a lot away.

She warned him she could not sponge on him because that assumed some degree of consent she hadn’t given. He won the argument at dinner. For heaven’s sake, he said, women never pay for dinner there. Don’t show me up.

On Sydney Harbour—amidst ferries and pilot boats and launches—they enjoyed a sailing expedition with an associate of Shaw’s father who owned a wonderful clinker-built yacht. His slight limp looked gallant in the lobby and created military fables about him amongst those who still believed that war’s chief duty was to lightly mar the brave.

She found the kisses they exchanged that night before she left the Australia Hotel—and the next morning when his coastal ship left Darling Harbour—were the more arousing because she was kissing her possible partner for life. These might be the opening gestures of the solemnities and fevers of the flesh for both of them. She felt enlivened and her blood churned pleasantly. She found them less than ecstatic. Were they meant to be otherwise? Last night they had not delayed her in getting ready for bed nor very much in falling asleep. He had no part in dreams. In fact, if anyone ever featured, it was Kiernan—though not in that sense. But as a kindly quantity he spoke like a sage in a dream of sun-drenched spaces. He was not forgotten.

The End of Lemnos

On bitter Turks Head on Lemnos the gales became near continuous, and rain was honed to sleet and crystallized to snowfall during nights. It was easier to keep warm in the wards than in the women’s tents. Now the moles stayed under the bitter ground. Come daylight, the women rushed across ice to their breakfasts—better breakfasts though than had been the case under the old regime.

Typhoid burned on in the infectious wards and pneumonia began to fill the medical wards. The wounds that arrived now often seemed to be bullet wounds to the head—from places where men had accidentally given away their presence at a low part of a parapet. Or else shell damage. It was apparent though—as the winter bit and ice formed on water buckets—that divisions were no longer going forth from their trenches looking for trouble at Anzac Beach and Cape Helles. Their gambits would have to be renewed at a more clement time.

Outside the mess tent the orderlies were unloading Christmas billy cans—stamped with a kangaroo and a boomerang and full of chocolate and minute puddings in cloth. A letter inside was addressed to “Dear Soldier of Australia.” Ten days to Christmas, and intact men were landing on Lemnos each day in numbers suddenly too big for the rest camp. Sally and Slattery—shopping from peddlers—watched them march by. Their faces were gaunt and stained with weariness. The eyes seemed not yet aware that they had been brought back into the living world. There was too much continuance of geography between Gallipoli and here.

As they went past they could be smelled—not just filthy flesh but fermentations of the skin and uniform. They still carried the trench-fever lice. For the louse it was always summer in the clefts and crevices of the body. From these men a faint rumor arose. They’re pulling soldiers out of Gallipoli, one of the senior nurses heard and passed it on. Don’t mention a word of it to any Greek peddler around Mudros. As Sally had learned, the Greeks hated the Turks. But one of them might be on the Turkish payroll, people said.

As Christmas ribbons went up to decorate the YMCA hut at Mudros, the number of wounded diminished for one day—which might have been luck. Then it stayed the same the next day, and a third. The diminution in wounded and sick began to look like the result of some human cleverness.

Walking-wounded officers and orderlies and nurses were now openly strolling or riding down to the wharf to greet the morning arrivals who had been spirited off Gallipoli at night. But all conversations were almost in code. It was as if every sentence might be listened to by an unseen party and the ruse which would redeem the Gallipoli folly would be thwarted.

The air around the hospital was pensively triumphant. There had been that night-after-night escape better planned than anything else had been in all this calamity. Yet the last wounded were still there. And so were the many dead, or in the snowy cemetery below Turks Head—both places impossibly located for devout flower bearing or grave visitations by relatives.

Sally and Honora took a cup of tea each and drank it with Leo—that girl whose temperament had never betrayed her. But later in the morning—amidst shouts along pathways and whispered messages in wards—it became known that two last ships had come from the black peninsula. Honora and Sally—due to go to sleep after night duty—were amongst the rush of people who got to the pier where the very last of Gallipoli’s harmed were being unloaded into motor ambulances.

By Christmas Naomi had returned from her brief Macleay Valley homecoming and had been working some weeks at the military hospital at Randwick—not far from her Aunt Jackie’s place. She had dutifully visited her aunt and chattered tentatively with her about the new Mrs. Durance.

Randwick Hospital was an orderly place. Patients were admitted not in a calamitous flood but one at a time. The food was regular and of the wholesomely plain ilk. Hours of rest could be banked on. But restlessness plagued Naomi. The war had made a misfit of her.

Every two days she got a fervent letter from Lieutenant Shaw about his efforts to be returned to Egypt. He had written to the adjutant-general in Melbourne, had garnered reference letters from a bishop, a member of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland, a federal senator. She too had gathered letters to help her own cause of getting back—one of them from Matron Mitchie—now returned to Victoria—and another from the chief medical officer on the Demeter. It was not only the sedateness of nursing life she found hard. Above all and beyond reason she wanted to put a great mileage between her and home ground.

Why did she hate it? That beautiful place, that river brown with fertile mud, the sweet pastures of Sherwood? And the blue Kookaburra Ranges full of plentiful native cedar—a stalk of which had killed Mr. Sorley and gained the Durance girls a stepmother. Weighing her home element by element, she had seen few places more well-made by nature and more temperate in her journeys. She had no excuse in her stepmother. Mrs. Sorley—as she remained in Naomi’s mind—was an enthusiast. As a result of Naomi informing her father and his wife of her arrival by Currawong, Naomi found the town mayor welcoming her to the landing dock in East Kempsey. He was attended by journalists and photographers from the Macleay Argus, and her proud father in his Friday suit and with his wife and her children. There was a procession of cars from the landing dock to the mayoral chambers. A ceremonial breakfast was held with Naomi in her gray uniform at the mayoral side. Naomi envied Kiernan who would not have to go through such ceremonies or be greeted by flatulent speeches. The mayor saw Mrs. Sorley along the table and called congratulations to her. But she said she could take no credit for this brave girl. Naomi was the product of the breast and influence of another woman. Unlike her mother, though, Mrs. Sorley seemed a woman in command and confident in the fruits of marriage. Her pride for her new husband’s sake and her renouncing of any credit on her own part were both disarming.

From the mayor’s speech it was apparent they had heard about “The Sinking of the Archimedes.” She did not know how. She discovered then that it had been published in an Adelaide paper and copied by the Sydney Morning Herald before the Demeter itself had reached Sydney. Who was to blame for that? Shaw or Kiernan? Shaw, she decided. A ceremonious man like Kiernan would have sought permission.

She was asked to speak at the breakfast. You become another person when you see the faces turned and the ready ears. The keenness to be heard and an electric curiosity ran through the speaker and jumbled and altered her. She heard herself say that the men were “Christlike,” that there was never a complaint, that it was her life’s privilege to nurse their wounds. She did not mention the dysentery ward and its shitty mattresses and its atmosphere claimed by flies. At last the breakfast ended. Women presented themselves who said they had been to school with her. Some of them said they had children. Of course, one of them said, our little Clarrie was killed last September. Mum can’t ever get over it.

The Durances were delivered home—down the hill from West Kempsey and over the bridge to Sherwood—in a car driven by the town clerk.

You do whatever you like, Mrs. Sorley whispered to her in the wide backseat. You rest if you wish to or go riding a horse. It was your home before it was mine.

Naomi kissed her and Mrs. Sorley beamed with pleasure. Naomi couldn’t depend on Mrs. Sorley to drive her away from home. Her father asked with an edge of concern about Egypt and Lemnos.

I could have lost both daughters, he said.

She could tell he had taken the Sydney Morning Herald and the mayor to heart. But he had accommodated himself also to having bred a heroine.

As they ate roast lamb on the Sunday of her visit home and as her father applied himself with earnestness to his plate and Mrs. Sorley beamed at her, Naomi thought of her stepmother, You will weep at his graveside but you’ll be there foursquare. You will live easily but earnestly with the grief.

She stayed on a week at the farm amidst the blackbutt walls of the bedroom she and Sally had shared. The creosote of the foundation posts—and some natural form of turpentine the timber foundations themselves imbued the soil with—still created the faint and familiar and forgotten odor of this place where she had been a sister to Sally and where she had abandoned her. And of course in which she now with mere justice did her duty under the added weight of her reported heroism. Despite all—love of father, kindness of stepmother—she merely observed the pieties of gratitude and of chatting with her half-brothers and -sister. And when awake at night she would be seized by the thought of her uneven-legged and eager captain. Sometimes she thought of admirable Kiernan. Kiernan had left the ship in Melbourne to go to his unimaginable Quaker family. There was pleasure and yet little desire of more than a general kind in her memory of either man.

Before she left—that morning at breakfast—she suddenly grabbed her father’s chapped, leathery hands and kissed them. The sight of them reminded her that Eric Durance had hired labor to prevent his daughters’ hands becoming leathery. When they saw her to the East Kempsey dock and to the Currawong steamer, Mrs. Sorley embraced Naomi and whispered, You kissing his hands. It meant the whole world to him.

She was bent on using her eminence as a Herald correspondent to her benefit. She had not forgotten to include that cutting—admiringly published and just a little edited by some censor to take the blame for the Archimedes’s death from the army—amongst her documents. She presented all of it now to the senior matron who interviewed her in Sydney. She could see there was some hope. She blessed the bush impishness in Shaw that had possibly released her creation to the newspapers. She realized she had two things that could not be found in any nurse out of a civil hospital. She had experience of terrible wounds. And she had stayed afloat after being sunk.

So there was to be a further interview—she read that as progress. Now it was the senior matron and a very elderly colonel who told her he had been in Egypt but repatriated. You’re not dealing with a doctor of any distinction in me, he told her frankly. My work is pure administration.

He studied her file and seemed impressed she had been a triage nurse. It was an asset she was willing to grab at that summer morning.

And your sister is nursing, I see.

Yes, Naomi asserted. She’s on Lemnos in the stationary hospital there.

Sally could serve as another argument for a return.

I should warn you that your intractability which is noted here is of some concern. But my God—this was under Spanner. I see that Colonel Leatherhead believed there existed extenuating circumstances. Still, your acts of rebellion will not be tolerated in future. Do you understand?

Naomi assured him she did.

He turned to the matron. An Old Testament God, this Spanner chap.

She had an exhilarating expectation now. They would send her back. She would not need to share a continent with Mrs. Sorley.

There is a ship due to leave Melbourne in two weeks, the colonel told her. You will be notified with the details and issued with a travel warrant closer to the time.

Her impulse was to kiss his hand like some feudal woman. But that would have convinced him that she was unreliable.

Should I say congratulations? asked the senior matron.

From a form of politeness rather than passion, she had written to Robbie Shaw. News—that was all. No false feeling. And she heard from him in return.