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.