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.