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.