Free The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

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