Free The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally Page A

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 LeonoraCasement 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