The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

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Raised on a dairy farm in a small Australian town, trained nurses Sally and Naomi Durance volunteer to serve on the battlefields of WWI. Different as they are, the sisters share a chilling motivation for leaving Australia. As they board the ship in Sydney, each carries half the burden of guilt for a sin so unspeakable that years of war experience pass before they feel able to raise the subject between them. Though nursing at the front brings the relief of forgetfulness, redemption remains elusive.

Before serving on the hospital ship, Sally thinks she knows “something of the nature of men,” the ones who start and fight wars.

Yet she is amazed, even awed by the “saintly forbearance” of the wounded soldiers she nurses. Though their faces reveal panic, their conversation is “almost fatuous.”

The men talk of “letting mates down by getting clipped, winged, hit, bowled base over turkey.” So soon after behaving wildly, drunk in the streets of Cairo, in hospital “they are holy”…“like monks dying.” As they suffer from wounds that “are the devil, their toughness is God.” The gallantry of the dying prompts a fellow nurse to speculate that men might be better at war and dying than they are “at living contented in houses.”

Nursing the endless stream of wounded in every possible situation, the sisters find that “the now, and not memory,” has “cornered all the power over them.” Among the trials that temper them through the war years are the sinking of their hospital ship in the Mediterranean, a ghastly period on Lemnos, the loss of patients and colleagues, nursing those afflicted with gas, and being ordered to abandon dying patients when the front line approaches their position. While Sally moves with the front across France, Naomi joins Lady Tarlton in her Volunteer Red Cross hospital, which is as needed as it is despised by army authorities.

In the midst of the annealing horror of the war, both Sally and Naomi fall in love. Through their joys and trials, we glimpse the social mores of the era, thankfully no longer in the ascendancy. Highlighting the enforced inequality between the sexes are acts of brutal disrespect to nurses by male orderlies, to which the Brigadier turns a blind eye. The rape of a young nurse and its aftermath provides another chilling example.

Besides the deft handling of plot and historic setting, the language of Thomas Keneally is a joy to read. Hauntingly, he evokes the setting where Naomi meets the patron of the volunteer hospital of which she is about to become Matron. “At a Second Empire hotel called the Paris Grand…tea was - as Lady Tarlton said - ‘taken’ in a high-vaulted lobby…drenched with light from vast windows.” The place seems “to exist in war-less parallel to the business they were about to launch on.”

With admirable subtlety, the author uses the flexible spiritual practices of Quakers to reveal how the church peddles certainties, and becomes in a sense complicit in the war. As Naomi sits in silence with Ian, awaiting their pre-marital counselling session, she observes how Quaker practices differ from those of other religions, which “began with certainties and pronounced them from the start of their rituals.” The Friends “seemed to have no certainties” and did not seem to anticipate or even feel sure that anything would grace them with a visit.” This attracts her as she has “never been in an uncertain church before.”

The trial of Ian Kiernan as a conscientious objector speaks to the incredible social pressure on men to fight. As he explains in a letter to Naomi from the jail cell he occupies after his court martial, “we take comfort from the fact that the Australian commanders still refuse to impose the death sentence for my sort of behaviour. I hate to think there may be some poor British Quaker, or even Canadian, who has been trapped in this peculiar way and could be executed.”

When after pleading for help from people in positions of influence Naomi is finally allowed to visit Ian, she finds him in reduced health. Her request that the guard give him a sweater is met with the cold comment that “all prisoners have blankets in their cells.” The moment is for her a revelation that the world is “after all malign by nature and not by exception.” Or perhaps it is a madhouse, where young men are “smashed for obscure purposes and repaired and smashed again,” making the Friends “criminals in the planetary asylum.”

When for Naomi’s sake Lady Tarlton begs her acquaintance General Monash to intervene in Ian’s case, his response is instructive of the pressures on those who manage wartime alliances. His brow darkening, he tells her “you must realize we can’t have people making choices.” He asks her to “understand above all that our French and English brethren are outraged by our leniency toward our own men when they are so stern towards theirs.” To complicate matters, the general tells his friend Lady Tarlton he is well aware that in his high position, he is “an embarrassment,” both for being Jewish, and for being “a citizen soldier.” As a historic note, Monash University, established in Melbourne in 1958, was named after him.

Like the relationship between Naomi and Ian, that between Sally and her lover Charlie portrays the strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity. As they grow closer, the two feel moved to reveal their deepest guilt to one another. Charlie follows his confession with the assessment that “I can’t guarantee what I’ve told you might not sometimes seep through and poison an hour. But it won’t poison my life.”

Then their croque monsieur arrives, and they “[fall] to it with all the ravenousness of the redeemed.” Later, as they offer fake marital documents in order to check into a hotel, they marvel at the need for this rigmarole. When Sally suggests it may be to encourage people to think twice before jumping into bed together, Charlie points out that “they don’t think twice when they want to tear a young fellow’s head off. They don’t think twice about artillery and gas,” which can be got “without jumping through hoops. No forgeries, no nods and lies.”

Reading historic fiction is a wonderful way to connect our human past with the present and ask ourselves how things have changed and whether our species has progressed. In the time of the COVID pandemic, such sentiments as the following could have been expressed in an op/ed column. “And in some of the stores there were - yes, even in these terrible times - signs that a few officials were in the business of war procurement…How rich some people were getting from all these dressings and pharmaceuticals and equipment…from syringes that sometimes fell apart.”

From this book, I learned of the refusal of Australians to accept conscription, which was voted down in two consecutive plebiscites. When it comes time to vote, Sally finds neither the “words of accusation — shirkers, slackers, cowards,” nor the reasoned arguments of the brigadier-general, that empowering the government “to compel men who had so far evaded their duty” sufficiently persuasive for her conscience, and votes against it.

The winding down of the war, which “is not a football match” with points allotted, ushers in the the appearance of the Spanish flu. At the mess table, the exhausted nurses discuss the rumour that the new influenza “had been dreamed up in an enemy laboratory.” The rumour is denied by the feisty Irish-Australian nurse Slattery, who declares that to believe that is “to give them too much credit.” [ In these times, one cannot help but be reminded of the early news stories that COVID 19 came from a laboratory in Wuhan, of the shady imputations swirling around in an effort to blame someone for the current plague.]

The virulent flu exacts its toll on the nurses, worn down by years of trauma, overwork and lack of sleep. Witnessing the death of a “girl” she has known since the beginning, Sally thinks how her friend has been “unable to keep a hold on the earth,” and is “now attached to the malign Somme eternally.”

As Sally herself lies tossing with the fever, she is revisited by “all the Sallys of her acquaintance — the child, the country nurse, the Egyptian tourist, the seaborne nurse, the land-locked one,” as they are torn away like leaves to expose “the thief, the murderer, the sister, the hater, the sinker, the swimmer, the unloved, the witness of light, the coward or dark and the binder and rinser of wounds,” and also the one who has found love and opened her body to Charlie.

Thematically, this is a novel about love, conscience, war, and the shifting truths of history. World War I ends eventually, bringing some hope of redemption. Even so, it is tempting to agree with Naomi’s sentiment when she escapes with minor injuries from a car accident that kills someone dear to her: “Life [is] so ridiculous…that it must be accepted and worshipped as it [comes].”

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