First, look at this picture:
http://www.greenhowards.org.uk/womans-war/jpg-files/ww1-nurse-001.jpg
And then, this one:
https://cas.awm.gov.au/screen_img/E01304
This one too:
http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTA2OFgxNjAw/z/3iYAAOxyV85R1cMJ/$T2eC16hHJGUFFh1bIIu0BR1cMJcBy!~~60_35.JPG?set_id=8800005007
If you have any desire to insert yourself into one of them, then you must read The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally, the Australian writer probably best known for Schindler's List. Say this for Keneally, he doesn't turn a blind eye to pain, tragedy or violence. While Schlindler's List went inside the effort to save Jews during WWII, The Daughters of Mars chronicles the lives of two Australian sisters who travel to far flung and hostile territory as nurses in WWI. The story is epic, and the sisters are cool customers who never seem to flinch when desperate times and situations envelop them.
Once they depart from the Macleay Valley, New South Wales, Naomi and Sally Durance sail around their home continent with the rest of the Aussie nursing recruits bound for the Middle East. They see the Nile, the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and the teeming markets of Cairo before wounded begin arriving on their hospital ship, The Archimedes.
Kineally's re-creations of crowded ship decks, the frantic triage assessments on board, the bandaging, wrapping, cutting, sterilizing, stitching, and comforting seemed so realistic to me. It was almost like I could hear the moans and groans of the injured or smell the blood and mud on boots and uniforms. He conjures up dazzling images of medical wards during the aftermath of combat at Gallipoli. Australians took huge losses there but this was but a small taste of what the Durance sisters had yet to encounter on their ship and in Western Europe.
Eventually, the war grinds on and both sisters land in France--Naomi in a private hospital, Sally laboring in a military clearing station. They tend to the wounded, gassed and shell-shocked troops, while trying to carve out time and space for themselves and men who crossed their paths years before.
The book spans the length of the war, and by 1918 medical personnel were facing another potent enemy--the influenza virus. It is here that Kineally throws a bit of a bomb himself, and I'm reeling from it. There is no clear cut ending. In fact, he creates two of them, and I'm not convinced I've got it right. Three times I went over pages 505-513 and am still dazed by this "choose your own adventure" closing. Somebody out there needs to read this so we can talk.
The book will stay with me for a long while. I loved it, yet I wanted to know more, know the truth of the story, know how it all ends. But Keneally doesn't allow it. Can I love the book and yet seethe at its author? Yea, I think so.
The Push From the Book: I'm too stunned to process this, but this much I know. Those nurses were heroes. Doctors and nurses in all wars are, I suppose, but without the medical tools and technologies of today, their jobs back in 1915-1918 must have been strenuous and demanding and not for the weak of heart. Just take a closer look at those pictures. I'm not sure I'm made of the right stuff.
