Book: The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

I loved this book about two Australian sisters who worked as nurses in WWI, mostly in the Mediterranean. It's what a novel should be. The characters become more and more vivid as I turned the pages. I absorbed some of the history of the war and was moved to read more. And, of course, there was much about nursing and war casualties...blunt force trauma, psychological distress, the phenomenon of gas as a weapon, horrific infections, amputations, respiratory illnesses and frostbite, but the delight and light of the book are the stories of Sally and Naomi, their friends, their family, their employers and the soldiers they, two of whom they eventually loved.

The book begins with the death of their mother from cancer: "For six month Mrs. Durance ate her fruit and sat in sumps of sunlight on the veranda. But the cancer owned her by night...Sally was to administer a sixth of a grain of morphine hypodermically when brave and reticent Mrs. Durance confessed, one way or another, to agony." 

After she dies, the sisters then travel via ship from their home in the Macleay Valley (north of Sydney) around the south coast of Australia, through the Indian Ocean to Port Suez and Alexandria and then over the Mediterranean to Lemnos (near Gallipoli) and later to France. Keneally has written a wonderful story set in the troubled, unsettled, often nearly unbearable times for the men and women of WWI.

"As they went past they could be smelled--not just filthy flesh but fermentations of the skin and uniform. They still carried the trench-fever lice. For the louse it was always summer in the clefts and crevices of the body."

"Sally was busy in the resuscitation tent for twelve timeless hours....There had been seven who could not be revived and eighteen sent on to surgery--where their fate would be a matter of margins. Four cases remained...plugging along on the fuel of low blood oxygen. She connected a healthy orderly's blood flow into that of a threatened case through a glass connector tube."

They were young and stalwart and brave, doing their duty, falling in love while immersed in killing fields and mobile hospitals, with occasional breaks in the grand cities of Alexandria and Cairo, London and Paris....where they dined out in small cafes, eating and drinking, where they went to museums; they saw the pyramids and the Sphinx in the moonlight....they flirted and laughed and loved and restored themselves in all the time-honored ways.

It's a huge canvas, engaging, sweet and sorrowful. Bravo, Mr. Keneally....