By Page 6, readers can put up their feet and relax. They know
they're in the reassuring hands of a master storyteller, and a
fascinating read lies ahead.  Australian novelist Thomas
Keneally is the author of "Schindler's Ark," the 1982 Booker
Prize winner that was reborn as director Steven Spielberg's 1993
Academy Award-winning film, "Schindler's List." Keneally has
written 27 other novels, 12 works of nonfiction and two
children's books. His latest work, "The Daughters of Mars," is a
paean to the forgotten heroism of Australian nurses who served
in World War I, and a powerful coming-of-age novel set against
the backdrop of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and the even
bloodier Western Front.  Yes, there will be blood here. But what
we learn about morphine dosages, sepsis, gas gangrene, wide-bore
trocar needles and "a new local anesthetic drug named Novocain"
is engaging, not off-putting. Because Keneally has drawn on
actual wartime diaries kept by Australian nurses, the scenes he
sets in dysentery wards and