A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front (21 page)

So the ship was scoured, every trunk and kit-bag searched for chocolate, sweets, Christmas pudding and Christmas cake just lately received from home, mufflers, stockings, coats, caps, anything useful that could be found.

For two tiny new-born babies those Englishwomen had improvised little jackets of cotton-wool covered with gauze, after the style of a pneumonia jacket, and the mothers they had equipped with warm woollens from their own stock of underwear.

Then So-and-so was instanced. Such a grey little life she had led in a dull little provincial town where she had lived and had her training. War broke out. She joined the service, and was sent to work in a marble palace in Egypt – Egypt, the land of sunshine, the land of colour, the land of a thousand antiquities, the vivid
land, the baffling mysterious land, the fascinating, bewitching land!

X——, too, had thirsted all her life for adventure, and for thirty years life had been totally humdrum. But when war came she was sent to Salonika, where the sisters had to live in marquees – with hundreds of flies – because bell-tents could not withstand the sandy winds, and where occasionally they had to leave the marquees for the safety of dug-outs because the place was being bombed.

From there she went to a hospital ship, which was torpedoed, she consequently having to spend three hours in the sea. Her next sphere of activity was a C.C.S., which later was bombed. Life in a camp hospital she found somewhat tame, but we assured her she was such a Jonah that something thrilling would no doubt befall us when she had been long enough with us to make the spell work.

Z—— had lived for some months on a barge at a time when this mode of transport was much used for abdominal and spinal cases and fractured femurs. She had been on one of the many hospital ships lined up – a fleet of white and green symmetry – to take the wounded on the evacuation from the Dardanelles. And the evacuation was managed so brilliantly that
not a single ship was required. From there she went to a C.C.S. situated in a beautiful French chateau, from there to duty on a hospital train, and then she came to us.

‘It is very nice and generous of you,’ suddenly spoke a quiet member of the party, ‘to give forth such unstinted admiration of our
pukka
sisters, their adaptability and their ability to work under strange and inimical circumstances, but do let us admire ourselves also. The V.A.D.s are not such small potatoes as some people would have them appear.

‘Look at G——. She has nursed for ten years, women and children’s work, but she has not had general training. Therefore she is a V.A.D., and counted untrained. Q—— is half-way through her M.D. degree, work she left to become a V.A.D.

‘R—— is a qualified dispenser and nursed for two and a half years, her training being uncompleted because she had to go with her family to the States. W—— is a fully trained nurse, but too young to join the Q.A.I.M.N.S., so she has become a V.A.D. until she is old enough to be eligible for the former corps.

‘S—— is a duly trained and qualified masseuse. E—— has the South African ribbon. She was in South Africa when war broke out, for her father was an
Army doctor. She nursed there in a military hospital until she caught typhoid.

‘And apart from nursing, the V.A.D.s are not purely ornamental. W——, whom for months I never imagined capable of playing “The Blue Bells of Scotland” with one finger, electrified me one day by playing to the boys in the Y.M.C.A. hut. Among other things she is an L.R.A.M.

‘Then the home-sister was getting grey hairs one day trying to sift out the batmen’s off-duty time so as to be strictly fair and just and to please every one, when Y—— laughed and said, “Make an arithmetical progression of it, old dear,” and in a minute she had it all accurately arranged. She’s a no mean mathematician, it seems.

‘M——, too, I noticed in the wards was pretty good with medicines, lotions, improvising apparatus, and generally fixing up things out of very little. Then one day a carefully guarded secret leaks out. She is a London B.Sc, while N—— is a London M.A.

‘I’ve an idea that if we laid bare the skeletons in more of the V.A.D. cupboards we should find quite a good share of brains attached to them.

‘And now, children, though not exhausted in subject, I’m tired of blowing our own trumpet, and,
since there is nothing more left to eat or drink, I vote we go to bed.’

Had an afternoon of malapropisms. A boy wrote and told his wife he was in hospital with ‘nerve-ritis,’ while another informed me he had not had his ‘two o’clock mometer.’ My momentary puzzled expression earned the assurance that he had ‘never had the mometer at two o’clock.’ So I gave him the thermometer, and all was well.

‘Sister in the next hut wants to know if you will send her an armful of omnopon,’ was the alarming message brought me a little later.

Not desiring to aid such astounding extravagance – if not slaughter – I gave the messenger an ampule, but so dissatisfied was he at my meagre interpretation of ‘armful,’ that I explained, and he went off, smiling broadly at himself.

Boarded a tram-car to-day wherein were seated two French girls and a British Colonial soldier, – a Military policeman.

For a time the girls conjectured as to what the ‘M.P.’ on his arm-brassard might mean but, failing to come to any satisfactory conclusion, one of
them finally plucked up courage and ventured:

‘Qu’est-ce que c’est, m’sieu?’

‘Oh! that. It means “Mam’slle Promenade.”’ Then, with true colonial enterprise making good his opportunity, he added, ‘Will you?’

The M.O. was questioning the patients to-day about their appetite and diet when one boy volunteered the information that he fancied a bottle of Bass and thought one per day would do him a world of good.

‘But Bass is jolly scarce out here, boy,’ the M.O. reminded him. ‘I can’t buy myself a bottle at any price, simply can’t get it.’

‘Then I’ll tell you what to do, sir,’ came the quick and unabashed retort. ‘Put me on two bottles a day and I’ll give you one for yourself.’

A general laugh, the M.O. took up the boy’s diet sheet and wrote:

‘Stout, pints, one.’

‘BLISS WAS IT
in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.’

We knew what to expect. For days and nights past we had heard the guns ceaselessly cannonading. So when the batman woke us at six one morning with the message that every one was to go on duty as quickly as possible, we were not surprised.

We washed, dressed, and breakfasted hurriedly. It was a glorious morning with great glowing shafts of streaming sunlight warmly irradiating the camp. The tent walls had as usual been rolled back, thus making of the wards a roof and a floor. We could see therein a great stir and bustle, but what was it caused a sick pain at the heart and hastened our hurrying footsteps?

In every walk there were wounded soldiers, a
bus-load of the more slightly wounded cases at one marquee, motor-ambulances with stretcher after stretcher of more seriously injured burdens bringing up the rear, men being carried pick-a-back by orderlies, others being brought on the ‘four-handed seat,’ others trudging along with the aid of a walking-stick.

Tunics had been torn to free wounded arms, breeches had been ripped for access to injured legs, boots had been discarded in favour of huge carpet slippers or bandages, heads were swathed, jaws tied up, bandages stained with dirt and blood.

Almost every boy was clay-caked, the hair full of yellow clayey dust, the face thinly crusted with it, the moustache partly embedded in it. One Jock I subsequently found with puttees caked to the legs which were covered with set clay as evenly as a plaster-of-Paris limb.

‘Good morning, boys,’ we called as soon as we were within speaking distance.

And a very volley, a regular cheer came to our white-clad, white-capped party. ‘Good morning, sisters.’

‘We’ll soon have you fixed up.’

‘That’s all right. We’ve shifted them, so it’s worth it.’

The first batch of patients we treated stands out in any memory. They were fed, bathed, put into
clean pyjamas, had their wounds dressed, were each given Blighty tickets and cigarettes, and lay with faces expressive of the personification of blissful contentment.

Presumably, they had reached the acme of Tommy Atkins satisfaction. But no! A gramophone in adjoining lines struck up a song associated with limelight, red noses, checked suits, flat long-soled boots, and knotty walking-sticks. Immediately those boys howled out the chorus. Their cup of joy was full.

On and on we worked, forgetful of time and remembering our own meal only as we became exhausted. Trestle beds with a paliasse, or donkey’s breakfast, as the boys call them, had been laid down in the wards. The church tent, the store tent, and the Y.M.C.A. hut had been requisitioned, and some Indian marquees sprang up infinitely more quickly than the proverbial mushroom.

These took the slight cases of which, fortunately, there was a very large proportion. The expansion, also fortunately, was a matter of speed in treatment rather than excess of numbers.

Every one ‘mucked in’ in that magnificent wholehearted way British people have when they are ‘up against’ anything. Armchair critics who love to talk
about ‘red tape’ ought to have seen the work being done. Rank and officialdom were forgotten, chiefly by those who held the one and were held responsible for the other. Every one turned with enthusiasm to the task they had in hand. Stately methods of procedure were most emphatically and unceremoniously dropped. In a big push, in battle, there comes a time, I understand, when it is ‘every man for himself.’ In the aftermath of a big push, in hospital, it is at all time ‘every man and woman for “the men.”’ And that has to have direct interpretation, whereas in more leisurely times a certain section of the staff, the clerical and the stores section, for example, must, of course, work indirectly for the boys.

Whatever our hand found to do on that memorable day and the four following days, we did with all our might. Our colonel and medical major, kept waiting a few minutes in the middle of the night for a convoy they were to receive, put off their coats and helped cut bread and butter for the coming patients.

A dentist, finished his dental work, did nursing-orderly duty far through the night. The
padre
ladled out soup and tea, at which he said he was an expert through long practice in soup kitchens and at Sunday School teas. He ran about unceasingly, too, giving
patients drinks, quite a big item in the case of newly wounded men and with the weather very hot.

He also acted as additional barber and went round with safety razor preparing for our further attention, surrounding surfaces of wounds on shin, cheek, jaw, and head.

‘My word, sister,’ we were repeatedly assured, ‘that razor’s a treat; it’s a champion. And the
padre!
’ – mentioning in an impressed undertone the decoration he wore and the rank he held – ‘Sister, he’s a real toff. The right sort o’ sky-pilot, he is. One o’ the best.’

Then, in true Tommy Atkins spirit of refusing to be impressed for too long a time, there would come a little chuckle, and, ‘Say, sister, eeh, eeh, eeh, should I offer him tuppence?’

Laughter, tears, immense satisfaction and pleasure, immeasurable pain and disappointment were commingled that day. One lived very many times in a torrent of emotion, agonised by a flood of pity, racked by an intensity of sympathy, tortured by an exquisite, mental pain, almost overwhelmed by the passion to help to fight for those lives.

Oneself at such times lives through an acuteness of mental suffering hitherto unparalleled in life, and one strange, curious self is busily concerned
with steriliser and instruments, dishes and lotions, hot-water bottles, extra blankets and black coffee. Then later a chance description of one’s self travels back as gossip will do.

‘She’s one of those calm, collected sort of beings who would have made a good surgeon. Doesn’t fuss, you know.’

As ithers see us!

Fortunately.

So the day wore on and night came. Without – a night of glorious July summer, with palest saffron, flamingo and purple lights, and one gem-like star, a night of ineffable beauty and peace, and within – a vision of Hell, cruel flesh-agony, hideous writhings, broken moanings, a boy-child sitting up in bed gibbering and pulling off his head bandages, a young Colonial coughing up his last life-blood, a big, so lately strong man with ashen face and blue lips, lying quite still but for a little fluttering breathing.

The boy goes to the theatre to be trephined – he later made an excellent recovery – the night sister takes charge of the Colonial and his neighbour; the medical officer asks me to have a man’s name put on the D.I. list. ‘No hope.’

‘Sonny, I’m giving out field-service post cards,’ I tell
him. ‘Perhaps you would like me to write yours and save you the trouble. I’m just taking your mother’s address from your pay-book.’

Three photographs drop out, a mother and father in ‘Sunday-best’ clothes, an elder brother, a gunner, and ‘Yours, Alice.’ The boy rouses himself from his listlessness to tell me she is ‘the best girl in the world, a munition worker’ – proudly – ‘making thirty shillings a week.’

As I write the address, put away his pay-book, and moisten his lips, the faces float before my eyes. Alice would weep, but the mother and father would just look numbly into the fire. For them there would be no outlet in a passion of grief, only an aching, gnawing want to hear the voice, see the well-set-up figure and the laughing face, that dreary want to be endured so long as life lasted. And the gunner would tighten his lips and feed the guns more determinedly.

The electric lights are shaded to facilitate and invite sleep. The dressings are now only minor ones, and we carry round a tray, and dress by the aid of hurricane lamp and flashlight. Finally we come to the last one, and leave the patients to the night staff.

‘Any help required?’ we ask our neighbours in adjoining lines.

‘No, every one seems to have finished.’ So we turn towards the quarters.