The Other Anzacs (40 page)
Another Australian nurse working with the Imperial Military Nursing Service, Sister Eileen King, also won the medal for her actions while serving at a British casualty clearing station. The
British Journal of Nursing
announced that the King had approved her medal in early February 1918, which means the action in question most likely occurred in the second half of 1917.8 According to a newspaper report,
Eileen King was serving in a tented field hospital in France when it was struck by a stick of bombs. She had part of her left thigh broken away and received other serious wounds but broke no major blood vessel. She remained on duty and managed to get her wounded out of the burning tent. Soldiers who knew her described her as one of the bravest women they had ever met.
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In late June 1917, Ballarat nurse Rachael Pratt, who had been awarded the Royal Red Cross 2nd Class a year earlier, was working at No. 1 Australian Casualty Clearing Station, near Bailleul. On the night of 3–4 July, the Germans attacked the station. Bomb fragments from the raid burst through the top of her tent, tearing into her back and shoulder and puncturing her lung. The only nurse wounded in the raid, she carried on until she collapsed. She was evacuated to England to convalesce, promoted to Sister, and awarded the Military Medal for her bravery under fire.
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This was a trying time for nurses and patients alike. Two weeks after the Battle of Passchendaele began, Sister Alicia ‘Rachel’ Kelly, from Perth, was on duty at No. 3 Australian Casualty Clearing Station at Brandhoek. It had eight operating tables going night and day. Head Sister Ida O’Dwyer was also there at the time, and noted that the Germans dropped bombs and shells on August 16, 17, 18, 19 and 21. It seemed as if the unit was under continual attack. Ida recalled one raid, on a ‘beautiful clear night’, when the injured were arriving in convoys and doctors and nurses had all been ordered on duty to start operating.
In the theatre not a word was said, every table was busy—bombs, someone said. Surgeons stopped in the middle of tying a blood vessel to perhaps utter a word that had no relation to the wound. Sister, who was noted for her quickness, did not get the catgut through the needle so smartly. That was all the difference it made, yet each was wondering who might be hurt and where they fell. In the busy ward with the rush of work the staff hardly realised what had happened ’til someone made the familiar remark, “where did that one go”.
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The attack on the 21st killed a Canadian sister in a nearby clearing station and left fifteen English nurses shell-shocked. May Tilton recalled how an agitated medical officer pushed his head into her tent. ‘Come on, you girls. Put on your coats and slippers. The [commanding officer] says you have to get into a dugout at once. They are shelling us.’
May and her colleagues were incensed because he would not allow them time to dress. ‘We wanted to go to the wards, not into a burrow in the ground.’
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Running in her slippers, May heard a long-drawn-out crescendo following her. She thought she was gone. Men shouted at her to run, others to drop. ‘My slipper tripped me, and I fell, just as the shell fell in the cemetery behind. I looked back to see a huge mass of black smoke and debris flying in all directions; felt myself lifted and dragged into a huge dugout where all the day staff had gathered. Every one of them was upset at the C.O.’s orders, and distressed to leave the patients.’
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Ida O’Dwyer decided to make the best of the situation, sitting on the sandbags with the mess book, calmly calling on the sisters to fix up their accounts before she lost sight of them. May had no money. ‘Well, find it somewhere, ’ Ida replied. ‘You will probably be scattered all over the country, and I won’t see you again, and we must pay our bills.’ The boys paid their debts.
In the meantime, Rachel Kelly had refused to leave her patients. She stayed in a hospital tent holding one man’s hand and doing her best to calm him and others. Chaplain G.C. Munschamp recalled her actions with admiration:
We have been bombed continually. The noise of the guns, only a hundred yards from the camp, has been startling and deafening. One bomb fell close to the sisters’ quarters, killing an officer and an orderly, and riddling the sisters’ tents in which they were sleeping, fortunately on the ground.
Finally came the day when the Germans deliberately shelled the camp, and no one who has not seen it can realise what it means to have huge armour-piercing shells fall in your midst with a burst of [a] quarter of a mile all round.
We got all the sisters away to a trench at the back of the camp, but when all had gone we found Rachel alone in her ward, giving to each patient an enamel bowl to cover his head from flying pieces of shell— absolutely comforting all these poor frightened helpless creatures in her calm and sweet mothering ways, and we had literally to drag her to a place of safety.
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The Chaplain said Rachel did not know that ‘she had been perfectly heroic . . . She was only troubled that she couldn’t obey the order to seek shelter, because her poor boys looked so frightened, and all the orderlies had run out of the ward.’
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According to May Tilton, when the first shell fell, Rachel ‘rushed for the enamel wash basins and covered the patients’ heads to protect them from bits of flying shrapnel, then stood in the middle of the ward, encouraging and cheering her helpless patients’.
Rachel was transferred to No. 3 Australian General Hospital and awarded the Military Medal. In the space of a few months, seven Military Medals had been awarded to Australian nurses and one to a New Zealander for their courage under fire. This extraordinary achievement has not been equalled in any campaign involving the Australian Army Nursing Service since the Great War. But those were not the last Military Medals to be awarded to Anzac nurses during the conflict.
Alice Ross King could not get away from the bombing. It seemed every night during August 1917 at Messines was spent in a dugout as the Third Battle of Ypres raged. After General Birdwood presented her and her three colleagues with their medals, they were feted with a dinner at Anzac headquarters at Hazebrouck. The town was bombed while they were there. They left in an ambulance, bombs falling all the way. One landed immediately in front of the vehicle. ‘Very narrow escapes, ’ Alice noted succinctly.
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Such experiences were now almost a normal part of life. She knew that No. 3 Clearing Station had been destroyed by shelling, and that No. 1 near Bailleul had been targeted but the bombs had not exploded: ‘We are taking their cases.’ She was working from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. The Germans were still shelling Bailleul, ‘and each day the shells go whining over our heads to the back areas.’
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When the Germans started using gas shells, the dangers intensified. Wind carried gas along a shallow valley to No. 2 Australian Casualty Clearing Station. One morning Alice was woken by a clamour of alarm bells. She thought it was a signal that the Germans had broken through, but the bells were warning of the gas. The deadly fumes quickly engulfed the hospital, and Alice felt the effects before she understood what was happening. ‘My throat and eyes were smarting and I felt awfully sick.’
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Topsy Tyson told her it was gas and they quickly donned their gas masks. But something else worried Alice—her new kitten was missing.
The kitten had lived in the trenches, somehow surviving on the scraps of food the men left, and had not yet seen milk when Alice took it in during July 1917. It arched its back and spat at her on their first meeting. But they grew on each other, and the kitten settled in, running up soldiers’ legs and playing with their rank badges. When General Birdwood visited, the kitten befriended him. He didn’t seem to mind, putting it on his shoulder and stroking it as he stood talking to Alice and the matron. Now her pet was in danger from the gas. Alice dashed outside, but the kitten did not recognise her in the gas mask and ran under the hut. Next day it returned, none the worse for wear.
The same could not be said for German prisoners. One day, as Alice was about to go off duty, she heard feeble, anguished moans coming from a tent that had been neglected for three and a half days. Inside were fifty-three badly wounded German prisoners who had no water or food. The medical staff were too ‘dead beat’ to come and attend to them. She searched until she found a doctor who would. Together, they treated forty men in forty-five minutes. Thirteen had already died. There was no waiting for chloroform for amputations. Somehow they got all the men onto a train ninety minutes after Alice had found them.
The doctors and sisters worked tirelessly, but the sheer volume of casualties and the severity of the wounds taxed them to their limits. And the threat of aerial attack was always there. An order went out: ‘All Sisters to go to Dugout when Fritz is overhead.’ Alice thought it silly. ‘I expect they want to get rid of the lot of us if there is a direct hit, ’ she wrote, her black humour irrepressible. Even so, they were spending more and more nights in the dugouts, under orders from General Birdwood to leave the patients during raids. He had warned that he would withdraw the sisters if he learned they had been exposed to fire. As Fritz flew overhead ‘doing his stuff ’, Alice tried to use the time to keep up her diary, with the gramophone playing in the background. A bottle of brandy was sometimes taken down, and the sisters had a drink to calm their nerves.
Alice did not take kindly to the warning to stay in the dugout and leave her patients. She was a nurse first, and in the Army second. During one raid, she ‘nicked down to the wards to see if the orderlies were there or hiding in the soap drain . . . A Fritz flew along the duckboards as I was running back—seemed to be right on top of me.’ Luckily, the aircraft was a fighter and not a bomber.
The battle to save the wounded often seemed futile. ‘The last post is being played nearly all day at the cemetery next door to the hospital. So many deaths, ’ Alice lamented. With so much carnage from the Ypres Offensive, her faith began to falter. The padre was always praying that ‘Right will prevail’, but Alice was beginning to wonder. ‘I can’t believe there is a God. It is too awful for words.’
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Those around Alice, especially her friend Topsy Tyson, realised that she was feeling the strain. A ‘nasty near miss with a bit of H.E. [high-explosive shrapnel]’ did not help. She stayed on duty but now ‘wet my pants whenever Fritz came over’. This was shell shock. For her own good, Topsy informed Evelyn Conyers, the Army Nursing Service Matron-in-Chief, that Alice showed signs of having been at the station for too long. ‘So I had, ’ Alice reluctantly agreed. She was sent back to No. 1 General Hospital at Rouen, further from the front line. As 1917 drew to a close, Alice learned that besides the award of the Military Medal she also had been Mentioned in Despatches twice—another commendation for gallantry or otherwise meritorious service.
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Across the Channel, at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Lancashire, Elsie Eglinton read a letter from her orderly. Ernest Hewish had gone into battle with the Australian Army Medical Corps’ 6th Field Ambulance as a stretcher bearer. He was a pharmacy student and, like Elsie, from Adelaide. They had worked together before—first at the Ghezireh Palace in Cairo in 1915, and then at No. 2 Australian General Hospital at Wimereaux. Elsie thought he was ‘a bonza boy’ from the start. At the hospital, they had a bit of fun with Matron Nellie Gould one night.
There was an empty bed in the corridor so I told him to get in and have a sleep and I would call him if he was required. He had just got in and made himself comfortable when who should come along but Miss Gould. She mistook him for a patient and bending over him said, ‘Why are you not sleeping, are you sure you are quite comfortable?’ Little did she know that he was fully dressed and should have been walking around. Poor boy said that he was terribly scared, but he really must tell her the joke when the war is over.
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