A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Illustrations

  Title Page

  Dedication

  I

  A Kitchener Nurse

  II

  En Avant

  III

  A Chilly Reception

  IV

  Camp Nursing

  V

  ‘Convoy In’

  VI

  Active Service in the Snow

  VII

  From My Diary

  VIII

  A B.E.F. Christmas

  IX

  Housekeeping on Active Service

  X

  The Trials of a Home Sister

  XI

  B.E.F. Nicknames

  XII

  ‘Blighty’

  XIII

  Heroes in their Carpet Slippers

  VIV

  Red Cross Needlework

  XV

  Our Concerts

  XVI

  English as She is Spoken (With the B.E.F.)

  XVII

  Some of My Boys

  XVIII

  Active Service in the Rain

  XIX

  Sounds of Hospital Life

  XX

  More From My Diary

  XXI

  War-Time Marketing

  XXII

  History Makers

  XXIII

  Our Boy-Blue Mail

  XXIV

  Ugh!

  XXV

  O.A.S. Hospitality

  XXVI

  Night Nursing with the B.E.F.

  XXVII

  Under Canvas

  XXVIII

    Active Service Kitchens

  XXIX

  My Diary Again

  XXX

  A Big Push – July 1916

  XXXI

  ‘Proceed Forthwith’

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘So sounds the bugle and the stretcher-bearers hurry off. In the course of a few minutes the tent door parts and our cases arrive. Clay-covered, mud-stained, blood-stained, clothing ripped...

  “Now, laddie, what is the matter?” ’

  Plucky V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment) Olive Dent served two years of the Great War caring for soldiers in a tented hospital on the Western Front. She wrote this vivid account of her time there and, though a classic memoir of the period, it was long forgotten until BBC researchers working on The Crimson Field delightedly rediscovered it, and pored over it for historical detail and dramatic atmosphere.

  Reproduced here in full, Olive’s journal tells a real-life story of courage and camaraderie. Her distinctive voice, cheerful resourcefulness and rebellious spirit shine through as brightly now as they must have done 100 years ago.

  About the Author

  Olive Dent was an elementary school teacher, who volunteered as a nurse in World War I, and served in a tented hospital in Northern France for two years. As well as writing this memoir, originally published as A V.A.D. in France, she also contributed regularly to the Daily Mail and The Lady. She died in 1930, aged 45, in the care of a Marie Curie cancer hospital in London, where there was a ward named after her.

  Illustrations

  Winter quarters: the temporary home of a medical officer

  A ‘line’ of wards

  Tommy’s impression

  A sunny day

  A ‘bairnsfather’ bunk

  The ‘blighty’ smile – an L.T.A. case

  The D.D.M.S. pays his official visit

  The orderly officer to the rescue

  A eusol foot-bath

  An operation at an army veterinary camp

  A windy night

  Night duty, 2 a.m.

  A night bird

  ‘Petticoat Lane’

  Nocturnal intruders

  A corner of the nursing quarters

  My thanks are due to the Editors of the Daily Mail, the Evening News, the Yorkshire Evening Post and The Lady for permission to use some matter – a small part only – which has appeared in their pages.

  WINTER QUARTERS: THE TEMPORARY HOME OF A MEDICAL OFFICER

  Chapter I

  A Kitchener Nurse

  ‘What have I done for you,

  England, my England?

  What is there I would not do,

  England, my own?’

  WAR! ENGLAND AT war! It couldn’t be. It must be some frightful mistake. War was the prerogative, the privilege, the amusement of the vague, restless, little kingdoms, of the small, quarrelsome, European States and far-distant, half-breed peoples. War was an unreality not to be brought to our land, not to be in any way associated with England, with our country.

  And yet – and yet – there was the dreadful, numbing, awful news in the paper, and newspapers would not dare publish anything untrue which was prejudicial to the common weal. People with serious expression and tortured thoughts tried to cope with the gravity, the enormity, the surprise of the situation. The dim, almost nebulous fear of years had actually materialised. England was at war! Fire, slaughter, dripping bayonet, shrieking shell, – how were they going to affect us? What was to be done?

  One looked at one’s dear ones at home with a passion of over-mastering love. One caught one’s self looking at strangers in the street, on the bus, and in the railway train, – at that worn little mother with the tired, trouble-haunted eyes, the laughing girl-child with the soft, rounded limbs, the crooning baby with his whole, wondrous future before him. Who was to defend them all? For the first time in a happy, even life one felt bitterly resentful of one’s sex. Defence was the only consideration in the popular mind in those early August days. And defence was a man’s job, and I, unfortunately, was a woman.

  Some one quoted Kingsley to be fiercely contradicted. True enough, the women would weep, and weep in full measure, but that was no reason for an apathetic acceptation. Meantime there was surely work to be done.

  But what work?

  Some few of us registered the names of, and arranged visits to, the families of soldiers and sailors immediately called up for service, and the sight of those pitiful, pathetic, utterly helpless families made our hearts ache and strengthened our determination to be up and doing. There came a call for men and more men. The regulars and the reservists had marched away to the war. Motley bands of recruits in ill-assorted mufti fell into line and nobly ambled off to be made into soldiers.

  No call had yet come for nurses. And yet the New Army of men would need a New Army of nurses. Why not go and learn to be a nurse while the Kitchener men were learning to be soldiers?

  The nursing profession was at that time regarded as very inhospitable to outsiders. No doubt we should be despised and abused, considered as very raw recruits and given only the donkey-work to do. Well, it would not be done any the less efficiently, through having studied as much as possible the science and art of nursing. Besides, weren’t the regulars, from mildly despising the Kitchener men, veering round to a well-merited appreciation and trust? That might happen in nursing. At any rate, auxiliary nursing service would assuredly be required. I would be a Kitchener nurse.

  Like every other woman at the time I reviewed my own particular case and weighed up matters. I had had a two-years’ course of hygiene and physiology in college, a half-yearly session at advanced physiology later, had done St. John’s Ambulance work for two or three years, and, provided I had a good aim in view, am what schoolboys term a good swotter. Not a great deal to go on, perhaps. Still it was a beginning.

  I resurrected my nursing books, bought others, re-attended St. John’s Ambulance lectures and practices, and wa
s fortunate in joining a detachment whose members used to visit hospitals on observation tours, and also used to enter civil hospitals for service, during as many hours of the day as could be arranged.

  If, at the time, I should have needed any spur to my enthusiasm, if I had needed any strengthening of my determination to nurse, I should have received such fillip in plenty. For Belgian refugees soon came to us, piteous little bands of people made apathetic by an exhausting succession of stupendous sorrows and fled from pillaged houses with all their world’s goods held in a string bag or a bundled sheet. They told us of those terrible days on the packed jetty at Ostend where men died and babies were born and people went mad. Frail old ladies, such as Rembrandt immortalised, were there, old men rich in years and poor in physical strength, young girls with terror-laden eyes, a blind boy. Think of it, – of the horror of hearing the first dreadful news of the oncoming of Uhlans, of the interminable stumbling along the white, sun-baked roads, of physical sufferings, of anxieties untellable, of a confused journey to a strange country where even the sounds were unfamiliar, – all in the maddening, inexorable darkness.

  And then our own fighting men came back from the war, our boys with shattered limbs, gaping flesh wounds, bruised, battered bodies.

  ‘Ever the faith endures,

  England, my England:

  Take and break us: we are yours,

  England, my own.’

  England had taken and broken them, and still there were so very many of us women doing nothing of value, nothing that counted. Events were proving that it was abroad where nurses were more urgently required. The war zones of the Western Front and Gallipoli were busy. Personal inactivity was galling. I had no ties. I could give my whole time to nursing, so disliked the thought of auxiliary, part-time work in England. I volunteered for foreign service, was accepted, inoculated, vaccinated and asked, in August 1915, to undertake service in Egypt. For private reasons I was compelled regretfully to refuse, but enthusiastically accepted service in France in the late summer of 1915.

  Chapter II

  En Avant

  MONDAY. SPENT THE morning at St. John’s Ambulance Headquarters where we were provided with arm brassards, identity discs, and identity certificates in place of passports, the latter most unflattering documents containing a terse, crude and unvarnished account of our personal appearance, age and address. The morning was bitterly raw and cold, but not even the order to prepare for life under canvas damped or chilled our ardour. Spent the afternoon at the stores in a chaos of other V.A.D.s, pukka nurses, khaki men and confused assistants. Bought a camp bed, camp chair, camp bath and camp basin, – they all look refractory and sullen, – a ground sheet, a sleeping-bag, gum-boots, an oil-stove and a collapsible lantern.

  Tuesday. Our party of a hundred V.A.D.s – members of St. John’s Ambulance Association, St. John’s Ambulance Brigade and the British Red Cross Society – left Charing Cross Station this morning. It may be the station of Infinite Sorrows, of heart-breaking farewells, but our going, at any rate, was quite unheroic.

  The place was very crowded with nurses, khaki men and officers, and a sprinkling of business passengers, and there may have been tears and piteous partings, but most of us were too busy attending to hand luggage, camp kits, vouchers and corner seats to be either observant or to listen for anything in the minor key.

  We had a very good and very quick crossing with not even a floating bottle to deceive ourselves that an enemy submarine was near. Only warships, dull grey from funnel to watermark, cruised around, and our escort hugged us close. I had been thrilled a few days before in reading the account of a well-known journalist who described himself sitting on deck in his life-saving jacket. He must have had a bad attack of ‘cold feet,’ for in our case such a precaution was not taken by any one, not even by one of our most popular princes who happened to be aboard.

  Arrived at Boulogne, the passengers ‘travelling Military’ were straightway disembarked, and we nurses went to an hotel where we were allocated to various hospitals, – all in Northern France, – and to which we were to proceed on the morrow. It was here we saw a new aspect of hotel life. I shared a room with a girl I had never before seen. It was seven feet by nine, with a sloping roof having two rafters and a skylight, and with lime-washed walls. Ce n’est pas magnifique mais c’est la guerre. War accommodation, and the bill next morning was a war bill!

  As we went downstairs a small crowd of other V.A.D.s were standing round a bedroom door shrieking with laughter. They invited us to come along to ‘their room’ and then we laughed too. The room looked like a picture after Hogarth. It contained five beds, three of them fat, French, wooden beds, two of them little iron ones, and it had lately been vacated, or rather was about to be vacated, by some officers. The bedclothes were lying about in piled heaps, there was a kilt, a Sam Browne, a couple of revolvers, a tin of tobacco, some cigarettes, haversacks and spurs and, tied to one of the bed posts, … a huge hound. He stood with drooping ears and tail, looking so very sheepishly and apologetically at us that we all laughed helplessly. Some one controlled herself sufficiently to pat him, and he whacked a great tail strenuously from side to side looking more ludicrous than ever … An Active-service bedroom, evidently.

  We had tea at a café beloved of peacetime days. The room was crowded with khaki, – the cakes as good as ever and the proprietor and staff casual as ever at presenting l’addition and taking pay. We waited so long for our addition, that we thought we might be charged ground-rent, and we amused ourselves with the French poodle who begs for oblong pieces of sugar to be placed on his nose – sugar was plentiful then! – at the ‘brass hats’ foraging for éclairs and petits fours with the pertinacity and perseverence peculiar to a brass hat, and at the variety in mackintoshes and trench-coats – some with a flair, some en Princesse, some belted, some collared in lambskin, some high to the ears like a wimple and so on. As we returned to the hotel, we shop-gazed, and became enamoured of a delectable blouse in ivory crepe-de-chine with tiny, lapis lazuli buttons. Then we scolded ourselves, – for this was only our second day in uniform, – and whipped the offending Eve out of us.

  Wednesday. We walked along to the Casino passing on our way the garage where were drawn up in a line upwards of a hundred ambulance cars of all makes and many of them gifts, e.g., from the British Farmers, from the County of Berkshire, from the Salvation Army, and so on. It was a very good sight to see so many fine cars smartly drawn up with their bonnets in line as though some one had called out briskly, and in stentorian tones, ‘’Shun. By the left, DRESS.’

  On by tram to Wimereux. Passed a company of British ‘bantams’ marching along singing to the accompaniment of a mouth organ, and with a rag-tag and bob-tail following of bare-legged Boulounnaise fisher-girls and old men, zinc buckets on arm. We wondered idly what the British Tommies first thought of things, – of the Boulounnaise women with woollen pants to ankles, and bare feet slipped into heelless sabots, of the mistress of the charcuterie who dusts the sausages displayed in the shop window with a feather duster, of the little boys called in by maman from play and deprived of their black, sateen pinafore to be arrayed in outdoor costume of goat skin coat, Homburg hat, buttoned boots and socks, – and of what the French first thought of the British Tommies especially, say, on occasion when in throaty unison they announced:

  ‘O – o – ah, it’s ’snice ter get up i’ th’ moarnin’,

  But it’s snicer ter lie in bed;’

  or when in mournful accents they declared:

  ‘Old Soldiers never die, never die, never die,

  Old Soldiers never die,

  They fade away.’

  Without doubt it must be difficult for the French and certainly an occasional strain on their entente cordiale feelings and intent to have their towns, their trams, their cafés, their restaurants, their streets and shops overrun with us British as is the case in Boulogne, Havre, Rouen, Abbeville, Amiens and most of the towns of Northern France. We English would assu
redly have found it so if French people had been garrisoned at York and Leeds, Birmingham and Leicester. One wonders if we would have been as forbearing, as gracious, as friendly as our neighbours are under the circumstances.

  At Wimereux we climbed up to the cemetery, which has been extended to include a military section for the fallen British. Long lines of smoothed graves, each headed with a little wooden cross, – it is a picture of majestic simplicity, of infinite pathos, nothing tawdry, nothing trivial, nothing but the grandeur of simplicity. We think of the poor, maimed bodies, all that remain of that grace of English youth and comeliness, of the beauty that is consumed away, of man turned to destruction. We think of Time who unheedingly dims the proud stories of those valiant heroes. Each little, smoothed grave means a tragedy, a gap in some home across those dark waters. Our age has paid its price for the nation and the race. Those are the dead who won our freedom. May we cheat Time, and ever retain the thought. May it compel us to greater patience, greater fortitude, greater forbearance in the work that is to come.

  We turn from the graves and leave our dead to their bravely-earned rest on the little wind-swept hill. May they sleep in peace.

  Chapter III

  A Chilly Reception

  WE LEFT THE Gare Maritime shortly after 2 p.m. The train loitered leisurely onwards for the next twelve hours. Some V.A.D.s went to Etaples where the big S.J.A.B. hospital is situated, some went to Havre, some to Le Treport, some to Versailles to the Palace Hospital there, some to Rouen.

  The journey was interesting enough while daylight lasted. We waved to all the British Tommies we passed, and they cheered and waved energetically in return, and we interrupted two games of Soccer by throwing from the carriage window illustrated papers and cigarettes.