A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front Page 7

  Down below, the sitting cases are going to bed in a big ward having tiers of beds arranged on metal supporting rods. The effect is, in a way, somewhat grotesque for the arrangement reminds one of so many tins of cakes in the cooling room of a bakery. On the way to the deck, we see through an open door into the engine room, with four huge boilers like Brobdignagian sparking plugs.

  Above we find an unexpected shower of rain. Drawn alongside our hospital ship is a leave boat, dull grey in colour, and with decks roofed in tarpaulin, whose wet surface brightly glistens in the light of a naptha flare.

  On the quay is a queue of khaki boys, jesting and happy, wholly disregardful of so slight a thing as the weather. Their leave papers examined they run up the gangway, a hunched figure with ‘humpy’ well-hitched on to their shoulders, and with heart, no doubt, as light as their pack is heavy. The dark-roofed ship swallows them as effectually as a tank does, and we think of the dim phantom with her war-worn freight stealing through the grey waters. Good luck, boys, and a good leave.

  The rain ceases as unexpectedly as it came, and by the time we put out to sea, a young moon shines benignly on us, promising a smooth passage. A good passage we have, too, and a quiet uneventful night so far as the nursing is concerned.

  ‘Sister, where are we, and is it really morning?’

  ‘Lying off Netley, and it is half-past seven.’

  ‘So we’re across. No tin fishes.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And I haven’t been seasick.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And we’re all glad to leave IT behind for awhile.’

  ‘OF – COURSE – NOT.’

  There is only one form of repartee in the Tommy Atkins vocabulary to meet that remark, and it comes –

  ‘I DON’T think, sister.’

  Four trains are drawn up at the English port to take away the cases from our hospital ship, and those from another which has come in alongside us. The first train is filled quickly with the more slightly-wounded sitting-cases, and is sent a short journey so as to be back in time to fill up again with the last patients left on board. The heaviest cases are also sent the shortest possible journey consistent with the best nursing and medical conditions, so as to eliminate, as much as possible, travelling and jolting.

  Once the train starts, heads are stretched and necks craned to catch a glimpse of the land of our many thoughts, and occasional dreams, while we were ‘out there.’ The morning sun pours floods of light on the reds and russets, the golds and bronzes, the browns and dark greens of the wooded copses. We catch fleeting glimpses of red-roofed farms, trim, well-built dwelling houses, orderly little towns, and – adorable little English children! Ours is a country worth fighting for, worth dying for, worth being maimed for. A funny thing – love of one’s native land. We who have endured heartbreaking scenes in those hospital wards in Normandy look away from one another now and blink very hard.

  Otherwise, we bid fair to make fools of ourselves soon.

  Chapter XIII

  Heroes in their Carpet Slippers

  ‘WHAT ARE THE men like?’ a military nurse is very often asked. ‘Do they make good patients?’

  Well, all the eulogies that have been showered on them, all the epithets and superlatives that have been rained on them, are but deserved. Splendid, magnificent, superb, they certainly are, heroes undoubtedly. But no man is a hero to his valet, and no man will permit himself to be a hero to his nurse. Homeric and epic they may be, but that fact they jealously guard from their nurse. Hence it is the homely human side we see. It is their trivial weaknesses, their little peculiarities, their big rough-diamond virtues we know. We see heroism shorn of its rifle, bayonet, and shrapnel helmet, and dressed in loose ‘blues’ and carpet slippers.

  Their brave deeds they persistently hide from us. ‘And what did you do to win the M.M.?’ one boy was asked. ‘Ah only fetcht a man hin,’ he almost surlily replied, his averted face plainly showing a disinclination for further conversation.

  Later, when our little blandishments had worn down his dourness, he thawed enough to explain that it took eleven hours to bring in the man, that he was ‘as good an officer as ever put two feet into shoes,’ that both of them were wounded, and craved for water, and that he had had to drag or carry the officer every inch of the way. Think of it! Eleven hours, almost a waking day, from breakfast to dinner-time, and every minute an exquisite torture of pain, perpetual suspense, and concentrated effort. But that was nothing to talk to ‘sister’ about. ‘Ah only fetcht a man hin.’

  With regard to decorations, they are modesty in excelsis. Although whispers pass round to other patients that another has a decoration, – and let me add their consequent respect and envy, – yet the owner himself never alludes to it, – he might be suspected of ‘swank.’ One man I congratulated on the possession of the M.M. ‘Oh!’ deprecatingly, ‘only an apology for the V.C. But.’ – with a little smile, – ‘my wife will be pleased.’

  In the earlier, more leisurely days of the war we used to prefer the boys while in the wards to wear their ribbons, the South African, the D.C.M., the M.M., pinned to their pyjama coats, but the modest wretches had a habit of taking off either of the two latter and hiding it when our backs were turned. They seemed to dread the other men regarding the wearing of it as their conceit rather than our wishes.

  As patients, ‘our boys’ are perpetually amazing. They will silently endure agonies from wounds and dressings, and yet groan and even howl when one removes a little adhesive plaster. They will tolerate stoically a shrapnel-ridden left leg, and yell from the further end of the ward to have a pillow or a piece of cotton wool moved under the heel of the right.

  Their sangfroid is tremendous. One smoked a pipe half-an-hour before he died, others one has caught smoking a cigarette within a few minutes of coming from the theatre. ‘Oh, I’m going great guns, sister,’ said a little boy with an amputation of the left leg. ‘As a matter of fact,’ went on the dreadful boy, ‘I think it will be a good idea to cut the other leg off to the same length. Then I could join the bantams. Don’t look so shocked, sister.’

  Another boy smoked a cigarette (bless the shade of Sir Walter Raleigh!) and joked to a sister who was holding up for him a picture paper the while his leg was being amputated below the knee. Stovaine was used, and the operation was very successful.

  The way the boys accept matters is simply marvellous. One was taken into the theatre to have a minor operation to his leg. Matters, however, were found to be so much worse than had been evident that it was a case of amputating the leg or letting the boy die. Naturally, the leg was taken off, and when I came on duty at night it was to be told to the boy, who was still under the influence of the anaesthetic and did not, of course, know of the amputation.

  I dreaded having to tell him. Each of the several times I went to feel his pulse, look at his dressing, etc., he was asleep, so next morning when the lights were fully turned up I went in trepidation to wash him and make his bed. To my astonishment he knew: he had awakened during the night, seen the bedclothes turned back – a plan we always adopt to facilitate the immediate detection of any possible haemorrhage – had realised what had happened, and quietly gone to sleep again without my knowing he had been awake. ‘Of course, it is a great grief to me,’ he remarked, ‘but’ – very charmingly – ‘I have been long enough here to know that whatever any one did for me is for the best.’

  Winter nights in hospital are the most domesticated times. It is then that our warriors from the trenches completely unbend. Wind and snow are lashing outside, but the tents are tightly laced, and blankets hung over the drawn entrance flaps. After supper gramophones, dominoes, cards, and games are put away, and often the up-patients will crowd round the stove, when somehow the conversation invariably turns to the old and young folks at home.

  Then each newcomer takes his photograph from his ‘Sister Susie bag,’ while older patients sit round ready on the slightest pretext to do the same, alt
hough we have already seen their photographs. On each, one makes adequate comments while occasionally having to cudgel one’s brain for appropriate and pleasing remark.

  ‘That’s the eldest girl. She is thirteen, and has just won a scholarship.’

  ‘Really! She looks very clever. And what beautiful hair!’

  ‘That’s the youngest, – ten months. I haven’t seen him. That’s my wife and family.’

  ‘Very capable woman I should think.’

  ‘Ah, she is that. Makes all the children’s clothes. She made those frocks they have on.’

  ‘Indeed!’ one says in a tone of surprise sufficient to be gratifying, though one glance at the delineated garments is enough to advertise the brave little effort blatantly, and, in a way, pathetically. Later, demands are made on our admiration on behalf of little girls in white dresses standing by pedestals adorned with baskets of flowers, little boys dressed à la Fauntleroy, with hand on head of a shaggy mongrel with not an atom of breeding, but quite evidently a faithful, greathearted, doggy thing, entirely lovable. And lastly there is ‘Me, taken in France.’

  ‘Me, taken in France’ is invariably very glossy, very shiny, full-length, post card size, three for a franc. A Frenchman taken in this style twirls his moustache, throws out his chest, puts on a pour-ma-patrie expression, and looks quite in the picture. But a British gunner sitting gingerly on a Louis Quatorze chair in front of a Watteauesque terrace, with peacock sailing along – a British gunner with firmly planted feet and hands, and a very conscious, almost defiant, expression peculiar to his photographed state, presents a sight, which to say the least, is somewhat amusingly incongruous. Still we mete out a semi-critical admiration, the critical suggestion being hinted at to ensure the genuineness of the admiration, and to remove any doubts that ‘sister’s gettin’ at yer.’

  From the ‘Sister Susie’ bags, too, come little souvenirs – a rosary picked up on the battlefield, the nose of a shell, a trench ring, a watch-chain made from flattened bullets, and, often wrapped in a piece of bandage, the fragments of shrapnel ‘that bowled me over.’ This shrapnel is twisted into a piece of bandage and tied to the arm on the wounded side of the body when the man leaves the theatre, or it is sometimes laid on the stretcher and tied to his bedstead on the corresponding side. In the great majority of cases the men prize this shrapnel enormously and have it made into a rough ‘charm’ for sister or wife or sweetheart; in a few other cases, ‘No, sister: I don’t want it: had quite enough of it.’

  During the July push several German helmets were brought down as souvenirs. I remember one man, with wound dressed and waiting for the Blighty train, seated outside the tent, asking me to admire his ‘millinery,’ a Prussian helmet, round which he had placed a string of dandelions.

  Yes, they are cheery, happy, casual sort of rascals, content, so long as they get their ‘Blighty tickets and a bit of furlough,’ to come back again and take up the game of ‘dodging Fritz and Co.,’ and strafing the ‘blinking old sossidge eaters.’

  Chapter XIV

  Red Cross Needlework

  AN APPRECIATION

  ‘SEVEN CASES MARKED for England, five “Lying Train B,” and two “C Sitting.” I had better go to the Red Cross Stores and get their clothes,’ – their ‘trousseau’ or ‘going-away dress,’ the men usually call the outfit.

  As I leave the tent, I make a mental note of what I want. Seven shirts, five pairs of pyjamas, five pairs of bed-socks, five woollen helmets, seven pairs of cuffs, or mittens, and two thick scarves, since November weather in the Channel is too raw and bleak to take risks. Then, too, I had better replenish our stock of bath-gloves and ‘Dorothy bags’ – more commonly known among the men as ‘Sister Susie bags’ – our small pillows, milk covers, and nightingales.

  What a godsend to us is the tiny, tightly packed room known as the Red Cross Stores! To convey what its comforts have meant to the maimed, bruised men they have clothed, to realise what it means to have such a supply to draw from, no human words are in any way adequate. The imagination might succeed a little better, though even then it would fall as far short of the reality as a child’s attempted conception of a billion of anything.

  We nurses know how much the gifts and comforts are appreciated, and we would emphatically assure all the women who have associated themselves with the distaff part of war work that every garment or article made, earned from some painracked man his grateful, heartfelt, though inarticulate, thanks. Every stitch they have made meant a few minutes’ greater comfort – and correspondingly less pain – from an aching body tortured on our behalf, for our defence and our birthrights. It is in no way a far-fetched statement to say that some garments – such as pneumonia jackets and cholera belts – have prolonged a man’s life. Many needlewomen have deplored and belittled their share in the war’s work; they have deprecated their efforts because these have not necessitated the donning of a uniform and the complete upheaval of their former life. If they would imagine what the comfort and warmth of their nice, smooth, home-knitted socks are to cold, chilblained feet, if they could see the men snuggling head and frost-nipped ears into their cosy Balaclavas, if they could witness – as we nurses have done – how a small jaconet-covered pillow, placed under the scapula of a man with his arm in an extension, has secured for the poor man a good night’s rest, there would be no more deprecating talk, no more half-sighing comments that ‘I don’t seem to be doing much. I’m only a Sister Susie.’ Be proud you are a ‘Sister Susie.’ You are doing some of the most valuable war service. The comfort supplying department is as necessary to the Army Medical Service as the Commissariat or the Clothing Department is to the army in the field. The fighting forces are infinitely glad of the existence of Sister Susies and their nimble fingers.

  There are two sets of people I should like to take for half-an-hour into the Red Cross Stores of any E.F. Hospital. One is our fighting men and the other is the women slackers. I should like the men to see those many, many garments, each bearing tangible proof of myriads of kind thoughts towards them and aching desires to help them, sometimes, doubtless, with hopes and fears, dumb sorrow and poignant anxiety woven into every loop of sock and meshed muffler. The slackers would, I hope, be shamed by those many evidences of tireless industry and by the unselfishness those garments epitomise into going and doing likewise.

  Look at this scarf. It was worked by frail fingers, the unevenness of the knitting shows that – done by a child or an old lady. No, not by a child, the scarf is too long for a child’s patience and concentration. Not only are the kind old knitter’s hands frail, her eyesight is failing, too. Here the dropped stitches have been picked up not quite correctly, here the matching of the wool is not accurate. But perhaps the latter was due to the limitations of the village shop, for one feels certain from the quality of the wool that the scarf was knitted by an old villager with not too many pennies to spare.

  Here is a bundle of neatly hemmed calico handkerchiefs labelled ‘Blackcote Girls’ School, Std. II.’ Std. II sounds very juvenile, and evidently there underlies a Herculean effort. One conjures up a vision of curly dark and golden heads, earnestly bent over the squares of calico, as chubby two-inch-long fingers laboriously push hot and sticky needles through the calico, and occasionally into the pink flesh, in valiant attempts to do their baby share of the war-work.

  Last night one of ‘my boys’ died. He had gas gangrene, and he cried continually, ‘Where’s my lavender bag, sister? My wound does smell so.’ I heaped some lavender bags into a piece of muslin and slipped it under his top pillow, besides hanging other satchets round him wherever possible. There are dozens of other boys who appreciate the lavender bags, boys who are nauseated by the smell of their wound whilst it is being dressed. For their sake it is good to see a new consignment, bunches of half a dozen sprigs of lavender, the stalks serving as handle, and the blooms shielded with a muslin cover caught with ribbon, an excellent time-saving, handy, convenient method of sending out the lavender.

&
nbsp; The neat idea of the bags is typical of the dispatch with which all the work in the stores has been done. Any woman interested in needlework could not fail to note with admiring approval how cleverly garments and comforts have been designed to obtain simplicity of making, convenience of wearing, and the greatest economy of effort in their production. She need only look at the cut and the putting together of each article to see that they have been planned thoroughly well and ingeniously before ever the scissors were introduced to them, planned so as to make the best use of the material and the shortest use of the worker’s time. They are sensible, useful, got-together-quickly garments, that are a credit to the needlewomen who have so efficiently made them.

  Strict economy, too, one notes. Look at this washrag, ingeniously made by knitting up the torn-off selvedge discarded from lengths of calico! And these slippers made from linoleum and scraps of strong cloth.

  Occasionally women may have felt a little depressed as the conscience-salvers recited the ancient tale of socks with ‘no shape,’ and shirts with ‘neckbands as large as waist-belts.’ It is an immense pity if they were adversely influenced by these remarks, if they allowed the ridicule to diminish their energies.

  Personally, I have never seen any such imaginary garment as the conscience-salvers love to cite and at which they love to sneer. Among many thousands of shirts, socks, pyjamas and bed-jackets, I have never seen one but was not very well made. Certainly I have never seen one garment of which we have not been able to make excellent use. So all the needlewomen who sew for ‘our boys’ via the Red Cross, can rest assured that they do their ‘bit,’ a bit that is most gratefully appreciated, and they can continue to ply their needle and thread into wool and cotton and flannel, and stitch, stitch, stitch for the boys who have gone forth to fight.

  NOTE

  The above was written in the autumn of 1915. Since then we have in some branches made less call on the Red Cross. For example, pyjamas and stockings for England cases are drawn from the quartermaster’s stores, but for the many needlework, and the countless little extra comforts which the Red Cross supply, all we nurses, on behalf of the ‘boys,’ are deeply grateful and extremely appreciative.