A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front (5 page)

A girl comes to an adjacent bunk. ‘U-u-u-gh! Where are my gum boots and sou’wester? It is snowing again. I knew it was going to do something offensive by the colour of the sky. Of course, I’m on the offensive about the occurrence, but—’

‘Napoo, napoo,’ shout several voices. I chuckle, then snuggle down.

Took a dozen of the boys to church this morning, – a beautiful little service. The church is a marquee and the bell is rung by striking a suspended, empty shell-case with a piece of old iron. The tent floor has been stained brown with solignum, and we have a few forms to sit on. Our chancel is marked off by two primitive rails and backed by four brown screens,
the reredos being of cream cloth stretched tightly, the top fringed with a little gold fringe. The service is beautifully simple, the hymns those well-known ones we have all sung since we were children, the ‘sermon’ a few minutes’ topical address on, say, ‘The Trenches of Life,’ ‘The S.O.S. Call,’ ‘The Making of an Attack.’ Then ‘Let us pray for victory, for those at home whom our absence has made desolate, for the navy and those in responsibility, for the sick and especially those in our hospital, for the triumph of the right, for the coming of peace.’ We all stand up at attention after the final hymn and sing the National Anthem, our feminine voices quite drowned by the men’s, and then, with the boy-blues, we all troop out into the soft, spring sunshine.

Across the road is a large hall, one given by the Boy Scouts of Britain, and to it come any troops resting in the neighbourhood, for a day or two, on their way up the line. When the hall is packed with a khaki congregation of a thousand or more, it is a wonderfully impressive sight, especially when the heads are reverently bowed in prayer.

In the evening our boys may go to an adjacent Y.M.C.A. hut, where a lantern service is held. I went last Sunday evening. The hymn ‘For those in peril
on the sea’ was thrown on the screen. At the piano was a patient with a crutch at either side of him, poor boy. He played and we all sang lustily. Then came a prayer for help in our work and our life, and courage to meet death in its season. We had the hymn ‘Jesu, lover of my soul’; some scenes, accompanied by verbal comments, of life in the Holy Land, and lastly, the hymn ‘Oh God our help in ages past.’ It gave one an overpowering feeling of sadness to stand there in the darkness, singing:

Our generation ended, these brave boys individually will be forgotten, but their deeds, dream-like in their amazing valour, have opened up a new day of freedom and independence which can never be forgotten. What a gift to posterity!

We had a mail in to-night, the first for five days. One girl on her way to dinner called at the office on some errand, discovered the letters sorted, and took upon
herself the glad task of playing postman. Accordingly, she appeared in the mess carrying a great bundle of correspondence in her apron.

Dinner was almost ended, and there was a general stampede towards a deserted table. We would have made a good picture for an illustrated paper as we all crowded round, a huddled mass of grey, white and red, heads and caps bobbing, aprons fluttering, hands greedily outstretched, the impatient mounted on chairs, the artful below burrowing their way determinedly to the front like so many sappers, the decorous, – or perhaps the merely inept, – contenting themselves with the outer fringe.

A delayed mail is nearly as exciting as a Christmas mail. We are all greedy and insatiable, no matter how many letters we get. Newspapers we neglect and ignore, ingrates that we are, even going so far as to say ‘Only newspapers, how disappointing!’ though knowing well we will resort to them for home gossip with gusto on the morrow.

‘I don’t like
embarras des richesses
even in the matter of a mail,’ says a cautious Scotch soul next door. ‘I like to spread out my joys as I do my possessions, and make them go far.’

But, seated among the débris of five letters and two
parcels, I, like a bacchante, laugh her to scorn. I love my joy in extravagant draughts.

Since the ‘Sister Dora’ cap is taboo, and we have the handkerchief cap with which to tie up our head, one V.A.D. has cut her hair short in the fashion of the bob-crop of American children. She quite rightly argues long hair to be an unnecessary waste of time and energy, – unnecessary since her head must never now be uncovered except in her own bunk. One called her a wise Virgin, but we others contented ourselves by dubbing her a strong-minded female, the while conservatively and foolishly retaining our own questionable crowning-glories.

Goaded to action by absent friends, two of us – V.A.D.s – went to be photographed this afternoon. We mounted interminable stairs eventually to find the occupants of the studio eating rissoles round a gas stove. We selected our scenery with the idea of eliminating the florid, while the operator selected our attitude and posture with the idea of including the picturesque, clamped irons behind us and stood critically before us. ‘Si triste, trop triste,’ we were abjured. ‘Pas belle, pas belle,’ we were assured – a truly nasty
blow. ‘Un petit plus gai. L’air joyeux,’ we were invited. ‘Comme ça, comme ça,’ we were exhorted as he licked his lips north, south, east and west. We obeyed in a comparative degree while he twisted our heads to a revue-girl, picture-postcard allure. This we disobeyed in very positive degree, remembering Devonshire House, and finally giving us up as a bad bargain he shrugged his shoulders until they were almost on a level with his parietal bones, hopelessly squeezed the bulb, and extravagantly bowed us out past his cardboard Watteau terraces, and his
papier-maché
eighteenth century pedestals in superlative disgust. We left in subdued mood, conscious of our shortcomings in the matter of English stiffness.

A drizzling November afternoon so B— and I borrowed an umbrella before going for a walk in the forest. The owner of the umbrella having recognised that our nursing staff, like the Apostles, have most things in common had taken the very necessary precaution to fasten on the handle a luggage label bearing her name!

Up a very steep and rugged pathway an old, old crone was tugging a handcart piled high with faggots. So B— and I pushed behind. Turning her head at the
unexpected lightening of the load, – for she evidently thought some of the faggots had fallen, or the cart like the chords of Tara’s harp had come asunder, – she showed us a face so ludicrous in its dismay and amazement as to make a delightful study. Our lack of conventional decorum astounds and mystifies the French.

Like silly children we walked on and on not thinking of our return journey so were very glad to accept the lift afforded us by some English Tommies on a steam-roller. Even more astounded looks from the French passers-by!

A dreadful day. The morning bitterly cold, and the fires refusing to light. The boys put on paraffin and soon the marquees were full of fumes. Then the wood smoked until it seemed as though we would all be kippered. Five convoy patients warned for England. They and their wounds to be dressed in forty-five minutes. A convoy in. Several patients to X-ray and some for operation; two of latter rather bad and very busily sick. No off-duty, but took quarter of an hour to go to the dentist to have a tooth stopped. A hectic evening, dressings, beds, diet-sheets, blighty tickets, temperatures, etc., etc. Frost very severe and only half a pailful
of water obtainable. Caught my finger on a bed-rail, overturned and broke the nail. Very tired and cold. No fires in the mess, and only half a jugful of water for washing and hot bottle. The wick of my oil stove dropped into the well. My chilblains particularly energetic. I had indigestion and no
aqua menth pip
and a tactless neighbour persisted in singing ‘When you come to the end of a perfect day.’

The country now is lovely, great hanging sheafs of wistaria, laburnum and lilac, the chestnut spires reared in pink and white profusion, and in the meadows round the camp hosts of buttercups, white marguerites, and great yellow daisies.

On the latter I seized with rapture, and then discovered they were plutocratic relations of our John-go-to-bed-at-noon suffering, too, from the very common ailment, swelled head. Only here the ailment justified itself most picturesquely. We have harebells and lovely, blue cornflowers growing wild, and a most delightful, carmine-coloured clover with a conical head which bursts usually into flamingo-pink. The up-patients go out and bring us back armfuls of flowers with which we deck the tents. Lately we have been going to the forest for lilies-of-the-valley, but
they are ‘over’ now, so we have to content ourselves with Geoffrey Plantagenet’s flower, the yellow broom. We get great branches of that, – and in our particular wards it appears to best advantage, in a ‘vase’ which is made out of the case of a British 18-pounder picked up by one of our R.A.M.C. men after Mons.

Camp life in these glorious spring days teems with interest and swarms with ants. Ants! – we have hundreds of thousands of them. ‘Maiden aunts, they must be,’ says a Scotch patient, ‘for they are so fussy and such busybodies.’ They invade the annexes, which we use as food cupboards, and though we commend their energy and enterprise, we condemn their violation of the treaties of cleanliness and possession. A tin of jam gets hastily put away over night, then next morning it is a seething black mass. A pot of sugar left for a few hours presents a heaving, black surface the next time one goes to it.

Accordingly we stand all edibles in a tea-bowl, and surround them with a moat of water. The enamelled bread-pan we have on wooden supports which have been soaked in paraffin.

The patients are often quite interested in the wee beasties. Some of them tell us fearsome yarns of the depredations of the white ants in colonies where they
have seen service. They call us to watch any particular little cutenesses our own ants display, give adequate admiration to the engineering feats the tiny things occasionally perform, – and only once soundly rated their lack of intelligence, and that was when I found a company in the medicine cupboard. Even then, however, some one vindicated them. ‘P’raps they’re fed up with the war, sister, and want to go west.’

‘May bugs’ we have too. One dropped on my bed last night. It was ‘Van-in’ for he fell on his shiny, russet-red back. He was about two inches long, and I removed him on a newspaper to the front line of trenches as materialised by a ditch in the hedge. Big, fat moths fly in at night and after bobbing round inconsequently for a time invariably flap on one’s face.

Bloated, Germanic-looking spiders come up miraculously through the boards in the tent floor, ditto hairy worms with sloshy bodies and busy little iridescent beetles that seem to have much to do, and very little time to do it in. Crickets sit outside our bell-tents and scream piercingly, and in the wet weather there come in snails and rain. To snails we are inured, but before the invasion of the rain we beat a retreat. However, it isn’t possible to manoeuvre much a six-foot camp bed in a small bell-tent, and after the drippings of rain have
successfully followed the bed in its circuitous movings, there is nothing for the tent’s inmate to do but hoist an umbrella, and report the matter in the morning.

But camp-life in fine weather is glorious – glorious are the nights when the nightingale sings in the forest which borders our camp. Glorious are the times when we lie abed looking out on a moon-bathed sky with scurrying mysterious clouds, nights when we tell ourselves that there is no war. Glorious it is to sit and watch a rose sunset fade to mauve twilight, with a honey-coloured moon, – long drawn-out nights when one’s life has time to pause, and one takes a moment to think. Then one loses the charm, turns sideways in the deck-chair, swallowing the lump in one’s throat, a lump partly occasioned by the beauty of the evening, partly by one’s sheer physical tiredness, and partly by the memory of a torn and gaping wound and of a magnificent young life dying behind a red screen in the ward yonder, quickly as the sunset.

CHRISTMAS WITH US
began a week or ten days before December 25. We weren’t afraid of its being long-drawn-out or of palling on the boys, for our hospital is usually just like a glorified casualty clearing-station. Our patients move so quickly. Besides, none of us O.A.S. people are of the blasé or bored type.

Festivities began by some Y.M.C.A. ladies bringing round presents for the patients. These presents were of two well-chosen varieties – useful, and capable of noise – and the men had their choice. The useful kind were notebooks and pencils, and both were soon busily used media for Christmas wishes to Blighty. The others were little sheep, ducks, lambs, etc., which could be made to emit noises travestying a baa, quack, etc. The boys were rather shy, as usual with strange
ladies, so I picked up a sheep, made it bleat, declared it awfully fascinating, and generally set the ball going. One of the ladies asked me to accept it as a mascot, and the boys’ tongues soon loosened when one of them said it was ‘scarcely the thing for sister to be associated with a black sheep.’

The men were very funny about these animals. In one ward they tied Blighty tickets to their coats and filled in the tickets fully – somewhat after this style: ‘C sitting. Able to walk on board. No. 19425618, Pte. Spud Tamson. Corps: First Field Canteen, Wet Division. Ship:
Friendship.
Diagnosis: Homesickness Acute. Signed: H. Oppit, Major, R.A.M.C.’

Some ‘were willing to sprint on board,’ some ‘delighted to jump on board’; one diagnosis was ‘swinging the lead,’ another ‘acute wangling,’ while a duck had an operation paper tied to it, ‘I certify that I am willing to undergo an operation for strangulation, and after the post-mortem to be stuffed.’

Round the hospital are forests from which we got lots of evergreens and mistletoe. Our Christmas trees we garnished with scraps of discarded cotton wool to represent snow, and decorated with crackers, etc. Wonderful results we got from an outlay of a solitary franc. Then the boys cut out mottoes from paper
wrappings: ‘Christmas Greetings,’ ‘God bless the lads in the trenches,’ ‘Heaven bless our sisters,’ ‘A Happy New Year to all.’ The boys had their own way entirely with the decorations, and incidentally pulled one another’s legs unmercifully, tied Christmassy ribbons and holly to the big, wooden, extension supports to which one boy’s leg was attached, stuck little golly-wogs on top of the cages over injured limbs, tucked mistletoe in the chart-board of a boy with his head and face all bandaged like a mask, warning him ‘Now, be careful, sister may want a pair of gloves this Christmas, and you being such a good-looking chap, well, well, well …’