A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front (9 page)

BOOK: A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front
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The ship’s medical officers come down to receive their cases from the care of the train’s officers. Any patient who has been ill on the train journey and is liable to be adversely affected by the sea-journey is detained for a few days, and sent into a hospital which adjoins the station, and which has been housed in the premises of the gare, the buffets, waiting-rooms,
douane
, etc. Here a patient who has had, perhaps, a haemorrhage brought on by the jolting of the train can recuperate, and have a further rest before proceeding on his journey.

The cases are sorted, the heavier ones, i.e., those needing most assistance, being detailed to the top decks so as to be more quickly got off the boat in case of accident. The lighter cases, i.e., those able to help themselves, go to the lower decks and in the downstairs wards. Cases possible to haemorrhage or to require dressing are put into lower berths, while bad travelling cases, e.g., those with abdominal injuries or with gastric trouble are given the best placed berths with the least amount of rocking attendant. Even spinal cases are carried, – and carried most successfully too, – splinted from head to foot, of course,
and subject to every precaution and care throughout the journey. Splints, by the way, are quite freely used when dressing the cases for England, not merely for fractures, but wherever jolting or movement of a limb is likely to cause pain.

The walking cases, meantime, with huge Blighty smiles which broaden in superlative fashion as they greet us, have ensconced themselves on board, and have either found cushy chairs or seats and magazines, – which they show little inclination as yet to read, – or are watching the stretcher cases taken on board and sent by lift to the deck specified. These lifts combine the maximum utility with the minimum of space and elaboration. They consist of a grooved wooden support to take the ends of the stretcher with a webbed surface underlying the stretcher itself and their raising or lowering is worked by a belt.

All patients duly aboard and comfortably settled, tea is served. Then comes a walk round the ship which has not yet started her journey on account of certain sailing restrictions. One peeps in at the dispensary with its lotions and potions, its ungents and palliatives; then another peep at the operating theatre, a beautiful, white room fitted with two tables for emergency work, and, fortunately, not often required – unless in
case of a long journey or in a heavy rush of patients.

The open door of the ‘wireless room’ shows a small cabin where all night long an operator will do his little bit towards ensuring a safe journey for the poor, broken boys aboard. One eyes somewhat more than inquisitively the stacked rafts, the open boats and the two motor launches, the latter known as Puffing Billy and Snorting Lizzie, Lizzie being the one into which the wireless operator and his batteries are to go in case of necessity.

Many people who realise how enormous is the task of moving wounded will have marvelled at the proportionately small number of casualties when hospital ships have been torpedoed. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that every member of the staff of the ship knows his or her duty in such circumstances, each has been drilled in his or her particular work, and routine, and the realisation of the importance of that duty have done the rest.

So far as preparedness goes, it is somewhat amusing to note that many of the nursing sisters when on long journeys used to sleep in their swimming costumes.

The autumn afternoon has waned in a purple-red splendour and darkness falls. Supper has been served, and we walk round each ward. We are not carrying
officers on this journey, and the L.T.A. boys have the officers’ cots, placed in what was formerly the ladies’ drawing-room. The lights are shaded and the little cream curtains drawn where requested. ‘Cushy, sister,’ we are assured, ‘if it warn’t for the island at the other side of the water, I could stay here for the duration.’

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.’

‘O
F

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, although 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.’

BOOK: A Volunteer Nurse on the Western Front
8.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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