The Other Anzacs (19 page)
As she waited at Lemnos for the troopships to take the men to the Dardanelles for the battle of Lone Pine, Elsie reflected on the war.
It’s fine to hear the cheerful way the boys go off to the Peninsula. A big boat load starts off and one of them calls out ‘Coo-ee, are we downhearted?’ and the rest all shout ‘No.’ The same boat comes back next day loaded with sick and wounded. Some of the boys are splendid, the manly way they treat each other, it’s quite a common sight when we are taking wounded on board to see a boy with a wounded arm pig-a-back another with a wounded leg or foot onto the ship.
10
On the first day, several hundred sick and wounded were taken on board. Elsie was aft with 300 patients, while another sister was forward with 400, ‘so our time is fairly taken up during the night’. The decks were covered with mattresses. ‘We have to do all our dressings etc, on our knees and they are so close together that we can scarcely kneel between two mattresses [and] as most of the poor fellows have body lice on them, the blankets are crawling, [and] we get covered ourselves before morning.’
11
Elsie sailed for Alexandria, noting two burials at sea on the way.
Daisy Richmond was also on ship duty in the wake of Lone Pine, sailing between Lemnos and the Dardanelles on the
Neuralia
. Returning from the fighting packed with wounded men, the ship came under fire. The nurses hardly had time to notice, such was the workload.
The girls on day duty are working till 1 and 2 a.m. as they did the night before. We were well under fire, many bullets coming on the decks. I was speaking to one boy, moved away to another patient when a bullet hit him and lodged in the thigh. I just missed it. We have to move a little further away to get patients as the present position is too dangerous for the transport of such.
12
The sea travel was made increasingly hazardous by prowling German submarines. Returning to Alexandria, the
Neuralia
passed through wreckage from the troopship
Royal Edward
, which was torpedoed on 13 August, killing more than 1000 men. Daisy could not help but notice the shattered wooden cabin doors and overturned lifeboats.
At times nurses faced pressures from unexpected quarters. On the
Ionian
, Elsie Eglinton was concerned about the behaviour of one of the pursers, ‘a most objectionable fellow. I was sitting in a corner quietly reading just now and Sister Kearns was sleeping in her deck chair. He came along and thought she was all alone and tried to kiss her, she jumped up and so soundly smacked his face that I guess it will be some time before he tries it on again.’
13
Elsie had no such problems. The staff, in particular the ship’s third engineer, George Mackay, a Scot from Glasgow, were willing to give her ‘great assistance’, she wrote. Elsie had several New Zealand patients. ‘One boy who was delirious pulled off his pyjama suit and laid under a water tap on the deck with the water full on, he was in a very high fever and he was a great deal better afterwards. When they are delirious they often imagine that they are in a battle or else German prisoners and it’s rather dangerous work trying to manage them.’
14
As she nursed in Alexandria, Mary Gorman was shocked to hear of the death at Gallipoli of a New Zealand soldier, Willie Tavandale. Willie had been a friend at home and Mary feared that his mother would be ‘in an awful state’. Besides a gaping abdominal wound, both his legs and arms had been blown off. Willie only lived 90 minutes. Mary had quickly learned that such shocking injuries were not isolated. ‘Another boy about 20 has had both eyes shot out and as for arms and legs blown off you can’t count them, ’ she wrote home in mid-August.
It was not just the dreadful wounds and broken bodies that troubled the sisters, but also the sheer physical toll that the fighting took on the men. They tried to cheer them up with treats like condensed milk, and gifts of shirts and socks sent by the Red Cross. ‘We go around with a notebook and make a list of the very worst shirts, ones dropping to pieces, filthy or covered with dried blood and then if we find we haven’t enough shirts to go round we have to still further condense our list. It’s pathetic to see the poor boys looking with such eager eyes to see if they are going to get a clean shirt.’
15
Pathetic it may have been, but it was nonetheless preferable to what was happening on Lone Pine—as Lieutenant Syd Cook, husband of Elsie Eglinton’s colleague Elsie Cook, could attest.
When the whistles blew at Lone Pine, the Anzac 1st Brigade rose as one in the trenches and went over the top. Lieutenant Syd Cook’s 2nd Battalion led the attack. Seconds later, bullets from Turkish rifles and machine guns flew like hail into the charging Australians. Those who reached the Turkish front line were faced with an unforeseen problem: aerial reconnaissance had failed to show that the trenches were roofed with pine logs. The Turks had left just one pine tree standing.
Some men fired down through gaps in the lumber, while others lifted logs and dropped into the enemy dugouts, or ran past the front line into the communication trenches in the rear and advanced from there. Men fought with bayonets, bombs and fists as they sought to take one of the Turks’ strongest positions. The Australians took the main trench within twenty minutes. But the Turks counterattacked. Syd Cook was shot in the head and evacuated to Alexandria.
It was a week before Elsie Cook, in Cairo, heard the news via a message advising her ‘to go to Alexandria at once’. Syd was there ‘dangerously wounded!’ Worried and upset, she phoned No. 19 Hospital, where he had been admitted, and urgently sought information before asking permission to go. Her friend, Ruth Earl, volunteered to work her night shift. A colonel took her to Cairo railway station, where she caught the 11:30 p.m. train. Elsie had ‘a wretched night’ on a slow train that did not arrive in the port city until 6 a.m. ‘All manner of conclusions fill my mind, ’ she wrote grimly in her diary.
1
At the hospital, no one seemed to know where Syd was. He was just one soldier among a big convoy of wounded that had come in the previous day. Records were in a mess. Pushing through the confusion, Elsie searched the hospital herself and found him ‘lying out on a verandah bed, head swathed in bandages, thin and pale and weary looking’. He ‘just gave a wan faint smile of recognition’ and closed his eyes again. Syd was ‘unable to speak’ and ‘could only make queer sounds’ and signs. Elsie was shocked by his condition and very anxious. Syd had been wounded before, in May, but this time his injuries were far more serious: the bullet had fractured his skull.
At Elsie’s insistence, Syd was given special attention. Two doctors she knew approached the eminent English neurologist Sir Victor Horsley, director of surgery with the British Army Medical Service in Egypt. He gave no definite opinion, deciding to wait for an X-ray, but the medical staff were soon ‘very hopeful’ about Syd’s chances of recovery. Years later, the
Lithgow Mercury
published a letter from a Londoner who had fought with the Australians at Gallipoli and been wounded at Lone Pine. He had been in the same ward as Syd.
One day I heard that young Lieut. Cook was rather an important patient. He had been hit in the head up on the Peninsula. Sir Victor Horsley came to see him, and as he stood between our cots, Sir Victor put his hand on my head, asking, ‘And what’s wrong with this boy?’ They took the lid off my arm-bath for him to see, and I heard a surgeon say it was ‘coming off tomorrow’. ‘Don’t do that, ’ said Sir Victor. ‘Let him go home to England first. You never know what the voyage will do for him.’ So I kept my arm. I have it still—thanks entirely to the fact that young Mr Cook, of Australia, was in the bed next to me. His father was the Commonwealth Prime Minister who later came to London as Sir Joseph Cook, to be High Commissioner. Young Mrs Cook was a wonderful nurse. I shall always be grateful to this daughter of Australia.
2
Elsie was determined to stay with her husband. She immediately sought, and received, permission to transfer to nurse him. She spent the first day by his bedside. By the second day, she thought Syd looked better, having ‘lost some of that weary worn out expression’. Elsie cabled Syd’s family in Sydney to tell them how he was. As the son of a prominent politician and former prime minister, his brush with death was noted by the Secretary of Defence, who wrote to Sir Joseph Cook on 16 August. Five days later he wrote again to tell Sir Joseph that the head wound was serious.
With many ‘very sick’ soldiers arriving, the workload at the hospital was heavy. Elsie was run off her feet, but she knew she was lucky to be able to care for her husband. ‘Seems so funny to have Syd for a patient and so nice. I can’t realise my great good fortune in being able to be here on the spot.’
3
But her presence caused a stir among the English nurses staffing the hospital, not least because of her uniform. ‘Went down to the dining room tonight—a strange, bewildering sea [of] new, enquiring faces. My scarlet cape causes comment as only Imperial Regular Sisters are allowed to wear them in the English hospitals.’
4
For the rest of the war Australian nurses continued to ignore British objections to their red capes.
Elsie was faced with competing pressures. Her immediate inclination was to nurse only Syd and the few other patients on his verandah. But the ward was so busy and the staff so shorthanded that she felt she simply must help more. Besides, she reasoned, Syd slept all day so he did not require that much attention. In normal circumstances, Syd would have qualified for what the nurses called ‘specialling’, or one-to-one care. But this was war, and nothing was normal. Elsie worried about the other patients and wondered, ‘if we are doing the sufficient amount of treatment their condition requires’.
Syd’s condition fluctuated. ‘Poor old Syd has bad headaches continually, sleeps in a heavy drowsy way nearly all day, ’ Elsie noted on 15 August.
Feeling very worried about him indeed, don’t like the look of him at all and I fancy the other sisters think he is worse, although they do not say anything to me. Sat up with him after I finished my work in the ward tonight and couldn’t help shedding some tears in the darkness, it all seems so terrible. Went downstairs and wrote a few lines to Mrs Cook to let her know how Syd is, and am going to bed, very tired and very miserable.
5
Syd did improve in time, and began taking nourishment more willingly. It seemed strange to Elsie to be feeding him and coaxing him to eat just a little more. Eight days after Syd was shot, his doctor showed Elsie his wound for the first time. It was much bigger than she had imagined, and was ‘very dirty, discharging pus very freely’. He was having warm foments applied every four hours to keep the wound clean. It was agreed that Elsie would put on his dressings in future.
While he began to look better and brighter, Syd complained of a constant headache and had trouble speaking. But Elsie’s presence was paying off. Eleven months after they had been married, Syd croaked out his first words since being shot. Elsie was thrilled that the anniversary of sorts had spurred him to speak again. ‘This morning Syd remembered the date, the 19th, and in a funny old cracked voice for the first time spoke and reminded me of the fact! Started to talk in a broken, uneven and disjointed way to Mr Jenkins in the next bed! Great sign of improvement, seems funny to hear him speak after such a silence, a week for me, and nearly a fortnight since being wounded.’
6
It would be another week before Syd began to speak normally, although he would still ‘get tangled up now and again’. After three weeks he was allowed to move onto a couch, but he felt giddy and light-headed if he sat up. He was still very weak, and found it difficult to walk without shaking.
Syd went before a medical board, which ruled that he should go to England to recuperate. Elsie resolved to ‘beard the lioness’ and lay out her case for joining him. ‘Called at [Matron] Oram’s office and put my petition before her—“might I go on duty on the hospital ship that should convey my husband to England, please?” Got rather a cool reception, and all sorts of obstacles raised. Miss Oram said I must have Australian permission from my own hospital, as well as “Imperial” permission.’
7
Elsie wrote to Matron Nellie Gould in Cairo to ask for ‘Australian’ permission. She was granted six weeks’ leave of absence. ‘Simply mad with excitement all day, so much so that I forgot to dress poor Syd’s head all day.’
While waiting for a ship, Syd and Elsie returned to Cairo, visiting Groppi’s, the fashionable Cairo café, for tea.