The Other Anzacs (2 page)

The declaration of war brought an immediate surge of volunteers among trained nurses keen to become military nurses. Waiting lists were so long for overseas postings that at least 130 nurses chose to sail to England to join the Australian Army Nursing Service’s British equivalent, Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, a recognised body within the Army. Several New Zealand nurses joined the same service. The Australians who left soon found that transferring to their own country’s nursing service would not be easy. Other Australian nurses and some women doctors joined private medical units in Europe and Britain, such as the Scottish Women’s Hospital Unit, which worked under dreadful conditions in Serbia.

Research by historian Dr Kirsty Harris shows that considerably more than the generally accepted figure of 2139 Australian nurses served overseas.

At least 2498 nurses served overseas with the AANS, with around 720 other trained Australian nurses and masseuses serving overseas with various allied services in addition to the AANS. This means that nearly as many Australian nurses served overseas in World War I as in World War II.
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In New Zealand, historian Sherayl McNabb has upgraded the number of New Zealand nurses who served overseas with the NZANS from around 550 to at least 610, with about a hundred more serving in other overseas nursing bodies, including Red Cross units and the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service. Again, it appears that the World War II figures for New Zealand nurses who did overseas service were similar.
³

In all, sixty-five Military Medals were awarded to military nurses from all World War I nursing services. Also, some forty-four Australian Army nurses received the highly sought after Royal Red Cross and 143 the Associate Royal Red Cross, while fourteen New Zealand nurses were awarded the Royal Red Cross and seventy-two the Associate Royal Red Cross.

To be accepted into the Army nursing services in Australia and New Zealand nurses had to have completed at least three years’ training in an approved hospital. Australian military nurses had to be aged between twenty-one and forty and either single or widowed, but in New Zealand they could be aged up to forty-five. If they married, resignation was mandatory for Australian nurses, although this rule does not appear to have been rigidly enforced in the early days of the war. For New Zealand nurses, marriage was first allowed, then banned, and finally allowed again.

The question of whether the nurses were members of the AIF was unclear. Legally, the nursing service could not be part of the AIF since its personnel could not be members of the armed forces. In 1932, the Crown Solicitor provided an opinion that Australian Army Nursing Service members were not enlisted within the meaning of the Australian Defence Act, so appointments to the service were made by the Governor-General. This meant that the AANS was ‘not a part of the Defence Force’.
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In 1943 the AANS changed from an auxiliary service to an incorporated part of the Australian Military Forces, but its status would not finally be clarified until the change from service to corps in 1951.

The issue of rank would become a burning question as the AANS sought to consolidate its organisational structure. A report by the Director-General of Australian Army Medical Services, Lieutenant General R.H.J. ‘Bertie’ Fetherston, found that in the Australian hospitals on the island of Lemnos there were soldiers who paid no respect to orders issued by women. Noting that Canadian nurses on the island had had military rather than honorary rank since 1901, he recommended, in his reorganisation of the AANS, that Australian nurses should wear badges of rank. Fetherston believed this would improve the nurses’ status and authority, especially in the eyes of non-commissioned officers and orderlies.

The change of nurses’ status to Army officers rather than civilians took effect in May 1916, even though the nurses were not in favour of the use of badges. The matron-in-chief wore a crown badge, and ranked as a major. The principal matron or matron had three stars, the same as a captain. A sister, with two stars, was equivalent to a 1st lieutenant, and a staff nurse, with one star, the equivalent of a 2nd lieutenant. But their pay was not made commensurate. A matron, for example, earned twelve shillings and sixpence a day, just over half a captain’s wage.

A similar situation existed with the New Zealand Army Nursing Service. Although it was officially part of the NZEF, only men could legally be members of the armed forces. An amendment was proposed to the New Zealand Defence Act in 1915 to regularise the NZANS’s legal status, but it was never made. Nurses’ status remained unclear, and they were refused permission to wear badges of rank. In 1916 a directive went out to all New Zealand camps and hospitals that the military status of matrons, sisters and nurses was that of officers, and that they were to be ‘accorded the usual courtesy salute’. But not all officers complied. To compound the insult, the nurses were paid less than male orderlies.

Australian and New Zealand nurses soon saw service in their own backyard as the shadow of the conflict spread into the Pacific. The Allies feared Germany would take over Samoa, which had been a British–German condominium, as a potential base for its Pacific naval squadron. Immediately after war was declared New Zealand was asked to send troops to Samoa to seize the German wireless station there. With six nurses aboard, a troopship sailed on 15 August. A fortnight later, a German takeover of Samoa was prevented when the islands were secured without incident and the Union Jack raised in the capital, Apia. New Zealand nurses took over the running of the Apia hospital.

The German-held colony of New Guinea was also seen to pose a threat. Australia was given the urgent mission of seizing a powerful wireless station that the Germans had installed near Rabaul. On 11 September 1914 a small Australian force landed in the area, but unlike in Samoa, the Germans resisted. Attending to a wounded German during the fighting, a captain in the Australian Army, Dr Brian Pockley, was shot and killed. He became the second Australian casualty of the Great War, an able seaman having been killed earlier in the same operation, which also claimed the life of another Australian soldier. As malaria and dysentery soon began to take their toll on the occupying Australians, medical reinforcements, including nurses, were quickly sent from Sydney aboard the hospital ship
Grantala
.

Also in September 1914, the first Australian nurses saw service in Europe. Sisters Claire Trestrail, Myrtle Wilson and Catherine Tully were in the middle of the fighting in Antwerp, Belgium, working at a makeshift 120-bed British Red Cross hospital. By a quirk of fate, the three nurses had been in England when war broke out a few weeks earlier. Separately, each joined the Queen Alexandria’s Imperial Military Nursing Service and, with a Red Cross party, sailed to Antwerp to set up the hospital. The nurses were needed more urgently than they knew, for the nursing profession in Europe had yet to make the advances that Florence Nightingale had inspired in English-speaking countries. Another nurse in Antwerp would later assert that the reason for the neglect was that ‘nuns were not allowed to attend to men patients below the waist’.
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Untrained orderlies did most of the work.

Within hours of the nurses’ arrival in Antwerp, the roar of the guns could be heard continually, ‘till at last we became so used to the sound that we slept peacefully’, Sisters Wilson and Trestrail recounted in an article in
The Australasian Nurses’ Journal
.
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Published in December 1914, this was the first account of the experiences of Australian nurses in the Great War. ‘No words can describe the awfulness of the wounds, ’ they wrote. ‘Bullets are nothing. It is the shrapnel that tears through the flesh and cuts off limbs, and makes gashes that one cannot possibly describe.’ Perhaps earlier than anyone else, they also came face to face with what would come to be known as shell shock. ‘The noise, too, shatters the nerves of men, and even deafens and maddens them.’ When Belgium fell, the sisters were evacuated. Only troops came after them.

The residents of Boorowa, in southwestern New South Wales, learned of the heroic deeds of the three nurses when the
Burrowa News
published an account of the drama involving the sisters. The paper proudly pointed out that Catherine Tully came from the area and had trained at Goulburn Hospital. For the farming folk of the district, her experiences were their first tangible link to the war.
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Like the soldiers, AANS nurses left Australia with little idea of their destination. The war was being waged in vast and varied theatres: Egypt, Turkey, Greece, France, England, India, Mesopotamia, Africa, Italy, Serbia and Russia. The first group of Australian nurses to go overseas—twenty-six in all, including four matrons—were aboard the troopships when the first convoy of 29, 000 Australian and New Zealand servicemen left Australia on 1 November 1914. A second, larger contingent of nurses left a month later.

They departed believing they were bound for England and ultimately France to prepare for the establishment of hospitals to be staffed by Australian Army nurses. However, as British military leaders discussed mounting a possible campaign against Turkey at the Dardanelles, the nurses on board were diverted to nearby Egypt. Gallipoli was their introduction to a casualty load that rarely lightened for the duration of the war.

Often they worked in appalling physical conditions, as was the case on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea, or at primitive medical facilities on the Western Front in France. In 1916–17, in France’s coldest winter for a century, operating theatres with free-standing fuel heaters exemplified the hardships of working at casualty clearing stations. In the spring of 1917, a sister at No. 3 Australian Casualty Clearing Station, Gertrude Doherty, noted that when she arrived there were no mattresses or pillows, only stretchers and blankets. ‘As soon as a patient was operated on and put back on the stretcher, it gradually sank in the mud.’
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Sister Ida O’Dwyer, who worked at the same station, was exposed to the full horror of wounds straight from the battlefield only a few kilometres away. Mostly the wounded arrived with the first field dressings still on, ‘or perhaps a tourniquet still on a limb that is almost blown off and the wounds still full of mud and clothes and pieces of metal . . . He may be a man with not one wound but perhaps ten or more in which there may be two fractures and a head wound, ’ she said. ‘Then there are the abdominal wounds which appear nothing ’till they are opened and there will be found perhaps the bowel torn in from six to twelve places.’
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Sister Elsie Eglinton saw different injuries at No. 2 Australian General Hospital at Wimeraux, near the Somme, in a ward where there were many disfigured faces. ‘We never even have time to take a bandage off, it is just cut off, ’ she recounted. ‘It’s quite common for a piece of shrapnel the size of a marble to drop out of the jaw whilst you are syringing it.’
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And then there was the sheer volume of wounded. In three years at Rouen, more than 90, 000 patients passed through No. 1 Australian General Hospital. Most were not Australian—only slightly more than eleven per cent of all admissions to Australian hospitals on the Western Front were AIF members, the rest being Allied troops and even German prisoners of war.

Many of the nurses were away so long that a sprig of wattle sent from home would become a cherished keepsake, a reminder of a long-ago life before war. These women were pioneers in the advancement not just of nursing as a profession but of women’s place in society. But many would lose brothers or lovers, or their own health; and some would pay with their lives.

GALLIPOLI

1
THE BIG ADVENTURE

Street peddlers jabbered and gesticulated, proffering postcards, figs, Turkish delight and beads. Beggars and urchins pleaded for money. The scene at Port Said, on the Suez Canal, could not have been in starker contrast to the measured pace of life back in Australia. After six weeks at sea, the women from the Australian Army Nursing Service had arrived in Egypt, ready for the serious business of war. But for now they were sitting around a table at the Savoy Hotel. There was a feeling of excitement and anticipation despite the mayhem around them. Sister Elsie Eglinton had seen nothing like it in Adelaide. There were ‘merchants of every description so thick around us that we could scarcely give our order to the waiter who kept trying to flick them away with his towel’.