Some days after the sinking, a letter from one of the nurses on the
Marquette
reached a friend in New Zealand. The
Otago Witness
published part of it on 10 November 1915: ‘There is no romance about war. It spells suffering, hunger, and filth, and how thankful I am every day that I came to do what I could to help relieve our brave boys.’ The author of the letter was Margaret Rogers, who had been found dead in the capsized lifeboat. It was the last letter she ever wrote.
In Egypt, many of the surviving nurses volunteered to return to Salonika to help establish the replacement hospital, but they were turned down and sent either home or to the New Zealand Hospital in London. It was thought they had been through enough. Edith Wilkin and Poppy Popplewell were sent to work light duties at a hospital at Luxor, 600 kilometres south of Cairo until they had fully recovered. But Edith Wilkin was disappointed that they could not ‘go on with the No. 1 Stationary Hospital to make a new start’.
4
In a letter home, she wrote of how she would love to return to New Zealand for ‘just a little while’, cautioning, however, ‘you must promise not to keep me home because I must come back—you see we are needed here so badly’.
5
In the next five months the new hospital would treat nearly 7000 patients in Salonika.
Australian Army Nursing Service Sister May Tilton met the survivors, having been transferred to the Egyptian Government Hospital at Suez in October.
Several of the sisters were in the water seven hours before they were rescued. These were the girls we met. They had all volunteered to go on, but the [officer commanding] said the day for such heroines was past, and he insisted that all of them must return home after such a dreadful experience. He said they were the most wonderfully brave and plucky women he had ever met. One only had to look at them to realise they had suffered a ghastly experience. The expression in their eyes haunted me for days.
6
Ida Willis pointed the finger at the decision by British Naval Command to send the nurses on a ship such as the
Marquette
. ‘It seemed a dreadful mistake to send a complete hospital unit on a transport carrying soldiers and munitions of war. Hospital ships were respected and safe.’
7
New Zealand Matron-in-Chief Hester Maclean had not long returned to Wellington when she heard of the sinking. While she mourned the nurses’ loss, she was ‘proud to remember that they were New Zealanders, and that they gave their lives for their King and their Country’.
8
The calamity, she continued, ‘inspires us with awe’. Years later in her autobiography, there was less imperial hyperbole. While praising the nurses, Matron Maclean sharply criticised the British military command’s decision to send the New Zealand contingent on the
Marquette
. Like Ida Willis, she believed the reason that the ship was torpedoed was ‘most probably’ that she was carrying a ‘big British ammunition column’.
It appeared a strange thing that the valuable hospital equipment, as well as the more valuable lives should have been risked on an ordinary transport, which was conveying soldiers and munitions of war, when constantly hospital ships were coming and going from Alexandria. The torpedoing of the
Marquette
, being a transport was quite within the rights of the enemy, and at that time hospital ships were not being attacked. This loss of our sisters and hospital orderlies was the first and possibly the most disastrous of the many at sea, which afterwards occurred.
9
And that was the issue—the
Marquette
had been carrying munitions. A survivor, New Zealander Arthur Judge, agreed. ‘We shouldn’t have been put on it although we had to do what we were told of course. But the point is that this was an ammunition ship.’
10
To this day mystery surrounds the circumstances that led to the sinking. At the very least, it was a dreadful blunder by the British Eastern Mediterranean Command. Press reports published in later years claimed that the nurses were ordered aboard the
Marquette
‘despite a German warning that it would be sunk’.
11
A Court of Inquiry, hastily convened on board HMS
Talbot
in Salonika three days after the sinking, did not help matters. Many witnesses were still in shock or exhausted and probably confused. A key witness, Lieutenant Colonel D.J. McGavin, the hospital’s commanding officer, who had lost ten of his nurses, was not even in Salonika. Stranded on a beach, he did not arrive for another two days—by which time the inquiry had concluded.
Two nurses appeared before the inquiry, Edith Wilkin and Poppy Popplewell, but their evidence was brief, dealing mostly with their recollection of events and personal experiences. The affair had been ‘very trying’, but Poppy recalled that the inquiry officers were ‘so good and kind, and made us laugh and petted and flattered us as though we were queens instead of two very draggled looking nurses in shrunken dresses and no hats and black eyes . . . When they couldn’t show their sympathy and kindness any more and we were just leaving, the commander called for cheers for New Zealand nurses from the bluejackets, and I wish you could have heard those three British cheers. It made one thrill.’
12
The court concentrated almost exclusively on the way the ship was handled after the torpedoing: whether she was following the instructions in her sailing orders; the launching of the boats; the transmissions of the SOS messages; and the discipline of the soldiers and crew. In its findings, the court said of the nurses: ‘On all sides nothing but praise and admiration is expressed for their discipline, courage and unselfishness; their fine example, combined with their cheery encouragement, undoubtedly prevented many men from giving in.’
13
The reason why a major hospital unit might have been transported on an ammunition ship has been the subject of considerable speculation. It has been asserted in various books and published articles that No. 1 New Zealand Stationary Hospital and its staff should have sailed from Alexandria on the British hospital ship
Grantully Castle
, as that ship had been ready to leave from another berth in the port.
Kath King’s diary, however, makes it clear that the
Grantully Castle
was not in Alexandria at the time.
14
She had been on board the ship since it left Alexandria on 29 September 1915. It then sailed for the islands of Lemnos, Imbros and Malta, where it arrived on 5 October. Five days later it arrived back in Mudros harbour and on the 12th sailed for Salonika, arriving the next day. It remained there for the next sixteen days, during which time Kath wrote of receiving seventeen patients on board, going ashore, and rowing around the harbour. The
Grantully Castle
was still moored in Salonika harbour when the
Marquette
was torpedoed on the 23rd. Indeed, when the
Marquette
survivors arrived in Salonika they were taken to the
Grantully Castle
—an event that Kath had both photographed and recorded in her diary.
The myth that the stationary hospital should have been transported on the
Grantully Castle
rather than the
Marquette
was fanned by John Meredith Smith’s otherwise comprehensive account of the tragedy,
Cloud Over Marquette
. However, despite there being no evidence to substantiate that claim, it has since been perpetuated by other historians. That, of course, does not excuse the British Eastern Mediterranean Command for sending the nurses on the
Marquette
. The decision itself was not discussed at the Court of Inquiry, prompting the suspicion that it was deliberately avoided. The court also failed to request a report from the transport officer who had been responsible for placing the hospital unit on the
Marquette
.
It is evident from Kath King’s diary that the nurses on the
Grantully Castle
had little work to occupy them. This raises the further question of whether the ship could have been sent back to Alexandria to pick up the New Zealand nurses, medical staff and equipment.
The Salonika destination, Smith points out, had been a secret kept very close by the Naval Command. Although a New Zealand hospital was the subject of the move, New Zealand military and medical leaders were treated contemptuously. The Command did not keep New Zealand informed. Several requests by Major General Alexander Godley, Commander of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, early in October to have the No. 1 Stationary Hospital sent to Lemnos where they could treat Anzac troops were simply ignored.
15
Colonel Heaton Rhodes, the New Zealand Red Cross Commissioner, had also asked that the hospital be established on Lemnos. The reply was that its destination had yet to be decided.
16
It is certainly true that for strategic reasons, the Allies had resolved to establish a troop presence at Salonika. But the haste to transport the hospital unit to the Greek port on the
Marquette
was a reckless and counterproductive decision that put the nurses, medical officers, orderlies and equipment at risk. While No. 1 Stationary Hospital did open when it took over the site and tents occupied by the 25th Casualty Clearing Station at Lembet, near Salonika, on 12 November, the hospital was a shadow of what it was intended to be. It had to wait for new equipment and, as the survivors had returned to Egypt, it had no nurses.
The loss of the nurses, medical personnel and their equipment had been entirely avoidable. Two other troopships, the
Royal Edward
and the
Southland
, had been torpedoed in the Aegean in the weeks before the
Marquette
, highlighting the extreme risk from German submarines. At the time, the Germans were not attacking hospital ships with Red Cross markings. Without the Red Cross painted on its sides, the New Zealand nurses were deprived of the protection of the Geneva Conventions. The U-boat had been within its rights to target the
Marquette
.
In a statement to the court, Lieutenant Colonel F.J.S. Cleeve, who commanded the 29th Divisional Ammunition Column, described how he was ordered at Alexandria to embark the
Marquette
and found that New Zealand Medical Corps personnel and stores for a hospital, as well as officers and nursing sisters, had been allotted to the same ship. He initially planned to house the Medical Corps on the fore troop deck, but he was told this could not be done, as that deck ‘was required for stores’. The Corps subsequently joined the ammunition column on the aft troop decks. This perhaps shows how the New Zealanders were rated in order of importance.
Before sailing, on the evening of the 19th, Cleeve said he received ‘a confidential memorandum as to action against submarines’, which in effect required him to use rifles in the hope of smashing or splashing the periscope mirror.
17
This clearly shows that a submarine attack was regarded as a serious possibility, and further underlines the irresponsibility of the naval command.
Colonel Cleeve said he regretted the deaths of two Divisional Ammunition Column officers, but expressed no regret for the dead sisters and medical staff, or indeed for those who had survived. Instead, he noted, ‘Many of these ladies appeared next day as if nothing unusual had occurred on the preceding one.’
18
It was as if their traumatic experience, and sacrifice of their colleagues, was trivial compared with that of his own officers.
The New Zealand government reacted quickly to prevent such a tragedy occurring again. The Governor, Lord Liverpool, wrote to the War Office on 8 November 1915 politely but firmly demanding procedural change. ‘In view of loss of
Marquette
my Government would be glad if arrangements could be made whereby medical units, such as stationary hospitals etc. should when possible be transferred by sea in a hospital ship.’
19
While not directly allocating blame, this quick response left no doubt about the New Zealand government’s conclusion as to the cause of the tragedy. Notice was taken: after the
Marquette
’s sinking, No. 1 Stationary Hospital travelled on hospital ships.
A sidelight to the scandal was a series of claims and counter-claims about the treatment afforded the nurses as the
Marquette
was sinking. On 15 April 1916 the
Evening Post
carried a story in which Colonel McGavin denied any implication that the men had neglected the nurses. Many men were imperilled, he told the newspaper, ‘and some possibly actually lost their lives in gallant attempt to save the nurses’. He added that he himself ‘saw that all the nurses were clear of the ship’ and gave an assurance that they were all off the
Marquette
‘some little while before it sank’.
20
Hester Maclean noted, in relation to the nurses on the port side of the
Marquette
, that the medical officer responsible for them thought they had all got into lifeboats. However, a letter to her from fellow survivor Mabel Wright described how, while standing on the deck, she had seen ‘a boat load of men in uniform getting away’. Mabel continued: ‘I wondered why we nurses were left on deck, without a chance of getting into a boat . . . Perhaps on the starboard side the nurses may have all got into boats; but not on the port side. Sisters Brown and Clark [who both died] got a few feet down the gangway, took each other’s hand, then jumped into the water. Sister Coster and myself did not get off the deck—we both helped two sick orderlies on to the gangway, and in doing so lost our chance of going down. One of our own NZ doctors came up to me in a few mins [
sic
] and asked me if I could swim. I told him, “No.” He just looked at me and said, “not much hope for you”.’
21