The Other Anzacs (35 page)

The overwhelming sadness of it all took its toll on Alice. The matron noticed, and gave her twenty-four hours’ leave. Alice was relieved, but when the matron increased this to three days she became scared. That meant more time to think of Harry. ‘The thought of time ahead with nothing to do but think frightened all sleep from me. I was relieved by tears at 10 o’clock.’
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She took the highly unusual step of taking some morphine. It had little effect except to make her feel ‘deadly sick’. The day went by in a dream.

The matron gave Alice’s friend Clarrie Green two days off to spend time with her. Alice saw her as ‘surely a good counter irritant’. Clarrie dragged her around Rouen on uninteresting errands during the afternoon before taking her for a forest drive. On their return, they saw Major Prior, who had just come back from England. Catching up again with her friend and mentor had a sobering effect on Alice. ‘Seeing him makes me realise how much I have gone off in the last week and makes me wonder if I am for a break up [breakdown]. I don’t want a dementia break. Anything that would pass me out would be welcome indeed, but to be useless for some months is no good to me.’
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Heartbreak in the ward was common, and death frequent. An eighteen-year-old had a fractured skull from which shrapnel had been removed. ‘He ate rice pudding for dinner, ’ Alice noted. ‘I was in the middle of writing a letter to his mother when he began to sob, great tears running down his face. About 10 minutes later he stopped breathing. Pulse remained good for about 20 minutes. After respiration ceased I did artificial respiration but it was of no avail.’
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Yet another soldier with a compound fracture of the sacrum and pneumonia was trying to tell Alice his fiancée’s address for her to write. But he died before he could make himself clear.

She managed to cheer up another eighteen-year-old, who had lost both legs and one hand, by buying him a watch. ‘He was thrilled when I fastened it on his wrist. We have had such a fight to save him.’
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His parents were cane growers. The irony was that they made walking sticks. She wanted to ‘special’ a young Canadian who had a perforated intestine and was in great pain. She made him comfortable and hated leaving him for time off, but knew that in a military hospital she had no choice. ‘Rules have to be obeyed and the girls would feel hurt if I stayed thinking I distrusted them.’
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He did improve. Alice was held in high regard. She heard that Major John Tait, a surgeon, had said of her that she knew her ‘work from A to Z and never lost my head’. Despite her anguish, she managed to retain her focus, which became even more important when she transferred to a casualty clearing station a few months later.

Life at one of these stations close to the front lines was a far cry from caring for the wounded at base hospitals, as Sister Ida O’Dwyer discovered. From Bendigo, she had sailed on the
Kyarra
with Alice, and served with her in Cairo before being posted to No. 3 Australian Casualty Clearing Station at Gezaincourt in the Somme. Here the wounded men arrived straight from the battlefield. In the base hospital’s operating theatre, the men had at least been washed. At the clearing station, if a soldier ‘should have a fractured thigh the patient is still left with one leg clothed in khaki boot and mud of the trench with a splint over all that was supplied at the Dressing Station’. Every act here was urgent: time was of the essence.

The first thing Ida saw on arrival were the ‘rows of duckboards everywhere’ connecting all the wards and the quarters as far as the road. ‘This seems very strange after the well regulated lines and hard paths of the base hospital, ’ she observed.
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The clearing station’s nursing staff varied in number according to the work. When a battle was imminent, the staff would be brought up to strength the day before. More often than not the station had just moved to its new location and had only tents for shelter, no flooring and scant equipment when the fighting began.

A key issue was always lighting in the theatre. Ida recounted how in one case, carbide flares had to be held over each operating table for a day and a night before a generator and electric lights could be installed. ‘This class of work was all very new to the sisters having come straight from the base hospital where everything is at hand before they start work, and yet they carried on in the usual calm way as if nothing were out of order.’ Within a few hours hundreds of wounded would be admitted, for treatment or swift evacuation to a general hospital. Work was unending, and ‘the first thing a sister realises is not what is to be done but what must be done first’.

Two roads enabled admission and evacuation to be carried out simultaneously. The admissions tent was where wounded soldiers were received and classified for either evacuation or on-the-spot surgery.

There is one continuous rush between cases, the sister clearing her tables and re-sterilising her instruments and dishes while the orderly is dispatching the patient and receiving the next. While the surgeon attends to the Field Card everyone has his or her set duty, perhaps not a word spoken for hours except may be to call for a special instrument or dressing. During a rush of work they have to be reminded that there are meals to be partaken of. Work will stop for about an hour, which to the surgeon does not mean a rest, he is urgently required to see special cases for perhaps more urgent operation. As for the sister, she makes the most of the short time after a hurried meal to readjust her table to get stock ready to continue endless operations. This pressure continues for some days to a week during a battle, everyone working a period of sixteen hours a day. After twelve hours assisting at operations, the sister overlooks the preparation of sutures, gloves and splints for endless operations of the next day.
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The most distressing part of a casualty clearing station was the resuscitation ward, which held those too gravely ill to undergo surgery. ‘This is really the biggest test to the sister as she has never experienced anything like it before in her career, ’ Ida observed. The patients here required immediate attention. Some died before they received it.

Every man is just as he was carried out of the trenches in his wet khaki and stone cold. All these men have to be undressed, a very difficult matter when collapsed with several wounds and broken limbs and the majority being extremely restless, yet not one complaint.

You can see death written in most of their faces, they realise to the full the great pressure you are working at, yet the thirst is so intense they gasp with apology for a drink. Yet with it all every man’s face wears a look of content or resignation. He waits his turn and never asks. That’s when a wounded soldier commands the respect and admiration of anyone in this world. The biggest percent of this ward die.

Sister has her trials, it is not as if she has a trained staff of stretcher bearers to help her, they are mostly volunteers from the infantry camps nearby waiting their turn in the trenches and often don’t know a wounded man’s head from his foot so invariably picks him up by the wounded limb.
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The acute surgical ward accommodated those returned from theatre. During the busiest time these men were evacuated as soon as practicable. ‘The ward is one constant for sister to get a drink here, move a limb there or ease a pain somewhere else, ’ Ida explained. ‘She steadily goes on receiving patients, all the time transferring the better ones to less acute wards to make room for the constant incoming of collapsed operative cases—never stopping except for meals. A sister’s whole time is spent in relieving pain, giving nourishment and making them comfortable.’
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In the evacuation area there were wards full of men waiting for the train. ‘Every man lies quietly on his stretcher and hardly murmurs. Sister goes round seeing each is warm with socks and comforter, the orderly following giving drinks and nourished where it is allowed. Sister’s work here is just as hard as all her cases lie on stretchers on the ground, packed closely together to make more room. She does not realise how the day has flown, except that her back is aching having put in some very trying hours.’

Ida described how the walking wounded were ‘mostly coiled up on their stretchers fast asleep, as nothing matters now, or they are seated about in little groups, friends having each other telling of experiences of the last 12 hours or so . . . As the work slackens the sister starts to get her ward into working order having carried on through that terrible rush usually on half equipment. By the time the next rush arrives she is ready to carry on her usual quiet way.’
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Olive Haynes moved from Boulogne to No. 2 Australian Casualty Clearing Station at Trois Arbres just a month after the Battle of Fromelles. Olive was close to the front line, close enough to find bits of shell and shrapnel outside her tent one morning. Disturbingly, bullets even fell beside one of her patients. ‘The aeroplanes are always flying around here above us and, as soon as the Germans spot them, they open fire and we do the same when theirs appear, ’ she wrote to her mother, who could hardly have been reassured.
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There was a huge fourteen-inch gun hidden nearby, which Olive went to inspect. ‘When it fires the windows smash in the houses around and everything shakes.’ She and her colleagues struck up a friendship with the engineers who looked after the gun, sharing tea with them. The sisters were fascinated by the immense size of the Allied guns, to which the troops gave names like Little Elsie, Cranky Cissie and Funny Fanny Flanders.

The bombing seemed incessant, but the sisters rapidly grew accustomed to the sound. Olive had a chance to go on a transport wagon to a nearby town, but the colonel would not allow it because the place was being shelled. ‘I would love to have gone in spite of the shells. He won’t let us go anywhere, though, nearer than we are.’ He had good reason. A few days later some German aeroplanes flew over, drawing fire from the Allied guns. Shells flew everywhere. ‘We heard a whizz, and you should have seen everyone duck. A shell landed just near us and made a hole 4 ft. deep. The boys dug it up and gave it to matron “pour un souvenir”.’
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They were finally issued with steel helmets and gas masks to wear during German attacks.

For the patients who poured in, the task of mere survival was uppermost. In the argot of the day, they sometimes asked Olive, ‘Sister, am I going west?’ When they died the nurses wrote to the soldiers’ mothers. Among the Scots troops were ‘baby Jocks’, as the sisters called them. They were just sixteen or seventeen, and it was so sad to see them die. ‘They are plucky little boys. You’d give anything or do anything to save them.’
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The letters to bereaved mothers only became more frequent.

Humour helped the sisters through it. ‘It is funny to hear the yarns our boys tell the Tommies, ’ Olive wrote to her mother. ‘They believe most of them, too. We tell them about the kangaroo feathers and how we live in humpies and how we ride buck-jumpers.’ They also tried to fool the Scots, one of whom was told a ‘very tall yarn . . . Yes, I know the Anzacs swallow battleships and you only know they’ve swallowed one when the funnel is sticking out of their mouths, ’ he responded. ‘The Jocks are canny—you don’t pull their legs much, ’ Olive wrote, ‘but the British Tommy is as gullible as anyone. We bluff them we have never heard of the Thames and ask them do people in England live in houses or out in the open like we do.’
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Olive liked the Canadians, but not the English. To her, they worried too much about appearances, were scared of what other people would think, and were subservient to authority.

The Australian sisters always knew when Australian boys arrived, for they called out, ‘Hello, Australia.’ And they recognised the Australian sisters’ uniforms. The compatriots were drawn to each other. They felt forgotten when, longing for letters, they saw the frequency with which the English nurses received mail from just across the Channel. To assuage her homesickness, Olive Haynes went into an English bookshop in Boulogne and asked for author Henry Fletcher’s
The Waybacks
, a series of books chronicling the fortunes of the unsophisticated Wayback family in rural Australia. She was astonished at the sales staff ’s reaction. ‘Do you know they had never heard of them! I told them we [had] had no idea of the frightful ignorance over here.’
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