The Other Anzacs (39 page)
But the fray was never far away. The sisters could not escape the sound of shells exploding, the roar of planes overhead or the moans of the wounded. They daily saw young men with smashed faces and pulverised limbs, men with chest wounds spitting blood and gasping for breath, bodies riddled with shell fragments, and the stumps of torn-off limbs. In outbuildings the nurses would find rows of corpses and piles of freshly amputated arms and legs.
And then there were the rats. One of Elsie Tranter’s colleagues set a trap in her tent one night and caught seven before sunrise. One morning, while Elsie and three other sisters were chatting, a boot against the wall began to squeak. The boot’s owner went over to investigate. ‘She put her hand down and there in the toe of one of them was a nest of young mice. Pleasant surprise, wasn’t it.’
24
The first anniversary of Harry’s death was approaching. For Alice, it had been a year from hell as she grieved and pined for him. On 19 July 1917, a desolate Alice wrote to Harry’s mother in Gisborne to share her grief. All Harry’s bereft parents now had to remember him was what the Army had shipped in a sealed trunk earlier in the year. Inside were his last personal effects—among them shirts, trousers, khaki shorts, his dressing gown, a bible and letters (Alice’s likely among them). They also had his identity disc, which had come from Germany via London.
By now Alice was much closer to the front line. She had been sent forward to No. 2 Casualty Clearing Station at Messines. Among her colleagues there were two Australian Army nurses, Sisters Clare Deacon and Dorothy Cawood, who had sailed with Alice on the
Kyarra
and served at Mena House in Cairo during the Gallipoli campaign. Staff Nurse Mary-Jane Derrer, who had followed later and served at No. 2 Australian General Hospital in Cairo, was also there.
In the wake of the Battle of Messines Ridge, No. 2 was one of nineteen casualty clearing stations preparing for the Third Battle of Ypres, which over the next three months would result in an estimated 310, 000 British and Dominion casualties, with German losses slightly lower. The strategic aim of Third Ypres was the liberation of the Belgian Channel ports and their denial to U-boat operations. But the attacks in the summer and autumn of 1917 took place in the wettest weather in seventy-five years. The vital drainage channels of this low-lying area of Belgium were pounded out of existence by the British and German artillery. The water table of the region turned into a sea of mud and blood that became known as Passchendaele, after the village that crowns the horseshoe of ridges that lie to the east of Ypres. The village was only ten kilometres from the offensive’s start line near Ypres, but it took the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and South African troops four and a half months to reach that goal.
As the troops massed and hospitals and clearing stations were set up, the Germans launched preliminary raids ostensibly focused on military targets. But the medical units did not escape the bombing. Head Sister Ida O’Dwyer, who would soon be posted to No. 3 Australian Casualty Clearing Station, understood the dangers.
War of the present day brings the enemy near with aerial bombing and long range shelling—the hospital must be put in a spot convenient to ward and railway, which is usually a target for the enemy, and it is not necessarily the hospital that is aimed at though it very often suffers. This brings a big disadvantage as most of the work is done at night with practically no light and now-a-days the Gothas [German aircraft] do not always wait for the full moon. They come after night and drop bombs on all the areas round, looking for railway dumps and camps. This affects the condition of the patients very much as they feel so there is no protection and they are so helpless—the buzz of the enemy engines is familiar to all and everyone knows of his presence in the sky long before the searchlights appear in the sky from all corners. He is very soon picked out with the light and will even then keep touring round dropping bombs everywhere though full fire is turned on him.
1
On the night of 22 July, three days after Alice wrote to Harry’s mother, the Germans began a bombardment on her clearing station. She was summoned to attend a delirious pneumonia patient at 10:25 p.m. She was walking along the duckboards behind Private John Wilson, an orderly, on the way to the patient’s tent, when a German aircraft was caught in the searchlight just above the hospital. Another orderly caught her arm, stopping her and motioning to her to look up. ‘Doesn’t he look pretty, Sister?’ he said.
2
As Alice watched, Private Wilson walked on ahead, swinging a lantern. Then they heard the whirr of a bomb dropping. ‘Get down, get down, ’ someone cried as they dived under a ward table. Alice ran on after Wilson, expecting the bomb to hit the railway line, but it fell ahead of her, at the rear of ward C5, the pneumonia ward, which consisted of four small marquees arranged in a square. The bomb blew a crater five metres in diameter and about two metres deep, completely destroying one tent and leaving the others unfit for use. A second bomb dropped outside the southern boundary of the camp, near the cemetery.
Although the camp had been targeted before, this was the first time that the clearing station itself had been hit. In the dark, Alice could see little around her, but she could hear. ‘The noise was so terrific and the concussion so great that I was thrown to the ground and had no idea where the damage was. I flew through the chest and abdominal wards and called out, “Are you alright [
sic
] boys?” “Don’t bother about us, ” was the general cry.’ Alice raced along the duckboards towards the tent of the pneumonia patient. Although every light was out and there was a faint moon, the sky was bright from numerous searchlights. Fragments from the bursting anti-aircraft artillery dropped like rain, one landing immediately in front of Alice. She met the cook running along the duckboards, making for an adjacent paddock and swearing hard. When he saw her, he shouted, ‘It’s put out my bloody fire, Sister, it’s put out me bloody fire.’ A patient in pyjamas ran past her, yelling, ‘I’ve got me paybook, Sister.’ Alice raced on. ‘The next thing I knew I went over into a bomb crater. I shall never forget the awful climb on hands and feet out of that hole about five feet deep, greasy clay and blood, though I did not know then that it was blood.’
The crater was immediately in front of the tent with the pneumonia patient. But the tent, which consisted of three marquees joined together, had collapsed. In all, there were forty-six stretcher cases inside. Alice shouted, but nobody answered, and she could hear nothing above the roar of the planes and the anti-aircraft guns. ‘I seemed to be the only living thing about. I tore along to the theatre, the lights were out and the doors shut. I hammered on the door and called out, “Help, help, we’ve been hit, ” but no-one came.’
Sister Topsy Tyson was there. But every bottle of anaesthetic in the theatre had been broken. With so much chloroform and ether unleashed, they feared moving in the darkness because of the risk of fire. Running back to the tent, Alice saw the padre. She told him she didn’t know what to do because she could not find help. The ‘dear old pet’, as she called him, replied, ‘Just leave it to the Lord, Sister.’ Alice thought him a ‘very decent chap’, but the raid had clearly shaken him badly. He added, ‘I’ll go and get some help, Sister, but you must get under cover.’
I tried to get into the tent again and got hold of a stretcher handle under the fly. There was a patient on it but he was dead, as I found afterwards. The stretcher handle must have been splintered and I fell backwards into the crater again.
She kept calling for Wilson to help. When he did not come, she thought he was ‘funking’. Somebody got the tent up, and when Alice reached the delirious pneumonia patient, he was crouched on the ground at the back of his stretcher, at the far end of the tent.
He would not take any notice of me when I asked him to return to bed, so I leant across the stretcher and put one arm around him and tried to lift him in. I had my right arm under a leg which I thought was [the patient’s], but when I lifted I found to my horror that it was a loose leg with a boot and puttee on it.
It was Wilson’s leg, which had been blown off. Next day they found the torso up a tree about twenty metres away. ‘I have no very distinct recollection of what followed but apparently I carried on with the job, ’ Alice wrote. The bombing destroyed the mortuary and, aside from Wilson, killed his fellow orderly Joseph Cox and two patients, one of whom was found still on his stretcher, embedded in the ground. Alice’s next clear memory was of just before dawn, when the Germans flew over once more, prompting her to get ‘a bad attack of trembling when I heard Fritz again’. Three bombs fell on the camp, causing more casualties. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel J. Ramsay-Webb, believed that the Germans were attacking a kite balloon section of the Royal Flying Corps, which was close to the hospital.
Alice was not the only nurse who sped to the aid of the patients that night. Clare Deacon was off duty at the time, but ran into one of the shattered wards and removed patients to safety. Dorothy Cawood and Mary-Jane Derrer also ran back into the wards, doing what they could to protect the patients, placing basins over heads and tables over beds as they ignored the soldiers’ cries for them to go to the dugouts for their own safety. Alice later noted that ‘all the boys are very wild with Fritz and they went out last night on reprisals’.
3
She wrote to a friend in Melbourne, saying that had the attack arrived ‘two minutes later it would have got me, too’.
4
The four nurses carried out their duties with conspicuous bravery, but thought little more about it.
The previous year, the Military Medal had been instituted as an award for bravery in the field for non-commissioned officers and privates, and had since been extended to nurses. The decision that nurses should be eligible for the Military Medal and not the Military Cross, which Army officers received, reflected their ambiguous position as honorary officers. A month after the German raid, on 17 August 1917, the commander of 1 Anzac Corps, Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood, wrote to inform the four nurses that they would be awarded Military Medals. In his letter to Alice, Birdwood wrote: ‘I well know the value on such occasions of the courage and coolness which you displayed, and which has fully earned you this decoration, upon which my heartiest congratulations.’
5
But no award could heal Alice’s sorrow.
For Alice, bombing seemed to become a constant. Just a fortnight after the fatal raid, the Germans struck again. A piece of shell case fell through the theatre roof, destroying the metal operating table and the floor.
Captain Calson had been giving an anaesthetic and had lifted the patient’s head while orderly lifted feet to place him on stretcher on the floor, otherwise it would have caught both anaesthetist and patient in the head. Captain Calson very shocked and had to go off duty. I wet my pants.
6
A day later, Alice was having a bath when the Germans returned, again targeting the balloon. ‘I could hear the whirr of a fragment. It fell six inches outside [the] washhouse. Never forget how it felt naked and shivering.’ She spent a day off shortly afterwards at the nearby town of Hazebrouck, having hitched a ride with an ambulance. The town had been heavily shelled earlier in the morning in a barrage that ended just half an hour before she arrived. She noted later that people were hiding in cellars and shops were closed. ‘I did not know anything was wrong and was walking round the square quite unconcernedly whilst all the soldiers stared in surprise.’
7
On the way home that afternoon, Alice returned via the route she believed ‘my Harry’ must have taken on the way to his burial in the Anzac Cemetery at Sailly-Sur-La-Lys. (But Harry’s body was never recovered and there was no report of his burial. As his name was on an official German death list, it seems likely that he was buried by the Germans near the battlefield, possibly in the mass grave at Pheasant Wood, which was partially excavated in mid-2008. His name is among 1299 commemorated on a memorial wall at VC Corner Cemetery at Fromelles.)
As air raids continued without let-up during July and August 1917, more nurses were decorated for bravery. The
London Gazette
announced on 18 July that a New Zealand nurse, Sister Laura James of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, had also been awarded the Military Medal. While no date was given, the incident for which she was honoured must have occurred some weeks earlier, probably making her the first nurse from Australia or New Zealand to win the medal. The
Dominion
newspaper would later report that she had been the sister in charge of the operating theatre one night when shells were ‘flying around’, and it was for her fortitude during this raid that she had been awarded the Military Medal—the only one given to a New Zealand nurse during the war.