The Other Anzacs (45 page)
What made all of this socialising possible was that, as Elsie observed, the hospital was ‘still very empty and [there was] practically nothing to do’.
12
Despite the heavy work after the Battle of Bullecourt, she was frustrated and wanted to be doing more. Perhaps she knew that further north, the Australian casualty clearing stations were struggling under the weight of German air raids. ‘We are so tired of not having proper work to do, ’ she complained. ‘So we called on Mr Pascard—Principal MO of the region—to ask for a transfer to a casualty clearing station, or somewhere where we will have work.’
13
Just three months earlier, the issue of the Bluebirds’ work had been the subject of a terse communication between the New South Wales Red Cross and the Croix-Rouge. The Red Cross Commissioner in London noted that the Croix-Rouge seemed ‘intensely irritated’ over the whole matter. The chairman of the New South Wales Red Cross, aware of the discontent among the nurses, replied that while he did not want to ‘revive any old controversy now, I will only say that if a first rate nurse is doing a tenth rate job it seems to me a pitiable waste of good nursing skill’.
14
This was a sentiment that all the Bluebirds could agree with, not least Nellie Crommelin, who wrote to her mother that there was an ‘awful waste of skill and experience’.
There isn’t a case here that V.A.D.s [Voluntary Aid Detachment staff] couldn’t do and in fact did before we arrived and you can imagine the result . . . The papers and the W.O. [War Office] are continually asking for more doctors yet they haven’t utilised their well trained nurses. Given one decent Dr and a staff of well trained practical nurses instead of the dozens of semi or untrained women and our hospitals would do much better work than at present.
15
It seems that the French authorities took notice of the discontent. The posting of two fellow Bluebirds—Fanny Harris and Frida Warner—to Zuydcoote in Belgium, closer to the line, fired up Elsie and Fraser to reassert their demands. They got what they wanted. ‘Offered a hospital in the Belgian frontier and accepted, as it seems to be a good chance of going to a casualty clearing station, near the Front.’
16
Four more Bluebirds—Sisters Hilda Loxton, Lynette Crozier, Winifred Hough and Helen Wallace—were already at the frontline. They had been stationed at the Hopital Chirurgicale, Mobile no 1 in Belgium, a hospital funded by wealthy American women for the French. They were only ten kilometres from the Front, and were now exposed to the full danger of the war, with frequent air raids and gas attacks, which forced them to wear gas masks. The bombs and the continual barrage of guns and anti-aircraft guns gave them constant headaches. Hilda Loxton kept a fragment from one of the bombs as a memento.
17
As they waited for the postings, Elsie and Fraser hired bikes and made the 100-km round trip from Amiens to Abbeville to call on Australian sisters they knew at No. 3 General Hospital. They were also given leave to go to England. Elsie wanted to surprise Syd on their imminent wedding anniversary. Early on 19 September she drove to Fovant Camp, ‘where I found Syd not yet up and gave him a great surprise at my unexpected appearance’. After breakfast they drove to the thatched farmhouse that Elsie had rented. It was ‘a very delightful’ anniversary.
A fortnight later Elsie and Fraser returned to Amiens to find orders instructing them to go to Zuydcoote immediately. Making their way to the hospital, they met Fanny Harris and Frida Warner but had to give Warner the upsetting news that her nephew had been killed. The hospital, previously a large sanatorium on the sea front, was enormous. Right beside it were two British casualty clearing stations. They were twenty kilometres from the front-line trenches and just eight kilometres from Dunkirk, which was under heavy attack. But they were much more satisfied with their greater responsibilities.
By now, Nellie Crommelin and her colleague Alice Robinson had been moved to a hospital at Revigny, about fifty kilometres behind the line at Verdun, and in the ‘Zone of the Armies’. While the German offensive had been stopped at Verdun, a doctor told Nellie before she left Les Andelys that Revigny was where there were ‘many Zeppelins’. She soon experienced an air raid there. It happened while she was in the village. A piece of jagged shrapnel, the length and thickness of a forefinger, fell at her feet. ‘Not until some officers came hurrying down the street and told us to take shelter and a huge piece fell through the roof of a house nearby and I could hear tinkle tinkle all around me, did I think of the danger of being hit, ’ she told her mother. In the letter, she drew an outline of the shrapnel that had come close to wounding her.
17
Elsie and Fraser received the troops straight from the field ambulances and aid posts within a few hours of their being wounded, and were soon dealing with big convoys. Death was all around, in the hospital and at Dunkirk, as German aircraft attacked frequently. Three bombs fell on the hospital, killing eight orderlies. Among the wounded was a nurse. The Germans unleashed gas, and the impact was immediate. Elsie was on night duty when hundreds of gassed troops were admitted. ‘I spend much time in the admission room, bathing eyes and helping them get fixed up. They were quite blinded and suffering—fresh ambulances kept on arriving— 550 gassed cases were admitted from Nieuport.’
18
As Christmas 1917 approached, Elsie observed that there was no let-up in the German attacks on Dunkirk, which were inflicting massive damage on the old town. ‘Again tonight Dunkirk is getting a doing from the long distance guns at Nieuport—we can hear the shells screaming over our hospital and land with a dull thud in poor old Dunkirk.’
19
Many civilians were killed. Elsie and Fraser made a flying visit to Dunkirk, and ‘just left in time—started to get hot and strong at 4 p.m’. With Christmas only two days away, they were intrigued when a French surgeon at the hospital asked for them to accompany him to a new hospital near the front. ‘He and his fracture doctors are to go and we “Anglaises” all excited and bucked about it specially as it is so vague and therefore so many startlingly excited rumours are afloat.’
20
Elsie and Fraser also had another reason to be pleased—both had been awarded the French Médaille de Reconnaissance for their services.
Despite the war, Christmas preparations went ahead. In a snowstorm on Christmas Eve, Elsie and Fraser donned their cloaks and, armed with sharp knives, walked to the dunes to cut some heather, gathering large armfuls to decorate the ward. They sat up by the fire making little baskets for sweets and a gift for each patient. Waking early, they hurried to the kitchen to heat up a special treat of chocolate instead of the daily ration of black coffee for breakfast. They gave each man his packet—stationery, tobacco, pipe, matches, cigarettes and a box of chocolates—and carried their decorations into the ward ‘amidst the cheers and pleasant surprised comments of the
blessés
’, who were overjoyed with the presents. Wine was served with Christmas dinner, followed by plum pudding aflame. The patients sent the sisters a ‘very sweet letter of thanks and appreciation’. They were ‘quite touched by their funny little letter of thanks’.
Elsie and the other sisters saved their celebration until evening. Syd was not far from Elsie’s thoughts. He had been with the 2nd Battalion at Hazebrouck for the previous seven weeks and, although he had sent her a brooch to mark the third anniversary of their engagement, she had not seen him since 13 November.
We lit our fire and spread out our cushions and rug and lazed about and opened our own little parcels. I wrote a Xmas letter to Syd—poor old dear—sitting about almost frozen in the trenches, perhaps whilst I’m cosily seated by this fire, my thoughts are with you all day, my dear old soldier man.
21
Two days after Christmas a letter from Syd arrived. Its mood struck Elsie as ‘miserable’. She thought of Syd ‘writing on his knee with a candle on his tin helmet, in a ruin of an old chateau freezing with cold—poor old chap and going into the line, I can well guess. I’m feeling consequently very “blue”.’
22
Yet another New Year’s Eve was upon her. She and Fraser sat by the fire and reviewed past New Years of the war. ‘Mine 1st on the
Kyarra
en route to Egypt, 2nd at Ghezireh Palace Hospital in Cairo, 3rd at Cannes, and the fourth one here on the Belgian frontier—and the next? Where? How? What retrospection and introspection a New Year’s Eve calls forth. Tomorrow starts a new diary.’
23
In more than three years at the war, Elsie and Syd had met only sporadically. But they had managed to capture fragments of the normality that belonged to ordinary married couples. These shared moments were precious, theirs alone to understand and remember, and they helped them both survive. In the harshest and most unpredictable circumstances imaginable, they were building a relationship.
The nurses faced a collective hurt as they watched a generation of their countrymen being maimed and killed on the Western Front. Confronted with hideous wounds and suffering beyond the imagination of ordinary people back home, they tried their best to keep the boys going. Often their efforts were to the detriment of their own health. But they felt as one with the troops. It was their job to patch them up and to keep them alive. They watched in anguish as the numbers of healthy men continued to slide and the burden fell on fewer shoulders because of blunders like Fromelles. Even earlier, Matron Grace Wilson had made clear her views about the men who did not sign up. She had just lost her brother at the Dardanelles.
My opinion of any man who stays unless absolutely prevented from going isn’t much—that is to say unmarried men—the others can do their duty otherwise—several wounded men said to me, ‘You don’t know what we say about the chaps who could come and won’t or don’t.’
1
At first, there had been no shortage of men wanting to go to the war, but as the enormity of Australian and New Zealand casualties on the Western Front emerged at home, the number of volunteers fell steadily. With no quick end to the war in sight, there was sustained British pressure on the Australian and New Zealand governments to keep troop numbers up. In January 1916, Britain introduced conscription for eighteen-year-olds, and as the year progressed, it was argued that Australia needed to provide 5500 new recruits per month to keep its forces overseas at operational level. Advertising campaigns were failing to achieve this.
Although they badly needed reinforcements, the troops were divided on conscription, many not wanting in their regiments the ‘slackers and cold-footers’ who had avoided voluntary enlistment. The sisters did not necessarily agree. They felt so keenly for the boys, who were often sent back into the line again and again—until they didn’t come back. To rectify the shortage of men, Prime Minister William Morris ‘Billy’ Hughes decided to hold a plebiscite on whether men should be compelled to undergo training for service overseas. The date was set for 28 October 1916. Australians would be asked: ‘Are you in favour of the Government having, in this grave emergency, the same compulsory powers over citizens in regard to requiring their military service, for the term of this War, outside the Commonwealth, as it now has in regard to military service within the Commonwealth?’
The government already had the power under the Defence Act to conscript men. This, however, was only for service in Australia—they could not be sent overseas to fight. To overcome that proviso, all the government needed to do was to change the Defence Act to extend the conscription power from home service to overseas service. But that was Hughes’s problem. He knew that while he had enough supporters among Labor and Liberal MPs to secure a majority in the House of Representatives, he was a few short of a majority in the Senate.
The campaign split the nation and took on a personal significance for those with relatives and friends who were already serving overseas or would be eligible for conscription. Anti-conscriptionists, such as the Australian Women’s Peace Army, mobilised against the plebiscite. They were especially active in Melbourne, where large crowds filled the Exhibition Building five weeks before the vote. In the next fortnight, 30, 000 people crowded the Yarra Bank for a Sunday meeting, followed a week later by another crowd of 25, 000. The Melbourne
Age
reported that an immense parade of women, promoted by the United Women’s No-Conscription Committee, gathered in Swanston Street between Guild Hall and Princes Bridge, and for ‘upwards of an hour the street was a surging area of humanity’. An anti-conscription stop-work meeting called by five trade unions on 4 October attracted 15, 000 people.