The Other Anzacs (53 page)
At first doctors were unable to identify the illness but eventually they concluded that it was a new strain of influenza. The soldiers called it Spanish flu, but it is now generally accepted that the disease was brought to the Western Front by a group of American soldiers from Kansas. By the end of 1920 it had killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
At first there were few fatalities among the infected troops. But in the summer of 1918, symptoms became much more severe. About one in five victims developed bronchial pneumonia or septicaemic blood poisoning, and many died. This second wave of the epidemic spread quickly. Men became delirious, with high temperatures and severe headaches. In one sector of the Western Front more than 70, 000 American troops were hospitalised and nearly one-third of them died. Rows of corpses filled mortuary tents, dead from a sickness doctors were powerless to halt.
The Australian troops were just as hard hit. By the end of September, No. 3 General Hospital, Abbeville, had 1647 flu patients. By October, two more large wards were filled with flu cases. No one worked harder than the nurses who now faced a quite different challenge from the war injuries they had been treating. Anne Donnell was working at No. 1 Australian Auxiliary Hospital, Harefield Park, England, when the pandemic took hold. ‘During our busiest time the influenza swept over us, involving extra work for those who kept well.’
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Not all did keep well. In mid-1918, one of Anne’s colleagues, Ruby Dickinson, from Sydney, came down with the flu. She died on 23 June, aged thirty-two. Anne was saddened. ‘When the worst was over more help came, but I shall always think that it came too late and at the price of life; for Sister Dickenson [
sic
]—a dear comrade who was with us on Lemnos and who felt she couldn’t give in—died, one might say, at her post, for she was on duty the day previous and died of pneumonia the next day. It was a sad shock to us all. She was buried in our peaceful corner with our own hero boys.’
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Four months later, Matron Jean Miles Walker also died. She was thirty-nine and had been awarded the Royal Red Cross (1st Class). Anne Donnell thought her ‘such a fine woman, and all we Nursing Sisters abroad have indeed lost a friend . . . Matron and I have just returned from her funeral at Sutton Veny. The coffin was draped with the Union Jack, but when I saw her red cape and white cap lying on top of the beautiful wreath of flowers it fairly broke me up.’
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The flu went on to claim the lives of another nine Australian nurses.
New Zealand Sister Bertha Taylor, at No. 1 New Zealand Stationary Hospital in France, noted in September that nothing seemed able to save the French soldiers infected with a particularly virulent strain of the flu.
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Kai Tiaki
reported in October that the flu was rampant and mortality high, owing chiefly to lung complications. In November, it claimed the life of nurse Mabel Whishaw at Featherston Camp in New Zealand.
In France, another New Zealand nurse, thirty-five-year-old Ellen Brown, who had joined the Australian Army Nursing Service in 1915, developed a simple therapy that helped ensure none of her flu patients died. All men brought into her hospital were given oxygen until their blue cheeks assumed a natural colour. Thereafter they were moved to wards upstairs, where careful nursing and plenty of whisky effected a cure. ‘Octopuses’ were set up in the wards: an oxygen bottle stood in the centre and hoses took the gas to the patients’ breathing masks.
In August 1918, the troopship
Tahiti
was transporting New Zealand soldiers of the 40th Reinforcements to England when the Spanish flu struck, apparently brought on board by coal loaders when the ship docked in Sierra Leone. Two days later eighty-four men were ill. The ten nurses and two medical officers were soon overloaded with work. One of the nurses described the epidemic in a letter to
Kai Tiaki
. The ship’s hospital being so small and able to take only the worst cases, the men had to be nursed on their own decks. Two sisters soon joined the sick, while others struggled to stay on duty. ‘Sister Evans should really have been off duty, but managed to keep going to ward the attack off, ’ the nurse wrote. ‘She still has a nasty cough, but each night we hear less coughing amongst the girls, so I hope before long coughing will be an unheard of thing in our ward.’
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It had been a ‘lucky thing’, she said, ‘that a few of us kept up’. Within a week, the ship had 800 influenza cases, including both the doctors, and thirty-three men were dead.
They responded to no treatment whatever—stimulate and nourish them as we would—they went downhill rapidly, and this was the worst time of all. To see the poor boys die on our hands, one after the other, was terrible, but I must say that all that could be done for them was done. It was hard for us to see them go, but harder, I think, for their mates. Such a number of them were quite lads, about twenty. Having no lights on the decks made it twenty times harder for us, and one night almost every way we turned we found men, who a few moments before had seemed fairly well lying in a collapsed condition, dying about an hour later.
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By the time the
Tahiti
reached Plymouth, seventy-six men were dead and many were still sick. Ten more died on special trains that took the ill to hospitals. Among them was nurse Esther Tubman, from Dunedin, who was put into an isolation ward. Next morning she seemed better and brighter, but by afternoon her temperature had risen sharply. ‘She raved terribly all night and next morning became unconscious, ’
Kai Tiaki
reported.
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She died two weeks later, on 18 September. Almost a year earlier, her brother had been killed in action in France.
On 8 August 1918, combined French and British forces stunned the Germans with an attack along an eighty-kilometre front, from the River Oise in the south to the River Ancre, on the old Somme front, in the north. The Allies had recovered far more quickly than they thought possible from their losses in the spring. The preparations were made in complete secrecy, and when the attack was launched—with prominent Australian involvement—the Germans gave way. Their big guns were captured and many prisoners taken. The German Commander, General Erich von Ludendorff, described it as the black day of the German Army.
The Spanish flu epidemic only added to Germany’s problems. More than 400, 000 German civilians died of the disease in 1918, making it impossible to replace sick, wounded and dying soldiers. German morale crumbled, both in the Army and at home, where the effects of the Allied blockade had reduced people to subsistence living. They wanted an end to the war. The Kaiser’s control was collapsing.
Everyone had had enough of the war, including twenty-seven-year-old Sister Frances Laird, from Mount Gambier, South Australia. She was working in the ‘head ward’ at No. 2 General Hospital in Boulogne, otherwise known as ‘hell ward . . . It was a very sad place, ’ she remembered. ‘It was the head ward that just about fixed me. I was doing night duty there and these head cases, they took such a long time to die.’
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The situation worsened when troop shortages made it necessary to send trained orderlies into battle. This left just a skeleton staff for the head ward, including a boy sent from the laboratory to help. He was shaking when he asked Frances if anyone would die that night. Frances replied, ‘I know three who won’t be here in the morning.’ Resigning himself to the work ahead, the boy asked Frances just to tell him what he had to do.
One morning her colleagues asked what sort of a night she’d had. ‘I jumped up in the middle of my breakfast and I said, “I can’t stand another five minutes of it.” I wrote out an application for transport duty to Australia.’ The endless misery was made worse by men beseeching her to get them on a transport because ‘I only want to die in Australia’. At the end of July 1918, Frances returned to Adelaide on transport duty, relieved to be home after three years away.
Nowhere was safe. But the tide of war was turning, and a new American song about nurses captured the imagination of troops everywhere.
The Rose of No Man’s Land
would be heard on phonographs in the wards, performed at concerts, and sung, hummed and whistled by the troops.
There’s a Rose that grows in No Man’s Land,
And it’s wonderful to see.
Tho’ it’s sprayed with tears,
It will live for years
In my garden of memory.
It’s the one red rose
The soldier knows,
It’s the work of the Master’s Hand;
In the War’s great curse stands the Red Cross Nurse,
She’s the Rose of No Man’s Land.
Although heavily sentimental, the lyrics captured the feelings of the troops. The nurses who had spent four years caring for them were now revered by the men. Nowhere was this truer than in the relationship between the Diggers and the Anzac sisters. In a hospital in England, Private John Hardie wrote to his mother:
I would never have got across here if it hadn’t been for one of the nurses in our ward, who was an Australian. She used to do her best to get all the Aussies across. There seems to be a great difference between our nurses and the others [British nurses]. Of course they are all very kind, but I would rather be in an Australian hospital at any time.
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The times were changing. With fewer wounded and less pressure, a more relaxed atmosphere developed. Early in September, Syd Cook unexpectedly arrived at Senlis with eight days’ leave for Paris. As he waited for Elsie to join him, he reacquainted himself with hospital life. ‘Syd wandered around the ward and watched a few of the dressings being done, which filled him with horror, ’ Elsie wrote, amused.
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An ambulance taking wounded men into Senlis conveyed the couple on to Paris, where they booked a hotel room overlooking the Tuileries Gardens in full bloom.
They dined at the Folies Bergère. ‘Rather “
un peu forte
” the review, ’ Elsie commented about the show, which was clearly a little too risqué for her liking. ‘
C’est Paris
, ’ she wrote. They slept late, strolled in the gardens, toured the ‘squat, over-decorated iced cake’ that was the Palace of Versailles, bought each other wedding anniversary gifts, and fell in love with the city. In the Bois de Boulogne, Elsie was entranced by the ‘lovely Parisiennes, looking chic and very elegant, with their latest young man of leave, or a very ridiculous little tiny dog, with a great big bow, and a very long chain’.
Returning to Senlis to become ‘Sister Cook once more’, she was soon inundated with work. ‘There’s no doubt that a fracture hospital never cools down and fractures always are much work.’ On 19 September, she reflected that in four years of marriage she and Syd had ‘very nearly’ managed to celebrate all their anniversaries together. This year, however, Syd was near St Quentin, attacking the Hindenburg Line. Elsie was alone and melancholy.
He won’t have much time to be thinking of anniversaries and reminiscences. Each year I look forward and think that perhaps the next anniversary will see us back in our own little home in Australia, but each anniversary sees us still pegging away. If we had realised that day, four years ago, that in four years time we should still be here, the war still going on, I’m afraid our hearts would have quailed and our hopes and spirits not so high as they were on that brief honeymoon at the ‘Pacific’ [Hotel]. However, this year things certainly do look much brighter and hopeful for a finish and I feel sure that next anniversary will be spent at home—how strange to be in our home!
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