‘I ever deemed it a great privilege to aid in caring for the sick and wounded, and while the hardships necessarily endured in such a campaign have faded from my mind, I still often seem to hear the “Thank you, sister” of the grateful soldier; while together with pleasant memories of large convoys of happy convalescents sent home comes the vision of the many sad graves left on the far-off veldt of South Africa. “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis” (Grant to them Thine eternal rest, O God, and in the light everlasting may they dwell).’1
GEORGINA FANE POPE was raised in an affluent household on Prince Edward Island off the east coast of Canada, and though she had the prospect of a comfortable and settled life, she was determined to become a military nurse. ‘Reading as a young girl a most interesting account of Miss Florence Nightingale’s noble work during the Crimean War, I became filled with the desire to become an “army nursing sister” and go to the front,’ she later recalled. ‘England being happily at peace, and I much under age, I was obliged to moderate my ardor; but with the main hope still uppermost, a few years afterwards I entered the training-school for nurses attached to Bellevue Hospital, New York.’2
Born on 1 January 1862 in Charlottetown, this remarkable daughter of William and Helen Pope was baptised Cecily Jane Georgina Fane. William was a determined politician and one of the most powerful men on Prince Edward Island, who became one of Canada’s honoured Fathers of Confederation, and so it is not surprising that the Pope household was a hotbed of politics and journalism. The family home was about a mile out of town, at Ardgowan, one of Charlottetown’s most exquisite estates, and it had beautiful grounds for the children’s recreation, as well as a large library. Georgina Pope was blessed with grace, education and all the options available to a young woman at the time. She could have had a comfortable marriage, run a traditional family home and enjoyed the island’s social life. But instead, she chose not to marry, and gave her heart and soul to her nursing career instead, becoming a pioneer in the specialty of Canadian military nursing.
The economic crisis of the 1870s was a turning point in the family’s fortunes. William Pope died in 1879, leaving his wife and seven children ‘in straitened circumstances … largely dependent on my care’, as his only son, Joseph, recalled.3 Young women in Georgina’s position could indeed take a job – a respectable one, like teaching – but only until they found a husband. Society expected married women to live a life focused on home and children, and adventurous exploits were frowned upon. But Georgina was born with an individualistic streak that would lead her far away from the island, and the fate of marriage and motherhood.
In pursuit of her passion, she attended the prestigious Bellevue Hospital School of Nursing in New York, which had been opened by the woman she’d admired as a girl – Florence Nightingale. After graduating in 1885, Georgina took a job supervising a private hospital in Washington DC, and later moved on to the Columbia Hospital for Women. As superintendent of nursing, she was asked to found a school of nursing. Five years later, it was up and running. But long hours and strain took their toll, and she resigned to return to New York for another year at Bellevue. Soon afterwards, she was put in charge of the nursing staff at St John’s Hospital in Yonkers. By now she had met many a challenge, and she remained in the New York /area until October 1899, when she returned to Canada to seek a position as a nurse with the troops departing for the war in South Africa. Just a few months before, a Canadian Army medical department as well as a Canadian Army nursing service had been established.
Georgina seems to have been motivated by both a sense of adventure and patriotism; Britain’s call to arms to its overseas dominions saw thousands of men – raised in a culture where militarism was a virtue – clamour for a place in the thousand-strong Canadian contingent. Accompanying these troops would be a small medical staff of three doctors and four nurses; for the latter positions, there were 190 applicants. At the time, people looked at war with a kind of wilful innocence, the consequence, perhaps, of Rudyard Kipling’s poetry and wartime accounts in patriotic publications such as the Illustrated London News. The reality, of course, was quite different to people’s imaginings: the Anglo-Boer War was particularly bloody and gruesome.
Given her broad experience, and the influence of her brother, Joseph, in government circles, Georgina stood an excellent chance of being selected, so it was no surprise when she was chosen to head the small but experienced nursing team. Her colleagues were Elizabeth Russell from Hamilton, Ontario, a graduate of the Presbyterian Hospital in New York who had served on a hospital ship during the Spanish–American War; Annie Affleck from Middleville, Ontario, who had served in the Ottawa Children’s Hospital; and Sarah Forbes from Liverpool, Nova Scotia, who had worked with Georgina in Washington. The nursing sisters were given the rank and remuneration of lieutenant, with a smart uniform worthy of that status. It consisted of a short khaki ‘bicycle skirt worn with a Russian-type blouse equipped with shoulder straps and service buttons’, a khaki sailor hat ‘adorned with a cockade in the form of a little red brush’, a brown leather waist belt and brown leather boots.4
They left Quebec City for Cape Town aboard the SS Sardinian, the vessel also carrying the troops, including thirty-two Prince Edward Islanders. On their departure, they were showered with gifts by an enthusiastic Canadian public. They arrived in Cape Town on 30 November 1899. Before the war was over on 31 May 1902, eight Canadian nursing sisters and 8 372 Canadian soldiers had served in South Africa. Along with the usual battlefield wounds, the ravages of disease compounded the horrors of war. The hot African climate and lack of sanitary facilities or adequate antiseptic arrangements led to large-scale outbreaks of disease and infection, and even before the first significant Canadian battle at Paardeberg, 10 per cent of Canada’s soldiers were unable to fight because of disease. In fact, of the eventual 20 000 British Empire deaths, only 6 000 were actual battle-related casualties.
Because the nurses were listed as attached to the Canadian Battalion for special service, the women expected to remain with the soldiers and go with them to the front. Upon arrival in Cape Town, they were placed under the command of Dr A.B. Osborne, a militia captain on the Canadian Army medical staff, who was on his way to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. They were welcomed by a Red Cross committee and, pending further orders, accepted the invitation of Somerset Hospital’s matron to stay at the hospital. But disappointment struck when, three days later, they were told that they would not be accompanying the Canadian troops up north. Georgina recorded:
Upon our arrival at Cape Town we found our troops had orders to proceed up country immediately [to De Aar and Orange River Station]. We reported to the principal medical officer, making every effort to be allowed to accompany them to the front, but this we were told was impossible, as no nursing sisters could be accommodated in the field hospitals. So with very disconsolate feelings we saw our countrymen entrain without us, and came to realize at that early date what served us in good stead later, viz.: that we too were soldiers, to do as we were told and go where we were sent.5
This turned out to be No. 1 General Hospital, a large base hospital at Wynberg Barracks largely comprised of huts, which accommodated 1 000 beds. No. 2 was pitched under canvas, also at Wynberg, and No. 3 in Rondebosch, close to Groote Schuur and next to the private Duke of Portland Hospital. Nearby, in Claremont, there was a convalescent hospital for officers, while in Green Point and Simon’s Town there were hospitals for the Boer prisoners of war. Of what they found there, Georgina wrote:
At Wynberg we found our services greatly needed, the wounded from Graspan and Belmont [23 and 25 November] having recently been brought down in large numbers. A few days after our arrival a large convoy brought in the wounded from Magersfontein [11 December] and Modder River [28 November], when all my empty beds were filled with the men of the Highland Brigade, which suffered so severely in these engagements. The arrival of this convoy was a most pitiful sight, many of the men being stretcher cases, shot through thigh, foot or spine. What struck one most was the wonderful pluck of these poor fellows, who had just jolted over the rough veldt in ambulances and then endured the long train journey, also the utter self-forgetfulness of everyone else, surgeons, sisters, and orderlies, all of whom worked on regardless of time or hunger until everyone was as comfortable as they could be made.6
Commenting on the attitude of the wounded British soldiers, she added, ‘Tommy made the least of all his woes. A drink first, then, after his wounds had been attended to, “a bit of tobacco” for a smoke, and a piece of paper to “send a line so they won’t be scared at home”, were invariably the first requirements.’7
During this early period at Wynberg, with the exception of sunstroke and rheumatism, almost all the cases were surgical, and operations would continue throughout the day following the arrival of a new convoy. Their X-ray machine proved invaluable in locating bullets, ‘and saved Tommy many a probe’. Georgina judged from her experience that the percentage of successful surgical procedures was high, and she also witnessed ghastly shell and bullet wounds that eventually made perfect recoveries.
After a few busy weeks at Wynberg, the Canadian nurses were transferred, along with three English nursing sisters, on Christmas Day to No. 3 General Hospital at Rondebosch. They worked at No. 3 under the supervision of Lieutenant-Colonel Wood, and Georgina took charge of the typhoid ward. There, patients ‘eagerly searched out the wearers of the Maple Leaf badge, and deemed it a great privilege to find them our own special patients’.8 The nurses also made time to visit fellow Canadians who were patients at the hospital.
Altogether, there were 600 beds, and for the next five months Georgina and her colleagues worked in the suburb below Table Mountain, where the fierce Cape south-easter blew in the summer months, and driving rain made life difficult in autumn. ‘After a month spent in the huts at Wynberg, we went under canvas at Rondebosch, experiencing the adventures of camp life and the power of an African midsummer sun, together with sand-storms, rain-storms, and sometimes a too intimate acquaintance of scorpions and snakes.’9
Fortunately, the hot, dry month of February brought with it a decrease in the number of enteric fever cases, which were often complicated by pneumonia and severe headaches. ‘The treatment was generally ice caps, sponge-baths and cold packs for temperature, poultices for pneumonia, tincture monson ovat. and ergotine for hemorrhages [sic]. The diet was fresh milk, Benger’s food, beef-tea – where there was no diarrhoea – and egg switches [eggnog], while some doctors included rice, biscuits, soft-boiled eggs, etc.’10 During the nurses’ time at No. 3, thirty patients died, a fairly low figure that included deaths at the neighbouring Portland Hospital. The relatively low mortality rate may have been due to the fresh air, clean water, abundant fresh milk and eggs, and daily supplies of fresh fruit from the Red Cross committee of the Cape Colony.
On the western battlefront, a besieged Kimberley was relieved on 15 February 1900, and twelve days later Boer general Piet Cronjé surrendered with some 4 000 men at Paardeberg. Lord Roberts then marched on Bloemfontein, the Free State capital, which the British occupied on 13 March. However, many troops had used contaminated water from the Modder River (where many horse carcasses lay) during the Battle of Paardeberg, with the result that thousands of men suffered from enteric fever. As a result, Roberts was only able to resume his march on Johannesburg and Pretoria in the Transvaal in early May.
Two of the Canadians who fell at Paardeberg were from Georgina’s home village, Charlottetown. One of these was Alfred Riggs, who, on 23 February, wrote to his father:
I have no time to write a letter now, as the mail goes in 5 minutes. We have had a big battle here at Paardeberg. We lost very heavily, casualties about 100, with 28 killed and the rest wounded. Poor Roland Taylor [also from Charlottetown] was killed. He was shot through the heart, and died instantly. I was with him when he died, but he did not know me when I got him to the stretcher.11
Scarcely a week later, Royal Canadian Rifles captain William Weeks wrote to Riggs’s father:
It is with feelings of the greatest sorrow and deepest sympathy that I write to you regarding the death of your dear son, Alfred. Words cannot express how I feel for yourself and your family in their great grief. It will be a consolation to you to know that Alfred died in the very front of the fight, fighting heroically and meeting a true soldier’s death. His name will ever be remembered by his comrades. Alfred was a good boy. His death with that of Roland Taylor has cast a gloom over us all.12
At the end of February, four more Canadian sisters joined Georgina’s nursing staff at No. 3 Rondebosch. Recruited in December from among the earlier applicants, they were led by Sister Deborah Hurcomb of Montreal and sailed on board the SS Laurentian to the Cape. The others were Margaret Macdonald from New York City Hospital, Margaret Horne from St Luke’s in New York, and Marcella Richardson from Regina Hospital. They all worked on the same terms as Georgina’s nurses. Soon, however, on 16 March, the newcomers left Rondebosch for the Masonic Temple Hospital in Kimberley. Six weeks later they were transferred to No. 10 General Hospital; and then, on 18 July, to Pretoria to the Irish Hospital, where Georgina and her nurses were later to join them.
For a while, Georgina and the three original nursing sisters continued at Rondebosch; however, in the first week of May they were instructed to proceed northwards to Kroonstad in the Orange Free State. The staff at No. 3 had been divided up, and Lieutenant-Colonel Keogh and half the medical staff, including sisters Affleck and Russell, were sent to Springfontein in the Orange Free State. Two weeks later, Lieutenant-Colonel Wood and the rest of the staff, including Sister Forbes and eight English nursing reserve sisters, with Georgina as superintendent, travelled to Kroonstad, where they arrived on 24 May.
After a stopover in Springfontein, Georgina’s group passed through Bloemfontein, where they found that enteric fever was raging in the town. All the hospitals – three general and many smaller ones – were crowded with patients. No. 9 General Hospital alone had 1 800 patients. It is no wonder that Rudyard Kipling, in his poem ‘The Parting of the Columns’ (1903), sarcastically referred to the town as ‘Bloemingtyphoidtein’. He was, for a while, a war correspondent for The Friend newspaper in Bloemfontein, and in his autobiography, Something of Myself, Kipling estimated that there were 8 000 cases of typhoid in Bloemfontein, a figure that turned out to be close to official estimates.
When the medical staff arrived in Kroonstad, which was now Lord Roberts’s headquarters, Wood established temporary hospitals in churches and hotels; in one such hotel, Georgina was told to take charge of 230 sick and wounded soldiers, many of whom were ill with enteric fever. It was a difficult, miserable time, with insufficient food rations, long hours, shortages of medical supplies, and extreme temperatures, with the ever-present fear of enemy attack. Georgina vividly recalled her time there.
In Kroonstadt we had our hardest taste of active service. Lord Roberts and Lord Methuen’s forces had just passed through, leaving sick and wounded in large numbers. Owing to the congested state of the lines of communication, our hospital equipment was delayed a few days in reaching Kroonstadt. The Dutch church, hotels, Staat Huis, etc., were quickly converted into hospitals, where we made the patients as comfortable as possible. Fresh milk was very hard to get, an officer’s servant having been shot dead by the Boers in his effort to get some at a farm near by, but of condensed milk, beef-tea, champagne, and jelly we had plenty.13
Fortunately, through her friendship with Lieutenant-Colonel Ryerson, the Canadian Red Cross representative, she managed to secure clothing and food, and even ‘whiskey and many other medical comforts’.
Once their hospital equipment arrived in Kroonstad, the No. 3 hospital tents were pitched on the outskirts of the town, next to the Scottish National, which was well equipped. As soon as the patients in Georgina’s care could be moved to other quarters, she and her nurses decamped to Wood’s No. 3.
The weather was now very cold at night, the frost being thick both inside and out of our single bell tents – the patients, being in double marquees, did not feel the cold so much. We were scarce of water, and lived on rations, which an orderly cooked for us on a fire on the veldt, dinner being a movable and uncertain feast on a rainy day. Around our camp, within fifty yards, were several six-inch guns, while we had prepared in a donga a place of safety for helpless patients and a bomb-proof shelter for all the hospital staff in case of attack, which for some time threatened us daily. Hanging in our mess was a copy of orders to be observed when attacked, etc. Several mornings we wakened to hear the boom of guns, which, however, were never near enough to necessitate our using the shelter.14
One of the soldiers hospitalised in Kroonstad was Captain Lisle Phillips, of Rimington’s Guides, who had succumbed to a bad attack of flu. He wrote from his hospital bed:
I lie here in a dim, brown holland coloured twilight. A large marquee of double folded canvas keeps out the sun; a few shafts of light twinkle through here and there. Through three entrance gaps I catch glimpses, crossed by a web of tent ropes, of other surrounding tents, each neatly enclosed by a border of whitened stones, the purpose of which is to prevent people at night from tripping over the ropes. Everything is scrupulously neat and clean. Orderlies run from tent to tent minding their patients. Every now and then a pretty little nursing sister, with white cuffs and scarlet pelisse, trips across the open spaces between the straight lines of marquees, or stops to have a moment’s chat and a little quiet bit of a flirt (they can always find time for that, I notice) with one of the officers or doctors …
Some way off, among the Tommies’ quarters, I can see groups of patients in clean, dark-blue clothes walking about, or sitting on seats, taking the air; some hobbling on crutches, some with arms in slings, heads bandaged, or patched and mended in some way or other. You feel like some damaged implement tossed aside a moment for repair. ‘Mend me this lieutenant!’ The doctors get to work, deft and quick; a little strengthening, repairing, polishing, and out you are shot again.15
Phillips was quite happy with his quarters, which, as an officer’s, would have been a step or so up from that of the ordinary soldier. ‘Every one is kind and sympathetic; a cool breeze blows through the looped-up tents; it is all very luxurious and pleasant for wearied-out soldiers,’ he wrote in a letter. ‘All our comforts are attended to. We have a shell-proof shelter in a ravine close by, handy in case of visits from [General Christiaan] De Wet.’16
Georgina was saddened to discover that in Kroonstad the mortality rate was much higher than at the Cape. The troops had been weakened by the hard campaign, and after drinking the contaminated water of the Modder River they fell easy victim to disease – they were in too poor a state to withstand the fever. ‘Sad indeed was the now familiar sight of fatigue parties bearing aloft the stretcher containing its silent burden covered by the Union Jack, and still more sad the ever-increasing number of little mounds on the veldt,’ Georgina observed.17
From Bloemfontein, Lord Roberts’s forces marched relentlessly northwards, across the Vaal River, and on 31 May 1900 – exactly two years before the signing of the peace treaty in Pretoria – Johannesburg fell into British hands. Shortly afterwards, on 5 June, the Transvaal capital of Pretoria was also occupied by the British.
Towards the end of June, the Canadian nurses at Kroonstad and Springfontein were transferred to Pretoria, where they joined Roberts’s army and were attached to the Irish Hospital, which a wealthy Irishman, Lord Iveagh, had equipped and sent out to assist the British Red Cross. The Canadians were the first private hospital staff to enter Pretoria, and were put under the supervision of Dr George Stoker, a veteran of three campaigns. The hospital was accommodated in the Palace of Justice, and dealt mostly with typhoid cases; by 10 July, patient numbers had risen from eighty-three to five hundred. Working conditions were difficult at first, though the nurses themselves had better quarters; also, enteric fever was on the wane, so their duties were lighter.
In a letter home to his family, Trooper Walter Maxfield of the Imperial Yeomanry, who had been admitted to the hospital with a bullet wound to the calf, praised not only conditions at the hospital, but also his treatment:
The Doctor says I won’t be able to ride again for a month. Well, I don’t care as things are very comfortable here, couldn’t be better anywhere. The nurses at this hospital belong to the Dublin hospital [Irish Hospital] and the one we have is an elderly lady and she couldn’t treat her own children better. There are five in here, which is a large marquee with every comfort that one could wish … This hospital is 3 miles from the town in a lovely position … This is Paradise after roaming the veldt for four months … I didn’t get much sleep the first 2 nights here. What with a Spring-bed, pillows and sheets it was too thick. They spare nothing here, all they think of is making you comfortable.18
In November, when their year’s contract was up, Georgina’s Canadian nurses were sent back to No. 1 General Hospital in Wynberg to await embarkation for Canada. But before this, they were given ten days’ leave of absence, which they spent travelling through Natal, where many bloody battles had been fought during the early phase of the war; among these were the battles of Elandslaagte, Colenso and Spioenkop. The nurses visited Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and in Ladysmith they met officers, surgeons and sisters who had endured the hardships of the Siege of Ladysmith and whose accounts made a lasting impression on Georgina.
Because of damage to the railway line, the nurses were delayed and reached Pretoria too late to join the first contingent of Royal Canadians who were on their way home via Cape Town and London. Georgina and her group were therefore obliged to remain in Pretoria for another month, until the second contingent of Royal Canadians was ready to leave South Africa. Eventually, with the trains running again, the nurses could begin their long journey home. On a windy 13 December, they boarded the Roslyn Castle in Cape Town and arrived in Halifax, Canada, on 8 January 1901. While on board, Georgina wrote an official report on the year she and her fellow Canadians had spent in South Africa; in it she emphasised their adventures, as well as their sense of duty and the great kindness they had encountered along the way.
Georgina had a special affection for the common British soldier:
We found Tommy Atkins a very good patient and fine fellow; always grateful, generally cheerful, bearing loss of limb, loss of health and many other minor discomforts with a fortitude that realized our best ideal of British pluck, while his consideration for the presence of the sister was at times quite touching. He is very entertaining during convalescence, often writing verses, sometimes in eulogy of the sisters and again in descriptions of battles, etc., and making all kinds of curiosities, those having had service in India doing beautiful work. I am the proud possessor of several specimens both of verse and handicraft which I value greatly. Above all, he loves tobacco and cigarettes, but enjoys any attention.19
In South Africa, the war was still dragging on. The Boers’ military strength may have been broken, but they continued fighting a guerrilla war that caused many problems for the British, whose government appealed to Canada to send another contingent to South Africa. And so, thirteen months after their initial departure from South Africa in December 1900, four of the original Canadian nurses – Georgina, Deborah Hurcomb, Margaret Macdonald and Sarah Forbes – returned to South Africa along with four others: Eleanor Fortesque, Florence Cameron, Amy Scott and Margaret Smith. Initially, the British government had agreed to five nurses accompanying the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles (CMR), but Georgina’s name was inadvertently omitted from the list. She had not yet returned to a civilian career in Canada, and had chosen to remain on the active militia list. Her brother, Joseph, brought this omission to the attention of Minister Borden. In the end, Borden and the British authorities agreed to include Georgina as a senior nursing sister, as well as two other nurses not originally part of the group of five.
On 28 January 1902, Georgina left for South Africa a second time. Owing to a lack of space, the nurses were not able to accompany the men of the 2nd CMR, as originally planned, and instead followed a route via London. They sailed from Halifax on the SS Corinthian, and arrived in England on 5 February; then, departing from Southampton ten days later, they eventually reached Cape Town on 2 March 1902. They stayed at Wynberg Hospital for two days before journeying to Harrismith to join the Canadian 10th Field Hospital. From Cape Town they sailed on the hospital ship Orcana to Durban, from where, two days later, they caught the hospital train to Harrismith. At first they were disappointed to find that the 10th Field Hospital had been sent to Newcastle, but they were relieved when they were attached to No. 19 Stationary Hospital, near Harrismith. The town had been occupied by British troops since 4 August 1900, without meeting any resistance from the Boers.
Georgina found Harrismith ‘a very pretty little town, about 6 000 feet above sea level, lying between the beautiful blue Drakensberg hills and a fine kopje called Platberg, under whose shadow “their” camp was pitched’. The nurses looked after ‘about 600 patients … more than half of whom were in well built huts and the remainder under canvas’.20 About one-third of their patients were suffering from enteric fever, but food and medical supplies were adequate and the nurses found their working conditions relatively pleasant. Nevertheless, they were subject to illness themselves, and by May 1902 their number had been reduced. Sister Hurcomb fell ill for a second time in May and was invalided to Canada, while Sister Cameron suffered a severe attack of jaundice and was sent to the Sick Sisters’ Home in Johannesburg.
After the Peace of Vereeniging was signed in Pretoria on 31 May, the remaining nurses were ordered back to Durban on 25 June, and they left for Halifax on the Winifredian with the men of the 2nd CMR. By late July, Georgina was back in Canada – by now the most experienced military nurse in the country. Her last stint in the Orange Free State, however, was to have a tragic ending. Her close friend, Sarah Forbes, contracted pneumonia in Harrismith, and eventually succumbed to the illness in Liverpool in December 1902.21 Forbes was buried with military honours in the family plot in a local cemetery.
Despite the trauma of her wartime experience, Georgina Pope had fond memories of her time in Africa. She concluded a report on nursing in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War thus:
I ever deemed it a great privilege to aid in caring for the sick and wounded, and while the hardships necessarily endured in such a campaign have faded from my mind, I still often seem to hear the ‘Thank you, sister’ of the grateful soldier; while together with pleasant memories of large convoys of happy convalescents sent home comes the vision of the many sad graves left on the far-off veldt of South Africa. ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis’ (Grant to them Thine eternal rest, O God, and in the light everlasting may they dwell).22
For army nurses like Georgina, the Anglo-Boer War proved to be a rehearsal for the two world wars in the following decades. The Boer War was a large-scale deployment for the British Army, and for the first time in Africa this formidable fighting force faced an enemy equipped with modern weapons, and using modern tactics. In common with all conflicts since then, a major concern was getting casualties off the battlefield and into the care of trained medical and nursing personnel. Another similarity was the reliance on reserve forces to augment the regular staff; at the start of the Boer War, the Army Nursing Service had less than 100 trained nurses, but by the end of it over 1 400 trained nurses had been deployed to South Africa.
The year after Georgina returned to Prince Edward Island from South Africa, she was commended for her dedicated service, and was awarded the Royal Red Cross Medal – the first Canadian to be honoured with this award. With the small annuity she received from her father’s estate, she lived quietly in Summerside on the island. While working at the Garrison Hospital in Halifax in 1906, she became a regular member of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, and two years later was appointed nursing matron-in-chief of the Canadian Army Nursing Corps, where her duties were mainly nursing recruitment and hospital administration.
For several years, Georgina suffered poor health, but she gradually recovered, and in September 1917, at the age of fifty-five, she embarked on a tour of nursing duties overseas during World War I. She worked in Canadian military hospitals in England, and was also stationed in France, close to Ypres in nearby Belgium, where one of the fiercest battles of the war was fought. When she succumbed to another bout of illness, which seems to have been related to shell-shock, she was sent home in August 1918. In her retirement, she went back to live in Charlottetown, where thunderstorms over the bay no doubt reminded her of the terrifying sounds of battle in South Africa and Flanders. She died on 6 June 1938, aged seventy-six, and was buried three days later in the Charlottetown Roman Catholic Cemetery, with full military honours.
‘My hair is now white,’ Georgina told a reporter shortly before her death, ‘but the sight of soldiers or sailors marching, a bugle call, the sound of the drums or military band has power still to stir in me the old enthusiasm and once more I long to minister to such cheery, grateful patients as the Soldiers and Sailors of the King.’23
A bronze bust of Georgina Pope commemorates her contribution to Canadian military history; it forms part of the Valiants Memorial in Confederation Square in downtown Ottawa. The monument was unveiled on 5 November 2006, during Veterans’ Week, and it honours fourteen Canadians for their service in five separate wars. The striking inscription on the wall below the monument captures the spirit of the memorial: ‘No day shall ever erase you from the memory of time.’