Nursing Sister Agnes Warner
To say that Agnes Louise Warner was a New Brunswicker is only part of the truth. Born in 1872 to American parents living in Saint John, she maintained US citizenship and for several years trained and worked in New York City. But Saint John residents claimed the accomplishments of “the distinguished Saint John lady” as a source of great pride, and there is no doubt that “home” to Agnes was the city of her birth.
In her earliest years, the daughter of General Darius Bingham and Nancy Robinson Warner lived with older siblings Laura and John and younger siblings Richard, James, and Mary on the Rothesay Road overlooking Kennebecasis Bay. By about 1877, however, the family had moved, likely to the house they would continue to occupy well into the twentieth century, on the block bounded by Peel Street and Hazen Avenue. That year, five-year-old Agnes and her family mourned the death of Richard, just two, during a visit to Chicago. It was not the family’s first tragic loss — a boy, Henry, had passed away at eight months in spring 1869 — but it was likely the first time little Agnes was forced to grapple with the frailty of human life and the permanence of loss.
In such a time, it probably helped Agnes to have remarkably resilient parents. Father Darius’s illustrious military career during the Civil War had brought him steadily up through the ranks of the Union Army to brevet general, but cost him his arm in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. On his way to his new appointment as US consul in Saint John, the Ohio native married Nancy Robinson in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and brought her to the New Brunswick harbour city, where he would endear himself against odds to a community initially apprehensive of Union military men. After serving as consul for twenty-two years, he went into the lumbering business with his brother and continued in active public life. The Warners remained based in Saint John, with continued ties and treks to Ohio, Illinois, and the Southern states throughout their lives.
Through her father, Agnes would have discovered a number of values that inspired her. Perhaps foremost among them was a sense of active citizenship and what it meant to take responsibility for one’s fellow human beings in a crisis. In 1877, as a horrified citizenry surveyed the more than eighty smouldering hectares of the city core that had been swallowed by the Great Saint John Fire, General Warner “became the man of the hour.” According to the Saint John Globe, he “telegraphed all over the US news of the calamity . . . and there was instantaneous and hearty response from many quarters.” Warner set up an office at the local rink where the homeless were sheltering, and from this base assumed the duties of general superintendent overseeing the long-term relief committee and continuing to correspond with his contacts in the United States — notably Chicago — to establish a relief and recovery system.
This might be why the Warners were in Chicago when, just a few months after the fire, young son Richard died. Truly, it was a calamitous time for the family.
As she grew old enough to reflect on it, it must have struck Agnes how efficiently her father, by virtue of his military experience, had commanded the situation through the networks of contacts and organized supply he was able to set up. She saw his energy and people’s confidence in his abilities despite the supposed debilitation of his missing arm. Years later, during a world war, Agnes would demonstrate the same qualities of coolness under pressure, resourcefulness in cultivating a network of supply, and, above all, a heartfelt responsibility for those tossed in the throes of crisis.
But first she would excel at home. Graduating with distinction from Victoria High School for Girls in 1890, she honed a natural interest in botany by participating in the province’s Natural History Society (N.H.S.), no doubt encouraged by a leading botanist, George Upham Hay, who was principal at Victoria High, and by her own father, who sat on the society’s executive. She studied local plants with interest, collected rare specimens, then skilfully dried, pressed, and labelled them for the N.H.S. — her specimens form part of the New Brunswick Museum’s botanical collections to this day.
A few of her specimens came from Montreal, collected while she pursued an undergraduate degree at McGill University. In June 1893, the Educational Review reported that the third-year McGill student had achieved “second rank honors in natural sciences, first rank in general standing, honorable mention for collection of plants, and prize in mental philosophy.” That summer Agnes stood up with her elder sister Laura (“Kit”) as she married Saint John barrister Charles Coster in what the paper called the “society event of the season.” Then it was back to McGill for a final banner year, which she finished off as a valedictorian of the Class of 1894.
Was it at this time that a future in nursing was brewing in Miss Warner’s mind? With two grown daughters left at the Warner home, one could certainly be spared to travel, learn, and launch an independent career in a recently rehabilitated profession. By 1894, the number of reputable nursing schools had proliferated, leaving Agnes with many alternatives, including one at her doorstep: the Saint John General Hospital School for Nurses. But something made her pass on both this option and a second, obvious one: the new training program at the Montreal General Hospital.
Renowned nurse Anna Maxwell had established the Montreal school and briefly served as its superintendent in 1890 before moving on to found and direct the Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing in New York City, and it was this latter institution that Warner chose to attend. Such a cross-border move was typical of her generation of New Brunswick women, many of whom left to find work or education in the New England states, and Agnes’s US citizenship would have made the move that much easier. Indeed, from the absence of all but the Warner sons from the 1901 Saint John census, it is possible that much of her family joined her in the United States, which would not have been at all unusual for them, either. Agnes might have had close friends or relatives in New York, but it was likely the reputation of the nursing school itself that attracted her, as it did others, such as Margaret Macdonald, future Matron-in-Chief of the C.A.M.C.
Whatever the particular appeal of New York and the Presbyterian Hospital School, Warner trained there, then remained as a private duty nurse for a wealthy couple on Long Island. It was common at the time for people of means to see their doctors at home and to hire private nurses to tend to their routine health care needs. A substantial fortune enabled Roswell and Louise Udall Eldridge to live an extravagant and somewhat cloistered lifestyle just outside the metropolis of New York. Warner became part of their extensive household, probably more like a member of the family than a servant, but still subject to the whims of the capricious Eldridges. (So intent on controlling their world were these two that, in 1911, they contrived to protect their estate from encroaching development and taxation by incorporating it as the Village of Saddle Rock, comprising servants and household members as taxpayers and voters, with themselves — first Mr., then Mrs. — as mayors.) The Eldridges had no children and they took frequent extended trips to Europe. This is how Agnes Warner came to be in France in August 1914, on the eve of the Great War.
It was probably not her first trip overseas with Mrs. Eldridge. This time the destination was Divonne-les-Bains, a village of about two thousand people on the Swiss border near Geneva that offered restorative spa accommodations in the shadow of the Alps. No doubt the party partook generously of the amenities at Divonne’s Grand Hotel from the moment they arrived in May 1914. But that summer anyone with an ear to the ground would have detected the uneasy currents pulsing through the continent. Many locals reassured themselves that war might still be averted at the last moment, but on August 3 the church bells rang out all over France to herald the declaration, and Warner was there to witness it.
On the very instant everyone knew what had happened. Gardeners, porters, all classes of men stopped work immediately and rushed to the city hall, where the same hour the proclamation of war was read and mobilization started. The very next day 500 men of the village marched out in uniform — off to the front. . . . [M]any women, after preparing their husband’s and their son’s and brother’s equipment, gave them all the money they possessed, thinking that they would need it to buy necessities. The same women were seen the next day working in various menial capacities to keep their families.
Two tense weeks passed during which restrictions on communications prevented any news of the war from reaching the village. In the meantime, there was no shortage of “thrilling incidents” to arouse fear and excitement. One of the hotel porters was discovered to be a spy reporting on the district to the enemy; the perpetrator managed to escape to Switzerland, but his complicit wife was imprisoned. A not-so-fortunate shoemaker in the town was found guilty and executed.
Within a few weeks, staff and volunteers had converted one wing of the Grand Hotel into a fifty-bed Red Cross hospital, though it was nearly a month before the wounded dispatched from the Alsace frontier would reach Divonne-les-Bains to convalesce. Warner was one of the first to volunteer for work in the makeshift hospital, even as most foreigners were fleeing the country for Switzerland. She also helped to train local women to provide basic nursing assistance.
When the wounded soldiers began to arrive, so did the more gruesome stories. But first the exhausted men had to sleep — one did so for thirty-five hours — and many slept so soundly that they had to be woken forcibly to eat. Others awoke after only a few minutes’ rest, unaccustomed to the hush of the hospital after spending weeks assailed by the booming clamour of the battlefields — men who had finally learned to rest amid the roar of guns now could not sleep without it.
Stories of vicious enemy acts reached Warner through the soldiers and through her friend, Mme. Lalance, recently returned from Alsace, where she had operated a hospital for French soldiers. If previously Germans had been a faceless enemy in Warner’s mind, a snarling, ruthless image quickly took shape through Mme. Lalance’s reports. She heard how German soldiers had stormed the hospital, held Lalance at the point of a pistol, ripped bandages from the bodies of the wounded to verify that they were truly impaired, and elsewhere shot a Red Cross nurse. Long before she got near the front, Warner’s faith in the protection of the Red Cross symbol or in her chances of surviving an encounter with the enemy must have plummeted, replaced by a deeply buried but persistent fear that all her movements through the war zone were acutely dangerous.
But then, in mid-December, it was time to go home with Mrs. Eldridge. Christmas was right around the corner, and though the Eldridges generously supported the hotel-hospital at Divonne out of their pocketbooks, this was no place for a well-to-do American in tentative health. Warner would have to accompany them home, then snatch some much-needed holiday rest in Saint John. But images of penniless French women, their men gone to war, struggling to work their farms and feed their dependents; of worn-out, injured men; of need and want everywhere but “no grumbling” seized her with sympathetic admiration and the conviction that she would be “a coward and a deserter” if she did not share everything she had with these stoic people. Long before she left Divonne with the Eldridge household, Warner had resolved to get back to France.
She spent a few days in New York getting the Eldridges settled and arrived home in Saint John two days before Christmas. There was little time to rest, really, between talking to eager reporters about her activities, getting her passports in order, making her rounds among friends and family, and drumming up material support before her departure on January 13. This time she packed heavy, “taking with her quite a large supply of useful articles contributed by St. John friends who know the value of the work she is doing and the necessity for contributions,” reported the Daily Telegraph. During her whirlwind mission, she must have encountered some confusion when she told people that, no, she was not nursing Canadian or British wounded, and, no, she was not working in a Canadian or British hospital, for the Daily Telegraph went on to note that
Miss Warner feels that our people do not sufficiently recognize the magnificent courage and spirit of sacrifice shown by the French people. She reminds her friends, in talking, of these things, that while the British have done heroic work, the greater part of the long line from the Belgian coast across to Switzerland, a curving line of 200 miles, is defended by the French. The whole French nation, men, women and children, she says, are deserving of the gratitude and admiration of the world.
Evidently Warner’s plea was persuasive: not only did her baggage bulge with supplies, but for the next four years a steady stream of packages and cash from her native Saint John would flow unabated.
Back on French soil, Warner spent an eye-opening few weeks at the American Ambulance in Paris, observing exciting surgical innovations that encouraged her. But soon she felt beckoned by the need at Divonne-les-Bains. As an American “neutral” not contracted to any organization in particular, Warner was free to move autonomously. With nothing urgent to keep her in Paris, she returned to Divonne in February 1915 to be welcomed back as the darling of the village.
As before, her practise of care in Divonne extended well beyond the hospital into the homes of soldiers’ families. For a war nurse, it was a unique, discretionary mission: at a time when her military counterparts focused most of their efforts on hospital work, Warner cast a wider net. Wherever she was posted, she drew deeply from her (informal) channels of trans-Atlantic supply to find comfort items and money for the most destitute families in the area. She also found ways to stretch and multiply the Saint John donations with schemes that enabled European women and children to supply goods for the insatiable war. When every society in Saint John was busy collecting socks for soldiers, Warner asked her friends to collect yarn, too, which she turned over to village women to knit into socks, thereby offering them the dual advantage of outfitting their fighting men and earning a small income for their families. Her continual shopping, soliciting, saving, and hoarding soon earned her the reputation of a packrat — good naturedly, of course, because anyone could see how quickly these precious articles passed through her hands to those who needed them most. That she even found the time to organize and allocate them while working long hours in the wards suggests an extraordinary efficiency on Warner’s part. It also demonstrates how clearly she understood that easing an anxious soldier’s mind about the condition of loved ones back home made it easier for him to keep on with the grim work of recovery — just as a cheery word about his recovery could shore up the spirits of his toiling family.
In April, officials began talking about expanding the hospital to four hundred beds and putting it under military control, with Warner in charge of nursing. No doubt she was the most senior nurse currently at the hospital, and this impressive promotion would have seemed natural to the authorities. But Warner’s first thought was one of reluctance to take on the daunting red tape of military bureaucracy. Perhaps as an attempt to educate herself on the administration of larger operations, that May she took a brief tour of hospitals in the Lyon area. After returning, she took charge of at least a sizeable portion of the Divonne hospital and remained there for the summer. But she had another field in mind.
That September, Warner suddenly announced that she was thrilled to be moving to an ambulance close to the front, where she would have “a chance to do good work” and be “nearer the Canadian boys.” This was an incentive she shared with many other nurses: all longed to work where there was the greatest need and the greatest chance of seeing familiar faces. Though she knew little about it before arriving, her next post would be with the F.F.N.C. at Mary Borden Turner’s newly established Ambulance Mobile No. 1 in Rousbrugge, Belgium, only twenty kilometres from the strategically important and oft-assailed city of Ypres, and within sixteen kilometres of the front — so close that the wounded could reach her operating room before infection set in.
Turner may have known of Warner prior to 1915, and they certainly had been in touch earlier that year. Whatever the nature of their prior acquaintance, from early on Warner clearly had the trust and respect of “Mrs. Turner,” herself a Red Cross nurse (though not a trained one) serving as la directrice of the ambulance she had founded. It is interesting to speculate about the relationship between these two women, particularly in light of Turner’s postwar publication, The Forbidden Zone, a probing literary reflection on her experience during the war. In a frank and controversial work that dispenses with the romantic veneer of wartime nursing narratives, Turner confronts the moral contradictions of nursing men’s bodies only to send them back to be re-abused, and she challenges assumptions about what was appropriate for women writers to articulate about suffering. From Warner’s brief remarks about their interactions and from Warner’s rapid elevation to infirmière major (matron) in charge of the ambulance, it is clear that the two women worked closely together in mutual trust. In the stolen moments of conversation, did they disclose a kindred sensibility; did they share a thoughtful critique of the way their grim world was being managed? Whatever they discussed, the postwar world would neither read a frank appraisal from Agnes Warner, who never published one, nor readily welcome Mary Borden Turner’s perspective.
Many of the other trained nurses in Ambulance Mobile No. 1 at Rousbrugge were F.F.N.C. nurses — hailing from the British Empire and the United States — who worked outside the British military system, moving instead with the French army, with teams of French doctors, caring largely for French poilus, and receiving French military decorations for their most gallant acts. To Warner’s delight, many of the nurses in the area were Canadian. Helen McMurrich, supervisor of the first Canadian unit of nurses to join the F.F.N.C., arrived in Rousbrugge in March 1916 and quickly hit it off with Warner. They travelled together when they went on leave and were still working together well into 1919. Not far away, in Rémy Siding, near Poperinghe, Saint John Nursing Sister Margaret Hare had charge of the busy No. 3 C.C.S. Warner visited her from time to time to compare notes, help with dressings, or observe surgeries. Best of all was the promise that her beloved nephew “B” (Robert Warner Bayard Coster) might be discovered somewhere near the front — indeed, he turned up in a camp near Ypres after some diligent reconnaissance on the part of his Aunt Warner.
To add to the Canadian camaraderie she discovered in her new post, Warner continued to receive care packages and cheques addressed to her from Saint John. While she was now much busier with urgent cases than she had been in Divonne, she still scrambled to distribute articles and cash to her poilus and their families. There is little doubt that chapter members Mary Warner and Laura (Warner) Coster had something to do with keeping their sister Agnes’s efforts in the hearts and minds of the De Monts chapter of the I.O.D.E., which continued to donate prodigiously. Supply shortages were a fact of life at hospitals such as Mobile No. 1 — as Nurse Warner continually reminded her supporters, it was thanks to their generosity that she was able to help as many soldiers as she did.
Then someone had an idea to amplify her message. Without actually consulting Warner, a group of friends gathered excerpts from her 1914-1916 letters to Saint John family and friends and contracted local printers Barnes and Co. to publish them in book form. By March 1917, local businesses were selling copies of My Beloved Poilus for $1.00 each, and proceeds from the little chronicle began reaching Warner herself shortly thereafter. What must she have thought about this well-intentioned parade of her private letters before a much broader audience? Did she know that even former premier (and soon-to-be lieutenant governor) William Pugsley was presenting copies as “souvenirs” to the dozens of V.I.P.s he entertained? It is unlikely that she worried about the content of My Beloved Poilus — skulky friends still can make trustworthy editors. The published letters had been modified and condensed with discretion, and none of her more intimate notes, if she wrote any, was allowed to stray into My Beloved Poilus. But she was uneasy about the unpolished style of her letters. To her mother she confided, “I must say it was an awful shock when I first received it, but if the people are interested, in spite of the appalling English, and it sells well, I must not mind. You know I did not even have time to read over my letters and they are rather a disgrace to a graduate of McGill.”
In throwing back the tent flap and giving the reader a glimpse of the daily rhythms of hospital life, the letters of My Beloved Poilus are illuminating, but inevitably limited by the nature of wartime correspondence. Long before the Saint John “editors” took their turn, Warner herself would have filtered the details to obscure the location and movements of her hospital to satisfy the military censors. This caution is much more pronounced in her letters from the Belgian front than in those written farther back at Divonne-les-Bains, and the need for it must have frustrated correspondents on both sides of the Atlantic. The nurses themselves, however, typically were kept in the dark about the army’s movements and could only speculate (from patterns of gunfire and numbers of wounded) about what was going on around them. In such conditions, rumours thrived and anxieties simmered as nurses waited for real news.
Quite apart from the dictates of censorship, nurses had other reasons to check their tone and convey a strategic impression when writing letters. Motives were as much personal as political, for if a nurse was unable to remain duly selfless and optimistic — even “cheerful” — about her part in restoring the wounded to victory, where would that leave her or her dependent charges and the possibility of re-establishing life as she once knew it? Despondency and introspection were dangerous when everything depended on swift and passionate action; a “chin-up” attitude was crucial for encouraging sustained contributions of men, materiel, and morale from home. Figuring prominently in Sister Warner’s letters, therefore, are the ongoing needs of the soldiers, the hardships borne bravely by local women, the triumphs of recovery, and gratitude for contributions. Her tone, though, is practical and matter-of-fact, rather than probingly reflective. In any case, clutching the stub of a pencil in her frozen fingers after eighteen hours on her feet, she did not have time to ruminate on what she had experienced, let alone wax literary. But she would summon her most earnest eloquence in detailing for bereaved French families the last brave hours their men had spent in her hospital before succumbing to their wounds. Then she might have a few minutes to scribble a letter home — lighter fare, though no less obligatory, even though there must have been moments when Warner was sorely tempted to bypass pen and paper for the relative rapture of just closing her eyes and ending the day.
As a trained nurse, Warner was no stranger to the gruesome sight and heavy smell of infection, the sickening cross-section of severed limbs, or the unnerving actions of a dying man. The gleaming blades and points of hospital instruments, the bustle of routine, the pressures of assisting at operations, the position one adopted when leaning over a miserable patient — all had long since been part of her reality but not subjects about which to write home. But now she was forced to come to grips with horror writ large: families torn apart, women struggling to feed their families, convoys of refugees, muddy, shattered soldiers. All this, combined with the perennial shortage of materials and personnel to meet the need, would have presented impossibilities she had never encountered at the New York Presbyterian Hospital School for Nurses. The need to heal the desperately wounded, moreover, was leading to new techniques, such as “plastic” surgery to reconstruct demolished faces, therapeutic massage, and new methods of dressing gangrenous wounds to permit ongoing irrigation with a germicidal treatment known as Dakin’s (or Carrel-Dakin) solution. Dakin’s treatment posed a special challenge for nurses because it required almost constant adjustment to manage the tubes and pumps — but it reduced the rate of amputations, which nurses were eager to avoid.
But new healing techniques could not keep pace with the sinister inventions of wartime: guns that hurled shells faster, farther; aircraft that dropped death and dismemberment from the sky; and, perhaps worst of all, vicious poison gases that swept into Allied trenches and choked all hope of recovery for thousands. Causing debilitating chemical burns on the skin and respiratory membranes of the patient, contamination with chlorine, phosgene, and, later, “mustard” gas could easily claim a man’s life — or worse (Warner felt), his eyesight. The pain of gas burns was often unendurable and the nursing arduous. Some cases had to be protected by bed tents against contact of any kind except careful swabbing with neutralizing solutions. Warner first mentions gas on her arrival at the front in September 1915, when both sides were using chlorine and phosgene weapons. In 1916, she declared gas “the worst thing I have seen yet” — not a superlative to be taken lightly from a nurse who had treated every variant of hideousness the war had manufactured to date. (Mustard gas, introduced by the Germans in 1917, had even grislier effects.) Despite the foul smell of gas masks and the inconvenience of working in them, nurses must have been grateful to have them.
Apart from gingerly handling gas casualties and dressing shell wounds, nurses also tended to men suffering from epidemic illnesses (pneumonia, dysentery, and trench fever), many which were spread through contact with decaying flesh, vermin, and filth in the trenches. Such cases occupied a certain percentage of beds in any war hospital: the “ill, not wounded.” Nurses near the front came in contact with their share of decaying flesh, swarming rats, lice, and filth, too, and they struggled to keep their areas, aprons, and starched cuffs clean. Special precautions, such as rubber gloves, kerosene shampoos, and meticulous grooming were essential to prevent septic fingers and infections. Cold, wet winters added to the burden, as long-term exposure to the elements left many soldiers (and occasionally nurses) with crippling rheumatism or frostbite.
Some ailments, despite their prevalence among the soldiers, are mentioned only rarely in contemporary accounts. One was nerve strain (alternately, “nerve paralysis” or “shell shock”), a condition that included disorientation, localized paralysis, mutism, or muscle tics brought on by psychological reactions to horrific experiences at the front. Early in the war medical personnel tended to consider it temporary insanity or emotional collapse — something that would melt away in a restorative setting such as Divonne-les-Bains. But the rising number of disabling cases represented a serious threat to manpower and prompted military authorities to become serious about getting victims back in fighting condition as soon as possible. The typical prescription — segregation and therapy at the hands of an exacting medical team — was not calibrated to be sympathetic, but to “re-educate the will” through exposure to demanding situations, discipline, and sometimes electric shock applied to uncooperative parts of the body. Whether the shocks were intended to be strictly therapeutic, partly motivational, or largely punitive is not clear, and may have depended on the administrator. It is evident from Warner’s letters that the hospital in Divonne-les-Bains offered electrical treatment. Though she only identifies its recipients as “paralyzed,” rather than “nerve paralyzed” or “insane,” the fact that so many of them reportedly regained their mobility under treatment suggests they may have suffered from shell shock.
The other hushed condition was venereal disease, sufferers of which typically were removed to separate hospitals or treated by male orderlies rather than by female nurses.
As 1915 gave way to a new year of fighting, the bombardments grew so severe that the numbers and condition of the wounded pouring into Mrs. Turner’s ambulance at times overwhelmed the staff. The wards were so full that when a wounded General Lerous arrived, nurses struggled to find the mandatory space to segregate him from the rank-and-file wounded, and furthermore to accommodate his wife and the Belgian royalty who came to visit him. (Royal visits to hospitals were relatively common events during the war; besides cheering the soldiers, they served to buoy the spirits of the staff and boost their visibility with war authorities and sponsors — Warner’s hospital was no exception.)
Unfortunately for Warner, the frantic pace that spring meant she had to postpone the rest trip to Divonne she had planned for March. When she finally was able to leave the roar of the front in May, her first sleep was as long as it was restful. But just like the soldiers she used to receive at the Divonne hospital, the next night she found it too quiet to sleep.
Presumably, as a requisite to service in the F.F.N.C., Warner was proficient in French, thanks in part to her Victorian education and the time she spent in Montreal. Proficiency would have been critical for managing good relationships with doctors, orderlies, and patients alike, and Sister Warner seems to have been singularly successful (or fortunate) in forging harmony with all three. Her letters are free of the exasperation shown in other nurses’ accounts toward the untrained help, possibly because her orderlies (and also the “nurses,” or “infirmiers” as she tended to refer to them, notwithstanding that they were amateur) were motivated French citizens rather than the P.O.W.s or “inept soldier” orderlies of British and Canadian military hospitals, who required close, prodding supervision. It is also likely that she commanded respect through her leadership abilities and attracted local affection with her relief work beyond the hospital. The humility in her letters certainly suggests that, after taking charge as matron in 1916, Warner led her colleagues by earnest example. In contrast with the matrons of larger military hospitals whose chief duties were oversight and discipline, she obviously participated fully as a ward nurse alongside her close-knit staff. It is noteworthy that, in so many of her sentences composed in Belgium, the subject is “we.”
Faced with mind-numbing toil and pain, nurses did whatever they could to lighten things up for themselves and the men. They planned and hosted entertainments, usually located on site so patients could participate. They lavishly summoned Christmas in the wards with festoons, songs, and treats — clearly a lot of work but unquestionably worth the trouble. No one viewed decorations as frivolous in a wartime hospital; rather, colourful ribbons, flowers, and blankets were an integral part of the restorative therapy nurses designed for patients — part of that tidy, heavenly atmosphere soldiers ascribed to the nurses’ sovereignty in the wards. Even a poorly heated barrack ward was nothing less than a palace next to the shivering, swarming miseries of grey trench life.
In truth, nurses embroidered their world as much for their own sake as for their patients’. An endless visual diet of grey walls, white sheets, brown mud, and red wounds had the effect of super-sensitizing the retina to colour and beauty, causing nurses to linger in doorways, enchanted by sunrises over the Belgian countryside, and to hover over flower arrangements picked by recovering patients eager to show their gratitude. We know that Warner had a zeal for plants from an early age, and it finds expression in her My Beloved Poilus letters. But in those surroundings, it becomes more spiritual than academic — like many nurses who sprinkle their accounts with glimpses of beauty, she interprets that beauty as Hope.
Personal joy might have been rare in the frenzied nights and days, but it would not have taken much to liberate a laugh from a human spirit craving mirth. A kitten’s brazen antics, a friendly message dropped by an air force pilot, or a patient’s quip could easily coax a smile from a nurse, and everyone was eager to earn one. If we are to believe the claim of Warner and other nurses that their soldier-patients were nothing if not perfect gentlemen — or, rather, “boys” — then it seems to have been relatively uncomplicated for nurses to maintain an easy, familial rapport. As long as men viewed nurses as religious or domestic “Sisters” and nurses considered themselves stand-in mothers to grateful children, all could enjoy a respectfully affectionate relationship in which nurses showed warmth without compromising professionalism. More likely, there were occasional lapses of patience or decorum on the part of both parties in an atmosphere of disgust, desire, madness, pain, and long-term deprivation. But reports of unseemly behaviour rarely made it across the Atlantic. On the contrary, nurses praised the manners and restraint of the soldiers and even indulged in national comparisons of their pluck:
At one hospital where nearly all the patients were French, several Canadians were brought in, among them a brawny chap named McDonald. The Poilus were very curious to see how this Canadian would behave, and as he had a bad dressing to be done Miss Warner was anxious that he should be as brave as the French. However, she saw his face getting red, and she said to him, ‘Well, if it will make you feel better, say it.’ And the Canadian opened his mouth and ejaculated, ‘Boys!’ The Colonel of his regiment, who came to the hospital later, told Sister Warner that McDonald could do better than that, as he was a foreman of the railway construction line and had quite a command of the language.
Another good reason to behave oneself in front of the nurse was the discretion she wielded. A good word from her to the medical officer might prolong a soldier’s convalescence period and keep him off the “fit for duty” list awhile longer — possibly even send him home.
What Sister Warner’s eager New Brunswick readership got in My Beloved Poilus was a series of snapshots — both visual and narrative — of her adopted world. Amid the unrelenting rhythms of work and care, she highlights her own experience of uncertainty, discomfort, joy, and revulsion. We get to know how strongly she feels about senseless devastation and how heavily she relies on support from home. We see how keeping busy sustains her mentally and how the poilus’ gratitude restores her emotionally. In the letters are glimpses of her inner struggle to sort out her feelings on the war’s lethal perplexities — wondering how to reconcile her fear and her pride when nephew Bayard signs up as a soldier or rethinking her position on nursing the enemy when German soldiers first arrive in her hospital in May 1916. And despite a momentary vow to give up nursing altogether after the war, we see her taking every opportunity to augment her professional knowledge of surgical advancements and methods of hospital administration by touring other facilities. Through the letters, we move ever closer to the front lines with a dedicated woman who takes one difficult day at a time.
As she was writing the last letter that would be bound into My Beloved Poilus, neither Warner nor her readers could have contemplated that her ordeal at the front was scarcely more than half over.
Agnes Warner. My Beloved Poilus
Solidago flexicaulis, collected by Agnes L. Warner. NBM VP-02816
Mike Bechthold
Canadian Victory Bonds poster using the example of French women to encourage Canadians. McGill University WP1.B12.F2
Mike Bechthold
Cover of My Beloved Poilus.
British gas mask known as a Small Box Respirator. CWM 19720102-061
C.A.M.C. nurse at a hospital reads the news from home to Canadian convalescents. CWM 19920085-529