The idea of hospitals run entirely by women, which could be set up near the battlefront, was the inspiration of the pioneering Scottish surgeon Elsie Inglis, who, among other ventures, founded three military hospitals in Serbia. She helped with the campaigning and organizing of another remarkable all-woman outfit, a group of Scottish doctors, nurses, cooks and cleaners, who established a hospital in the French abbey of Royaumont, on the Western Front. The hospital was operational from 1915 until the end of the war, but one of its most severe challenges came in the early days of the Battle of the Somme, which began on 1 July, when tens of thousands of men were wounded and killed in a matter of days. The following account comes from the radiographer, Miss V. C. C. Collum, who herself had been seriously wounded a few months earlier when her ship was torpedoed.
On the first [July] we waited, full of tense, suppressed excitement. The Great Push had begun – how were the Allies faring? Our hospital had been evacuated almost to the last man. Our new emergency ward of 80 beds had been created in what had once been as big as an English parish church – our theatre and our receiving rooms had been supplied with a huge reserve of bandages and swabs, of lint and gauze and wool; our new x-ray installation had been fitted up to the last connection; our ambulances were waiting ready to start at a moment’s notice in the garage yard. The incessant thunder and boom of the great guns had never been silent for days. This day, at dawn, the thunder had swelled to an orgy of terrific sound that made the whole earth shiver; then, a few hours later, had ceased, and we could hear once more the isolated reports of individual cannon. Those of us who had been at the hospital through the attacks of June 1915, and the more serious push in Artois on September 25, went early to bed. If the call came in the night we could always be summoned – meanwhile we slept when we could. The late-comers marvelled at our lack – our apparent lack – of anticipation and excitement, and waited up long into the night.
[Finally, the casualties began to arrive.] Their wounds were terrible … many of these men were wounded – dangerously – in two, three, four and five places. That great enemy of the surgeon who would conserve life and limb, gas gangrene, was already at work in 90% of cases. Hence the urgent need for immediate operation, often for immediate amputation. The surgeon did not stop to search for shrapnel and pieces of metal: their one aim was to open up and clean out the wounds, or to cut off the mortifying limb before the dread gangrene had tracked its way into the vital parts of the body. The stench was very bad. Most of the poor fellows were too far gone to say much …
[We] had accommodation for 400, and for weeks we worked, once we were filled, with never a bed to spare. Our operating theatre was hardly ever left vacant long enough to be cleaned during the small hours and it became a problem how to air the x-ray rooms during the short hours of dawn that stretched between the ending of one day’s work and the beginning of another’s. We were fighting gas gangrene and time was the factor that counted most. We dared not stop work in the theatre until it became physically impossible to continue. For us who worked, and for those patient suffering men, lying along the corridor outside the x-ray rooms and the theatre, on stretchers, awaiting their turn, it was a nightmare of glaring lights, of appalling stenches of ether and chloroform, and violent sparking of tired x-ray tubes, of scores of wet negatives that were seized upon by their respective surgeons and taken into the hot theatre before they had even had time to be rinsed in the dark room. Beneath and beyond the anxiety of saving men’s lives, there was the undercurrent of anxiety of the theatre staff as to whether the boiling of instruments and gloves could be kept level with the rapidity with which the cases were carried in and put on the table, as to whether the gauze and wools and swabs would last! – and with us it was anxiety for the life of the tubes, anxiety to get the gas gangrene plates developed first, to persuade them to dry, to keep the cases of the six surgeons separate, to see that they did not walk off with the wrong plates – for we had pictures that were almost identical, duplication of names, and such little complications. And it all had to be done in a tearing hurry, and at the end of a day that had already lasted anything from 10 to 18 hours, and no mistakes to be made. I do not think we lost a case from delay in locating the trouble and operating in all that first terrible week of July. The losses were due to delay in reaching the hospital.