The sensation of travelling as a parcel, put into the train and taken out at appropriate times is very soothing.
Captain H. C. Meysey-Thompson, wounded at Bailleul,
21 September 19171
Nurse Bickmore managed to lorry-hop all the way up to the front entrance of the railway station specified in her orders. Here she was to take up her new posting on board an ambulance train. She had been assured that it would all be quite easy, if a bit cramped: just turn up on time, get on board and check in with Sister. Not much different from work at home. The ambulance trains were like hospitals on wheels, carrying wounded soldiers away from the battlefield to the base hospitals on the French coast for long-term care – or, if they were lucky, all the way home to England. The trains picked up the injured men from railheads as close to the casualty clearing stations as could possibly be built. Cables went out when a load of wounded needed collecting and the nearest available train set off down the line. There were officers on board and at the stations who were in charge of entraining and detraining the wounded men. Bickmore had liked the sound of an ambulance-train post. Like work at the CCSs, the trains offered nurses the opportunity of real nursing. Having your own carriage was like having your own ward. You had to keep it clean and the patients were your responsibility, all the way to the end of the line.
When she went inside the station, it was dark and cold like a cave. It seemed completely deserted. She called out into the gloom, ‘Hello, is anybody there?’, but her words echoed round the vaulted ceilings and off the stone walls. No one replied. She wondered if it had all been a mistake. The whole station seemed to blur into one dark mass. Suddenly there was a quick flash of light, lasting just long enough for her to make out the closest train. This had to be her train, she decided. She started to walk towards where the light had come from, until she reached the end of the platform. To get to her train, she would have to jump down onto the tracks and walk over the tangle of rails and points – even though every good English child had been taught never ever to jump from a railway platform. She hesitated and wondered whether she had made the right decision after all. But she couldn’t stand there for ever and there was no turning back now. She bent down low to put her hand on the edge of the platform and then lowered herself carefully onto the rails. She gathered up her cape and skirts and, grabbing her tiny valise, set out across the tracks. A number of times she almost fell, but she stumbled forward, the occasional glint of the metal rail alerting her to a new obstacle. Then she saw some small strips of light ahead of her and, as she focused on them, they solidified into a frame – it was a train window covered by a blackout blind. She continued to walk towards it, trying not to trip. Then, suddenly, there was a solid block of light as a door opened and a voice called her name, ‘Nurse Bickmore?’ A hand reached out to help her up a set of wooden steps.
Nurse Bickmore tried not to show quite how relieved she was by the sight of the soft, golden lights of the train carriages and the voice of the orderly who welcomed her on board. He took her valise and congratulated her on her light packing. Space was tight on board and some of these nurses packed as if they were going on holiday. Then he led her along the corridor to her sleeping quarters in an old first-class carriage. They had to stop constantly to stand aside and let people rush past carrying piles of linen and steaming kitchen pots. How could this entire world have been so well hidden in the dark cavern of the station? she wondered. But, more important, how would she ever be able to clear her uniform of the oil and soot stains from her journey across the tracks? The orderly apologised that she would have no time to rest, as the train was preparing to depart. Everyone else got to sleep at night-time, he grumbled, even at the front, but not the staff of the ambulance train. Night-time was for cleaning and restocking and getting ready for more patients. They had to sleep in shifts, whenever there was time. There wasn’t time now, so when she had taken off her cape, she’d be reporting to the kitchen carriage to get a mop and some hot water.
As they left the sleeping carriage, the train lurched forward and Nurse Bickmore steadied herself with one hand on the carriage wall. You’ll get used to it, said the orderly, and as she followed him along the corridor towards the kitchen car, the man warned her to keep her elbows in at all times. Then the train pulled out of the dark station and onto the open tracks, the wheels picked up speed and the carriage began to sway. She’d get used to that too.
Sister was waiting for her at the door of the kitchen carriage, steam misting up the windowpanes from the enormous vats of water boiling away on every gas ring. Nurse Bickmore was given a bucket of hot water and a mop and sent to her carriage, further up towards the engine. Get it ready, were her orders: sparkling clean, beds made, ready for patients arriving this morning. Keep the mop close to your body. Don’t swish it about too much or people will trip over it. And keep an eye on the bucket: if the train stops suddenly, you don’t want it tipping up and sending filthy water down the corridor.
Her carriage – her ward – was warm and bright from a row of electric lights along the wooden walls. It didn’t seem too dirty. There were some brown stains on the floor that could have been dirt or blood, but they came off quickly. She only needed a couple of changes of water to get it all sparkling clean. Then she turned the lights down, as instructed, and opened all the windows to let the fresh air do its bit. The train was rattling along now in open country and the breeze was wonderful. She closed the windows again and began polishing up the brasses on the light fittings and doors. Next came the beds. Her carriage had four rows of triple-layer bunks, each with a sprung mattress. There was a pile of linen on each mattress – proper pillows and sheets and blankets. She hadn’t expected to find such quality bedding. It took her a while to make up each bed, and the top bunk in particular was really tricky. She had to keep her balance on the ladder while reaching over into the far corner to tuck in the sheets and blankets. As she worked she realised there would be a lots of stretching and bending for her, once there was a wounded man lying up there, but he would be comfortable, in clean sheets, and that was what counted. Finally the carriage was done. Standing in the doorway, she looked at her work with satisfaction and pride.
As she walked back to the kitchen car to deposit her bucket, she paid attention to the contents of the other carriages. In some carriages there were seats for the walking wounded, cushioned and well built, like proper first-class carriage seats. In others she noticed frames and loops as well as seats: for stretchers, during pushloads, someone had told her. Pushloads – Nurse Bickmore noticed that whenever anyone said the word, their face froze for a moment.
By now it was light and the train was slowing alongside a platform. Bickmore took up her position by the carriage door, as instructed. She realised that she didn’t know quite what to expect and was getting really nervous, so the sudden banging of the doors opening all along the train made her jump. Looking out of the window, she saw row upon row of bearers with stretchers lined up alongside the train, standing still, frozen like a ghost army. All of a sudden they started to move, pushing and shouting as they approached the train. Then the first bearer pushed past into her carriage, and soon stretcher after stretcher was loaded up in front of her. Even though she tried, she couldn’t see much of her patients wrapped in their blankets, except for a glimpse of pale flesh. Bed by bed her carriage filled until there was no more space. The last bearer to leave caught her eye. All yours now, Nurse. Bickmore saw the exhaustion and strain on his face, his eyes bloodshot, unblinking. Then she was alone with her patients.
For the next hour Bickmore settled in the wounded men. She began by checking their tickets, trying to put names to faces. She noted those with a large red cross on their tickets: they were the most serious cases, and she would have to do everything for them. She reapplied bandages that had slipped, took temperatures and tried to pick up on any particular needs. One man had a bandaged jaw. Liquid diet, she noted, he’d need a straw: make sure to get one from the kitchen. She tucked in blankets and arranged pillows. She hopped up the ladders to the top bunks to make sure that all the men there had seen her face and knew she would care for them. Then the train lurched forward and they were off. Men cried out at the jerked movement. Bickmore flew between the bunks to find out what was hurting, then fetched more blankets and rolled them up to support fractured limbs.
When it was quiet again and they were rolling steadily, she went to the kitchen and fetched a huge vat of hot tea. In the carriage she handed it out in enamel mugs. It seemed that most of her patients finally started to relax. Bickmore stayed on her feet, walking the aisle between the bunks, watching, soothing, chatting and joking with the men. She handed out her first meal and afterwards, into the evening, her patients gradually began to fall asleep. She would have stayed on duty in her carriage for ever, but someone checked on her early the next morning and she was sent off to get some sleep.
After a week Bickmore had learned to pace herself, and much more besides. Tending her patients hour by hour, day by day, it felt the same as being on a hospital ward. Most journeys were so slow it was almost as if you weren’t moving at all. Any ideas she had about trains steaming across France were soon dashed. A full train meant you could only travel at ten miles an hour, so journeys that would normally take hours often took days. Hospital trains occupied the lowest rung on the priority list for rail use, so they were always stopping to make way for other trains carrying troops, ammunition and supplies.
She also got to know the train itself. There was a dispensary in one carriage with up-to-date disinfecting apparatus for instruments. If patients could walk, they would be treated in dressing rooms manned by orderlies. Bickmore was most impressed by the store carriages next to the kitchen. As well as cupboards and shelving, they had huge barrels of water and ice chests. More water was stored in vats on the roof, although there could never be enough water for cooking, washing and cleaning. She also came to understand why British ‘Khaki’ trains were so preferable to French ‘Green’ trains. On Green trains there were no corridors, so staff in one carriage could only move into the next one by stepping outside onto the footplate and jumping across – how one was supposed to do this in a nurse’s skirt while the train was moving was anyone’s guess. The doors of Green trains were also very narrow, making it difficult to get stretchers up into the carriage. Moreover, Khaki trains had windows that could be removed to make way for bad stretcher cases and entraining under pressure.
After a couple of months Bickmore had become a train expert. She moved quickly and neatly along the corridors, elbows tucked in, always looking ahead for what was coming towards her. She learned how to change a dressing whatever the position of the patient and however cramped the space. She never wasted a drop of water. She could tell how full the train was just from the way it moved along the rails. Initially she enjoyed the speed of an empty train, but soon she came to associate it with what lay ahead – the grim, grey lines of bearers and the pale-faced men on stretchers – and she came to prefer the slowness and certainty of a loaded train heading for the hospital. She had learned to fall asleep quickly and to wake suddenly; time on the train meant something different from time in the outside world. She now also knew what a pushload was, although she too never spoke of it and couldn’t bring herself to write about it to her family.
She learned not to mind the delays: hours sitting in sidings as other trains flew past. Somehow time seemed less wasted if she watched the view from the window with her patients, who were speculating where the trains might be going and what battle they were heading for. If they anticipated a long wait, staff even got off the train – keeping one eye on the open carriage door – to get some fresh air and stretch their legs or pick some flowers. When all of a sudden the jolt came that meant they were off again, the nurses would break for the train, scrambling up and slamming the doors behind them, while their patients cheered and cracked jokes about missing the 3.45 to Paddington.
Bickmore loved the joking in her carriage. She found that the best jokes came from the men on the ‘Blighty trains’ heading straight for the hospital ships to take them home to Britain. Blighty patients had Blighty tickets and Blighty smiles. Blighty smiles were the widest smiles of all and lasted the whole journey, however long the delays, and by the end Bickmore found she was wearing one too. But not all loads were Blighty ones. Some trains stopped at the line of base hospitals up and down the French coast, and the men knew they would be treated there and would probably soon return to the front. Those loads were less cheerful, and she had stopped counting how many times the men asked, ‘Do you think they’ll send me home after all, Sister?’ But at least they knew they would be safe and looked after for a while.
When she went on leave for the first time she realised how much she missed her train: it had become her home, and its crew her family. While most people would spend the war cooped up, she was permanently on the move, her feet hardly touching the ground. She thought of the train almost as some living being, warm and dependable, and knew its every noise and movement. And she would never tire of cleaning her carriage. When she had finished she would open its windows and let the night breeze renew them all.
Nurse Morgan, too, couldn’t understand why anyone would want to work anywhere else. Her home was the No. 3 Ambulance Train. About 300 yards long and with a maximum capacity of 440 patients, it was a more basic model than Nurse Bickmore’s train. It didn’t have the luxury of built-in beds; instead it had iron stands and straps where cots or stretchers were hung. These made nursing difficult, because when the train was moving at speed the stretchers swayed and swung about. The nurses themselves had basic quarters with very little comfort or storage space. One day an enterprising orderly had come in with a carton of empty confectionery boxes that he had got from a French patisserie while on leave. He fastened the sturdier ones to the walls above each bunk to make little dressing tables for the nurses’ mirrors and personal items.
Like all ambulance-train orderlies, those on board No. 3 were practical men. Not only could they repair the electrics and the gas supply, but when the cooks complained that the train’s food-storage area was too small, they converted an empty carriage into a meat-safe by lining it with a wood-and-canvas frame with shelving, where the kitchen staff put trays of cold water to keep the temperature cool. So well did the storage work that No. 3 had fresh meat for its patients even in hot summers. Its kitchens produced good, hearty food – soups, stews, milk puddings – essential for malnourished men with nothing to look forward to on the long journeys but their next meal.
Something bothered Nurse Morgan as soon as she joined No. 3. There were no curtains on any of the carriage windows, so patients squinted in the glare of bright sunlight or were woken much too early in the summer. Others didn’t like being stared at by civilians as the train slowed to go through stations. So she bought as much fabric as she could from a French haberdasher’s and, in her free time, sewed curtains for every single carriage on the train, which the orderlies fastened up for her. A pair of curtains made each carriage a little more like a home. She soon looked for other ways to bring comfort to her patients. When the train stopped at a siding she always jumped down to pick flowers. One of her patients gave her an empty shell casing that he had polished up to a smart brassy shine, and it was never empty of flowers on a little shelf in her carriage. When word got round, Nurse Morgan soon had more shell casings than she could have imagined – and every carriage had a collection of highly polished vases full of French wild flowers.
The long hours on the rails or in the sidings gave everyone on the train plenty of time to get to know each other, and the patients always wanted to leave their nurses with a gift to remember them by. So Nurse Morgan didn’t just get her artillery shells: she was also given road signs written in German, horseshoes and even a French roof tile, carefully saved in a kitbag and the only thing its finder had to offer the nurse who had eased his journey with such skill and care. Trains were generally chatty places, everyone talking all at once, carrying on conversations across the aisles. Nurse Morgan therefore paid particular attention to the men in the top bunks, who found it difficult to join in and could only stare at the wooden ceiling. She would spend hours up a stepladder, chatting to them and making sure that they were comfortable.2 But she knew that not every train was full of happy men bound for Blighty with a shell casing in their kitbag. For each patient who was delivered home in soothing comfort, there was another for whom every jolt of the carriage was agony, the long journey a mixture of boredom and pain, and who cried themselves to sleep.3
It was in the summer of 1916 that Morgan felt she finally came to understand the war. They knew what was coming because they were delayed more than ever before; endless supply trains flew past them towards the front, and camps and depots sprang up overnight alongside the rails. Then there was no more time for flowers or presents, and the pushloads began to arrive. Unlike Nurse Bickmore, Morgan explained frankly to her family at home that a pushload was a train running at full capacity – no empty cots or seats, and all available back-up space used for stretchers. During the Somme offensive the pushload of 440 or more became the norm, as No. 3 struggled to keep up. Carefully planned entraining and detraining routines went to pieces in the face of the sheer numbers of casualties at the railheads, and within a week of the Somme the whole system of transit simply broke down.
Morgan realised just how bad things were when No. 3 train pulled into a base station to deliver its pushload, only to find 2,000 men who had arrived on an earlier train still waiting to be removed, with stretchers simply abandoned on the platform, the sidings and inside the station. There was not a spare inch of platform on which to detrain No. 3’s patients, so the train sat there for hours until the previous arrivals were finally moved. Morgan tried to calm her patients, while all around them they could hear the moaning of men in agony, the train an island in a sea of human desolation.
But that was just the beginning. Soon afterwards they took another pushload to Le Havre and, as they pulled up to the platform, someone pointed out that all the other trains in the station were the dreaded TATs. Temporary Ambulance Trains were standard rolling stock pressed into emergency service and originally intended to move only the lightly wounded. Yet by the end of July 1916 they were being used to transport all sorts of casualties and arrived at their destination like a chain of charnel carriages; for the wounded men, the journey on these inadequate trains was agonising. As they watched the TAT wagons being unloaded at Le Havre station, a desperate medical officer asked the No. 3 staff for help with the detrained men. Nurse Morgan and a group of others volunteered to stay behind at the station after their train had left.
For almost two days they worked non-stop, constantly worrying that their supplies would run out and waiting for word that the base hospitals in town were finally ready to take in the wounded. But then they were told that the hospitals had no more room. The train controllers were ordered to divert all trains from Le Havre as its station and hospitals were full to bursting point with casualties. Some of the nurses went out into the town to beg for supplies. Nurse Morgan worked on, trying to catch some sleep whenever she could, standing up or leaning against a pillar or a door, ten minutes here and there. Then, two days later, the base hospitals began to open again and their bearers came to take away the patients. When No. 3 returned to pick up its staff and Nurse Morgan felt again the movement of the train under her feet, she smiled with relief.
But the summer offensive went on and the pushloads continued. Whenever the train stopped at a railhead, more and more patients were loaded into every available space. There was also a new, unwritten rule: moribund patients were no longer taken on board. If their ticket said they wouldn’t survive the journey, they were left behind at the railhead and the bearers would take them back to the CCS. As the train pulled away from the railhead, staff tried not to look back on the men who had been left to die.4 Not that they had much time to think about it. At Vimy they picked up 436 patients, almost all having received no treatment except first aid from the bearers who had found them on the battlefield several days before. Often the men fell into a coma-like sleep as soon as they were laid down in the corridors or on a bed, and nothing could wake them. Their clothes and bandages were caked in mud and blood and it was almost impossible to keep the carriages clean. Sometimes all the nurses could do was shake out the blankets and then put them back on the patients.
Another time, 539 stretchers were somehow loaded onto the train, far in excess of its capacity. Stretchers hung from every strap and were laid out in the corridors, end to end. Morgan and the other nurses struggled just to move around the train, and their backs almost broke from the strain of nursing on their knees and trying to keep their balance. They toppled over onto their patients when the train lurched and gave up carrying vats of tea, as being too dangerous.
This was the hardest load she had to deal with. The wounded men’s journey from the battlefield to the railhead where they were loaded onto No. 3 had taken two days. During that time they had received no medical care. There were spare uniforms on board, but before they could be distributed, and before any serious medical care could be given, each man had to be cut out of his uniform remnants and the mud and blood on his body washed away. With so many of them having multiple wounds, this process took almost a whole day; only then could treatment be given and new dressings applied. There was another reason why Morgan would always remember this load: it was the first to infect the train with lice. And it was when they found the bugs in their bed linen that the nurses finally lost patience with the whole damn war.
Only at times when a smaller load gave them some breathing space did Morgan have time to look out of the window and see what was happening in the outside world. She watched troop trains go by that were at least twice as long as No. 3, full to bursting with fresh soldiers for the front. Often she drew the curtains on her carriage so that the men couldn’t see each other. At one station the train chugged slowly past an almost endless line of shells – so that’s what they looked like before she turned them into vases. During another long stop in a siding they heard the cracking of anti-aircraft fire close by and climbed up onto the carriage roof to watch an aircraft weave and dive to escape before it was shot down. It was terrifically exciting, although no one knew whether it was friend or foe. It made Nurse Morgan take an interest in the war in the air. One of her patients on the next load turned out to be in the Balloon Observer Corps. He had fallen out of his balloon during a storm, but had got entangled in its ropes and only suffered some broken ribs, a broken ankle and some bad rope-burn. He drew pictures in her notebook of his accident and also showed her how to identify German and British aircraft.
In September the train was sent deep into the battle zone, further than they had ever gone before. It was ‘the Frontiest bit of Front so far’, Nurse Morgan wrote home. The train grew silent as the staff gathered at the windows, staring out at the blasted landscape they had heard so much about. Some patients turned away from the view they knew too well and asked Morgan to draw the curtains. One of them pointed out that the smashed ruins they were passing through had once been the beautiful town of Albert. Its inhabitants fled long ago, he mumbled into his pillow. The only people still living there were soldiers, trapped by the offensive, having dug themselves shelters in the rubble. As they peered out of the window at the carcass of the town, they could see small plumes of smoke rising from fires, and occasionally some men – as grey and dusty as the rubble – were moving around. They soon passed other ruined towns and a landscape turned inside out by shelling. No one spoke until they arrived at the railhead and the banging of the train doors woke them from their contemplation of the destruction they had seen.
Sometimes their view was more heartening. On a journey to collect casualties from Fricourt and Mametz, the train travelled slowly through a huge British cavalry camp. Bright sunshine gleamed off the horses’ tack as drills were carried out by lance-carrying cavalrymen. A little further on they could see a corral of horses, their coats glistening in the bright day. It reminded many of home. Suddenly the horses became nervous, shaking their heads and stamping their hooves, as right overhead appeared an RFC squadron flying low over the scene before their eyes. As the train moved slowly through the camp, they passed a huge crowd of colonial soldiers in colourful uniforms, all seated on the ground and listening to a sermon given by an army chaplain. Nurse Morgan couldn’t hear him above the noise of the train and the aircraft, but the congregation was listening intently. A patient looking up from his stretcher pointed out the different nationalities. There were the turbans of the Indian contingent and the bush hats of the Anzacs. When the soldiers all got to their feet and started singing, the nurses tried to work out which hymn it was, but the train had passed through the camp before they managed to identify it.
Then, at the end of September 1916, they had their first experience of shellfire. Pulling into a railhead to collect casualties, the train rocked as shells landed nearby. They weren’t hit, but it was a timely warning. Enemy aircraft were now targeting trains, hoping to catch supplies and reinforcements before they reached the front, and ambulance trains were fair game. As the autumn nights drew in, blackout protocols were reintroduced. Orderlies kept watch and, if they heard the sound of aircraft in the dark, the train immediately stopped and all the lights were switched off. Then they waited, hardly daring to breathe, until the danger had passed. When they entrained at night, they had to do it in almost complete darkness, with torches shone only briefly on the faces of the patients while the MOs checked their paperwork.
Throughout October No. 3 travelled deep inside the battle zone. The staff now understood why their patients averted their eyes from the windows when the train passed through the devastated landscape. Nurse Morgan also kept her head down when she walked along the corridors and avoided looking out of the windows any more than necessary. When snow started to fall in November, she thought it looked beautiful, before reminding herself what those white contours were hiding. But she was glad to see the snow as it meant an end to the offensives. Loads returned to manageable levels, and by December they were carrying half-loads again. They now had time for their patients, for each other and for the view from the window.
But before long it was spring again, the battles resumed and the pushloads returned. After another year and countless journeys between front railheads, base hospitals and ports, on 23 December 1917 an empty No. 3 train found itself in sidings right in the middle of a large trench network close to the front. Word came through that they would be there for at least three days. It was quiet in the sector and there was little to do. Nurse Morgan stood by the carriage door and, when she opened it to let the cold air nip her nose, she realised that despite looking at the landscape of the war for two years, she had never stepped off the train to examine it up close. She found two other curious nurses and so they got their capes and gloves, jumped down from the carriage and went off to explore.
They soon became the centre of attention: the soldiers in the trenches thought the women were a kind of early Christmas present. Nurse Morgan found herself surrounded by men surreptitiously trying to comb their hair and get some of the mud off their faces. Someone at the back was even polishing his tunic buttons, and it was nice to see tunic buttons that didn’t have a ticket tied to them. The men were keen to give the nurses a tour, and earnest discussions ensued about what they should see. Tanks first, no question. But could the nurses climb up and see the insides? Of course they could, Morgan thought. These were women who scampered over rail tracks in the dark and worked on moving trains. She loved the thought of being one of the first women in France to climb up and peer down inside the huge machines.
When they were walked over the frozen white battlefield, someone pointed out the German lines in the distance. Morgan had never seen the enemy so close, but it was an oddly empty experience. She could detect just a little movement here and there and some plumes of smoke. The Germans were just like them, she thought. Stuck at war over Christmas. Then the nurses were helped down a ladder into an actual trench, walking its length and seeing how the men there lived. They were shown a dugout and were impressed by its size and by the fire burning in the hollowed-out grate. Someone even made them cocoa, which was quite a treat: usually it was nurses making cocoa for the soldiers. Nurse Morgan returned to the trenches on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, this time with almost all the other nurses from the train. It was then that she collected her very own shell casing, easing it carefully out of the ground after a soldier helped her find one that had gone off cleanly and wasn’t too dented.
In return for their hospitality, she told the soldiers about her work on the train. They were amazed to hear that only the driver ever knew where the train was going, and that often they entrained their patients without knowing where the railhead was or even its name. They laughed when she told them how the train occasionally set off all of a sudden while they were still in the station café or shopping in town. But there was no need to worry, she assured the men. The train moved so slowly they could usually catch up with it at the signal points.
When the time came for No. 3 to continue its journey, Nurse Morgan stood on the footplate of her carriage to wave all the soldiers thank you and goodbye. She hoped most sincerely not to meet any of them again in one of her carriages, she told them. As the train gathered speed, she watched the soldiers disappear in the distance, grey coats against the snow, waving farewell. Then the cold drove her back inside and the men went back to the comfort of their braziers in the trenches – nurses and soldiers returning to their different worlds of war.
Sister Margaret Brander started her service in France at the hospital in Wimereux, where most of the Neuve Chapelle casualties had been taken. When one of her best nurses died of cerebrospinal fever, the loss drove her to ask for a transfer. She received orders to report to the station on 18 May 1915 to join No. 10 Ambulance Train. She would be the Khaki’s senior nurse. When she turned up at the station that morning in the pouring rain, the train waited for her with a pushload of 265 patients. Sister Brander didn’t even have time to take off her coat before she found herself attending to the wounded in their rain-sodden clothing and dressings.
It took hours to process them all – checking temperatures and diet sheets, making sure they were fit to travel – and when they had finished, Sister Brander went to sleep in her uniform, too tired to undress. When she woke the next day they had arrived at Rouen, where the men were detrained. The carriages were still damp and humid from the rain-soaked men, so Sister Brander ordered that all windows and doors be opened so that the train could be thoroughly aired before the next load arrived. After twenty-four hours on No. 10, it felt as if she had never worked anywhere else.
Yet it took some time to get used to being on a train. Although No. 10 was constantly moving, Sister Brander felt as vulnerable as she would have been at a casualty clearing station at the front. Collecting one load in the spring of 1916, the train was so close to the enemy guns that the carriages were shaking as the shells fell nearby. She hurried the bearers and chivvied the orderlies so that they could get going as quickly as possible. But it wasn’t just the enemy she worried about. When they took in another pushload, there were so many men on board that their weight was too much for the train to bear and, with an awful-sounding crack and then a thump, the couplings snapped and the train slammed to a halt. Inside the overcrowded carriages men flew out of their bunks, landing on other patients lying on stretchers on the floor. In the kitchen carriage everything fell off the shelves and almost all the crockery and glassware was smashed; only the enamel tea mugs survived. It took the nurses hours to return the men to their beds, re-dress their wounds and calm them down. The kitchen staff and orderlies took almost as long to restore the kitchen and the stores carriages, and no meals could be served, only tea and water in the tough old mugs. Meanwhile the driver and his assistants rigged up a chain to reattach the carriages to the engine. It took three times longer than normal to get to base, and Sister Brander could feel the strain of the engine hauling their pushload, tearing and tugging along every yard of the track. Afterwards she was alert to every sound the train made: she knew that a sudden creak could signal disaster. The replacement crockery that she ordered was all made from enamel and tin.
Then there was the constant danger of derailment. The continuous traffic had worn out the tracks and throughout 1916 they were derailed several times. Although it wasn’t particularly dangerous – the train was travelling too slowly to roll over or crash – everybody was terrified by the sudden sensation of the carriages coming off the tracks.5 Then they all had to get off, one by one, with the unconscious patients tied to their stretchers. They had to wait beside the train, sometimes in the rain or snow, and nurses and patients cheered on the orderlies who tried to lift the derailed carriages back onto the track.
Accidents further up the line, or a track damaged by enemy shells, could cause serious delays. Such delays not only put further strain on their tight supplies, especially the available water, but caused other significant disruptions as well. If the train was late returning to its base, it would miss the post or the payroll, which was bad for staff morale. It was often up to Sister Brander to fix things. As soon as they pulled into the base, she would run to the telegraph office to signal the army post service and pay-masters to reschedule their deliveries; and she became skilled at playing the sympathy card to get their attention. Often the supplies they were expecting had been loaded onto other trains, so the nurses had to buy what they could in town to restock their larder. An empty store carriage, concluded Sister Brander, was almost as much trouble as a carriage full of patients.
Despite all this, she came to love her train. After she paid a visit to a friend on another ambulance train she reported back to her team that it didn’t come close to No. 10. She encouraged her nurses to pick flowers on their long stops and to keep the carriages bright and cheery. She was always concerned that the men got bored, so she spent much of her pay on books and magazines, which she distributed around the carriages. She loved the train year-round, even though each season brought its own problems. In spring her patients often arrived with their clothes drenched by the rain, and in summer the train would become insufferably hot. In autumn thick fog could slow the train to a crawling pace or stop their progress altogether. In winter it was difficult to keep the men warm, as the heating system only worked when the train was in motion and the engine generated steam, so when they had to stop the carriages soon became freezing cold. If they spent many days in below-freezing temperatures, their entire water supply froze; the orderlies had to light small fires underneath boilers and pipes to try and get it going again. One morning it was so cold that when a nurse started to mop the floor of her carriage, the water froze solid in minutes, turning it into an ice rink.
Each year Sister Brander was determined that they should celebrate Christmas, no matter where they were. Just before Christmas 1915 she wrote to her local newspaper describing her work, and in response she was sent enough donations to put together a small gift parcel for each patient, containing paper and pencil, a handkerchief, socks and a woollen scarf. They even had ham and eggs for breakfast on Christmas Day and plum pudding for lunch. Then one of the orderlies revealed that he had brought his bagpipes and he roamed the corridors all afternoon, the sound of his playing carrying from one end of the train to the other.
The train took Sister Brander to places, and showed her sights, she had never imagined. One night she woke when she felt the train slowing – always a bad sign. When she got up to find out what was happening, she saw a work party laying new track alongside theirs. They were working by torchlight and the scene had an almost fairytale quality, the men’s silhouettes dancing in the flickering light. They encountered more and more work parties during the late spring and early summer of 1916, and she realised that a big offensive must be on its way. The groups of soldiers marching towards the front alongside the track got more and more numerous, and when the train slowly passed through one of the huge temporary camps, the noise of so many men in one place was unsettling for everyone. None of her patients slept until they were back on clear track.
One day, as they slowed to go through another camp near Abbeville, she noticed a soldier who was tied up to a post. What is this about? she asked her patients. Field Punishment Number One, Sister, said one. You get this for nothing, chimed in another. A bit of drinking, rowdiness, lip to an officer: you get tied to the post for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. Supposed to give you time to think about what you’ve done. But all it gives you is sunburn and not being able to itch your chats. By now the entire carriage was rumbling with resentment. Sister Brander was glad for the train to pick up speed and take her away from the senseless scene. Turning again to her patients, she smiled and talked brightly about something else – anything that would make them all forget the world beyond the window.
Leonard Horner joined No. 16 Ambulance Train in the summer of 1915. He was a Quaker – able to serve, but unable to fight – and had volunteered for the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. Like everyone in the FAU, he had taken several courses in first aid and medical care in their Oxfordshire training camp before leaving for the Western Front. Initially Horner was pleased with his posting to No. 16. Everyone knew it was the best train in service. It had been privately commissioned by the United Kingdom Flour Millers’ Association and consisted of fifteen of the most up-to-date coaches, with smart copper boilers, huge water-storage capacity and upholstered seating and bunks in carriages painted a bright white.6 But within days Horner began to lose his enthusiasm. To start with, the train was difficult to clean. It had 708 windows and Horner grew to hate every one of them. In addition, the smart white paint showed every speck of dirt and got chipped every day, so after every inch of it had been washed clean, he had to touch up the paint with a brush. Having spent his first day on the train cleaning, Horner wrote to his family that evening requesting several sets of overalls so that his smart FAU uniform wouldn’t get stained.
Then there were the large water tanks. When he was shown them on his first day, no one mentioned how they got filled up. At some railheads there was overhead water storage with pipes and pumps, but most of the time they had to be filled by hand.7 Any train staff who could be spared dismounted and formed a line from the tanks to the mains supply, passing buckets along one after the other. The line often stretched across the entire railyard, over platforms and into goods sheds, where there might be only a single tap to fill one bucket at a time. It took hours to fill up the tanks. Sometimes, at smaller railyards, locals would join in the line to help them and then it wasn’t so bad.
Throughout the autumn of 1915 there were very few casualties aboard No. 16 and Horner got bored. And although the carriages were empty, he was still cleaning them, day after day. When one evening another orderly pointed to the unpicked bunches of purple grapes that were withering on the vine in the French countryside, Horner felt that he too was going to waste. The next day he requested a transfer to a despatch-rider unit. While his request was being processed, his letters home got more and more angry about the injustices and privations of life on the train.
He hated the delays most. They spent so much time just waiting to move on, with nothing to keep them busy except more cleaning. When there was fog they couldn’t see any debris or damaged tracks ahead of them, so derailments were common. Horner almost broke his back the first time he got out with the others to try and lift a carriage back onto the rails. When fog was thickest, the train moved as slowly as it could and one of the orderlies walked ahead, looking out and alerting the driver to any obstacles. At other times the fifteen carriages were too heavy for one engine to pull them up a steep hill, so additional engines had to be sent for. This meant more delays and, as Horner soon found, delays begat delays. No. 16 had been specially designed to take patients right up alongside the hospital ships waiting in port, and the train ran to the ship timetable, which was driven by the tides. So if they were delayed, they missed their ship and had to wait at least twenty-four hours for the next one, to the dreadful disappointment of their patients, who thought they were on the last leg home.
Yet worse than delays was damage to the train – and it wasn’t always caused by the enemy. In a tunnel outside Rouen they passed a heavy goods train whose load had come loose and it scraped along one side of No. 16, breaking every single windowpane, ripping off all the door handles and leaving deep scratches in the carriage walls. The repairs took over a week and the train’s staff had to find and pay for rooms in Rouen while they waited. But damage from enemy fire was more common. Trains became easy targets for German guns. The engine’s smokestack was visible from afar in cold, clear weather, and increasingly aircraft were sent out especially to look for trains. One such air raid landed no direct hits, but still smashed 250 of No. 16’s windows. Another destroyed the kitchen carriage, so there was no food or hot water: staff and patients had to make do with cold drinks, bread and biscuits. They had to pull into the nearest railhead, which was located next to an ammunition dump, and while the mechanics worked hard to repair the damage, no one slept that night for fear of another air strike. With the shells nearby, they knew that this time they were likely to be blown to pieces. Although the repairs weren’t finished, they decided to move on the next morning.
When the train entered the battle zone, it often came under fire. Once they were shelled during entrainment, and orderlies and bearers had to dive under the carriages, leaving the poor patients on stretchers to their fate. A Quaker brother from another ambulance train told Horner that one time they were pulling away from a railhead with a pushload when the enemy broke through the lines close by and a huge number of British soldiers suddenly appeared alongside the slow-moving train. They jumped on, desperately hanging on to footplates and couplings as the train got them all away to safety.
But then, sometime in 1916, Horner withdrew his request for a transfer. He had to acknowledge that he had begun to enjoy being on his train. He had got used to its rhythms and quirks, and the strains and groans of the engine no longer irritated him. Instead, he found himself urging it on under his breath as he worked: Come on, old boy, you can make it. His family knew that his mood had changed when they received a letter asking for tins of toffee for his patients. One night the train stopped in open country and Horner climbed out on the roof to look at the stars. He could see the whole night sky and tried to pick out the constellations he had learned at school. In his next letter home he asked for star charts.
Each ambulance train was a community on wheels and Horner now tried his best to improve morale among the staff. He helped put together a newsletter, as recommended by Quaker HQ for all ambulance trains, featuring plenty of jokes as well as reports on flora, fauna and the astronomy visible from the train roof.8 He organised a chess tournament, carefully timed so that the finals took place in the last hours before arriving in port. There was also a football team and, when the train stopped at a casualty clearing station for more than a day, the train’s orderlies would arrange a match against its staff; Horner looked the other way when some of his patients placed bets on the outcome.
No. 16’s staff constantly had to adapt to new situations. In the autumn of 1917 more and more patients arrived on board with infectious diseases in addition to their wounds. Horner suggested that they allocate a quarantine carriage to prevent staff and other patients from getting infected with meningitis, flu or rheumatic fever. Ambulance-train staff were more likely to fall ill than any other units at the front: a train was simply too confined a space ever to be completely cleared of bugs and viruses. Horner also organised the supplementary carriages that were needed to care for a load of mental cases, who had to be kept in confinement. These were attached to the end of the train and had their own staff. One night one of the patients escaped by jumping out of a window. As he was suffering from religious mania, Horner tried to get him to return by calling out religious exhortations into the darkness, but they were unable to catch him. The fugitive was later found in a prison for deserters in Rouen, and the train’s medical officer who collected him assured the staff there that he was not a coward, but delusional.
Horner was also put in charge of the carriages for POWs that were sometimes attached to ambulance trains to transport them to camps. This was work he really enjoyed. It was interesting to meet the enemy up close, and they didn’t seem all that different from his own side. Most of all, they were a good source of souvenirs. Horner swapped cigarettes and French currency for the best war trophies – Luger bullets, woollen uniform caps, crests, badges, even a time-fuse from a German bomb – which he sent back home to his family. But despite his pleadings and his offers of many boxes of cigarettes, he was never able to get the most valuable trophy of all: a German helmet.
One day, when Horner looked out of the window and saw a despatch rider going by on his motorcycle, he felt a sense of relief that his transfer hadn’t come through. Not for him the lonely life of mud-spattered goggles, rutted roads and shouted orders. He worked on the smartest and best-kept ambulance train. He was part of the closest community serving at the Western Front. By the end of the war, No. 16 train had carried over 150,000 passengers from the front to the ships for Blighty. Quaker histories noted what Horner already knew: that the Friends’ work on the train was the most consistent and solidly useful done anywhere at the war.