THE AFTERMATH of every major battle was human carnage on an unimaginable scale. One of the most demanding and heartbreaking jobs on the Western Front was that of giving medical help to the wounded and dying. In the worst fighting, there could be more than 10,000 British casualties in a single day. The stretcher bearers, medical orderlies, nurses and doctors who had to try to save the lives of the injured did a remarkable job – but they were often overwhelmed by the scale of the tragedy they had to deal with.
The British army had prided itself on the quality of its medical services in the front line ever since the days of Florence Nightingale, who had campaigned for better treatment of wounded soldiers during the Crimean War. The trained personnel of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service, were helped by medical orderlies from the Red Cross and the Order of St John. Between them, wounded men were evacuated from the battlefield through an infrastructure of Advanced Dressing Stations, Casualty Clearing Stations and Base Hospitals. Convoys of Field Ambulances, Ambulance Trains, and even barges, ferried the wounded along the chain of medical command, all the way back to Britain and the many war hospitals around the country. Despite the careful integration of medical services, nobody could have predicted the vast number of casualties or the appalling nature of the wounds, in what was the first war of the modern industrial era. Shrapnel and machine gun fire tore apart the bodies of the countless thousands who advanced through No Man's Land. Depending on the terrain, a minimum of two, but often four, men were needed to carry a stretcher. Yet, with only 32 stretcher bearers per 1,000 men, it is easy to see that if 60% of men became casualties in battle, the stretcher bearers would be hopelessly understaffed. In the terrible mud of Passchendaele, many stretcher bearers could manage only two trips to pick up the wounded before total exhaustion.
While riflemen and machine gunners could distinguish between the combatant and non-combatant, artillerymen could not. Shrapnel was responsible for a large proportion of the 4,039 RAMC officers and men who were killed in the war, and for three times as many wounded. It meant stretcher bearers joined the long trail of injured men making their own way back for treatment, leaving even fewer men to help the wounded. As most battlefield wounds became septic within six hours, many men either died or had to have limbs amputated simply because their evacuation and treatment was too slow.
After each battle, the walking wounded and the stretcher bearers would converge on Advanced Dressing Stations near the trenches. All that was available here was first aid of the most rudimentary kind, given by the RAMC. The wounded were then loaded onto ambulances and transported to Casualty Clearing Stations, a few miles behind the front line. Here emergency operations, including amputations, would be undertaken. The wounded were then sent on down the line to better-equipped Base Hospitals near the coast. There were over sixty military hospitals for British troops in Belgium and France, many of them organised around the main medical bases such as Etaples, Rouen and Calais. At every stage of this gigantic rescue operation, the professional medical staff found themselves hampered by dreadful conditions and a lack of facilities. Furthermore, despite a near eight-fold increase in the number of military nurses during the war, there remained a severe shortage of nursing help at the Front.
With the formation of the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) in 1910, the medical services had 47,000 partially trained women ready for work when war broke out. The VADs were intended for home duty only, but such was the urgent need for volunteers to work at the Front that many more women answered the call. By 1918, there were over 80,000 VADs, of whom around 8,000 were given the opportunity to serve abroad. They were unpaid, and as a result most were recruited from middle and upper class families. The minimum age to join was nineteen, and to go to France a woman was meant to be twenty three. But many younger teenagers tricked their way in and were readily accepted by the authorities, such was the enormous demand for their labour. By 1917, it was not uncommon for seventeen and eighteen year olds, fresh from school or college, to be nursing in Casualty Clearing Stations just behind the front line, and in Base Hospitals.
Nothing could have prepared these young nurses for the life and death struggles they had to face in the makeshift wards and medical outposts to which they were hastily posted. With a sheltered middle class upbringing behind them and only a basic training in first aid, they suddenly had to work around the clock, nursing and comforting men close to death. They had to deal with horrendous physical injuries and to dispose of amputated limbs. The care, skill and courage these inexperienced young volunteers displayed was legendary. They became known as “The Roses of No Man's Land”, named after the popular wartime song that celebrated their heroism and compassion.
The Royal Army Medical Corps stretcher bearer had one of the toughest jobs at the Front. Roving amongst the dead and wounded, he criss-crossed the exposed battlefield trying to recover appallingly injured men, or carried the latest trench casualty perhaps a mile or more to the nearest Aid Post. For William Easton, just 19 at the time, the job was onerous in the extreme, but one which he carried out with great self-assurance, saving friend and foe alike. It was to win him the respect of both the British Tommy and the German Jerry. At 100 years old, Bill recalled the time when heroism and stoicism had to come in equal amounts.
When carrying a stretcher, it was important to get a good team together. Some of the bearers were hopeless, not very efficient carriers because they would be frightened all the time. At Ypres we lost no end of RAMC men, and replacements had to be found among the men of the Army Service Corps at the Base. These chaps had only ever dealt with supplies and had never carried a stretcher. They'd turn up for one trip and start moaning like the devil, then you'd perhaps have a day off and they wouldn't be back, they'd go sick. I was lucky, I teamed up with a northern lad called Tom Barrass. He was a rough diamond and swore like a trooper, but he was an absolute inspiration to me. I don't know how many shells would be coming over, but Tom would walk through them, he seemed to take no notice. He told me, “If you're going to get hit by one of these shells, you'll be hit, and that's all you need to know.”
The first time we went up to the trenches, Tom put together his new team, saying to me, “You're the lightest of us. Left-handed, aren't you? Right, you'll be on the right side of the stretcher because your left hand will be stronger than your right.” Of course he was correct, I couldn't carry a stretcher with my right hand, I couldn't even bear anything on my right shoulder. Then he said, “You are going up the line tonight, first time. Now when we go in just hang close behind me. You'll probably be a bit frightened, but never show it, fear is infectious, just get along.” He'd talk on the way, and I don't know what he was saying half the time, but he kept me going so that I got to rely on him. Our Field Ambulance unit lost any number of men, half of whom we hardly knew, but Tom just seemed to go on and on.
As stretcher bearers, we had precious little medical training, and were hardly allowed to touch the wounds. If they had a bad open wound you'd just cover it up and get them out of it, that was the most important thing. But some of the men were so badly wounded, you'd practically pick them up in pieces. If they were still alive, you had to cart them away, and you knew jolly well that they'd die at any time. If a man died on the journey, we weren't allowed to put the bodies down, or tip them off the stretcher, once they were on board we had to carry them out. We didn't think anything of struggling for perhaps two or three hours down to a Dressing Station and on arrival found the man had died. It made you hardened to the sights, it had to. I lost all feeling once I got into the line. My one object was to get the people out and be done with it. Some of the other men thought I was heartless, but it was the only way to survive.
The only time I really got upset was during the Battle of Messines. Tanks were used, and one was hit by a new type of armour-piercing shell, containing mustard gas. Four or five men were brought out alive but there was nothing anyone could do for them. They were just taken to the Dressing Station and laid out in the open on a bank. I was at the Dressing Station at the time and we weren't allowed to go near these men, but you could see these little bubbles of mustard gas coming from their mouths. It took two or three days for them to die and I shall never forget that! One of them was kicking up an awful row. I said they should have given them an injection, or shot them, anything. But they kept them lying there, and the men didn't like it. Officially, we didn't know that injections were given to help a badly-wounded man die, and the powers that be were careful you didn't see anything controversial, but it went on because you knew jolly well that some of the wounded you brought in were never going to live.
If a man was shot and fell in an attack, the practice, in our Division, was to stick his rifle and bayonet upside down in the ground, so the stretcher bearers could see where the wounded man was. However, most of the wounded we picked up were going up to or back down from the front line. Most of the wounds were caused by shellfire and unfortunately most of those were pretty hefty wounds, you'd reckon they wouldn't last the journey. We couldn't bandage the wounded, the job was to get them on the stretcher and if there was anything obvious you could tie up, we would, but we rarely had anything other than simple shell dressings, and they were poor affairs really. Of course you couldn't help but get blood on your hands and it was awful feeling them all sticky, slowly drying, gluing your fingers together. It was a horrible sensation, and if we could, we would try and stop at a shell hole to wash our hands.
Up at Ypres, we used to go up the line and we'd be waist deep in mud. We were carrying the wounded down near a place called Hooge, where there had been a terrific amount of fighting. We had taken the village but the Germans had retreated to the next height. The only way down was to get across the muddy field to a little rise that was a bit drier, then we could walk down to a place called Birr Crossroads, on the Menin Road. There was a Dressing Station there, nicknamed the Elephant Dugout because it was about forty foot deep, steel-lined, and was supposed to be strong enough to stand any shell. It was no easy job, either, to carry the wounded down into the station or to bring them back up for the ambulances which took them to Ypres at night. The trees along the Menin Road were all shattered, so canvas was hung across the trees to stop the Germans observing who was coming or going. But the first thing they would do was blaze away with shrapnel at these trees to knock the canvas down, so that by 9am, they could see again.
Every now and again, the Germans would lob some high explosive or shrapnel over, perhaps four or five shells. The crossroads was a place the Germans targeted at regular intervals, and we could count the shots and then rush by and get under cover. There was a little shelter built close to the crossroads, where we could stop until we were ready to run to the Dressing Station. You'd got perhaps twenty yards to run, but if you hesitated you could run into the next salvo. One night, the Germans fired some very heavy shells and one penetrated the Elephant Dugout and killed everyone inside. Unfortunately, the dead included a lot of ambulance men having a well-needed rest and a cup of tea, and the casualties were fearful. The dugout was a mess and some of the dead were cut to pieces and had to be removed in sandbags.
You couldn't carry a man down in the mud at Ypres, it was almost impossible; one trip down a trench in those conditions and you would be all in – exhausted. If you got two or three wounded men down in a day, that was all you could expect to do. We had to carry men in fours there, and we had to be very careful because you could do more damage to a man than the shell if you jolted him too much or he fell off the stretcher.
Most of the wounded looked like a heap of rags, and simply trying to get them out of the firing line put finish to quite a lot of them. If we could have carried them out straight away it wouldn't have been so bad, but often we had to wait until darkness. The wounded rarely had clean bullet wounds, most were injured by shrapnel and the shock meant they were beyond talking, beyond words. Now and again, you'd get one who'd ask how long it would be before they went to Blighty. Some would ask which hospital they were going to, but of course we hadn't got a clue. They wanted to know impossible things, we hardly knew where we were, let alone anything else. We never saw a hospital, we only went to the Dressing Stations and then ambulances would take over. Tom was always as cheerful as anything, and used to tell them all sorts of tales, because he was at the head end of the stretcher, but most wounded soldiers didn't worry. They just lay on the stretcher and took the chance of having a rest.
Some of the wounded would groan and kick up an awful row, which was rather nerve-pulling. To make carrying easier, we had slings which we put round our shoulders and over the stretcher's handles, so if anybody was too restless we used the slings to tie them on. It was mostly the older married men that were a bit of trouble sometimes. Some of them would worry about what was going to happen, if they were going to lose a hand or anything like that. Tom would say, “You never know – wonderful what they can do now.” Then he'd tell them about something he'd done at home. He was a jolly good chap for that job. Still, some of the wounded were very emotional and would look on the black side. They'd start up and it would be infectious and some of the stretcher bearers would get emotional, too; they were frightened of being frightened, that was the truth of it.
In a general attack at Gallipoli, Dick Barron would follow the troops forward into action, quickly tending to the casualties he came across, and evacuating as many wounded as he could from the exposed battlefield. It was a highly dangerous job that did not spare the men of the RAMC, as Dick was to discover.
There was a place called Chocolate Hill and in front of it was a salt plain across which we were ordered to attack. I was attached to the medical officer so I was to more or less follow the fighting troops to deal with casualties. As we crossed the plain in waves we were attacked by bursting shrapnel, flying all over the place and casualties began to fall.
I wasn't in a normal state of mind, I staggered forward. It's difficult to describe the state you are in, you weren't cool and collected, saying to yourself I must do that and look out for such and such. My feelings were of bewilderment more than anything else, I didn't know what was going to happen. I was numb. I knew the direction and I just went that way. I could see the dismounted cavalrymen going forward when my pal Gally was killed next to me. We didn't have steel helmets then and Gally was hit in the head. He fell down and I looked at him, his brains were sticking out. He was unconscious and I knew he'd had it but I stopped. You can't imagine seeing your pal like that. It sounds gruesome but all I could do was to push the brain, which had exuded through the wound, back into the cranium, and then put a bandage – a field dressing – on his head, no good of course, but you don't behave normally in those conditions.
That evening the dry shrub on the salt lake caught fire. The shellfire set it alight and there were wounded out there, so a lot of rescuing had to be done. It's bloody awful trying to carry a chap on a stretcher – I felt my arms were coming out of their sockets. A chap gets very heavy, you know. You have straps over your shoulder, but I was only a lad and when you go over rough terrain where it's all bumpy, it's very exhausting. We had some medical equipment, we had a field dressing under our tunic. This was in case you were wounded, you applied it to yourself if you knew pressure points for bleeding, but many died from loss of blood anyway. Our job was to try and stop the bleeding. A lot of wounds didn't haemorrhage a lot, it depends where it was. On the extremes, toes for example, there wasn't much blood but anywhere near the aorta, the blood was flowing. If blood was pulsing from a wound you knew he'd had it, all you could do was put a dressing on the wound and send him back. You have got to remember, we weren't in an operating theatre, we were in a field, but we had to do something. Was it a primitive instinct? Of course it is, but you don't get rid of a primitive instinct, it's one of those natural things which manifests itself on these occasions.
Although the intention had been that VADs would work only in hospitals at home, the catastrophic fighting overseas soon ensured that hundreds of young volunteers were given the chance to serve near the Front. Helen Gordon-Dean had only first aid training and a rudimentary medical knowledge when she found herself at a Casualty Clearing Station ministering to the wounded. Carrying out duties she would never have been allowed to perform in Britain, she comforted the dying soldiers, some no older than her own slender eighteen years. Helen lived close to her daughter at Drumnadrochit, on the shores of Loch Ness, where she died.
I told them I was nineteen, but I was a year younger. I got away with it; telling fibs is a gift, but you've got to be convinced yourself. I wanted to go to France very badly but I had to get past this board of eight people quizzing me. One lady was very sceptical about my answers. “What age are you? What year were you born?” I resented the questioning because of all the things I could have chosen to do, it was nursing that inspired me. It is such an intimate job and I just loved it, really, really, really, loved it.
Dad had to pay for everything when I joined up, but then I could always get round him. I could make the job sound frightfully important. There wasn't much glamour about it, it was the idea of nursing pure and simple, seeing somebody improve because of what you had done, that was very creative and exciting. Patriotism? I don't think we thought much about that. There was a war on and we had to win it, I knew that. It was exciting really; at home we were on the fringe of doing things, in France we would see things other people would never know. I suppose there was a curiosity. I don't know if I was a good nurse, I hope I was, but the job had an extraordinary fascination for me.
It was very primitive over in France. There was a tent as a rule, outside which men were often laid on the ground, waiting surgery, while others were put in dirty beds that were lice-ridden. For a girl of seventeen or eighteen the work was so tiring, but I was young and eager. I wanted to see what life was all about.
You heard the shelling and sometimes it seemed very close and noisy, but I never remember fear, naked fear. I was conscious of the shells, but I thought, well, a shell could kill anyone and if it is me, then so be it. But there was so much to do, there wasn't time to stand back and think. Ambulances were always arriving, generally in convoys, and you would go out and help those who could walk or limp along, and the rest would be carried in for treatment. Those who weren't too badly injured sometimes asked me for a cigarette.
The wounds were smelly. I think very often the smell was the worst. Every wound was treated with a swab doused with lysol, a red solution. The lysol was in a dish and you held the swab with forceps, dipped it in and applied it to the wound quite brutally to clean this nasty place up. These wounds were so dirty, sometimes full of maggots, and on one occasion I saw lice in the wound too.
Bad wounds were quite horrific, shocking beyond belief. They were filthy really, and you didn't want to believe what you were seeing, the horror of what people, responsible people, were doing to each other. I remember the first amputation. They said “Go on, nurse, you can help, this is a quite simple one,” and they shoved me into the room with the others and it suddenly struck me how simple and ordinary it was to deliberately cut a hand off. I felt it was a terrible thing to have to do, and with big amputations I couldn't look, I couldn't bear it. Even though an amputation was very often necessary, somehow you felt they could do it another way, but in the end you saw so many, you sort of tried to make it seem ordinary to yourself, and not the terrible thing it really was. I stood next to the doctor and would lift the amputated arm or hand with forceps and put it where it was out of the way. I knew it had to be done and my job was to do it, not nice.
It's funny how quite strong men that you looked up to, would be wanting to hold your hand during these moments. It was a very real expression of what I believed in very, very firmly, the physical contact with other life. It generally came from them, they wanted to hold your hand and you wanted to hold theirs. It was a horrible feeling to know that somebody is going right into eternity that moment, and you have held their hand, maybe patting it to give them courage. So often, so often these young men would look at you and say, “You remind me of my mother”, who would be three times my age. It was something that happened and always the same words, “You remind me of my mother”; I felt pride, privileged.
Rejected by a kindly recruiting sergeant as being under-age to enlist in the army, sixteen-year-old Alfred Pearson sought out an alternative route by which to serve. He offered his services to the British Red Cross and was quickly made a medical orderly. After working at a convalescent hospital in Staffordshire, Alfred was sent to Boulogne just before his eighteenth birthday, to help evacuate the wounded from the Ambulance Trains to the hospital ships destined for England. Until his death, Alf lived quietly in a residential home in Bridlington.
On the 24th of June 1916, I was sent to France in preparation for the forthcoming Battle of the Somme. I went on a hospital ship with a large group of doctors and nurses and a cargo of medical supplies. We landed at Boulogne. My job as an orderly was to work as a stretcher bearer, unloading the trains that brought the wounded back from the Front.
In the week before the battle began, everything was very quiet. Any Ambulance Trains were apparently going to Calais, so I was told to hang about as there was no work to do. I was billeted at the Hotel Christol, where I slept on the floor with a lot of other medical orderlies. The hotel was on the sea front, and every day I looked out and in the distance I could see the coast of England, and I wished I could get there. I watched the ships come into Boulogne and was interested to see them turn round, stern first, before they entered, because the harbour was so small.
Everything changed on 1st July, of course. After that day I helped unload Ambulance Trains day after day, right through until November. Only with winter, when the countryside became too churned up with gunfire so that nothing could move, did things quieten again. The RAMC would evacuate the wounded to the trains at Amiens, where medical orderlies took over some of the work. Occasionally I went up on the train to Amiens to help out, and I remember you could almost put your hand out of the train and touch the magnificent cathedral there. The army had built a new railhead below, in a field, where our trains used to go.
The trains were divided into three sections, British wounded, German wounded, and I've got the idea that any men who died on the way were taken down to the third portion of the train. At least, whoever was in there was always the last to be taken off. The nurses who looked after the men coming down the line had a very trying job, the carriages were packed so that even where the luggage rack would normally be, there was a bed. The trains were a tremendous length with two enormous French engines on the front of every one, and when they arrived at the station in Boulogne they took up the whole length of the platform. There was no waste of room inside or outside the train.
The work was very hard, as Ambulance Trains ran back and forwards. As soon as one was empty, off it would trundle again, very often with a new train ready to come in. They arrived well into the night, and as the train approached the station, the nurses prepared the men for moving. I used to help carry the wounded on stretchers to the end of the train, where two doctors used to look at each man, and they would indicate either the harbour or St Martin's Camp, a large hospital which was right above the town. The wounded were very eager to get back to Blighty, and disappointment was often written across the faces of those who were not fortunate enough to be pointed in the direction of the harbour; you couldn't help but feel sorry for them because, in a way, they were so close to getting home.
Many of the wounded were in a frightful state. Some were wounded in the head, or the face, and were swathed in bloody bandages. Worst of all were those who'd been gassed. I saw on one occasion a line of gas victims, one behind the other, with their hands on the shoulders of the man in front, and it looked like a procession – of animals almost – most distressing. They were all blind, most of them temporarily, but whether they all recovered I just don't know.
The work of the nurses was in some ways the most impressive thing I saw. My first job had been at a stately home in the Midlands, called Sandon Hall. This had been turned into a convalescent hospital with volunteer nurses from the social élite, you know, society ladies. These people had mucked in like everyone else, and after my initial surprise, it was nothing to see a titled lady sweeping the ashes from the fire, or scrubbing the floor. But it was their response to injuries that was remarkable. These ladies, and the nurses I met in France, had lived closeted lives, and it was a complete surprise for them to find men who had been so badly wounded. The sights they would see would be very upsetting at first, although they tried not to show it, of course. They got used to the sights like everybody else, I suppose, because we were all thrown in at the deep end in the war.
Finding a nurse from the First World War was difficult enough; finding one who served on the Western Front was nearly impossible. Less than 10% of all nurses who served in the war, served abroad and, of those who went, all were supposed to be twenty-three years old or over. Alice was just such an age when she sailed for France in 1917 to serve at Number 24 General Hospital at Etaples, one of the main Base Hospitals during the war. At 104 years old, she recalled the days when German bombs were not just reserved for the front line.
I felt I had to do something for the war effort, and nurses were needed so badly, and I suppose that was all I felt I could do in a way. I had always had an interest in caring; as a child we had fussed over dolls, hoping they were all right, and tucking them up in beds. I can't say that we pretended to be nurses as such, more to be good mothers, to take care of them nicely. Growing up, I would always take an interest if anyone was ill or had a bad leg, so I took some training in First Aid and learnt quite a bit about bandaging and that sort of thing, taking exams to chart my progress. Then in 1915 the world heard about Edith Cavell, the nurse executed by the Germans. We heard about her good works, and I thought it was wonderful that a woman could do all that. Perhaps I might be as good as that some day. Well, I felt that her death was a terrible crime and we should all do our best, really. After the war, I was in London when her funeral took place. I remember sitting on my little suitcase and waiting for her body to pass. There wasn't a sound, and as the cortège came along I put my head down and I cried and cried. I thought she was wonderful, an example.
I knew that young nurses were needed, and I was told to report to St Barts hospital in London. I remember I took a bunch of flowers, beautiful flowers from my garden, and I gave them to the Matron. I was the only one who did that, well, of course the Matron talked to me. She asked me quite a few personal questions and said afterwards that she would take me on and help me have the war training I needed. I remember I was given a test to see if I was any good, and that was to hold a man's leg as it was amputated. The leg was wrapped up and I held it as they cut through the skin and bone, and didn't cave in or anything. I was pleased I stood the test.
A friend of mine had volunteered to serve overseas, in the east somewhere, and would I like to go too? I phoned my mother but she forbade me going such a long way by ship, but I could go to France if I wished. I heard later that my friend's ship was torpedoed and sunk. She had survived but lost all her belongings. So I was to go to France. I went home to say goodbye to my parents and they gave me a packet of biscuits for the trip and off I went.
As I was leaving on the boat, I saw a Zeppelin in the night sky, and I watched it. This Zeppelin wasn't bombing. It would fly into a cove and then come out again and go into another cove. I heard afterwards that the Germans were examining every possible landing place for an invasion of England. This fitted with what we had heard before the war, and that was that the Germans had been buying up properties all round the coast of England, so that when they came everything would be ready.
When we landed, several of us were taken to a hotel and the first thing someone did was to switch on the light. Well, the manager came rushing in, “Lumière, lumière!” He turned the light out; that was my first experience in France.
The convoys from the Front to the hospital and from the hospital back to England came at all times, we never knew when they might arrive. A convoy of wounded might be taken away and we would leave the hut tidy and go off for the night, and we'd come back in the morning and every bed would be full, so we'd start all over again, looking after them, finding out what the matter was. Of course, the men would have so many lice on them, their clothes had to be fumigated and the men cleaned up. They suffered terribly with lice, I don't know how they lived with them. I heard that they tried taking their underwear off and turning them inside out just to give themselves a few minutes' peace before the lice buried their way underneath again.
Each hut at Etaples was like an army hut and had ten patients along each side of the ward. We had no curtains or anything like that. Because we had no light, I just carried a little oil lantern and I'd walk up and down, up and down.
One night the German bombers came and bombed the hospital. We didn't know that, earlier in the evening, some horses had evidently been tethered outside our hut, and one of the bombs, which I suppose was meant for us, hit these horses instead. The noise was something terrible. I never knew a horse could scream, scream all over. I kept walking up and down the hut as fast as I could, because I always thought if I walked up and down perhaps the bomb would drop the one end while I was at the other. Everything would shake if a bomb dropped close by, and I would just hold myself tightly, it was an awful feeling, though. I always tried to keep a brave face. I thought in my own mind that it was very important that I didn't show any fear, to try and help the men, to keep them all calm, because some had only just come out of the trenches and could not bear the thought of anything happening now they were out. Of course I'd talk to the men to reassure them, but some were more nervous than we were and tried to climb out of their beds to get underneath for protection.
The worst nights were when there was a full moon because that shone everything up. Then, if we were off duty, we took our blankets and we went to where there were trees on a little rise and we took shelter there. We were hidden by the trees and we lay down and tried to sleep. There was a Chinese camp nearby, the Chinese Labour Contingent. They used to dig trenches around our hospital and sometimes, if we thought we would be safer, we would sleep in those trenches, although I always found them pretty damp really. Anyway, one bad night when we were huddled under the trees, the Chinese were so scared they climbed over the barbed wire fence that surrounded their camp, and ran right by us in panic, one grabbing at my blanket, which I clung onto. We were safer under the trees, but several nurses were killed at the camp when bombs hit the huts. I couldn't ever understand why they bombed the hospital, as all the huts had big red crosses painted on the roofs. There was a big cemetery at Etaples and the nurses who were killed were buried there alongside the soldiers.
We were all exhausted from the strain of work. There were no drugs or anything to combat disease, so many would come down with dysentery, and there were never enough things to keep the men clean. Then another illness like flu would come along, and would knock out yet more men. If anyone was ill with constipation, he could have a number nine pill, and if that didn't work he had to have a dose of castor oil, that's all we had. We had so few vegetables and I don't remember any fruit, no wonder everybody was constipated, including the nurses. I was constipated and given castor oil by the Matron and I went out of her office and threw it all up. The food was so poor, I remember a fish dinner being kept for me as I was working late and when I finally ate it, it was just a mouthful of fish and host of bones, but you couldn't say anything. The doctor on our ward looked so haggard and tired, so tired, he asked me not to disturb him unless absolutely necessary. The bombing wore his nerves down too, and on the occasion the bomb hit the horses he came onto the ward and tried to climb under one of the beds to escape the bombs, just like some of the wounded men.
I remember one boy with flu, oh he'd been so ill. He was crying for his mummy, crying for his mummy. “Oh,” I said “I'll be your mummy tonight” and I gave him such a hug and he went to sleep quite quietly. The next night the convoy came to take so many back to England, and they'd just take them, nothing to do with me. I mean, they'd know who they had to take and they had one place they hadn't filled, and they looked around and said they'd take that boy. “Oh,” I said “he's not strong enough, give him two more days, he'll be all right then.” Well, no, the convoy had to go full, so he went, and via the grapevine I heard that he saw his mummy and then he died, and I still feel sad about that in some way. It was kind of unnecessary.
When we could, we tried to entertain the soldiers on the wards. I remember we had some screens you could put round the men when necessary, just wooden screens with thin red cotton covers on them. Some of us got together and wrapped ourselves in these covers to look a bit christmassy and we sang Christmas carols. We were so tired, I don't know how we managed to squeak, much less sing, but we tried anyway, we did our best and the men appreciated it and tried to join in.
I did miss home when I was in France. I remember quite plainly we had a cold spell, and I used to put little dishes of water out on the ward windowsill to see if they had frozen into ice. As a child, I had taken great pleasure in skating on the frozen park lakes in London. I knew if there was good ice, there would be ice in that park in London. Isn't it funny that I had to find out if there was ice back home, in the park?