A Rose for the Anzac Boys (20 page)

It took months of training to become an official nursing assistant—a member of a VAD (Voluntary Aid
Detachment established by the Red Cross and the Order of St John)—and you had to be twenty-three years old to be accepted for overseas service. But if you got to France independently, conditions were so desperate that anyone, no matter how young or untrained, could be useful.

Theirs is still a mostly untold story. We remember the soldiers, we remember the official nurses. But these volunteer girls and women were as much ‘the roses of no-man’s-land’ as those in the army’s records.

The nurses, VADs, ambulance drivers, canteen workers and volunteer letter-writers near the battlefields worked under horrific conditions. Nurses and other health workers faced an unending line of maimed and wounded, with no relief at all. Even their one day off a month was rarely given. Leave was almost unknown except in special circumstances. Many women worked for four years of war with almost no break.

It was heartbreaking work in those days before antibiotics, effective painkillers and other drugs. There was so little they could do for the men—but they kept on trying.

Some were wounded, like Australian Sister Rachel Pratt, hit in the lung by a piece of shrapnel while working at No 1 Casualty Clearing Station near Bailleul. (Despite her wound and the advancing enemy, Nurse Pratt stayed working at her post. She was promoted to Sister the next day, and awarded the Military Medal for gallantry under fire, usually reserved for men in those days.)

Others died young, like Matron Mary Mackenzie Findlay from Kilmore, Victoria, worn out by the work, the
heartbreak, the poor food, the cold. The women worked in coats and scarves, and there were no stoves to keep their patients warm or even to melt the ice for water to wash with or to drink.

Most women suffered severe infections, especially to their hands, from the suppurating wounds they tended, and in later years would recognise a fellow war volunteer by the scars on their hands, red and shiny and so thick it was difficult to sew or knit or even hold a teacup without dropping it. The women, too, caught the diseases of the trenches: typhus, dysentery, measles, mumps and influenza.

It is hard for many of us to understand these days how limited most women’s lives were before World War I. Few worked for wages; those who did were mostly servants in other people’s homes, starting about age twelve, or even younger. Girls from richer homes were expected to stay at home till they married.

Schools for girls

Few girls had more than a rudimentary education, and those who did go to university were usually not granted degrees. Even up until the 1960’s—and certainly back when this story is set—many girls’ schools concentrated on teaching girls ‘deportment’ skills like how to sit ‘like a
lady’ (i.e. with your knees together and back straight); how to write a polite letter in elegant handwriting; and cooking, sewing and mothercraft. Wealthier schools might focus on how to direct one’s servants to do the cooking, sewing and mothercraft properly, as well as some embroidery to keep one occupied.

Girls were also taught French, art, music, enough literature, history and geography to conduct an interesting conversation at dinner, and enough maths to supervise the household accounts. But as they weren’t expected to go to university, or have a profession, most schools just taught girls the basics.

Many schools, however, did give a lot more private tutoring to any girl who had a lot of talent or did really want to go to university, even if she couldn’t get a degree. Some parents also paid for private tutors if their daughters were passionately interested in things like science or wanted to learn ancient Greek. Others were horrified—they were afraid that no man would marry their daughter if he thought she was more intelligent than he was, or was a ‘bluestocking’, the word used for any girl who was more interested in books and learning than marriage and looking after a family. And in those days, when there were so few careers for women, most parents knew that the only real security for their daughters was in making a man think she’d be a suitable wife.

Women had only recently won the right to vote, first in New Zealand and then Australia; in England, women were still regarded as unable to take on the responsibility of
electing governments. Women were regarded as too fragile to be doctors or even bus conductors, too childlike and illogical for business or for any role outside home and family, and too emotional to be reliable under pressure.

But suddenly there were these organised armies of women doing a multitude of tasks, overcoming the most extraordinary obstacles.

Most of the women who served as volunteers overseas were from the middle or upper classes—as they received no wages they needed family money to survive. Some were servants, and their employers supported them. In at least one case a small country town collected enough money to send a volunteer nurse overseas. The women were daughters, with fathers or brothers in the army; mothers, widows, sisters. Many knew each other from school. Others soon became a close-knit group, with nicknames and their own slang.

Many never married. They were a generation that lost its men, with so many killed by war or disease. But by the time the war ended they were also a body of extraordinarily capable, experienced and probably very stroppy women—who were almost unstoppable.

It is impossible to look at the social changes born of the 1920s and ’30s without wondering if they would ever have happened without these independent women, no longer content to remain dutiful, housebound daughters and wives, who fought for the right to vote, for contraception, degrees for women, access to both general and higher public education, hospital reforms and far more social reforms than I can list here. The war was their university
and their training ground. So many things we take for granted now, we owe to them.

The Red Cross nurse of the song was truly ‘a rose in no-man’s-land’. But there were so many other roses. And each one of them deserves to be remembered and celebrated.

Women dedicated their lives to ‘the cause’ at home as well.

The armies on both sides of the conflict were ill equipped—there simply weren’t enough clothes or food, much less medicines, stretchers or bandages, for the troops. In a large part, they were fed and clothed by their families and volunteers back home.

In Australia and New Zealand women knitted socks and balaclavas, rolled bandages, made biscuits to sell for ‘comforts’ for the men. Each state had a division of the Australian Comforts Fund. In 1916, for example, when the army was short of socks, 80,000 pairs were knitted in a couple of months.

Many women knitted a pair of socks a day, and that in a time when wool first had to be rolled into balls before you even started knitting. Few women throughout the war ever had idle hands—they sewed, they knitted, they crocheted, even when standing in line at the fruit and vegetable shop. They also provided 20,000 tommy cookers (small cans packed with sand and petrol for cooking in the trenches). The Tanned Sheepskin Committee made
110,734 sheepskin vests. Women and girls from 150 schools in the Babies Knit Society made baby clothes for refugees and the orphaned children of soldiers and sailors.

Other committees sent tins of preserved fruit and vegetables, Bovril, condensed milk and toffees, as well as soap, pencils, notebooks, chocolates, ginger, shirts, caps, mufflers, air cushions and fruit cakes. Wives, mothers, sisters went hungry to send their men a fruit cake, long baked biscuits like ‘Anzacs’ (called ‘soldier’s biscuits’ back then) or a boiled suet pudding—something that would last until it reached the battlefields. Letter after letter I have read talks so much about food. In those days of few dentists—and only for the rich—the majority of men in the army had poor teeth, or false teeth. The only way to eat the ‘biscuits’ of the trenches was to soak them in dirty water—and risk dysentery too. You relied on your women folk at home to make your cakes, pack them, send them, feed you, as well as knit your socks and underwear…

It would take a whole book to list the extraordinary number of women’s committees, too, both large and small, that made, collected or bought quantities of supplies that would be regarded as impossible these days.

Theoretically, the wounded or sick were carried from the battlefield to the regimental aid post. This was, if not in the
middle of the fighting, at least on the edge of it. Often two wounded men might support each other, or a friend risk his own life to carry a mate to safety.

The men’s wounds were dressed as best they could be at the aid post—bandages put over the bleeding areas, or limbs tied to keep the flesh together. The wounded man was then carried by stretcher (if there were enough) to a field dressing station, where he was given an anti-tetanus injection.

If he survived, hopefully there would be an ambulance to take him to the casualty clearing station, perhaps fifteen kilometres from the battlefield—though all too often ‘the battlefield’ shifted so that the casualty clearing stations were hit by shells or bombs. Often, too, there weren’t enough ambulances. Wounded or blinded men walked kilometres for help, supporting or guiding each other.

Clearing stations were mostly tents, or, like the hospitals, they were set up in commandeered schools, railway waiting rooms, convents, breweries, chateaux and farmhouses.

At the clearing station the men were ‘stabilised’—emergency operations performed, wounds sewn up and dressings applied. The men were kept there till they were well enough to be sent by ambulance or hospital train to a base hospital—or until they died. Men with minor wounds might also be kept at the casualty station and sometimes given light work as orderlies till they were ready to go back to their units.

If the nearby base hospitals were full—as they often were

—the wounded were shipped hundreds of kilometres toanother hospital or even over to England. The men were kept in hospital till they were either well enough to go back to
their unit, or to go to speciality hospitals in England for rehabilitation—for false legs or arms, a long convalescence, treatment for badly gassed lungs or burns, or the rudimentary plastic surgery of those days if their faces had been destroyed.

These days we know that any horrible experience—not just war—can cause deep trauma, and physical as well as mental symptoms. But in those days many doctors—and most military men—thought that any failure to cope with the horrors of war was cowardice or ‘lack of moral fibre’. They also couldn’t understand how some men could cope with an experience, while others couldn’t.

But the British Government also didn’t want the expense of paying post-war pensions if they could avoid it, so they tried very hard to stop any recognition that men could be mentally injured by the war.

‘Shell shock’ is a broad term covering many different conditions. Sometimes men might be cold and speechless

—literally in shock. Others might seem all right but asudden noise could send them screaming or cowering away. Some men became violent; some retreated into their own private worlds—the many different symptoms of and variations on shell shock (or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) are too complex to cover here.

It is probably true to say though that no man—or woman—came out of World War I unscathed. Most men refused to talk about the war at all: some became alcoholics; others had nightmares or attacks of sudden terror all their lives. It was doubly hard for them to cope when the families they had come back to had no idea of the
horrors they’d experienced. Many, too, didn’t understand that the ringing in their ears was the physiological result of the years of loud noises.

Instead they were afraid they were hallucinating, and still hearing the ring of falling bombs from the war they thought they’d left behind.

I find it amazing that so many people did manage to recover from their experiences, and lead happy and fulfilled lives.

There were never enough clearing stations, hospitals or trained staff to look after the wounded at the best of times; and when there was a ‘push’—that is, when the men were ordered out across the barbed-wire entanglements between them and the enemy—tens of thousands of wounded would sweep through the clearing stations (as well as railway stations and hospitals), totally overwhelming the staff and facilities. Stretchers would be piled three high on the beds, and wounded men staggered from bed to bed trying to help their comrades.

It was hell on earth. And in this chaos, anyone with two hands and a willing spirit was indispensable, no matter how little training they had received.

World War I was called the Great War; and in the beginning it was called the Great Adventure too. People
ran cheering through the streets, cheering with excitement, when, on 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on its longterm rival Germany after Germany invaded Belgium.

As part of the British Empire, Australia and New Zealand were also at war, which meant joining Britain’s other allies, France and the Russian Empire, against the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) and the Ottoman Empire when they too declared war on 29 October 1914.

This was the chance to ‘fight for the Mother Country’, to show the world what ‘colonials’ were made of. And for men and boys who had never been further than the next town, many of whom had never even seen a photograph from Europe, it was a chance to see the world.

All were volunteers. Many would never come home.

World War I cost Australia and New Zealand more men than any other war. There were fewer than 5 million people in Australia at the declaration of war, but 300,000 men enlisted. Of those, 60,000 Australian men were killed. And 150,000 to 200,000 more were wounded, gassed or suffered shell shock and other mental problems. New Zealand sent 103,000 troops from a population of just over 1 million—42 per cent of men of military age. There were 16,697 New Zealanders killed and 41,317 wounded. Australia and New Zealand had the highest casualty and death rates per capita of all countries involved in the war. They were superb soldiers, placed in impossible situations by British commanders. (Even Australia’s then Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, felt he could promise that the last
drop of Australian blood would be spilt to save ‘the Mother Country’—England.)