Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War

Copyright © 2010 by Shawna M. Quinn.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by Brent Wilson and Barry Norris.

Front cover images courtesy of Library and Archives Canada: LAC-PA-002562 (top), LAC-PA-006783 (bottom).

Back cover illustration entitled “Sister,” courtesy of Canadian War Museum: CWM 19700046-012, portrait of Agnes Warner courtesy of
My Beloved Poilus
, uniform courtesy of CWM 19590034-002.

Cover and interior page design by Jaye Haworth.

Art direction by Julie Scriver.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Quinn, Shawna M., 1977-
   Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War [electronic resource]/ Shawna M. Quinn.

(New Brunswick military heritage series; v. 15)
Co-published by: New Brunswick Military Heritage Project.
Includes bibliographical references and index. Electronic monograph. Also issued in print format.
ISBN 978-0-86492-758-3

1. Warner, Agnes. 2. World War, 1914-1918 — Medical care — Canada. 3. World War, 1914-1918 — Personal narratives, Canadian. 4. Nurses — New Brunswick — Biography. I. New Brunswick Military Heritage Project II. Title. III. Series: New Brunswick military heritage series; v. 15

D629.C2Q56 2010     940.4'7571510922     C2010-904375-8

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and the New Brunswick Department of Wellness, Culture and Sport for its publishing activities.

Goose Lane Editions

500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

Fredericton, New Brunswick

CANADA E3B 5X4

www.gooselane.com

New Brunswick Military Heritage Project

The Brigadier Milton F. Gregg,

VC Centre for the Study of War and Society

University of New Brunswick

PO Box 4400

Fredericton, New Brunswick

Canada E3B 5A3

www.unb.ca/nbmhp

Contents

   
Chapter One
“I Have Been There, Too”

   
Chapter Two
New Brunswick Nurses Go to War

   
Chapter Three
Nursing Sister Agnes Warner

   
Chapter Four
My Beloved Poilus

   
Chapter Five
After
My Beloved Poilus

   
Acknowledgements

   
Selected Bibliography

   
Photo Credits

   
Index

Chapter One

"I Have Been There, Too"

Former Canadian army nursing sister Katherine Wilson-Simmie was nearly eighty years old when she finally undertook to publish an account of her wartime nursing experience for a wider readership beyond her immediate family. She began by referring to stories of danger and soldiers' bravery, knowing that these accounts, told by the men who lived them, had continued to capture the imagination of Canadians like her children and grandchildren throughout the six decades since the Great War. But she also felt that the soldiers' accounts “tended to romanticize things,” and wondered aloud why no books had been written by Canadian army nursing sisters. There were many male authors writing about important First World War campaigns. She said, “Well, I have been there, too.”

Katherine Wilson-Simmie's recollections, published in 1981 as
Lights Out! A Canadian Nursing Sister's Tale
, is exceptional among Canadian First World War nurses' accounts for being one of only a handful to have been published after the war, and its belatedness is noteworthy. The First World War was a global conflict such as no one had ever seen. It pulverized untold hectares of landscape, killed millions of soldiers and civilians, and gripped much of Canada with a fervent patriotism, drawing the nation's resources and humanity into unknown dangers across the Atlantic. As Canadians mobilized to fight “Might” with “Right,” women were there, too. On the home front, they replaced absent men in munitions factories, farms, and other areas of employment formerly closed to women, while overseas
they served in non-combatant and traditionally feminine roles. There were opportunities for women to help by cooking and performing other supportive work in England and elsewhere, but if they wanted a heady brush with all the urgency and immediacy of combat, the only accepted female contribution offering anything close to the frontline experience was nursing. The need for trained nurses was great, and well over three thousand Canadian women enthusiastically answered the call, suppressing whatever vague premonitions they had of the difficulties that lay ahead.

Most of these nurses would return home to Canada after the war to resume or re-create their lives. And that's when these women — who had seen extraordinary sights, suffered abysmal conditions, and mended so many shattered bodies — fell silent about what they had experienced. But not immediately, since theirs was an adventure that few Canadian women could have imagined and all wanted to hear about. Before they could vanish altogether into their former routines, these returning heroes found themselves drawn into a whirlwind of triumphant “welcome home” receptions, during which they recounted their stories to transfixed audiences and accepted their accolades with appropriate humility. Paraphrases of these lectures survive in the limited columns of local newspapers, but how many of the nurses' own words made it to publication?

Very few, in fact, but it was not for lack of prompting. In fall 1920, Margaret Macdonald, who had been wartime Matron-in-Chief of the Canadian Army Medical Corps (C.A.M.C.) Nursing Service, wrote to former nursing sisters asking for their reminiscences to include in a “full account of the conspicuously distinguished work of this corps.” She hoped each of the twenty-five hundred recipients of the letter would contribute a “characteristic incident, a telling photograph or authentic circumstance of historical value that came under [her] personal observation.” Macdonald's request yielded a meagre eight responses. Of these, some respectfully declined to contribute, while others apologized for having nothing of importance to offer or recounted a second-hand story they'd heard from a soldier. Why such reticence on the part of nurses who were every bit the “eyewitnesses” of war's extremes that soldiers were?

Perhaps the phrase “of historical value” made many nurses doubt their personal observations could be worthy of inclusion in a national history of the Great War. Perhaps they felt it immodestly out of character for nurses to publicize their working experience and achievements, an attitude reinforced by wartime propaganda and earlier representations of nurses as discreet, self-effacing “angels of mercy.” Macdonald's biographer, Susan Mann, suggests that, besides these other grounds for discretion, nurses had a professional obligation to maintain a quiet, therapeutic atmosphere around the wounded and to protect their privacy when off duty. Even more urgently, silence was a wartime expedient: under the constraints of War Office censorship, nurses had to be circumspect about the details of their work, and the habit of self-censorship they adopted lasted well beyond the Armistice. And if there weren't external pressures enough for nurses
to downplay their experiences, there were deep-rooted, private motives. Women who had seen horrors beyond words naturally shrank from the heart-wrenching task of serving them up in print to an uninitiated, if sympathetic, audience.

A few Canadian nursing sisters, however, did put pen to paper after the war. Besides Wilson-Simmie's
Light's Out!
, there was Mabel Clint's penetrating account of her service in France, England, and the Mediterranean island of Lemnos entitled
Our Bit: Memories of War Service by a Canadian Nursing Sister
(1934). Both of these authors, though, waited many years before publishing their accounts. One of the earliest offerings was from C.A.M.C. Nursing Sister Constance Bruce, who in 1918 informally published a lighthearted but often poignant narrative called
Humour in Tragedy.
This short work is witty and lively, illustrated with tongue-in-cheek drawings of nurses in high action — veils blowing out behind them like cones as they got up to good-natured tricks, enduring the discomforts of camp life (such as missing laundry or swarming flies), and gamely enjoying the novelties of local culture, all with an endearing readiness to laugh, cry, and
experience
. It is interesting that the foreword of this little book, written by Lord Beaverbrook, implies that the reader should treat it as a personalized “peep behind the scenes” in the absence of an official C.A.M.C. history, which was then being compiled by Sir Andrew Macphail under commission of the Department of National Defence and would not be published until 1925. In the meantime, Beaverbrook assured the reader that

The official record of this branch of the Canadian service is in able hands, but this book of Miss Constance Bruce. . . is a very unofficial and delightful tale of the adventures of No. 1 Canadian Stationary Hospital in France, at Lemnos, at Cairo and at Salonica . . . I am certain the book will commend itself not only to all Canadians, but the wider public of the British Empire, which is only realizing slowly the steadfastness of our women in their adventures in the greatest adventure in the world.

While nurses' stories may have brought women's contributions to light and captured human interest, they would not find a place in the “official” record. Perhaps if more than a handful of her charges had answered Matron Macdonald's call for contributions, her volume might have taken its intended place beside Macphail's among the histories of Canada's role in the Great War. But she did not complete the project. Instead, her effort survives as six pages in Macphail's chapter on “The Ancillary Services,” briefly surveying the evolution of the military nursing service in Canada and devoid of any personalized observations from nurses. The official history itself, moreover, does not dare to portray the war through nurses' eyes. Take, for instance, the way it follows the wounded man's progress through various stages of medical aid, beginning with the moment he is hit. The author describes that instant as an experience of painless “wonder.” The man on the stretcher then views the ensuing rush to the casualty clearing station with “apathy and unconcern” — but still no pain. It is not until he reaches the base hospital that pain hits the soldier with all its force, whereafter it becomes “atrocious and had best not be spoken of even in a history of military medicine. To witness this suffering which they could so imperfectly allay was the
continuous and appalling experience
of the nurses
at the front and at the base.” Bearing witness to unspeakable pain was the nurses' predominant experience, yet even the C.A.M.C.'s historian draws the curtain on this phase of suffering rather than attempt to depict it, and abruptly ends the chapter there. Behind the curtain, nurses continued to work.

Where can a reader go, then, for nurses' personal accounts? Fortunately, Canadian women working overseas were highly motivated to record their experiences in private diaries — some terse and pragmatic, others literary and rhetorical. Because of their personal and solitary nature, unpublished diaries can be difficult to find. But a rare few have been published, such as those of Ella Mae Bongard, edited by her son Eric Scott, in
Nobody Ever Wins A War
and Nova Scotia nurse Clare Gass, edited and introduced by historian Susan Mann, in
The War Diary of Clare Gass, 1915-1918.

Canadian nursing sisters on active service far from home were also motivated to keep communion with their loved ones through frequent
letters. Like diaries, many of these letters remain out of reach in private collections, but in their time they had a wider distribution than diaries. They were circulated among family and friends and sometimes even found their way into the columns of regional newspapers alongside soldiers' letters from the trenches. On much rarer occasions, friends might collaborate to gather a nurse's letters together and publish them in an effort to raise awareness and funds for her continuing work. It is in this latter way that we come to possess Nursing Sister Agnes Warner's wartime letters published under the title
My Beloved Poilus,
an enduring expression of one New Brunswick nurse's devotion to the people of wartorn France and Belgium. Though Warner's journey to the front lines differs from that of other Canadian nurses in significant ways since she did not serve with the Canadian army, her trajectory from nursing student to Edwardian private-duty nurse to nurse under fire has much in common with that of her “sisters.”

Office of Matron-in-Chief Margaret Macdonald.
LAC-PA-5230

Title page from Constance Bruce's book,
Humour in Tragedy
.