Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War (16 page)

Ambulance Volant in winter.
My Beloved Poilus

Showing linen caps and Chinese umbrellas. Purchased for patients from contributions.
My Beloved Poilus

The Queen of the Belgians leaving the ambulance.
My Beloved Poilus
.

Nurse and nephew. The meeting in France, one serving with the French, the other with the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
My Beloved Poilus

My
Salle
— Christmas 1916.
My Beloved Poilus

Chapter Five

After
My Beloved Poilus

Nineteen seventeen picked up intensity where 1916 ended, bringing more responsibility for Warner, more critical cases, more patients, more danger. As the demands on her grew, it seemed impossible to get away, not even to be with her mother and siblings in Saint John when the sad news came that General D.B. Warner had passed away at the age of eighty-five. His obituary noted that his daughter Agnes was “nurse in charge of one of the important hospitals of the French Government on the Belgian Front.”

That was February, and Warner was in the process of packing up and relocating Ambulance Mobile No. 1 to another part of Belgium. The ambulance would move several times again, always following the 36th Corps of the French army. Now expanded to hold more beds and handle more serious wounds closer to the front, the ambulance kept seventeen nurses on full-time duty. Warner took charge of this crew as the hospital's matron sometime before May 1917, just as the hazards of its work were multiplying. The
British Journal of Nursing
would caution in its May 26 issue that “The work at this hospital greatly appeals to the nurses, although the Matron, Miss Warner, carefully warns Sisters who wish to join the staff that they must be ready to put up with any difficulties.”

“Difficulties” included working in noxious masks when mustard gas seeped into the hospital from the German lines and holding one's nerve through pounding air raids. Sometime in May or June, that nerve was severely tested when a German bomb fell directly on the hospital, injuring
Sister Jaffery's foot and producing fumes that rendered Sister Coppin unconscious when she rushed to save Jaffery. Matron Warner commended her staff for their “magnificent work under very dangerous conditions,” like this bombing, which she always maintained was a deliberate attack on a clearly marked hospital. Indeed, in 1917 and 1918, reports of hospital bombings increased alongside bitter denouncements of German barbarism. Of the Canadian Army (C.A.M.C.) nurses alone, over forty-six lost their lives in bombings of Canadian hospitals and hospital ships, and posters vowing revenge further galvanized public resolve, most famously after the drowning death of fourteen nurses aboard the
Llandovery Castle
, including Anna Irene Stamers of Saint John, and the execution of British nurse Edith Cavell for helping Allied P.O.W.s escape from occupied Belgium. Nurses were largely beyond reproach in public opinion, and aggression against them provided the Allies with some of its most potent propaganda opportunities.

By mid-1917,
My Beloved Poilus
had been in press for several months and proceeds were reaching a grateful Warner. In May and June,
The Saint John Globe
published two responses to the book by Warner, the first written to an individual and the second meant for a wider group:

The copy of
My Beloved Poilus
did not reach me until some time after I arrived here [at Ambulance Mobile No. 1]. . . . I got the notification about the money from Messrs. Morgan, Harjes & Co. and they said the book which had been forwarded would explain it. I thought it was a book written by one of my friends, so I was quite unprepared for what came. I am very pleased that the book has sold, and am so glad to get the money for my men. We need more than ever here and I cannot expect people to keep on giving, when there are so many demands on every side. They have all been so good and generous to my
Poilus
. I shall write more fully about it very soon, but have not had a minute, there has been such a rush ever since we came. . . . One poor man who has been awfully ill . . . says this is the first home he has
had since the war began. Just think of how he must have suffered to feel like that! His little girl is nearly three years old and he has never seen her — she was born after the war began. He adores Miss___ — one of the Australian nurses who has been taking care of him. Fortunately, each one thinks his nurse is the best of the lot.

It is just as well you did not ask my consent before publishing the letters in
My Beloved Poilus
, for I never would have given it; and just think what a loss it would have been to my men!

How can I thank the friends and readers of “My Beloved Poilus” enough for all that they have done for me and my soldiers, and Mr. Cody for the very nice preface. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that any one outside of the family would have been interested in my letters, and I can scarcely believe it is true that they have been the means of bringing in so much money. You have all been so good and kind about them and they have helped my
Poilus
so much. The state of one's mind and nerve at the end of a hard day is not conductive [
sic
] to good letter writing.

I am sending you the model of a Taube, the German aeroplane that has done so much bombarding. They are small and very swift and carry four, six or eight bombs. We see them very often, and the bombs drop too close to be pleasant sometimes. Yesterday a piece of shell went through the roof of one of our barracks, but fortunately no body was hurt. . . .

[E]verything is going so well that we hope the war will be over before the end of the year. I do not see how it can last much longer.

The larrigans . . . arrived in time for Christmas and
for the first time my feet were warm and dry in the terribly cold, wet, muddy weather we were having. Please thank many times all who were interested in sending me such a lovely present and one that would contribute so much to my comfort. . . .

Over one thousand cases passed through this ambulance the first month we were here and before we were fully organized. Some stayed only twenty-four hours, but the badly wounded and the worst gas cases were kept. It was a great joy to have so many of them recover — when they first came in there did not seem to be much hope for them. We have sixteen nurses now, all well trained and such splendid women, it is a pleasure to work with them.

With heartfelt thanks to all,

THE WRITER OF THE POILUS LETTERS

Warner had grown accustomed to packing the ambulance and moving it forward, but when the Germans launched a massive offensive in March 1918, Mobile No. 1 was evacuated and its staff sent to the interior. Facing a rapidly moving front line, authorities decided to position the hospital at a safe distance from the front, at Forges-les-Eaux, where it would function as a base hospital rather than an advanced ambulance. But within a couple months, Warner received this desperate letter from a doctor she had worked with for three years in Belgium. He was now serving at front-line ambulances associated with the 36th Corps and his plea was not subtle:

The wounded began to come at 23 o'clock, there were 600 in the yard, the rooms and the hall of our establishment. We worked all night hoping [for] some rest for the day after, but the arrivage was about 2,000 and every day
like that during ten days. For five days Messr. R. (chief surgeon) and I were alone. We asked for you the first day. No compresses, no towels for the operations, amputations or debridgements. Extractions of projectiles were made on the
brancards
(stretchers) often without an anaesthetic. How many poor chaps died without care! How many would not be dead if you had been here! The evacuation was impossible. No trains, no motor cars. Oh, what an infinite suffering! Messr. R. is very very sorry, like me, to be deprived of your precious help.

The doctor's letter moved Warner and five other nurses immediately to request release from their current post so they could offer their services at the front. Authorization took three weeks. While they waited, she and Helen McMurrich worked in an overcrowded Paris hospital where for the first time Warner had the opportunity to care for American patients. She would later impress upon a Saint John audience the strength of the Americans' courage, their burning hatred for the enemy, and their bitter resentment at having shown up too “late” to the fight. For some of her listeners, this may well have been a new interpretation of the American position.

Not long after, Warner would be enthusiastically welcomed back among her old military and medical friends at an F.F.N.C. mobile hospital, Ambulance 16/21. Somehow, they found the wherewithal to celebrate the reunion. Warner threw a Fourth of July party for the patients, with surprise bags for all, and the wards rang with shouts of “Vive l'Angleterre” and “Vive l'Amérique” as patients delivered a moving tribute to the nursing staff. (Warner, of course, was still identified as an American citizen, though primarily a resident of Canada.) Another summer night, convalescent patients and nurses took up the general's invitation to a theatrical performance, where Miss Warner took the seat of honour in the general's box and heard how badly she and the other sisters had been missed.

From that point on, the team of sisters learned to do even more, with even less. Nearly every three weeks they moved the ambulance from one pulverized part of France to another, looking for standing houses (three
walls would do), factories, or chateaux that had survived the enemy's scorched-earth practice and would be suitable for a temporary hospital, and scavenging furnishings from empty houses. This time the nurses worked closer to the front than ever. So many wounded men were lost in transit over rough, muddy fields en route to the ambulance that at last it was moved forward to a point just ten kilometres from the front line. Without the necessary surgical supplies, “we could only save fifty per cent,” Warner would later tell a Saint John reporter, “but we did all we could, and the men knew that and they were not left alone.”

Just as the soldiers daily transcended their most basic fears in the face of mortal danger, so the nurses of Ambulance 16/21 steeled their own nerves. When the lights went out and the bombardments came, nurses steadily made their rounds in the dark, heedless of their patients' pleas to “Lie down on the ground, Sister, it's safer that way.” One sister woke in the night to the shock of a bomb's force blowing out one side of the house in which she was sleeping, and “on being told it was only the other side of the house and not the walls immediately above her, she went to sleep again.”

The workload was crushing and hazardous, but with the Allies' counterattack pushing the German line steadily back, Warner could finally dare to predict the end of the conflict. Ten days before the Armistice she wrote:

The pressure of work has been terrific, but we are having a let up now, and the rest of our staff has joined us, so it will
not be so hard. We are not much to look at these days, but we can work. The washing is an awful problem. . . . [T]he rain has started in . . . but so far we have had enough fuel to keep the stoves going. The holes in our house have been patched up and the windows pasted over with paper where the glass is missing, so we feel that we are in luxury, being able to keep both dry and warm. We are in St. Quentin and living in the remains of a real house. . . . In each of our bedrooms we have small stoves that we found in the houses about here; whatever we needed in the way of furniture, we got from the ruined houses or from the streets or from the trenches nearby. Most of the things had to be mended, for what the Boches did not take away with them they destroyed. However, this place has escaped better than some of the others we have been in, for they did not have time to do their work as thoroughly as they usually do. Unfortunately the beautiful old church of the twelfth century is a mass of ruins. I think we are getting very near the end, and if peace is not signed before Christmas, at least the fighting will be over. Three of the Australian nurses are leaving Mobile No. 1 to return home. They were most anxious to join us, but feared the life would be too hard for Miss S___, who had about come to the end of her tether.