Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War (18 page)

Three days later, a “thronged house” of Saint John High School alumnae heard another account, reported in the
Daily Telegraph
:

Of the patients' field hospital to which she went after the first year of the war Miss Warner told many wonderful things . . . of the boy field telephonist who thought his oxygen treatment was more telephoning, and said as he died that God was at the other end of the line; and of the orderlies drawn from all ranks and classes, twenty-seven of them priests, and some more intellectual than practical, even to the extent of using cocoa instead of a cleanser to scrub a table.

Miss Warner described the King and Queen of Belgium as she had seen them when they visited this field hospital. The queen had inadvertently been shown Miss Warner's own room which as it was used as the storeroom for supplies from home was more useful than tidy and was known as “The High Class Bazaar.” The king, she said, was keenly interested in flying and often flew over the hospital.

The gifts sent from St. John had been of untold worth in emergencies especially, Miss Warner said, and the money from the book of her letters published by George Cushing had, she said, been put to such excellent use that she had almost forgiven him for publishing it. One of the pictures which she showed at the close of her address was of two patients wearing De Monts Chapter dressing gowns. . . . [S]he was able to assure the audience that all supplies they had sent would be put to good use as any
that remained are now being distributed to the refugees and returned prisoners.

The report added:

Miss Warner had afterwards accompanied the ambulance that followed the 36th regiment [
sic
] through the devastated regions around St. Quentin. She told of the hurried marches through the dreary land where sign posts said of a heap of ruins that before the war this was such and such a place. She described the venturesome journeys for supplies returning by darkness through a wilderness of mud and shell holes; and told also of the joys in one French village retaken after four years of German suppression where French flags had been unearthed from their burying places and the people welcomed their own grey clad soldiers for the first time, never having seen the French uniform.

Of the scarcity of all materials and how the inhabitants contrived to do without she told many strange tales. A spool of thread was valued at $4 in one village and the children saw cows for the first time after the Germans were driven from the town. The devilish cruelty of the Germans was illustrated by Miss Warner in several forcefully told stories.

She appealed to her hearers in conclusion not to think that now the war was over France needed no more help. Her soldiers were not being welcomed as ours are. They were returning to desolate homes. Thousands of her villages were more desolate than Halifax after the explosion and many men knew not whether their families were alive or dead. For our own returning men she asked that they be dealt with patiently for they had endured almost the impossible. While at the front there was
nothing that was not noble; in the idleness of inaction at the rear there must be discontent and trouble. There were two forms of vision, she said. [Of] two men looking from the same window one would see mud and the other stars. The stars were there if they were only looked at and even in the mud of Flanders the nurses had seen them reflected brightly.

Warner's defence of soldiers' conduct holds an interesting hint that her audience had been exposed to media reports over the course of the war tarnishing popular images of military chivalry. This appeal for leniency coming from the irreproachable figure of a nurse was a powerful endorsement, and she seized this public opportunity to offer it as well as to reassert the “devilish cruelty” of the enemy. In her lectures, she made a point of contrasting very “feelingly” the essential nobility of one side with the demonstrated depravity of the other. Did this conviction come from reflecting on the debased behaviour that she witnessed, including even her own patients' enthusiasm for violence? As she bent over dressings and listened to her
poilus
boast about how they had routed the enemy, did a peaceable nurse from Saint John require a comparative morality to come to terms with the ugly actions of both sides without sliding into a paralyzing relativism? She was now reassuring others as she had herself: that the enemy perpetrated the greater inhumanity — and more gratuitously.

As a lifetime achievement, nursing in the War to End All Wars was a tough act to follow. The day-to-day intensity and personal growth could not be matched by anything in the nurses' experience before or after. Gripped by the awful thought that the rest of her life would be nothing more than a denouement, an F.F.N.C. colleague of Agnes Warner's lamented: “Alas! I have said farewell to the most interesting period of my life. Never before have I, a plain and poor person, been able to realize myself. . . . I do hope I don't shrivel up again when they no longer need me.” Another
affirmed: “This great responsibility, and closeness with tragedy, seem to have started one off growing again. . . . I really am a bigger person, humanly speaking.” Alert, independent, and confident from their time at the front, these women were reluctant to trade the passion of emergency for the stifling confines of routine. They worried that they would soon tire of regular nursing.

Continuing as a military nurse was not an option, since army authorities reduced the C.A.M.C. to its pre-war size, retaining just a handful of permanent nurses. But there were new opportunities to be seized in the nursing field. The influenza pandemic of 1918 required many health-care hands, and great numbers of returning veterans needed the professional service of nurses trained in physiotherapy to help them reintegrate into work and family life. New spaces for travelling public health nurses and mental health nurses reflected changing societal attitudes about public health education and mental illness, while positions in schools and health centres with the Red Cross and the maturing Victorian Order of Nurses
(V.O.N.) occupied a greater number of nurses than ever before. By 1921, the number of nurses in Canada had more than tripled from a decade before. Many of them were demobilized military nurses trying out a new sub-vocation in one of these developing fields.

The extent to which the war was a catalyst for greater gender equality even as it summoned a powerful impulse to reinstate “comfortable” pre-war conditions, including traditional gender roles, is still a matter of debate. True, many women had contributed to their nation's war effort by filling factory and farm positions in the absence of men, proving they could perform effectively in male-dominated roles. But now these same women left their posts to returning veterans and many went back to their firesides. In the relief and chaos that followed the Armistice, it became clear that wartime changes would be considered a temporary aberration; that women on the homefront had been encouraged to act in the place of men only “for the duration.” And women at the battlefront had not been
welcomed into male roles at all, but were restricted to non-combat roles as nurses, aides, and clerks. Ultimately, though women's wartime service and bravery may have helped to “earn” them the vote (in the rhetoric of the day), it did little to augment materially their social and political power or to weaken the polarity of separate spheres in the postwar decade.

For Warner, who returned from the war in questionable health, like so many of her beloved
poilus
, a full-time career in nursing was likely out of the question; so, now in her late forties, she entered semi-retirement. Thereafter, she kept busy with “missionary activity” (possibly volunteer work) with the Saint John Health Centre and cared for her aging mother in their South End home at 11 Pagan Place. She also corresponded faithfully with many of her former French patients and their families, sharing a unique bond with them that only battlefront initiates could truly fathom.

Sister Warner would live only seven more years. Her final trip to New York was to seek treatment at the Presbyterian Hospital for the most serious phase of the unnamed illness that still afflicted her. Sadly, there was little her
alma mater
could do to restore her, and she succumbed to the illness on April 23, 1926. Arrangements were made to carry her remains back to Saint John, and the following stormy Sunday a large congregation gathered for a heroine's funeral at Trinity Anglican Church and final farewells at Fernhill Cemetery.

Aside from the brief, obligatory lecture circuit when she landed back in Saint John and the periodic wartime letters that kept family and friends apprised of her work, there was no evidence that Warner continued to process her wartime experiences with a view to publishing them. On the contrary, eulogizers praised her “modesty” in keeping silent about her overseas achievements, declaring that “at no time has she said a great deal of the life she endured.” In reality, conditions in New Brunswick after the war probably did not invite a frank recollection of what happened or any attempt to grapple with its rawness. Acquaintances who had spent
the war on Canadian soil may have been willing and eager confidantes, but they lacked the terrible literacy of front-line work that the nurses now carried. And others who themselves had returned from overseas carried their own unique experiences and processed each memory differently. In the postwar world, it is hardly surprising that so many nurses pulled a screen across their war work in order to get on with their interrupted lives and forge a “new normal.” It is even less surprising that they kept silent about what they encountered near the front. Moreover, many nurses must have internalized the persistent ideal of selfless “modesty” that applauded a woman for claiming nothing particularly important about her own experience. Were it not for Agnes Warner's friends promoting the letters on her behalf, Saint John and the wider world might never have discovered a New Brunswick nurse's faithful service to countless families, nor had the opportunity to be humbled by the boundless compassion she showed her beloved
poilus
.

Funeral of Nursing Sister Gladys Maude Mary Wake, who died of wounds received during a German air raid on Étaples, France, May 1918.
LAC-PA-002562