Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War (3 page)

While . . . there are English, Scotch and Irish nursing sisters not one whit behind their Canadian sisters in any respect, socially, as a body, the nursing profession in Canada has,
in the first place, a higher status than it possesses in the old country. It attracts, in general, the daughters of professional men, and those from comfortable households . . . It is a rule that Canadian Nursing Sisters have had, not a common, but a High School education . . . And as nurses their training has been very thorough, with fuller courses of lectures on the basal subjects than is usual in Great Britain. As a result, a remarkably large proportion of the matrons of the great hospitals in the United States are of Canadian birth and training. Add to this that the Canadian nurse embarked on her profession is paid on a scale which in Great Britain would be thought extravagant. But then she is thoroughly competent . . . [I]n this war they have abundantly “made good.”

Adami then hastened to uphold the nurses' humility, as if their elevation was more richly deserved because they did not demand it suffragette-style: “It should be emphasized that this step was taken . . . by the Ministry and Militia Council, not as the result of any agitation by the nursing sisters themselves — in fact, some years before the suffragettes became militant. The experience of the Canadian Army Medical Service has abundantly justified the innovation and proved it to be right and wise.”

As lieutenants, Canadian nursing sisters could attend the entertainments hosted by other officers, enjoy relatively comfortable amenities, and claim respect and obedience from orderlies in the military hospitals. Meanwhile, the British army continued to deny rank to nurses in the
Q.A.I.M.N.S., itself a non-military organization but still the chief body of nurses supporting Britain's military. Not surprisingly, the issue of rank occasionally fuelled tension between co-working British nurses disdainful of uppity “colonials” and Canadian nurses who resented being treated as inferiors. For the most part, however, working relations between nurses of the two countries were cordial, even warm, as troubling inequalities gave way to mutual purpose.

Some Canadian nurses even donned the uniform of the British Q.A.I.M.N.S. In September 1916, the Saint John
Daily Telegraph
reported that a new request for two hundred nurses for the Q.A.I.M.N.S. “will no doubt satisfy the desires of a number of trained nurses who wish to get overseas.” Sixty-six of these were to come from the Maritime provinces, and interested women applied at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. Contracts were for one year, renewable, or for the duration of the war; return passage and uniforms were provided.

Other important routes to the front arose besides the C.A.M.C. and the Q.A.I.M.N.S. Following the Great Retreat to the River Marne in 1914, the French Army medical service (
Service de Santé Militaire
) found itself stretched far beyond what it could handle. Desperate for nursing personnel, officials reached out across the Channel for help and the French Flag Nursing Corps (F.F.N.C.) was born, a collaborative effort between the French government, two prominent nurses in Britain — Mrs. Bedford Fenwick and Miss Grace Ellison — and their supportive committee. The British ladies were determined to recruit a steady supply of British (and, by extension, Canadian) nurses for French medical hospitals who would not only provide much-needed care, but also “raise the whole tone of nursing in France.” In other words, they would rehabilitate the standards of French military nursing, which, by all British accounts, were adequate but cried for the precision, sanitation, and “cheeriness” that prevailed in British hospitals. Beginning in the latter half of 1914, approximately two hundred and fifty graduate nurses from Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand who attested to being born of British parents and proficient in French signed up with the F.F.N.C., looking for a taste of the first aid experience behind French trenches. Because the French government expressly requested that no young women be sent, the minimum age was set at twenty-eight, later raised to thirty.

F.F.N.C. nurses typically worked in small groups of six or fewer, joining the staff of existing mobile hospitals near the firing line and stationary hospitals in the French interior. As nurses they accepted officers' rank in
the French Army and until March 1917 the French government paid them a small salary and outfit allowance — so small as to make them nominal “volunteers.” Travel and other expenses were to be paid out-of-pocket, and deficiencies in hospital supplies — such as gloves, thermometers, soap, and hot water bottles — were to be solicited from folks back home. Beginning in 1917, the British Branch (
Comité de Londres
) of the French Red Cross assumed financing and oversight responsibilities.

Evidently there were interpersonal obstacles to overcome in this arrangement. According to a contemporary (unabashedly pro-British) account, “Differences of custom and of religion . . . provide subtle opportunities for bruised feeling . . . But what may well cause wonder is that, with so many occasions of difficulty, things came to run so smoothly as on the whole they have done. The Sisters won their way to confidence by the excellence of their work.” One can well imagine the tensions this situation suggested for nurses in the wards, and the journal
The Canadian Nurse
acknowledged that the linguistic, cultural, and practical challenges were “difficult for us, of course, but even more so for [the French]. Both contracting parties, however, have bravely stood the test, and have broken down all the barriers which might have proved insuperable.”

Cool, brave heads were critical in the milieus of F.F.N.C. service. While some of its hospitals were permanent structures located well behind the front, many others took the form of
ambulances volants
, or “mobile ambulances.” Not to be confused with motor ambulances, which were transport vehicles, these were rough barracks and tents erected close to the front, ready to be hastily dismantled and re-established as the army advanced or retreated. When the wind wasn't blowing the canvas down around their heads, nurses caught precious sleep in tiny bell tents while aircraft growled overhead and not-so-distant guns convulsed the ground. Night-duty nurses slept in broad daylight as convoys rumbled through and soldiers drilled just outside their tent flaps. “For a woman to be part of an ambulance like this is quite a new order of things,” Grace Ellison wrote to her readership, for the F.F.N.C. promised acute danger and long hours at a time when the Canadian army had not yet introduced nursing sisters into its casualty clearing stations near the firing line. Recruitment
appeals were fairly blunt about conditions: only women animated by a “pioneer spirit” need apply for this situation of discomfort and danger, surrounded by ruins and mud and sometimes lacking in basics such as four walls and someone to look after laundry. But, Ellison's letters urged, the satisfaction of lending desperately needed help to grateful
poilus
, the affectionate term in general use for the mustachioed and bearded French soldiers, was reward enough for the “true nurse.” Indeed, F.F.N.C. nurses could boast of being in the vanguard — for example, they were among the first to occupy the devastated districts across the Hindenburg Line in 1918 — and many took home prestigious French military honours such as the
Croix de Guerre
and
Médaille des Épidémies
, awarded for persistent bravery under bombardment.

The scope of the F.F.N.C. sisters' mission differed in another major way from that of their Canadian military sisters: F.F.N.C. hospitals were less exclusively military and more available to the civil population. Whether or not the founders originally intended it that way, the F.F.N.C.'s mandate came to embrace whole villages, not just fighting men. F.F.N.C. work was as varied as it was relentless. In the absence of civilian doctors, F.F.N.C. nurses cared for local civilians, and fed and clothed refugees, often on their own time:

We had a sad experience two nights about ten days ago when we were asked to meet two trainloads of refugees from the invaded districts . . . These poor, miserable people, so cold, hungry and travel-worn . . . all huddled up together in carriages without either light or warmth. . . . The snow lay thickly on the platform and it was bitterly cold. Being a very wretched night the Red Cross ladies were conspicuous by their absence, and we F.F.N.C. Sisters had the work to ourselves. This consisted in going from carriage to carriage with warm milk for the babies and small children, and plates of soup for the adults, with large chunks of war-bread. . . . Poor things! . . . Our work being finished, we went off to our various abodes to snatch a few hours' sleep
before getting-up time. On getting into my comfortable bed I thought of those tired homeless people spending such dreary hours on the hard train seats, after their trying dreadful experiences. The following night we were again told to meet a train of refugees.

On Christmas Day 1915, a contingent of ten Canadian nurses supervised by Miss Helen McMurrich, former instructor at Montreal General Hospital, sailed from Saint John, bound for the F.F.N.C. For their passage and equipment, they relied on the generosity of the Canadian public to the amount of $400 per nurse. During their stopover in England, they were invited into London's drawing rooms and theatres to catch an “idea of the greatness of London,” all the while fortifying themselves with inspiration for their upcoming sacrifice. It was a breathless whirlwind of entertainments, sightseeing, and receptions that would stand in sharp contrast to next month's accommodations. By March, McMurrich and at least one other Canadian F.F.N.C. nurse were set up at Ambulance Mobile No. 1, a new surgical unit in the village of Rousbrugge, Belgium, and a gift of wealthy New Yorker Mary Borden Turner, herself a war nurse and author. Sister Agnes Warner had already been at this hospital for almost four months, looking forward eagerly to the extra pairs of Canadian hands that were rumoured to be on their way. She would soon praise them for being “a joy to work with, for they have had splendid training and are the kind that will go till they drop.”

Trained nurses were not the only ones intrigued by the prospect of high adventure and the pleasures of travel abroad. Thousands of other young, talented Canadian women longed to make a tangible contribution and see the world beyond their provincial neighbourhoods, but was there a role for them? Many could not produce a graduate certificate from an accredited nursing school, but had taken a St. John Ambulance course on basic nursing and were more than eager to learn on the job. In the face of
the tens of thousands of young men who needed care, could not dogmatic insistence on formal training be set aside and non-nurses be allowed to serve for the duration? In Canada, the answer was a resounding “no”: under no circumstances would the C.A.M.C. recruit untrained women for overseas nursing.

In taking this stance, Canadian authorities wanted to avoid the powder keg situation that had evolved in Britain with the pre-war formation of Voluntary Aid Detachments (V.A.D.s) — local groups of volunteer women recruited by the Red Cross and trained in brief courses by the St. John Ambulance to be called upon in an emergency. The more than 23,000 women who had joined Britain's V.A.D.s were a godsend in the crisis, but they also represented a threat to the status of trained nurses and a potential step back for the profession as a whole. If
any
woman could nurse, then training and certification would quickly become dispensable barriers to entry to the profession. Amateurs commanding lower rates of pay and privilege then might march into hospitals and set postwar nursing back to the nineteenth century.

And well-meaning “society ladies” who wanted to do their bit were actually getting in the way. On November 30, 1914, the Saint John
Daily Telegraph
reported the indignation of the profession when a hundred C.A.M.C. nurses crossed the Channel to take up their work at No. 1 Canadian General Hospital in Boulogne only to find that “lady amateurs [had] dispossessed them by buying their rooms over their head” for a higher rent. In Britain, where trained nurses were still struggling for protection through state registration, aristocratic women without any nursing experience were being allowed to assume positions of responsibility as directors or “lady superintendents” in war hospitals, a situation nurses chafed under and considered imminently dangerous to patients.
The British Journal of Nursing
regularly denounced “the inefficient amateur who, with practically no qualifications, is welcomed . . . smothered with lightly-earned brooches and medals, and given altogether false notions of her own value in national emergency.” Editorialists among British nurses scorned the V.A.D.s as “undisciplined kittens,” and dismissed their enthusiasm as “sentimental excitement” based on false ideas of what it meant to nurse.
They considered the V.A.D.s' quest for experience at the elbows of trained nurses a dangerous imposition. Occasionally, they lashed out with sarcasm at the higher-profile imposters: “[T]he half-penny papers have shown us some wonderful specimens of ‘nurses in War dress'. . . . The Duchess of Westminster is quite in Puritan pose . . . with the addition of very high-heeled shoes and a liberal display of silk stocking. What the wonderful ruby and diamond cross suspended on her bosom denotes, we do not know, but the pet wolf-hound has gone along — and will, presumably, prevent its being snatched by the battle-field ghoul, when her Grace is under fire picking up the wounded.” Other nurse editorialists were more admiring of the V.A.D.s' work and appreciative of their assistance, though still firmly critical of a system that continually betrayed trained nurses. Indeed, in Britain, the V.A.D. question was bound up with the wider struggle to elevate the nursing profession above that of domestic servant. British nurses, looking ahead, wanted to prevent thousands of volunteers swamping postwar hospitals claiming they had received their “training” in military wards and thus reducing the trained nurses' certificate to worthlessness.