Agnes Warner and the Nursing Sisters of the Great War (5 page)

C.A.M.C. nurse's working uniform.
LAC 1970-163

British recruitment poster for V.A.D.s.
CWM 19920143-009

Convalescent ward at the New Brunswick Military Hospital in Fredericton.
NBM 1990.11.4

Nursing sisters from the McGill Unit on leave overseas.
NBM NANB-Military-7

Red Cross poster appealing for financial support.
CWM 19900076-809

Chapter Three

Nursing Sister Agnes Warner

To say that Agnes Louise Warner was a New Brunswicker is only part of the truth. Born in 1872 to American parents living in Saint John, she maintained US citizenship and for several years trained and worked in New York City. But Saint John residents claimed the accomplishments of “the distinguished Saint John lady” as a source of great pride, and there is no doubt that “home” to Agnes was the city of her birth.

In her earliest years, the daughter of General Darius Bingham and Nancy Robinson Warner lived with older siblings Laura and John and younger siblings Richard, James, and Mary on the Rothesay Road overlooking Kennebecasis Bay. By about 1877, however, the family had moved, likely to the house they would continue to occupy well into the twentieth century, on the block bounded by Peel Street and Hazen Avenue. That year, five-year-old Agnes and her family mourned the death of Richard, just two, during a visit to Chicago. It was not the family's first tragic loss — a boy, Henry, had passed away at eight months in spring 1869 — but it was likely the first time little Agnes was forced to grapple with the frailty of human life and the permanence of loss.

In such a time, it probably helped Agnes to have remarkably resilient parents. Father Darius's illustrious military career during the Civil War had brought him steadily up through the ranks of the Union Army to brevet general, but cost him his arm in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. On his way to his new appointment as US consul in Saint John, the Ohio
native married Nancy Robinson in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and brought her to the New Brunswick harbour city, where he would endear himself against odds to a community initially apprehensive of Union military men. After serving as consul for twenty-two years, he went into the lumbering business with his brother and continued in active public life. The Warners remained based in Saint John, with continued ties and treks to Ohio, Illinois, and the Southern states throughout their lives.

Through her father, Agnes would have discovered a number of values that inspired her. Perhaps foremost among them was a sense of active citizenship and what it meant to take responsibility for one's fellow human beings in a crisis. In 1877, as a horrified citizenry surveyed the more than eighty smouldering hectares of the city core that had been swallowed by the Great Saint John Fire, General Warner “became the man of the hour.” According to the
Saint John Globe,
he “telegraphed all over the US news of the calamity . . . and there was instantaneous and hearty response from many quarters.” Warner set up an office at the local rink where the homeless were sheltering, and from this base assumed the duties of general superintendent overseeing the long-term relief committee and continuing to correspond with his contacts in the United States — notably Chicago — to establish a relief and recovery system.

This might be why the Warners were in Chicago when, just a few months after the fire, young son Richard died. Truly, it was a calamitous time for the family.

As she grew old enough to reflect on it, it must have struck Agnes how efficiently her father, by virtue of his military experience, had commanded the situation through the networks of contacts and organized supply he was able to set up. She saw his energy and people's confidence in his abilities despite the supposed debilitation of his missing arm. Years later, during a world war, Agnes would demonstrate the same qualities of coolness under pressure, resourcefulness in cultivating a network of supply, and, above all, a heartfelt responsibility for those tossed in the throes of crisis.

But first she would excel at home. Graduating with distinction from Victoria High School for Girls in 1890, she honed a natural interest in botany by participating in the province's Natural History Society (N.H.S.),
no doubt encouraged by a leading botanist, George Upham Hay, who was principal at Victoria High, and by her own father, who sat on the society's executive. She studied local plants with interest, collected rare specimens, then skilfully dried, pressed, and labelled them for the N.H.S. — her specimens form part of the New Brunswick Museum's botanical collections to this day.

A few of her specimens came from Montreal, collected while she pursued an undergraduate degree at McGill University. In June 1893, the
Educational Review
reported that the third-year McGill student had achieved “second rank honors in natural sciences, first rank in general standing, honorable mention for collection of plants, and prize in mental philosophy.” That summer Agnes stood up with her elder sister Laura (“Kit”) as she married Saint John barrister Charles Coster in what the paper called the “society event of the season.” Then it was back to McGill for a final banner year, which she finished off as a valedictorian of the Class of 1894.

Was it at this time that a future in nursing was brewing in Miss Warner's mind? With two grown daughters left at the Warner home, one could certainly be spared to travel, learn, and launch an independent career in a recently rehabilitated profession. By 1894, the number of reputable nursing schools had proliferated, leaving Agnes with many alternatives, including one at her doorstep: the Saint John General Hospital School for Nurses. But something made her pass on both this option and a second, obvious one: the new training program at the Montreal General Hospital.

Renowned nurse Anna Maxwell had established the Montreal school and briefly served as its superintendent in 1890 before moving on to found and direct the Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing in New York City, and it was this latter institution that Warner chose to attend. Such a cross-border move was typical of her generation of New Brunswick women, many of whom left to find work or education in the New England states, and Agnes's US citizenship would have made the move that much easier. Indeed, from the absence of all but the Warner sons from the 1901 Saint John census, it is possible that much of her family joined her in the United States, which would not have been at all unusual for them, either. Agnes
might have had close friends or relatives in New York, but it was likely the reputation of the nursing school itself that attracted her, as it did others, such as Margaret Macdonald, future Matron-in-Chief of the C.A.M.C.

Whatever the particular appeal of New York and the Presbyterian Hospital School, Warner trained there, then remained as a private duty nurse for a wealthy couple on Long Island. It was common at the time for people of means to see their doctors at home and to hire private nurses to tend to their routine health care needs. A substantial fortune enabled Roswell and Louise Udall Eldridge to live an extravagant and somewhat cloistered lifestyle just outside the metropolis of New York. Warner became part of their extensive household, probably more like a member of the family than a servant, but still subject to the whims of the capricious Eldridges. (So intent on controlling their world were these two that, in 1911, they contrived to protect their estate from encroaching development and taxation by incorporating it as the Village of Saddle Rock, comprising servants and household members as taxpayers and voters, with themselves — first Mr., then Mrs. — as mayors.) The Eldridges had no children and they took frequent extended trips to Europe. This is how Agnes Warner came to be in France in August 1914, on the eve of the Great War.

It was probably not her first trip overseas with Mrs. Eldridge. This time the destination was Divonne-les-Bains, a village of about two thousand people on the Swiss border near Geneva that offered restorative spa accommodations in the shadow of the Alps. No doubt the party partook generously of the amenities at Divonne's Grand Hotel from the moment they arrived in May 1914. But that summer anyone with an ear to the ground would have detected the uneasy currents pulsing through the continent. Many locals reassured themselves that war might still be averted at the last moment, but on August 3 the church bells rang out all over France to herald the declaration, and Warner was there to witness it.

On the very instant everyone knew what had happened. Gardeners, porters, all classes of men stopped work immediately and rushed to the city hall, where the same hour the proclamation of war was read and mobilization
started. The very next day 500 men of the village marched out in uniform — off to the front. . . . [M]any women, after preparing their husband's and their son's and brother's equipment, gave them all the money they possessed, thinking that they would need it to buy necessities. The same women were seen the next day working in various menial capacities to keep their families.

Two tense weeks passed during which restrictions on communications prevented any news of the war from reaching the village. In the meantime, there was no shortage of “thrilling incidents” to arouse fear and excitement. One of the hotel porters was discovered to be a spy reporting on the district to the enemy; the perpetrator managed to escape to Switzerland, but his complicit wife was imprisoned. A not-so-fortunate shoemaker in the town was found guilty and executed.

Within a few weeks, staff and volunteers had converted one wing of the Grand Hotel into a fifty-bed Red Cross hospital, though it was nearly a month before the wounded dispatched from the Alsace frontier would reach Divonne-les-Bains to convalesce. Warner was one of the first to volunteer for work in the makeshift hospital, even as most foreigners were fleeing the country for Switzerland. She also helped to train local women to provide basic nursing assistance.

When the wounded soldiers began to arrive, so did the more gruesome stories. But first the exhausted men had to sleep — one did so for thirty-five hours — and many slept so soundly that they had to be woken forcibly to eat. Others awoke after only a few minutes' rest, unaccustomed to the hush of the hospital after spending weeks assailed by the booming clamour of the battlefields — men who had finally learned to rest amid the roar of guns now could not sleep without it.

Stories of vicious enemy acts reached Warner through the soldiers and through her friend, Mme. Lalance, recently returned from Alsace, where she had operated a hospital for French soldiers. If previously Germans had been a faceless enemy in Warner's mind, a snarling, ruthless image quickly took shape through Mme. Lalance's reports. She heard how
German soldiers had stormed the hospital, held Lalance at the point of a pistol, ripped bandages from the bodies of the wounded to verify that they were truly impaired, and elsewhere shot a Red Cross nurse. Long before she got near the front, Warner's faith in the protection of the Red Cross symbol or in her chances of surviving an encounter with the enemy must have plummeted, replaced by a deeply buried but persistent fear that all her movements through the war zone were acutely dangerous.

But then, in mid-December, it was time to go home with Mrs. Eldridge. Christmas was right around the corner, and though the Eldridges generously supported the hotel-hospital at Divonne out of their pocketbooks, this was no place for a well-to-do American in tentative health. Warner would have to accompany them home, then snatch some much-needed holiday rest in Saint John. But images of penniless French women, their men gone to war, struggling to work their farms and feed their dependents; of worn-out, injured men; of need and want everywhere but “no grumbling” seized her with sympathetic admiration and the conviction that she would be “a coward and a deserter” if she did not share everything she had with these stoic people. Long before she left Divonne with the Eldridge household, Warner had resolved to get back to France.

She spent a few days in New York getting the Eldridges settled and arrived home in Saint John two days before Christmas. There was little time to rest, really, between talking to eager reporters about her activities, getting her passports in order, making her rounds among friends and family, and drumming up material support before her departure on January 13. This time she packed heavy, “taking with her quite a large supply of useful articles contributed by St. John friends who know the value of the work she is doing and the necessity for contributions,” reported the
Daily Telegraph.
During her whirlwind mission, she must have encountered some confusion when she told people that, no, she was not nursing Canadian or British wounded, and, no, she was not working in a Canadian or British hospital, for the
Daily Telegraph
went on to note that

Miss Warner feels that our people do not sufficiently recognize the magnificent courage and spirit of sacrifice
shown by the French people. She reminds her friends, in talking, of these things, that while the British have done heroic work, the greater part of the long line from the Belgian coast across to Switzerland, a curving line of 200 miles, is defended by the French. The whole French nation, men, women and children, she says, are deserving of the gratitude and admiration of the world.